CHAPTER4

FROM DANDAKARANYA TO MORICHJHAPI:

REHABILITATION, REPRESENTATION AND
THE PARTITION OF BENGAL (1947)
Oh queen, oh my queen,
In your kingdom
The ill-fated children
Of menial mothers
Arrive in throng ....

Subhash Mukhopadyay, Thakumar Jhuli

When Partition came in 1947, East Bengal had a sizeable Hindu population.
About 344,000 refugees came into West Bengal, many of them middleclass people
who had jobs in West Bengal or some family connections. 1 While in Punjab there was
virtually an exchange of population, there was no such equal exchange across the
Bengal borders. There was, therefore, a massive population pressure on the state with
every successive migration. To prevent further influx of refugees in the months after
the country was divided, a number of initiatives were undertaken to see that the
minorities in East Bengal remained where they were. In April 1948, an InterDominion conference was held in Calcutta where the Rehabilitation Ministers of West
Bengal and Pakistan declared their intention to take possible steps to prevent an
exodus. It was decided to establish Minority Boards at the provincial and local levels
in both countries to redress grievances and as a confidence building measure. Another

Gyanesh Kudaisya, 'Divided landscapes, fragmented identities,' in Tai Yong Tan and G.
Kudaisya, eds, The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia, London, 2001, p., 144. Also reprinted in
Tai Yong Tan and Gyanesh Kudaisya, eds, Partition and Post-Colonial South Asia: A Reader,
vol., II, London, 2008. No one knows for certain how many refugees came to India from East
Bengal from 1946 to 1964; the official estimate is just under 5 million. See also Joya Chatterji,
The Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India, 1947-67, Cambridge, 2007, pp. 105-106. The largest
number, mostly Hindu Bengalis, settled in West Bengal with districts of 24 Parganas, Calcutta,
Howrah and Burdwan taking the largest influx; around 13% went to Assam, while the people of
the Chittagong Hill Tracts, mainly the Chakmas, settled in Arunachal Pradesh. A relatively small
number of Hindus from Sylhet went to Assam and Tripura. The Rajbongshis from the districts of
Rangpur and Dinajpur came to Coochbihar and Jalpaiguri.

125

Inter-Dominion conference took place m December 1948 to follow up on these

actions?
These measures, however, largely failed to stem the influx of refugees into
West Bengal. Although the decision to leave was based on a set of complex
calculations, a number of reasons, economic and political, made the Hindus
apprehensive about living on in East Pakistan. A spokesman of the East Bengal
Minority Committee claimed that nearly 2.5 lakh members of minority communities
had already left for the Indian Union (Hindustan Standard, 28 March 1948) amidst
growing allegations of atrocities on Hindu villagers in various districts like Sylhet
(Amritbazar Patrika, 20 November 1949). By August 1949, acute food shortage in

large areas of Tippera and some other districts in East Pakistan added to the exodus.
Coupled with this was the passage of the East Bengal Evacuees (Administration of
Property) Act (1949) that enabled the Pakistan government to confiscate properties of
evacuees. This fuelled Hindu apprehension about their security in Pakistan. However,
despite the risk that their assets would be seized, many left while others tried to
exchange their properties with Muslims arriving from India. In the early months of
1950, when serious riots engulfed certain areas of Bagerhat subdivision of Khulna and
parts of Rajshahi and Barisal, the Indian Prime Minister, Pandit Nehru, made a
statement in Parliament about the .'grim East Bengal tragedy.' 3 Throughout February
and March,

newspaper~

in Calcutta

report~d

widespread looting and arson in

Chittagong and Barisal. Steamers and trains carrying fleeing people were raided and
looted by Ansars, a semi official para-military Pakistani force that was formed to
protect the borders. In March, Dr P.C.Ghosh, member of the Congress Working
Committee, visited Dacca and made a statement: 'There is no sense of security in the
2

Inter-dominion conferences on the ministerial level (that discussed security of minorities) as well
as Boundary Commissions (that discussed disputed boundary lines between India and Pakistan)
were some of the unfinished business of Partition. The former discussed threadbare the ways in
which security could be provided to minorities in both countries but on the ground these promises
did not mean much. See Willem van Schendel, The Bengal Borderland: Beyond State and Nation
in South Asia, London, 2005, pp. 98-99: 'The new states of India and Pakistan meant the
disarmament of minority communities and their active expulsion. In spite of the lofty promises and
intentions expressed by the leaders of India and Pakistan, those who were labeled 'minorities' in
either country were often perceived and treated as internal enemies. Thus Muslims on the Indian
side and non-Muslims on the Pakistan side were widely assumed to be disloyal to the new state.'
Amrit Bazar Patrika, 24, February 1950.

126

minds of the Hindus. The greatest scare has been caused by attacks resulting in deaths
in the railway trains. ' 4 Photographs began to appear on the front pages of national
dailies of worn out men, women and children walking along railway lines, detained at
Darshana (the last outpost before reaching West Bengal) or huddling on the platforms
at the Bongaon and Sealdah stations with their meager belongings piled next to their
weary bodies. By March end of 1950, over 2,50,000 refugees had entered West
Bengal by air, river and land routes since the disturbances started in December while
special steamers were requisitioned by Dr B.C. Ray, the Chief Minister of West
Bengal, to bring stranded East Bengal refugees from Khulna, Narayangunj, Chandpur
and Barisal (Hindustan Standard, 14 April 1950).
The Amrit Bazar Patrika reported on 23, March 1950 that 'people from
villages in districts like Dacca, Chittagong, Rajshahi, Mymensingh, Bogra and
Rangpur say that large scale movement of Hindus have started. Cattle, stacked paddy
and com, plough and the land offer no more lure to them to keep to their village
homes ... village smiths, kavirajs, day-labourers, carpenters, namasudras, santhals- in
fact every Hindu in Eastern Pakistan is trying to move out.' In April that year, a pact
was signed between the prime ministers of the two countries to create a sense of
security among the minorities but the Nehru-Liaquat Pact was unable to stop the
attacks on minorities and throughout the early 1950's the exodus continued. On 30,
March 1951, A. Mitra, Superintendent of Ce:psus Operations; West Be1_1gal, stated that
the total number of persons who declared themselves as Displaced in the state was
2,117 ,896. The number was soon to swell with near famine conditions in parts of East
Bengal like Khulna and the introduction of the proposed passport system in October
1952. By November, Renuka Ray, State Relief and Rehabilitation Minister, reported
that 27lakh refugees were living in West Bengal (Amrit Bazar Patrika, 18, November
1954).
4

Amrit Bazar Patrika, 4, March 1950. See also Sandip Bandopadhyay, Deshbhag-Deshtyag,
Calcutta, 1994, pp. 60-63, for a discussion of the reasons why Hindus fled East Bengal. Also,
Biplab Bala, 'Jey Gach Ruyechi: Jara Thekey Gelam,' in Shemonti Ghosh, ed., Deshbhag: Smriti
Aar Swabdhota, Calcutta, 2008, pp. 118-132, for an account of those who refused to leave. Bala's
account points to the counter narrative of Partition logic: Partition did not always mean migration
for a large group of people; instead they faced a different sense of insecurity in their very place of
sojourn.

127

The Government's inability to tackle such heavy exodus was openly admitted
m official circles5 especially since 1952 the refugees were the lower caste
Namasudras and Poundra-Kshatriyas who were agriculturists and would require some
form of land to be resettled. 6 Refugees who came immediately after the Partition
could rehabilitate themselves with very little government help. But after 1952, it was
mainly the small farmers, traders and artisans who began to migrate. This
considerably changed the way the state and union governments looked at
rehabilitation. Earlier the effort was to provide relief and rehabilitation to refugees
fleeing communal disturbances (especially after the Calcutta and Noakhali riots).
Immediately after the country was divided, the middleclass and white collared
population who came to the state did not require large-scale rehabilitation, as they
were sufficiently solvent to relocate by their own efforts. After 1952, the demographic
and occupational character of the refugees changed and relief now provided by
government agencies was more in the context of displacement and not in the context
of riots as was the case earlier. This led to a major alteration in the state's relief
policies of the 1950s. Classification of refugees was now done more in terms of their
occupations: agriculturist refugees with strong ties to land would need land to make a
living.
Roughly, the refugees who came into West Bengal immediately after Partition
were classified according to the nature of government relie( given between 1948 and
1952. These were people living in transit camps, permanent liability camps, worksite
camps or squatters' colonies or government-aided colonies. 7 But after 1952, the
See Hiranmay Bannerjee, Udbastu, Calcutta, 1970, p., 66. See also Tathagata Roy, A Suppressed
Chapter in History: The Exodus of Hindus from East Pakistan and Bangladesh 1947-2006, New
Delhi, 2007, Chap., 6, where he terms 1950's as 'the great progrom' when the rural masses such as
traders, weavers, and cultivators started to flee.
6

Amrit Bazar Patrika reported that 'an alarming feature of the present exodus is that a large number
of Hindu population who are deeply rooted to the soil and never moved out despite grave threat to
their way oflife are now coming over to West Bengal,' 11, October 1952.
Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan, London, 2007, p., 164: 'In
West Bengal the phraseology of 'camps' does not do justice to the enormity of social dislocation
and the scale of change instigated by the arrival of Bengalis from the east.' Roughly the East
Bengali refugees were either camp refugees or non-camp refugees, apart from those who had
arrived before 1950. Amongst the camp refugees were the non-permanent liabilities (divided
further into transit camps, worksite camps and government sponsored colonies) while permanent
liability refugees were divided into P.L. camps or Homes for destitute and widowed women and
children.

