Unattached Women, Able-Bodied Men: Partition, Migration and Resettlement in Bengal

195 Pages·2022·2.244 MB·English

by  Tista Das

Unattached Women, Able-Bodied Men
This book is one of the few gendered histories of the Partition experience in
Bengal. Tracing the afterlife of the Partition in Bengal through the gendered
experience of displacement and resettlement, it analyses the spatial recon-
figurations that were brought about.
Drawing heavily on police records, private papers, newspapers and mem-
oirs, this work enters the realm of personal time in the lives of the migrant
and refugee and follows them to see how the spaces that they inhabited, the
city of Calcutta and its suburbs, were transformed to accommodate them
and imposed with new meanings and, one might say, new borders. It high-
lights how ‘fear’ came to be the dominant emotion associated with the
migrants’ flight, how it was subsequently politicized and how it became the
cornerstone of the refugees’ bargaining with the state. Furthermore, it
focuses on how the state, in its attempt to become a charitable institution,
put in place a gendered structure of relief and, later, rehabilitation. This
work also shows how camps and colonies became the sites of political con-
testation, how the refugees found a brand of Leftist politics particularly
useful for their purpose and how it became the cornerstone of their new-
found identity.
A major intervention in Partition studies, the volume will be of great
interest to scholars and researchers of South Asian history, migration and
diaspora studies, gender studies and politics.
Tista Das teaches history at Bankura University, India. She obtained her
PhD from the University of Calcutta, Kolkata. She was a junior research
fellow at the Peace Studies Group, Department of History, University of
Calcutta. Her research focuses on the afterlife of the Partition in India and
narratives of life in refugee camps and colonies in post-partition Bengal. She
has focused on the experiences of women in this narrative. She has worked
on ways and means of reading violence and those of reliving the experiences
of the Partition in South Asia through remembrance and forgetting.

Unattached Women,
Able-Bodied Men
Partition, Migration and Resettlement in
Bengal
Tista Das
First published 2023
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2023 Tista Das
The right of Tista Das to be identified as author of this work has
been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book
ISBN: 978-1-032-30624-7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-34216-0 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-32105-7 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003321057
Typeset in Sabon
by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)
To my parents

Contents
List of Tables viii
Acknowledgements ix
Abbreviations xi
Select Glossary xii
Introduction 1
PART I
The Hindu from Noakhali and the Muslim from Bihar 19
1 Violence and Migration 21
2 Crossing the Border 52
PART II
Through Barbed Wires 69
3 Camp Refugees and the State 71
4 The Inmates 99
PART III
Creating Homes 119
5 Life in the Colonies 121
6 The Women of the 1950s 149
End Words 165
Bibliography 173
Index 180
Tables
2.1 Figures of Arrival of Refugees per Year 53
3.1 Number of Inmates of PL Camps and Institutions
in West Bengal 75
3.2 Camp-Wise Distribution of Vagrants 82
4.1 The Number of Deaths in Eight Wards of Dhubulia
Camp, 6 June 1950–7 July 1950 105
4.2 Zones of the Dankaranya Project 114
Acknowledgements
It was in another time that the initial work on this project had begun. It
began as a doctoral project which itself had taken ten long years to get
done. It was much later that the idea of a book germinated and it was again
years later that it crystallized into a plan. The book, therefore, has gained
years with me. I hope that this has been for good.
I have incurred many debts along the way over the years. In the very first
place, I wish to thank Professor Bhaskar Chakraborty, my teacher and
supervisor without whose guidance and care I could, in no way, hope to
begin, go about and finish this project and find my way through a mesh of
ideas. I wish to thank all my teachers at Presidency College, Kolkata and
the University of Calcutta for inculcating in me a deep love for the disci-
pline of History. I am thankful to the Peace Studies Group, Department of
History, University of Calcutta