128

refugees were mainly people who needed serious rehabilitation efforts as they had
limited means of rebuilding their lives. Earlier, relief was in the context of riots for
the large number of people affected by communal conflagration in Noakhali, Dhaka
and Calcutta. Relief camps had been temporary, as the people had returned to their
homes when things quietened down. But by 1952, as the number of refugees swelled
(the causes were not communal disturbances but more economic and political) the
official discourse of relief changed slowly into the discourse of rehabilitation as there
was no sign that the influx was going to be stemmed for some time to come. 8 In an
article titled 'Rehabilitation of Displaced Persons' that Renuka Ray, minister in West
Bengal Cabinet wrote in 1958, this idea was stressed: ' ... With the increasing influx,
by 1954, it was found that it was no longer possible to fit in the new comers' for West
Bengal was a state 'which since Partition is 1/3 in its original size with a density of
806 per sq mile, which is one of the highest in India and the world. It must also be
remembered that the new comers have come to a state whose economy has suffered
even before partition as a consequence of a major famine in 1943 and the impact of
the war and turmoil that took place on the eve of Independence. ' 9 Muslim evacuee
property in West Bengal was negligible as most Muslim migrants were labourers and
artisans and numbered much less than in Punjab.

Calcutta, the capital

city, was

stretched to its limits with the sheer numerical strength of the refugees who changed

10

Joya Chatteiji, 'Right or Charity? The Debate over Relief and Rehabilitation in West Bengall94750' in Suvir Kaul, ed., The Partitions Of Memory: The Afterlife of the Division of India, Delhi,
2001, p., 79, points out that West Bengal government decided 31, October 1949 as a cut off date to
phase out relief camps. She sees this period as also a time of harsher government policies towards
refugees when rehabilitation would only be given to those the state defined as 'refugees.' It is
around the first five years of 1950s that relief policies undergo a major shift: it is now that relief in
the context of displacement becomes the key discourse over relief in the context of communal riots,
as more and more refugees arrive in West Bengal. See Saroj Chakraborty, With Dr. B.C. Roy and
Other Chief Ministers, Calcutta, 1974, pp. 169-178. See also Hiranmay Bandopadhyay, Udvastu,
Calcutta, 1970, p., 32, where he states: 'Dr. Roy decided to undertake the work of rehabilitation
under a new government department soon to be opened. As of now the old Relief department was
looking after the work relating to the refugees ... but if importance has to be given to refugee
rehabilitation, then it has to be conducted under a separate department .... .later when rehabilitation
became an even more pressing problem, this measure was immensely beneficial.'
Renuka Ray, Speeches and Writings by Her (1957-67), Serial No. 34, p., 2, NMML. See also
reports about sending refugees outside West Bengal taken in the Rehabilitation Ministers
Conference in Calcutta reported in Jugantar, 30 January 1956 and Ananda Bazar Patrika, 30
January 1956.
See Nirmal K. Bose, Calcutta, 1964: A Social Survey, Calcutta, 1968, p., 33.

129

many semi-urban areas into towns. 11 Partition had also disrupted the regional
economy, particularly the jute sector, and the West Bengal government claimed that it
was unable to take in the burden of the continued influx. The state's food situation
was precarious throughout 1957 and 1958. Acute unemployment, rising prices of
essential commodities and food shortage were also adding to the perception that the
state had taken more than its fair share of burdens. So by 1954, the West Bengal
government increasingly took the view that the 'refugee problem' was not its sole
responsibility and must be shared by the Central government as well as by the
neighbouring states. The East Bengal Relief Committee, chaired by Dr Meghnad
Saba, participating in a conference held at the West Bengal Government Secretariat
on December 3, 1953 (presided over by Shri Ajit Prasad Jain) pointed out caustically
in a memorandum that 'the Government of India should proclaim with respect to East
Bengal refugees the same policy as the case of West Punjab refugees.' The
memorandum stated that up to the end of 1953 the expenditure on refugees in West
. Punjab was 142 crores while for East Bengal refugees it was 60 crores. In November
the next year, Meghnad Saba urged Nehru to take up the State's Rehabilitation
portfolio as 'refugee rehabilitation has completely failed in Eastern regions.' 12
The new Union Relief and Rehabilitation minister Sri Meher Chand Khanna
was soon to announce that the resettlement problem of pisplaced Persons in West
Bengal was 'far more complex than that o(Punjab.' 13 By June 1955,in a me~ting of
the National Development Council, plans were set out for resettling refugees outside
West Bengal with six Eastern states accommodating 3 million refugees. But
11

Biplab Dasgupta, 'Urbanisation and Rural Change in West Bengal, EPW, 22: 7, 14, February 1987,
pp. 278-9.

12

Amrita Bazaar Patrika, November26, 1954. See also Draft of a Press Statement (22.11.54) issued
by Dr. Meghnad Saha and Shri Tridib Chowdhury after a tour of Cachar refugee camps, Papers
and Correspondences received by MN Saha during his tenure as MP regarding East Bengal
Refugee Rehabilitation, 1952-55, Instalment VII, Sub. File 6, p.,l22, NMML where Dr. Saha stated
that 'dichotomy between power and responsibility has been as much responsible in Assam as in
West Bengal for the unsatisfactory state of affairs with regard to rehabilitation for displaced
persons .... .The passage of years has taken away much of the urgency and priority accorded to the
problem by those in authority.' He blamed this on the major disagreement of policies between the
Union Rehabilitation Ministry and the State Ministry concerned and urged that the 'Prime Minister
oflndia ... should take upon himself the Portfolio of Refugee Rehabilitation of the Eastern Zone.'
Amrita Bazar Patrika, 9, May 1955.

13

130

rehabilitation schemes were often ill conceived and efforts to send refugees outside
the state mismanaged. On 13 August 1957, Amrit Bazar Patrika reported 'trenchant'
criticisms in the Lok Sabha 'about slow progress of rehabilitation of East Bengal
displaced persons ....... delays in execution of schemes, [and the] lack of proper
planning' by the Rehabilitation Ministry. By 1957, the Union Minister was to
announce that there was no more room for Refugee Rehabilitation in West Bengal.
'Over 40 lakhs of Hindus had already come from East Pakistan and of them a little
over 30 lakhs were in West Bengal alone. During the last two years, 1955 and 1956,
the exodus had been the heaviest, the figures being 5,60,000.' 14 In spite of opposition
by various Left parties to send refugees outside the state, efforts were made to
dispatch batches of refugees in Bihar, Orissa and Assam. 15 These, however, were
largely unsuccessful and there were a large number of deserters from camps in Orissa
and Bihar. 16 In1956, families were sent to be resettled in the Andaman Islands and the
government promised that soon '20,000 acres of forest land are to be cleared and
made available for 4000 agriculturist families from the mainland.' 17
The Dandakaranya rehabilitation plan was conceived in early 1956 to resettle
the East Pakistani refugees as West Bengal was groaning under the huge burden of
rehabilitation. At the National Development Council meeting in June 1957, it was
14

Amrit Bazar Patrika, II, May 1957 reports on the press conference in Calcutta held by the
Minister.

15

The Rehabilitation Minister M.C Khanna's tirade reported in Amrita Bazar Patrika, 14 August 1958.
See also Phulrenu Guha, 'Rehabilitation: East and West' in Ritu Menon ed., No Woman's Land: Women
from Pakistan, India and Bangladesh write on the Partition of India, Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2004,
p., 196: 'The Communist Party oflndia never realized the irreparable damage they caused by objecting
to the transfer of refugees to these islands - the Andamans could really have emerged as a second East
Bengal ... As someone who originally hails from East Bengal, I still nurse this grievance against the
Communists.' See also Saroj Chakraborty, With Dr B. C. Roy, p., Ill.
Most of the refugees sent to Orissa, for example, were agriculturists who went to Bushandipur,
Ramnagar, Romuna and Chandbali. They complained that 'the lands offered for rehabilitation were
unyielding to cultivation and lack in even essential facilities for resettlement. The lands were
mostly marshy or waterlogged which were found to be extremely difficult for cultivation.' Amrit
Bazar Patrika, 15, July 1956. See also Amrit Bazar, 12 January 1951 for news on desertion from
Rairakhol in Sambalpur district. In Bihar, the Bettiah camp had a large number of deserters. See
Amrit Bazar Patrika, 15 May 1958 for news of firing on the refugees in this camp.

16

17

..

Amrit Bazar Patrika, 11 April 1956. Also Anandabazar Patrika and Jugantar, 30 January 1956 on
the Rehabilitation Ministers' Conference that formalized the need to send EB refugees outside the
state. See also Sabyasachi Basu Roy Chaudhury, 'Exiled to the Andamans: The Refugees from
East Pakistan' in Pradip K. Bose, ed., RefUgees in West Bengal: Institutional Processes and
Contested Identities, Calcutta, 2002, pp. 130-141.

131

formally decided to develop Dandakaranya as a place for permanent resettlement (not

rehabilitation) of Displaced Persons. 18 Right from the onset, it was clear that by
'rehabilitation' the government meant resettlement 'in the narrower economic sense'
while refugees were termed 'displaced persons' who were categorized into three
classes. 19 On 18 June, a front page news item in a leading Calcutta newspaper
described the Union Government's intention: 'Dandakaranya: Legendary Lore's
Forest Fringed Soil - Vast 80,000 Sq Mile Land Mass to be New Haven for 1.9 m
DPs'. Dandakaranya, thrice as large as West Bengal, watered by numerous rivers and
channels, had a density of population of only I 00 persons per square mile as
compared to 900 of West Bengal. The newspaper reported that the members of the
Planning Commission 'have come to the conclusion that the area offered attractive
possibilities for resettlement of refugees. ' 20 The authorities were well aware of the
magnitude of the task. In a note circulated among members of Parliament on the.
proposed Dandakaranya scheme, it was stated that an autonomous central authority be
set up to oversee the project as the area, in large part, was covered by thick primeval
forests. An overall development scheme would be necessary before refugees could be
rehabilitated. State Minister Renuka Ray was also of the same opinion. In 1958 she
wrote in The Statesman: 'As large jungles have to be cleared and swamps reclaimed,
it must take time before it [the Dandakaranya. scheme] can be implemented in any
satisfactory manner. ' 21 In the Lok Sabh~, acrimonious
debates about
tl).e proposal
,.
.
18

Amrit Bazar Patrika on 4 June 1957 carried a report on this meeting: 'After hearing the report of
Mr. H.M. Patel, Chairman of the Committee asked to go into the development of the Dandakaranya
scheme covering the three states of Madhya Pradesh, Orissa and Andhra Pradesh, the National
Development Council decided that an autonomous authority, on the lines of the D.V.C. should be
set up to clear the jungle and develop this area and resettle East Pakistan displaced persons there.'
The report was followed by front-page news on 16 June quoting the statement of Shri P.C. Sen,
West Bengal Rehabilitation Minister who stated in the assembly that the Dandakaranya project had
the 'potentiality of rehabilitating a crore of East Bengal refugees.'

19

The 'displaced persons' were those who were homeless but not registered as refugees, registered
refugees who did not live in camps nor received doles, and registered refugees receiving both. In
connection with the Dandakaranya project, the DDA was mainly concerned with the third category
consisting mainly of lower caste people such as the Namasudras, Kshatriyas and the PoundraKshatriyas. See Alok Kumar Ghosh, 'Bengali Refugees at Dandakaranya: A Tragedy of
Rehabilitation,' in Pradip K. Bose, ed., Refugees in West Bengal, pp. 107-8.
Amrit Bazar Patrika, 18, June 1957.
Renuka Ray, 'And Still They Come', article in The Statesman: West Bengal in the Second Plan
Supplement, 23, January 1958. See also, Renuka Ray, Speeches and Writings by Her (1957-1967),
Serial Number 40, p., xi, NMML.

20

21

132

were common as 'the land in Koraput and Malkangiri area is of very poor quality' and
'the fallow, waste and waterlogged lands available in West Bengal could be profitably
developed and distributed. ' 22 Left parties saw little merit in the scheme and often
deemed the plans as 'reckless' and warned the government against wasting much
needed funds on it. 23
An aerial survey was quickly undertaken to assess the potentialities of the
region that stretched between Koraput and Kalahandi districts in Orissa, Bastar
dis~rict

of Madhya Pradesh and parts of Andhra Pradesh. Although the isolated

Dandakaranya, with its self sufficient tribal population, inaccessible hilly tracts and
uneven rainfall was not conducive to resettling large numbers of agriculturists who
were used to a riverine land and a wet climate, the area's low population density was
a crucial factor in its choice as a site for refugee rehabilitation.

24

The two large

refugee organizations, the United Central Refugee Council and Shara Bangia
Bastuhara Samiti had a number of reservations about the Dandakaranya project,
especially at the Government decision to wind up all camps in the state by July 1959
and thereby forcing many refugees to go to there, sometimes against their will. 25 By
August end 1957, the Government of India had decided to entrust the development of
the entire Dandakarnya scheme to the Union Rehabilitation Ministry instead of
leaving it to an autonomous body. It was decided to appoint an executive officer who

22

23

24

25

Communist MP Renu Chakravartty's remark in the Parliament reported in Amrit Bazar Patrika, 13
August 1957.
See Sadhan Gupta's remarks in Lok Sabha Debates, Vol XV, April 8- April22, 1958, Lok Sabha
Secretariat, pp. 9519-9520.
Statesman, 15 August 1957. The DDA reclaimed land for rehabilitation of which 25% were
returned to the state governments to be distributed to landless tribal people of the state. The rest
were to be used for refugee rehabilitation. See Pannalal Dasgupta, 'Dandakaranya Ghurey Duti
Protibedon', Jugantar, 25 July 1978.
See H. Bhattacharyya, 'Post Partition Refugees and the Communists: A Comparative Study Of
West Bengal and Tripura,' in Ian Talbot and Gurharpal Singh, eds, Region and Partition: Bengal,
Punjab and the Partition of the Sub-Continent,' Delhi, 1999, p., 325, who sees the Communist
mobilization of refugees as dictated by two objectives: electoral support and political recruitment.
So genuine refugee interests were subordinated to political needs and prospects of real
rehabilitation was hampered. This was certainly the case in Dandak and later Marichjhapi. See also
The Statesman, 23 December 1959 about refugee agitation against Dandakaranya.

133

would make a detailed survey of selected areas with a team of experts with a special
emphasis on developing communications and eradicating malaria?6
In July, 1958, at the Rehabilitation Ministers' Conference, it was decided that
displaced families would start going to Dandakaranya from January next year.
However, as opposition to resettlement of refugees outside West Bengal by various
Left parties continued, the Government decided to give the refugees the options of
either going to Dandakaranya or leaving the Government aided camps after taking a
lump sum of three months' dole. In any case, all DP camps were to close by 31 July,
1959, and the strident note on which Dandakaranya was promoted by the media as
well as in the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha debates are noteworthy. 27 The
Rehabilitation Minister urged officials to make the scheme a success because it was
the 'greatest national cause to which one and all owe their duty' (Amrit Bazar Patrika,
2 November 1958). Rehabilitation was now being correlated with the general
development of the country and often the Government accused the Left parties of
undermining this by taking up the refugees' cause. Refugees were sent from camps in
West Bengal by train to Raipur. From Raipur, they came to transit camps in Mana and
to worksite camps where they worked on land reclamation, road-building etc. 28 From
these camps they were finally taken to villages for permanent settlement.
Shri S. K. Gupta was the Chairman of the Dandakaranya Development
Authority for ten months in 1963-64. After he quit the post, he wrote a series of
articles in The Economic Weekly, assessing the rehabilitation programmes that were
undertaken from 1959 onwards when the first batch of refugees arrived there. These
26

Amrit Bazar Patrika, 25 August 1957.

27

See Amrit Bazar Patrika, 8, December 1958 as well as The Statesman, II April 1958. Also see Lok
Sabha Debates, vol., XV, 1958, Lok Sabha Secretariat, p., 10781.

28

The situation in Mana was hardly conducive to the welfare of the refugees. Ashoka Gupta, who had
traveled frequently to Mana when her husband S.K. Gupta was the Chairman of DDA, testifies to
the abysmal condition of the camps. In a report on the 'Present position at Mana and the gravity of
the situation' that she prepared for the Central Social Welfare Board (of which she was a member)
Ashoka Gupta wrote: 'Mana, once an Army camp and abandoned after the last war, is a large
treeless stretch of morrum land, unfit for agricultural purposes. Mana is extremely hot in summer.
There is a great dearth of water. The possibilities of subterranean water resources were yet to be
explored when the new migrants began to arrive in an endless stream.' Ashoka Gupta, Papers and
Correspondences regarding Rehabilitation Work in Refugee Camps in Dandakaranya, Sub File 3,
1964, NMML. This report is also reproduced as an appendix in Saibal Kumar Gupta,
Dandakaranya: A Survey in Rehabilitation, Calcutta, 1999, pp.1 08-116.

134

articles are worth quoting extensively because they are in many respects an important
assessment of things that happened in Dandakaranya in the name of rehabilitation.
Written with facts gleaned from government reports and his own assessment of what
he saw, S.K. Gupta's articles also have importance because they blew the lid off from
one of the most prominent rehabilitation projects undertaken in the post Partition
years. The series of three articles begins on a somber note:
The development of Dandakaranya was undertaken to solve an almost
intractable human problem - the rehabilitation of a large number of refugees who
were uprooted from their homeland in East Pakistan, victims of a political decision to
divide the country in which they were not consulted ...
Dandakaranya was expected to provide a home for the residuary refugee population in
camps or elsewhere for whom there was supposed to be no more room in West Bengal.
More then twenty-two crores of rupees have already been spent and further
expenditures are in the offing but barely 7000 families have been given rehabilitation
of a sort in the course of five or six years. What is the end result of all this expenditure
of time and money? What are the prospects? It is time that a proper assessment was
made and people saw Dandakaranya without any blinkers.
What I saw myself and learnt on further enquiry caused me profound disquiet. I have
decided to share my disquiet with the public, not to cast reflections or start a polemic,
but so that if things are what I believe they are, immediate actions may be taken to set
things right. Human distress on a large scale is much too serious a matter to be passed
over in silence either to feed official complacency or to save reputations. 29

In Dandakaranya, the scheme was simple: a plot of 6.5 hectares was given to
each family and loans were disbursed for building houses and purchase of bullocks
and agricultural implements. But it was clear from the start that the refugees had to
'make do with the worst lands, hitherto regarded as uncultivable' and S.K. Gupta
noted that in Pharasgaon zone, '6% of the plots were basically unfit for agriculture,
32% were poor and sub-marginal, 53% could be of medium quality if their moisture
retention capacity could be improved, and only 9% were of good quality. ' 30 Lack of
sustainable irrigation, cost of manure and shortage of adults working on fields from

29

S.K. Gupta, 'Dandakaranya: A Survey of Rehabilitation, I: The State of Agriculture,' The

Economic Weekly, Jan 2, 1965, p. 15. See also S.K. Gupta, 'Proshongo Dandakaranya' in Kichu
Smriti Kichu Katha, Calcutta, 1994, pp. 121-140. Gupta's three essays are later collected in book
form in.1999 and published in Calcutta.

30

S.K. Gupta, The Economic Weekly, p.,l6.

135

each family were other reasons why agricultural rehabilitation got off to a poor start.
Gupta was also clear that the absence of tenancy rights over the plots failed to create a
sense of responsibility among the refugees. 'The displaced persons have not yet had
tenancy rights secured by the grant of pattas because the Ministry is as yet unable to
decide whether the cost of reclamation and development of agricultural land should be
charged to the settler. It would be a cruel joke if people uprooted from East Bengal
who have lost all their assets are made to pay for the development of Orissa and
Madhya Pradesh. ' 31 The small traders and businessmen among the refugees also faced
'an uphill task.' They were offered a business loan of a thousand rupees and a housebuilding loan of2000 and a maximum of three months dole. Within that time they had
to earn enough, not only to pay off the loans but also to maintain their families. 'The
scheme was, therefore, not very realistic and the rigidity with which it was applied
made its harshness all too plain. One glaring example was the case of 23 displaced
families, who had never before lived in a government relief camp and who arrived
towards the later part of 1963. They were not offered any homestead plots and did not
on that account take the business loan because there was no place where they could
ply their trade. Their dole was stopped after three months, reducing them to
starvation. ' 32 The infrastructure, promised vociferously by the Indian Government,
also failed to materialize. Electricity was not available over large areas and there was
often an acute shortage of drinking water. The lack of medical services and the rough
terrain led to frequent epidemics with a high rate of child mortality that unsettled the
refugees. Dandakaranya, the mythological place of the 'dark forests' where Ram was

31

S.K. Gupta, ibid., p., 26.

32

See S.K. Gupta, 'Dandakaranya: A Survey of Rehabilitation II: Industries,' The Economic Weekly,
January 9, 1965, and 'A Survey ofRehabilitation III: Other Urban and Semi-Urban Employment,'
The Economic Weekly, January 16, 1965, p., 89. Rehabilitation Minister Shri M.C Khanna in the
Rajya Sabha stated: 'I am going to see that elaborate arrangements are made for the welfare of the
people whom I take there (Dandakaranya). I will have hospitals, I will have schools. I will have
Bengali doctors, I will have Bengali teachers and I will have Bengali social workers.' Rajya Sabha
Official Report, Vol XX, Feb 26- Mar 14 1958, Rajya Sabha Secretariat, p., 3148. See also, Renuka
Ray's copy of her speech in the Parliament (no date) that is available among her personal papers:
' ... this picture of promises made and not kept, of excuses made and an extraordinary tendency to
shelve blame on others and to find scapegoat for one's own deficiencies seem to be the story of the
Ministry of Rehabilitation of recent years.' Renuka Ray, Papers and Correspondences relating to
the activities of the Relief and Rehabilitation Department, Government of West Bengal, 1954-56,
Serial number 3, p., 4, NMML.

136

exiled, appeared to the new settlers less as a land of hope than a place of banishment.
It was not surprising that within 1964, cases of desertion began to appear in local

dailies and were also reported in the national press. From Dandakaranya, Marichjhapi
.

was JUst a step away.

33

II
The Partition of India is commonly understood as a violent territorial and
political separation of groups as well as forced evictions and migration of populations
after communal upheavals. It is also the personal price paid by people undergoing all
these traumas. But Partition refers to much more than the processes of forced
separations of communities and the creation of distinct political identities. It creates a
different experiential reality for whole groups of people as it also forms 'the basis for
long term practices such as identity, work, memory and inspiration. ' 34 Each member
of the displaced families has their own Partition, and in their stories we see both
resistance and accommodation. The 'affective dimension' of their pain, trauma, guilt
and nostalgia that has been exorcised from Partition history must be taken into
account to give us a fuller picture of the division that takes place in the subcontinent. 35
In Punjab, if the originary moment of Partition is marked by physical violence, in East
Bengal it is displacement and migration, other forms of violence. This displacement
of a whole

peopl~ cu~ting a~ros~

.class

~~d -~aste,

followed by

r~habilitati~n

or

resettlement in a new place, forms one of the important social and cultural processes
33

34

35

Manikuntala Sen, 'Partition: Streams of Refugees' in Ritu Menon, ed, No Woman's Land: Women
from Pakistan, India and Bangladesh Write on the Partition of India, Delhi, 2004, pp.71-2 states:
'A number of peasant families were sent to Dandakaranya ... where they were given plots of land to
cultivate so that they could resume their lives as farmers. Much of this land was barren and rocky
but they poured their life blood into it, made it fertile and succeeded in growing crops ..... The
skirmish at Marichjhapi is proof enough of the fact that aJl refugees have not been able to reach
such a state of resettlement even now.'
Smita Tewari Jassal and Eyal Ben-Ari, The Partition Motif: Concepts, Comparisons,
Considerations, New Delhi, 2007, p., 21.
Priya Kumar, 'Testimonies of Loss and Memory: Partition and the Haunting of a Nation' in Tai
Yong Tan and Gyanesh Kudaisya, eds, Partition and Postcolonial South Asia: A Reader, vol., II.
London, 2008, p., 326: 'Conventional historiography has been conspicuous for its inability to
enunciate collective traumas of the scale and magnitude of Partition. Since such painful
experiences can only be comprehended by taking their affective dimensions into account dimensions of pain, shame, guilt, revenge, nostalgia that history has traditionally chosen to excise
and exorcise from its telling.'

137

that we see in the post Partition years in West Bengal. This course of movement also
forms the basis of refugee memories of Partition and the master narrative of Partition
uprooting and resettlement that discursively dissolve the socially divisive categories
of caste, class and gender and seriously challenge the official notion of a refugee as a
'victim' of forces beyond control. 36 Rehabilitation and resettlement, a form of internal
displacement that repeats the processes of Partition, therefore is the narrativizing
principles of a number of novels that are written in Bengal that are woven around
these themes. I suggest that these kinds of representations, deliberately looking at fallouts of the Partition other than communal tensions and migrations, are not an accident
but a deliberate way in which literature is foregrounding questions of citizenship and
the exigencies of the modem nation state. They are laying claim to notions of agency
and livelihood on behalf of specific groups of peoples whose inarticulate and
unspoken experiences is not the stuff of 'national', 'rational' and 'progressive' history
of the nation state. 37 These narratives that use rehabilitation as a motif do not simply
approximate the 'reality' of their social and historical contexts in mimetic ways;
rather they employ a different exploratory perspective that radically rethinks the lived
realities of the refugees' circumstances. Rehabilitation becomes a narrative core of
these texts because resettlement creates a different experiential reality for a large body
of people. Issues of home, settlement, livelihood, and work create a new body of
literature that re-look at Partition and its consequence, the free nation state, in very
important critical ways. Moreover, in these novels the refugees come across as agents
that successfully contest the stereotype embedded in official discourse that attributes
the failure of refugee rehabilitation to the inherent parochialism of the refugees, their
unwillingness to settle outside Bengal and their lack of mobility and enterprise. These
narratives then undercut in interesting ways the 'representations of the Purbo Bangiyo
refugee (that) has remained trapped within predictable categories of shoronarthi
36

37

See Joya Chattetji, 'Who is a Refugee? The Case of East Bengalis in India' in Tai Yong Tan and
Gyanesh Kudaisya, eds, Partition and Post Colonial South Asia, vol., II. ibid., p., 209: 'A second
maxim of the "official mind" is that refugees by definition are victims .... The notion that refugees
were not active agents but persons "displaced" by political forces outside their control has been
central to the elaboration of refugee policy.' This was a common stereotype in the official circles as
is evident from Patel's speech at the 55th Congress Session at Gandhinagar. Hindustan Standard,
18, December 1948 reported that while speaking about East Bengali Hindus, Patel stated that
'Bengalis were not strong, they only knew how to weep.'
I use these terms after Gyanendra Pandey where he makes a distinction between 'national' and
'local' forms of history. See G. Pandey, Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and
History in India, Cambridge, 2001, p., 119.

138

(seeking refuge), vastuhara (homeless) and udbastu (uprooted): official terms with
which refugees were classified.' 38 Terms such as these, classifying people into
categories, hide the other complex aspects of being a refugee: the feelings of exile,
dislocation and the lived experience of resettlement. The narrative discourse of
displacement that we see in some of the literary texts of the period is different from
the discourse of 'rights' that these governmental terms seem to imply. This
dichotomy, between the legal machinery and the actual practices in the resettlement of
the refugees can be seen in the critical modes of subjectivity that some of these texts
employ: Amiyabhushan Majumdar's Nirbaash (The Exile, 1959), Narayan Sanyal's
Aranya Dandak (The Forest Dandak, 1961) and Bokultala P.L. Camp (The P.L. Camp

at Bokultala,1960), Shaktipada Rajguru's Dandak Theke Marichjhapi (From Dandak

to Marichjhapi, written 1980-81), and Dulalendu Chattopadhyay's Ora Ajo Udvastu
(They are Still Refugees, 1983) are texts that look at issues of rehabilitation through
the optics of fiction and subvert the notion of refugees as 'victims' of a history they
fail to understand. Since the novels are all written in different times, a different
context is written into the time differences. For example, the earlier novels are mainly
preoccupied with middle or lower middle class refugees but Rajguru's novel, written
later, is about the Namasudra peasants and artisans who trickle in throughout the years
of 1950s and 1960s. The state's response to this later influx is also very different to its
earlier handling of the refugees immediately after the Partition.
Amiyabhushan Majumdar (1918-2000) has a number ofnov.els that reflect his
sense of history and society. Garh Srikhando (1957)39 is a novel that is set far from
the urban milieu and can belong to a group of novels in Bangia that consciously
evoked the locale and ethnography of a rural underdeveloped marginal people and
place. 40 The novel is set in an area in North Bengal and describes the struggles of the
38

Anindita Dasgupta, 'Denial and Resistance: Sylheti Partition 'Refugees' in Assam' in Tan and
Kudaisya, eds, Partition and Post-colonial South Asia, vol., II, p.,l94.

39

Amiyabhushan Majumdar, Garh Srikhando, in Amiyobhushon Rochonashomogro, vol., 1, Calcutta,

2002, pp. 21-385. Translations mine.

40

This can be termed as a distinct genre in Bangia fiction: Manoj Basu's Bon Ketey Boshot (1961),
Satinath Bhaduri's Dhorai Chorit Manosh (1950) and Advaita Mallaburman's Titash Ekti Nadir
Naam (1956) tum attention to the marginal communities of fisher-folk and peasants whose lives
and struggles create new fictional tropes of labour and culture that question the given notions of
nationalist literatures. In Bangladesh, similar impetus can be seen in the works of Syed Waliullah
and Akhtaruzurnman Elias.

139

Sandar tribesmen, the peasants of the area as well as the feudal Sanyal family, on
whose lives the wounds of war, famine, peasant struggles against the jotedars and
Partition throw long shadows. The canvas of the novel is big, so is the writer's social
consciousness of a large epic span of events and happenings that is implicit in the
questions of livelihood and labour of the characters. For example, the effects of the
1943 famine make women like Fatema and Surotan paupers who tum to illegal rice
smuggling to earn a livelihood. The elder Communist son of the Sanyal family,
Nriponarayan goes to jail as he is charged with sedition while his wife Sumiti is a
symbol of rebellion against the age-old feudal practices of his family. The novel's
wide canvas describes a changing Bengal through the years of the World War II and
is reflective of Amiyabhushan's critical yet humanistic aesthetic at work. His later
novel Nirbaash is smaller in scale where the theme of refugee-hood has a different
aesthetic implication and inflects the earlier literary conventions of Garh Srikhando.
In Nirbaash, 41 the referents of rehabilitation in Dandakaranya are not so direct but still
visible. The novel, set in 1959 around a camp called Holudmohun, revolves around
Bimala who is an inmate there. 'They 'have used all sorts of materials to build
permanent homes for themselves. Hay, tree leaves, terracotta tiles, serrated tin pieces,
even the brownish barks of trees. There was a plywood factory nearby. One can buy
the rejected bits of ply there, nothing better than barks of trees. The camp inmates
have used those too'(6). The novel opens with the imminent departure of the camp
inmates for Dandakaranya and the resistance that some people have to this idea of
leaving and going further away from the land they once called their own. 'At the
Holudmohun camp, people were living in an atmosphere of decay that destroyed them
slowly and inevitably. If one looked at them it would seem that the only solution was
to resettle them in another place. But where? Where was that country? ... .In
Holudmohun camp there were many who felt a deep longing for a country where the
mighty Padma flowed like an immense vein. Some of them were not fisher-folk
whose livelihood depended on the river, nor were they farmers whose plots were
made fertile by it. Padma never gave anything, except sometimes it came near like a
curse and moved away again. All these people searched for shelter, afraid for their
lives, yet they always tried to live near the river. Padma and all the small tributaries
41

Arruyabhushan Majumdar, Nirbi:wsh, Calcutta, 1996. All translations from the Bengali texts quoted
through the chapter are mine.

140

that were her relation ... They belonged to the land where Padma flowed. Outside that
land, lay the wide world but it was not home' (50). The boundaries of the new nation
state thus become contingent and unreal; it encircles what is not 'home.' When the
order comes to leave for Dandakaranya, a woman named Sodamuni asks Bimala,
'Will it be good or bad?' And Bimala reflects on Dandak: 'There will be plenty of
trees in Dandakaranya. Even then - No, there will no longer be any trees. And
forests? Trees will be felled mercilessly and towns will be established. Tractors will
help cultivate fields. And if that happens, who will object to bulldozers demolishing
forests? It was naked virgin fertility. It was a way to start anew, to be born again' (7).
In spite of raising the question of the environmental impact of rehabilitation in
a primeval forest-land, the novel does not enter into the real discourse of exile and
banishment. Rather it skims the surface and the narrative superficially examines a few
characters without exploring the impact of displacement in any great depth. The
refusal of Malati to go to Dandakaranya and her organizing other refugees to protest
the move is sketched in faint lines and the spirit of resistance remains unexamined.
The colossal efforts the refugees make to rebuild their lives, in the absence of any
integrated plans, certainly meant social adjustments and environmental costs that are
only hinted at in the novel. Yet Amiyabhushan's novel raises important questions that
are relevant to Bangia Partition fiction. The idea of 'ethnic' stereotyping that we come
across particularly in the ministry of Rehabilitation papers that often depict the
Bengali refugee as 'a bundle of apathy' is overturned time and time again in novels
like Nirbaash. This is a text that pictures the middle-class refugees not as victims but
as pioneers whose efforts at self- rehabilitation make them agents capable of changing
lives and environments. This comes out most clearly in the section where Bimala,
along with a few others, raise a few huts in an abandoned land. 'Next morning,
everyone will get together to clear the jungle. The women will make fences after
gathering twigs and branches. Young boys will help them. And the oldest woman
among them, Ma Thakuran, she has a job as well. She will cook for every one. After
sundown they will sit down to eat. Those who have small children must keep chira
and muri handy. Only when the huts are ready will they sit in them to breathe a sigh
of relief. Until they are ready, nobody gets to sleep.' (65) The women, except Bimala,
are not sketched sharply yet their presence pervades the novel. Their efforts to

141

reconstruct their homes, or their refusal to move to Dandakaranya, can be seen as the
refugee's new efforts at legitimization to become citizens of the new country.
Dulalendu Chattopadhyay's two novels, although written much later is, to a
large extent, autobiographical. Ora Ajo Udvastu (They are Still Refugees, 1983) and
Shikorheen Manush (Rootless Humans, 1988) are two texts that describe his own life.

As a young boy, he becomes homeless after the death of his father, an East Bengali
working in Calcutta. The first novel describes the writer's personal experiences in the
Dhubulia refugee camp and the latter, his struggles in a refugee colony in Garia, a

suburb in South Calcutta. Ora Ajo Udvastu is set in the year 1950 and describes the
life of a middle-class family. Sumit, the eldest, is the protagonist and his widowed
mother Sunanda choose to live in the camp so the children can be educated with
government aid. The novel revolves around the daily life in the camp, the family's
struggle for survival, and their efforts to get education in the camp school. The camp
spaces that the characters occupy, the bazaars, the schools, the fields and pasture lands
are carefully described in the text, signifying how these spaces translate into labour
that enrich the refugee's community life: 'When Sumit came, as a refugee, to the
camp it was like a desert, dry and arid. But today it was verdant green. Everywhere he
looked he saw houses, buildings, movement of people, as if the camp was alive. It
could be said that the refugees, in order to stay alive, had given a new lease of life to
the camp as well ... ' (19).

Th~

small plot of land next to their house is Sunanda's

'

kitchen garden that supplements her meagre doles. The daily labour of feeding her
three children and educating them are given a special status in the text: the mundane
and the ordinary are raised to another level of consciousness that forms the basis of
Sumit's memory as he prepares to leave the camp at the end of the text to be
rehabilitated in a colony in Garia. The novel however shows nothing of the turmoil of
Bengali life outside the camp. The months of 1950s are marked by many popular
protests against price rise and unemployment that throw no shadow on the camp
inmates. The life within the refugee camp and outside the colony almost does not
intermingle except through very passing images. Chattopadhyay's narrative fails to
give depth and resonance to Sumit's struggle that remains bound by contingencies of
individuality." The novel, however, lays bare the after-effects of the Partition on the

142

daily lives of the camp inmates: the smuggling across borders is possible with the help
of a group of young men living in the camp who are eager to supplement the
government doles as well as a new sense of insecurity for women living within its
walls. Prostitution is rife and women are often raped and molested by camp officials.
The novel discusses the rehabilitation plans of Dandakaranya and its effects on the
camp inmates: 'The government decided at this time to rehabilitate refugees in
Dandakaranya. The directive was - anyone who refused to go there will no longer
receive government help ..... will the rootless people continue to face the blows that
land on them or will they protest against the new rehabilitation plans? ..... Soon, the
refugees began to speak a language of rebellion - We will not be sent to
Dandakaranya' (110-111).
Ora Ajo Udvastu is a bildungsroman of a new kind. In the new nation state,

growing up refugee in a government camp sets a different paradigm for a novel of

realism and this is indicated in the title that has no sense of completion or of an end.
Certainly, the novel charts Sumit's journey from childhood to maturity, from
innocence to knowledge but the configurations and milestones of that maturity are
different. While out with his friends, Sumit sees a woman being dragged into the
nearby jute fields. He is too young to understand the import of what he sees, but very
soon he realizes the meaning of that experience: 'That day Sumit had not understood
why the woman had been dragged into the jute field, why she had screamed so loud,
or why very soon her voice had become faint like a sleeping human's. As he grew
older, he understood how the scream of that unknown woman had become one with
the past wails of many others, hovering through this free world as laments that no one
can trace.' (68) The novel gives a first hand description of a refugee camp that is not
quite common in Bangia fiction yet its language is cliched and unimaginative. The
novelty of theme does not set off an exploration of image and language. This has
contributed to the fact that although the writer uses locality and memory to look at the
exegesis of Partition and his novel is 'a union of history and literature' 42 these texts
have been consigned to oblivion by readers.

42

Dulalendu Chattopadhyay, Ora Ajo Udvastu, Calcutta, 1983, with a preface by Pranabranjan
Ghosh. Translations mine.

143

Narayan Sanyal (b.l924) a popular novelist of the 1960s, penned a number of

texts on the refugee question notably, Balmik (1958), Aranya Dandak (1961) and
Baku/tala P.L. Camp (1955).

43

The novels capture the loss of moral values in rootless

lives; for people whose existence becomes degrading while living in footpaths, station
platforms and slums, morality is a luxury. Of the three novels, the last has a unique
place in the Bangia literary canon. 44 It is set in a permanent liability camp around the
years 1954-55, but the protagonist is not an inmate but a camp official. The text is
structured as a reconstruction of the diaries and letters of Ritobrata Bose, who comes
to work in the Bokultala camp, set somewhere on the border of West Bengal and
Bihar. Earlier, the camp-site was an army barrack used in the World War II, but the
now abandoned barracks are used for a different kind of army: 'A series of trucks
unload their passengers in the field in front of the Control building. The guests alight
- not army soldiers but soldiers of death. They do not wear khaki, but tom and ragged
clothes. Their minds are not suffused with thoughts of victories in battles but are
shadowed with the humiliation of defeat in life's battle: with the horror of their past
and the terror of an unknown future! They came in large numbers. Thousands and
thousands of refugee families who were the oldest primal foreign inhabitants of the
newest nation state!' (9) The reference to the army barracks string together the World
War II experiences with that of the Partition, presenting an unbroken continuity of
traumatic experiences in Bengal's,social and economic life. 45

In the uneven tenor 6( camp life, Ritobnita is also a refugee of sorts, exiled
from the pleasures of Calcutta, writing love poetry to an absent girlfriend and bidding
his time before he can leave for the city again. Yet he is not unsympathetic to the
refugee's plight. Their sufferings and deprivations give him new insights of what

43

44
45

Narayan Sanyal, Bokultala P.L. Camp, Calcutta, rpt., 1978. Other novels are Aranya Dandak,
Calcutta, 1961 andBalmik, Calcutta, rpt.l983. Translations mine.
Asrukumar Shikdar, Bhanga Bang/a 0 Bang/a Sahityo, Calcutta, 2005, p., 36.
We recollect the famous scene in Ritwik Ghatak's film Subamarekha (1962), the last of his
Partition trilogy, where the young children play in an abandoned World War II aerodrome. With
the Partition serving as a backdrop, the film is 'about relational elements like history, war and its
aftermath, mass displacement and loss of an old habitat.' See Somdatta Mandai, 'Constructing
Post-Partition Bengali Cultural Identity Through Films,' in Anjali Gera Roy and Nandi Bhatia, eds,
Partitioned Lives: Narratives ofHome, Displacement and Resettlement, Delhi, 2008, p., 71.

144

Partition has come to mean to these destitute families. The physical environ of the
army barracks, its constricted space in which families live with meager separations of
'fossils of dorma walls' leave no space for age old rituals of caste: in the same hall
live 'brahmins, kayasthas, baishyas, baidyas as well as the untouchables.' (12) The
eradication of caste lines is just one of the significant social transformations wrought
by the Partition. The camp is an equalizer: everybody is a refugee here. They are also
'former human beings' who once 'laughed, played, earned their livelihoods, spent,
saved just like us.' ( 18). It is a narrow physical space, eighty feet by twenty, occupied
by eight families: 'Someone was patting a child to sleep, some others were separating
the ration rice from stone chips; in another section, cooking was being done on a
small open fire ..... darkness engulfed the entire hall and made it eerie. Most windows
had no frames ..... rotting dorma, broken tin sheet, has been piled on the windows.
They have to save themselves from the onslought of rains. But these prevented the
entry oflight and turned the entire hall into a dark chamber'(36). The eerie darkness is
a reflection of the despair that permeates the refugees' lives, a destruCtion of their
social organization, an inscription of dispossession that permeates the postcolonial
moment of liberation. 46 Inside the camp, Ritobrata's education takes new turns; he is
shocked to learn that women from the camp are regularly trafficked; others ply the
oldest trade in the nearby rail station. The government doles make the men into a new
'class ofperpetual professional legalized beggars' a description Ritobrata hears from
the Camp Superintendent (60). Ritobrata discovers that the turpitude of the men who
prefer to accept dole than to work is reflected in the ways camp life makes them lose
all sense of decency and propriety. One day he is witness to a quarrel that breaks out
in L/29 barrack. The swear words and crude language he hears makes him ponder on
the stark reality of post Partition Bengali society: 'But these people were not slum
dwellers. Among them were educated, civilized people, middleclass and lower middle
class ..... even some days ago, they belonged to a group in society. They performed
puja,

listened to kathakatas

and panchali songs,

sent their children to

pathshalas .... they were perhaps not all well off, but they had a sense of propriety and

decency (59).' Ritobrata's assessment of the refugees may be a liberalist dream but
46

The 'eerieness' that Manto describes in Toba Tek Singh is a similar enunciatory site: a destruction
oflanguage and social organization.

145

one of the stark effects of the Partition on the refugee lives is an erosion of their sense
of self and their human values. The corruption rampant in the Camp is a testimony to
that. The camp officials steal, as do the refugees who make false claims for doles.
Although Ritobrata tries his best to perform his duties to eradicate the misery
of those under his care, he maintains a distance from them through a sense of
superiority. He unwittingly gets involved with a camp inmate, Kamala, but decides
never to marry her: 'How can he take a refugee girl as his wife? .... He hoped to spend
a few more days here before making his escape' (132) Ritobrata's middle class
sensibilities that informs his position as protector/provider to the refugees is a
patriarchal power structure that Sanyal is careful to replicate from society at large. It
is also an indication of what the women inside the camp are up against. Kamala is one
of the many women in the camp whose life has been marked forever by the shock of
Partition. The traumatic life stories of the refugee women of the camp, Kamala,
Kusum and Kamala's mother, are symbolic of a whole generation of women who
were killed, maimed, abducted and remained untraced during the Partition. Their
untold stories form a major impetus of this narrative as it tries to unravel the mystery
surrounding Kusum or restore Kamala to a life of dignity. Sanyal's narrative thus
operates on two planes: the outward life of the camp is the foundation on which he
builds the personal tragedies of the refugee women. They have a stronger presence in
the text than the men. Yet the structures of power, patriarchal and social, are not
absent from the internal dynamics of camp 'life. The nov~l, however, fails to show a
contestation of these structures by the women themselves. If power can be subverted,
it can only be done by a man, as Ritobrata's benevolent patriarchal guidance shows.
At the same time, rehabilitation is the mode through which this power relation is
validated. The daily tasks of giving dole, looking after sick inmates, rebuilding the
barracks, supervised by Ritobrata, make us realize the limitations that operate in the
very premise of rehabilitation: it is an unequal relationship between the giver and the
receiver that replicates and continues existing power structures. Sanyal's working life
has been that of a relief official and he had visited Dandakaranya in 1960. The
depiction of his protagonist may or may not have something to do with his own life
experiences. However, what is interesting is the way he uses the motif of

146

rehabilitation in his text. The vision underlying rehabilitation in the novel is one of
benevolent state patronage where the abject dependence of the refugees is used
against them without going into the dynamics of support and benefaction.
Shaktipada Rajguru's novel, Dandak Theke Marichjhapi (From Dandakaranya
to Marichjhapi), 47 set in the 1970s, follows a group of camp refugees who are taken to
Malkangiri in the Dandakaranya area. The novel opens in Mana transit camp where
the camp inmates are people 'uprooted from far away Bengal and like flotsam and
jetsam have stopped at the banks of the infertile Mana's banks. Twenty years ago they
had come, like waves, in the hope of rehabilitation in the soil of Dandakaranya. Some
among them, the fortunate ones, got homesteads, but a few thousand families were
left behind who were still living within the surrounding areas of the Mana camp.' ( 1)
Sarat Das, a camp inmate, says, 'For seven years we have lived on the charity
doles .... what is the good of reducing us to beggars? Instead of making the entire race
beggars, give us land, a little homestead, let us work and earn our keep. In these last
years of our lives, let us live as cultivators as we were born. We don't want to live like
beggars.' The frustrations and aimlessness of the camp life is demeaning to human
dignity, saps energy and creates a new class of people, born and raised in the camps
who live a 'life of charity and joblessness in the tents and sheds, in its incipient
darkness of frustrations and lethargy.' (2) The breakdown of familial ties and moral
values throw the refugees into a darkness of chaos_ and disarray,._ 'The remembrance of
those days on the Sealdah platform, living in huts and going hungry, was etched
deeply in Potla's psyche. Nobody had saved his life; he had done it himself- by
begging, stealing, getting kicked around.' So when his father berates him for stealing
and drinking he growls, 'Don't you dare. What have you done as a father? The
government gives me dole, rations. Who are you?' (p.13) When the camp storekeeper
Khetubabu cajoles Ketaki to spend time with him in exchange for rice and sugar, she
tells him,' We are like fodder to you all.' (p.l5) This 'rudderless new class' 'who
know no ideals, to whom everything has become meaningless' is the real after-effect
of the Partition. Rajguru's novel is remarkable because, unlike many other tales of

47

Shaktipada Rajguru, Dandak Theke Marichjhapi, Calcutta, 1996. Translations mine.

147

Partition's trauma and pain from the Punjab where 'women and poor refugee men
seldom tell their own stories ..... (and) do not author their own history' 48 , Rajguru's
refugees, pushed out of West Bengal on a chimeral rehabilitation quest, articulate
their experiences in their own tongues. 49 Th~re are no central protagonistls in this
narrative but a host of minor individualized characters who are drawn with real life
brush strokes, dealing with real life situations. In that sense, Rajguru's characters are
no victims as they are agents of change and his novel captures the processes of
transformation of this group from ordinary refugees to inhabitants and locals of
Dandakaranya. Their individual experiences are not condensed into a collective
experience although the collective is important in a novel where rehabilitation and
resettlement form the discursive principles. This novel then, in more ways than one,
recover the lost (his) stories of refugee men and women whose voices have hitherto
been absent in any retelling of the Partition in Bengal.
The novel encompasses the reality of the Dandakaranya project in its most
significant aspects. The larger plan that did not take into account the ground realities
is explicated in the very opening lines of the text. The resettlement plan means
clearing of vast primeval forests, building of roads, schools and hospitals and a new
life for hundreds of men and women. But it also means a clash between the new
arrivals and the local populace: a classic peasant-tribal confrontation over land. The
novel is explicit in setting out this simmering discontent.
The Dandakamya Development Authority reclaimed some areas and let the
camp authority know that they were ready for settlers. The camp authority sent some
families and completed their responsibilities ..... and a new set of refugees came to
take their place in the Mana camp in the hope of rehabilitation. The wheel was
moving in this manner; from transit camp to the new settlement. But meanwhile some
48

Ravinder Kaur, Since 1947, p., 254.

49

Rajguru is careful to depict his characters as lower caste agriculturists who were the last wave to
arrive as refugees after Partition. Ties to their land had kept them in East Pakistan till it became
impossible for them to stay. For the enormous number of Namasudra peasants of Barisal, Khulna
and Jessore, post Partition realities confmned their inability to shape or influence broader political
realities in East Pakistan, so by 1955 trans-border migration of scheduled classes assumed serious
proportions. See Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, 'Mobilizing for a Hindu Homeland: Dalits, Hindu
Nationalism and Partition in Bengal (1947)' in Mushirul Hasan and Nariaki Nakazato eds, The
Unfinished Agenda, p., 190. In the novel they all speak a dialect that is lost in translation.

148

people realized the real import of things. A new group of politicians realized that ....
Dandakaranya was no longer an inhospitable, difficult mountain terrain. People were
living there; schools, hospitals and electric lights have transformed everything. The
new arrivals have made the virgin lands fruitful. With central grants, Dandakaranya
Development Authority has founded new settlements. This created a new feeling
amongst the people who have always lived there. They want a cut of the pie too, and
they have started agitating after inciting a few people .... "Foreigners Out! They have
no place in our land!" was a common slogan. In contrast there is the official
nationalistic discourse of pioneering work, clearing lands, making them fertile,
harnessing wild nature to create a 'new Dandakaranya' and a 'a new nation.' (29)
This sudden and abrupt transformation of indigenous tribal land is of course an
effect of the official rehabilitation plans, but instead of the clash between the
indigenous population and the new arrivals, Rajguru shows instead the clash of man
and nature that becomes the wide background on which the novel unfolds its
narrative. 50 In their first night in the new settlement amidst mosquito bites and
howling of wild animals, the refugees spend a fearful night. 'The night passed
sleeplessly .... For centuries the forestland had lived with its dreams intact. Today's
humans stake. their claim by completely destroying it.' (34) The feelings of
despondence and alienation rife among the refugees vanish as they get to work on
their own lands. The men work eight to ten hours to make the barren land of
Dandakaranya fertile again. Their relationship to their work and the land they work
upon gives a new meaning to their existence, their subjectivity. The novel compels us
to ask 'whether it is possible to think about identity and place in more ontological
ways, where belonging to a place, to a land, can also be very significant to the ways in
which we think and feel our subjectivities, to our own ways of being in the world?' 51
50

51

The reason for this may be that the novelist is more interested in showing the cultural inability of
the refugees to manipulate the unfamiliar ecological terrain. See A.B. Mukherjee, 'A Cultural
Ecological Appraisal of Refugee Resettlement in Modem India,' in L.A. Kosinski and K.M. Elahi,
eds, Population Redistribution and Development in South Asia, Jaipur, 1991, p., 102.
Priya Kumar, 'Testimonies of Loss and Memory: Partition and the Haunting of a Nation' in Tan
and Kudaisya, eds, Partition and Post Colonial South Asia, vol., II, p., 326. The cry 'Amra Kara?
Bastuhara' that resounded on the lips of the thousands who came to West Bengal is a cry of
identity that is historically contingent, yet Priya Kumar's question is a valid way in which identity
and belonging can be read in Rajguru's novel; a way in which, particularly for these agriculturists,
belonging to a land was their way of being in the world. Land was not just subsistence it was life
itsel

149

Certainly the characters in this novel feel and think that it does. It can be seen in the
clash between the older refugees and the young who are attracted to an urban way of
life. The dichotomy between expectation and reality is made use of by certain
politicians who do not want the refugees resettled in the area. They create a fear
psychosis among the settlers by setting fire to their huts or cutting down their ripe
com. In a hostile land, with very little irrigation and water, these added provocations,
where the 'refugees are made to be pawns in a political game' (74) make
Dandakaranya the 'dark forest' ofthe myths in more ways than one.

52

In the novel,

the intrepid refugees pack up and leave Dandakaranya. They come to Hasnabad near
the lchhamati River whose one arm flows towards the Sunderbans and the other,
taking the name Raimangal, flows past Bangladesh. However, their euphoria is shortlived as Sarat Das and others realize that they are now considered deserters: 'They
had no food, no shelter, nobody was responsible for them. No government cared for
them. They were citizens of no country, their names had been deleted from
humanity's book.' (126) Yet when night falls, 'the air is laden with the smell of paddy
fields and the scent of hasnuhana flowers .... The smell of Bangia's soil and tunehow long they have been deprived of it.' ( 13 7) The dream of building a home on this
soil kindles their tired bodies and lightens all their exhaustions. But when a group of
them decide to cross into Sunderbans they realize that all means to cross the river is
barred to them. Young Girija realizes that 'they will never let him go to the
Sunderbans. This was a life and a death situation facing them. On one side was a
powerful opponent,

on the other a few thousand of t~ese helpless unfortunate people.

In this wide world there was no space for them.'(l33) The young and the old are now
all united, determined to start a life where they can live with dignity, close to the soil.
The estuarine delta of the Sunderbans with its mangrove forests is not easy to
cultivate. The forests are thick with tigers and the rivers with crocodiles. Yet nothing
can deter these men and women. The administration stops all boats that can carry the
refugees but the men snatch a few and set sail.
The novel comes to an end when the settlement in Marichjhapi is attacked and
destroyed by the police in 1979. The narrative ends with a stark message: a true
52

Contemporary newspaper articles went into an overdrive trying to extol the virtues of
Dandakaranya, an area associated with Ram's banishment in the epic Ramayana. The report of
Amrit Bazar Patrika, 18 June 1957 carried a headline that stated that Dandakaranya was now in
'public attention' because 'the legendary lore's forest fringed soil' would be a new 'Haven for 1.9
million DP's.'

150

history of what actually happened in Marichjhapi is yet to be written. The lower caste
refugees, who die in the police firing, are expendable, their names forgotten and their
memories erased. History has not taken up the arduous task of writing about them.
They have no more strength to fight. So much pain, bloody days of hunger and
death have depleted all their strength. History has never written this story of
facing impossible odds, of fighting to the bitter end with their lifeblood. All the
words that would have described their lives will be lost, may be, it will be
written one day from another distorted standpoint. But in the eternal story of
humankind's struggle this story will be written again and again. The love of
life of these refugees and their struggles will remain etched in that history
forever .....but today they have been defeated. They have lost their all. ( 185)

In the history of refugee rehabilitation in West Bengal, the name Marichjhapi

is almost a forgotten chapter. Few people talk of it, even fewer have written about it,
while discussions about it by historians have also been negligible. 53 The reason for
this can be seen in the presence of a large percentage of marginal communities and
lower castes among the refugees who came to Marichjhapi for whom the elitist
Congress ministers at the Centre had little sympathy, nor did the urban middleclass of
Calcutta. The tragedy was that when a Communist government came to power in
West Bengal, the characteristic of the nation state did not change. In 1977, with the
Left Front government in power, the refugees who had been rehabilitated in
Dandakaranya became hopeful that the new popular government who had always
53

Discussions about Marichjhapi in Indian Partition Studies are few with the exception of writings by
Nilanjana Chatteijee, Ross Mallick and Annu Jalais. In Bangia, there are some writings, newspaper
articles as well as essays that have been collected in a recent volume. See Madhumay Pal, ed.,
Marichjhapi: Chinna Desh, Chinna Itihash, Calcutta, 2009. The recent debacle of the Left Front
Government in the 2009 Lok Sabha polls has made Marichjhapi come back in public memory. In
Bangia, apart from newspaper reports, the best introduction to the subject still remains a book by
Jagadishchandra Mandai whose Marichjhapi: Naishabder Antaraley, Calcutta, 2002 remains the
most prolific account of the massacre. Where history failed, literature has been ample in its act of
witnessing. Poets Subhash Mukhopadhaya and Shankho Ghosh have written poems on Dandak. I
have quoted from a poem by Subhash Mukhopadhyay at the beginning of the chapter. Shonkho
Ghosh's 'Tumi Aar Nei Se Tumi' and 'Ultorath' are two memorable poems on the refugees in
Dandakaranya. Sunil Gangopadhyay's novel Purbo Paschim, Calcutta, 1988, also talks of
Marichjhapi but not in such telling details. Hareet Mondol, an underclass Partition migrant travels
through various camps like Coopers' Camp; is then pushed out to a camp in Charbetia and then to
Marichjhapi, but his destination following the massacre remains unclear. See also Gangopadhyay's
brilliant story 'Puri Expresser Rakkhita' in Debesh Roy, ed., Roktomonir Harey: DeshbhagSwadhinatar Golpo Shankolon, Delhi, 1999, pp. 334-352. Amitabh Ghosh's novel The Hungry
Tide, Delhi, 2004 has given Marichjhapi a representational space in the English-speaking world, so
that other, older narratives are pushed to the background. Rajguru's novel has been out of print for
many years and has Just seen a reprint in 2008. .

151

espoused the refugee cause would now help them come back to West Bengal. The
Left Front Minister Ram Chatteijee visited the refugee camps at Dandak and was
widely reported to have encouraged the refugees to settle in the Sunderbans which
had been a long held Left demand. So through the months of March and April 1978,
families sold their belongings and left Dandakaranya. 'How many days did we eat a
full meal in Dandak? We spent twenty years like that. Can't we manage three months
more? But I am no longer a refugee, my bastuhara title is at an end' said the 55 year
old Ratish Mondo I who left for Marichjhapi to begin a new life.

54

But Left Front

policies had changed under the altered circumstances of governance. It was also
acknowledged that the refugees in Dandakaranya, (under the organization of
Udhvastu Unnyanshil Samiti) had refused to be a part of UCRC, a Communist Party
of India (Marxist) refugee organization, since they felt that the refugee problem was a
national problem, so their identity must not be part of any political group. The CPM
in tum was miffed at the thought that their dream of getting electoral advantages in
states like Orissa and Madhya Pradesh with a large refugee electorate might become
redundant. The new Left Front government in West Bengal, that had come to power
with the refugee vote, now urged these people to go back to Dandakaranya, refusing
to entertain their demand of settling in West Bengal. Many refugees were sent back
but around 10,000 Namasudra refugee families under the leadership of Satish Mandai,
president of the Udbastu Unnayanshil Samiti, set sail and settled in Marichjhapi. 55
Although it was not an island that was strictly under the mangroves, the government
was in no mood to relent. It declared Marichjhapi as a reserve forest and the refugees
as violating the Forest Acts who were destroying 'the existing and potential forest

54

55

Interviewed by Jyotirmoy Dutta, reprinted in M. Pal, Marichjhapi, ibid., p., 63.

There seems to be some dispute about the exact number of people who managed to settle in
Marichjhapi but it can be any where between 4000 to I 0,000 families. See Kalyan Chaudhuri,
'Victims of Their Leaders' Making', Economic and Political Weekly, 8 July, 1978, pp.l098-1099,
as well as Ross Mallick, 'Refugee Resettlement in Forest Reserves: West Bengal Policy Reversal
and Marichjhapi Massacre', The Journal Of Asian Studies, 58: I, 1999, pp. 104-125. Pannalal
Dasgupta, who had covered the Marichjhapi massacre extensively for Anandabazar Patrika stated
in his report that 2713 families were relocated to Dudhkundi camp after the massacre. If each
family had three members that made 8139 people atone, apart from those killed in police firing or
who died on the island. See Pannalal Dasgupta, 'Operation Marichjhapi,' reprinted in M. Pal, ed.,
Marichjhapi, ibid., p.,l68.

152

wealth and also creating ecological imbalance. ' 56 On January 26 1979, India's
Republic Day, the Left Front Chief Minister Jyoti Basu announced an economic
blockade of the island to force the settlers to go back. Thirty police launches
surrounded the island; the refugees were tear-gassed, their huts, fisheries and tubewells destroyed. Those who tried to cross the river in makeshift boats were shot at.
The refugees, armed with carpentry tools and makeshift bows and arrows were no
match for the government forces. A conservative estimate gave the dead as several
hundreds men, women and children who died either through starvation or who were
shot at and their bodies thrown into the river. Marichjhapi became out of bounds to
visiting journalists, opposition politicians and even a Parliamentary Committee who
came to investigate police atrocities faced harassment at the hands of the Forest
Department officials. The silence surrounding Marichjhapi's massacres was to
continue for some time except stray efforts that tried to expose the lies, deceit and
betrayals that came to signify Marichjhapi. Rajguru's novel is the only fictional work
that talks of Marichjhapi with such candour. That makes it exceptional given the
silence that has surrounded Marichjhapi.
Certainly, Partition's violent uprooting of a whole people engendered other
ways of representation, a playing with the form of the literary text or the visual text of
the cinema and there are many examples of that from the Indian subcontinent. But the
question that comes to mind is whether Rajguru's text employs new techniques of
representations that differ from other Partition novels? Does Rajguru make a new and
radical departure in the accepted narrative ideology of Bangia novels not only in his
subject matter _but also in his treatment? The answer to both the questions is 'yes.'
This novel has a large canvas and the incidents and characters cannot be summarized
but one can sketch a few of its salient features. In the novel, characters like
Nishikanto, Kalu, Girija, Potla as well as the women like Ketaki and Lalita are
sharply etched individuals. Their suffering and hardships are described without
sentimentality, without melodrama. Rajguru's novel is extraordinary because, unlike
many other tales of Partition's trauma and pain from the Punjab where women and
56

Letter from the Deputy Secretary, Relief and Rehabilitation Department, Government of West
Bengal, quoted in Annu Jalais, 'Dwelling on Marichjhapi: When Tigers became 'Citizens',
Refugees 'Tiger-Food', Economic and Political Weekly, 23 April, 2005, p. 1759.

153

poor refugee men seldom tell their own stories and who appear as part of a crowd, this
novel tells the refugee's story as one of individuals who exist in their own right. We
have, in the text, men and women who speak in their own voices and their voices are
those of the marginalized and the poor. Much of Bengal's Partition's narratives,
except a few, are from the lips of middle class men and women. So Rajguru's text is a
departure in the narrative practices of the times. In his novel, the displaced men and
women are given an agency that is remarkable. They are not objectified as 'victims'
in the statistical demographic paradigms of the nation state but are seen as players in
the progressive life of a community. The novel celebrates their struggles as well as
their humanity. In that sense, Rajguru's novel captures the processes of
transformation of a group of ordinary refugees to inhabitants and locals of
Dandakaranya and later of Marichjhapi. These men and women are presented as
individuals who are capable of changing their status of refugee-hood into meaningful
choices of livelihood and places of sojourn. Rajguru's depiction of the refugees in
Dandak is very different from Narayan Sanyal's, especially in the implications of
rehabilitation they set out in their texts. In Dandak Theke Marichjhapi, the efforts of
the Namasudra refugees to change their status and their lives are a contrast to the
abject dependence of the middle-class inmates at Bokultala. The former forcibly take
up means to set up a commune in Marichjhapi and transform, through their labour and
political will, the discourse of refugee rehabilitation in post Partition India while the
latter are shown trapped in apathy. In some ways then, Sanyal replicates the
Rehabilitation Ministry discourses about the purbo bongiyo refugees. The difference
in the time of composition may be the cause: Rajguru's text, written in 1980, was
composed exactly after a decade of the traumatically tragic Naxalbari uprising that
took the young of Calcutta by the storm, many of them from refugee backgrounds.
For the next few years, Calcutta would tum into a battleground. By the time
Emergency was proclaimed in I 975 by Indira Gandhi, the Naxal movement had
petered out. When the CPI (M) came back to power to form the Left Front, euphoria
was high, but then Marichjhapi happened. Rajguru's novel is written in a time of
assessment, after the violence is over: it takes stock of not only the tragic happenings
at Marichjhapi but even further beyond to search out the violence that lives at the
heart of the nation state.

154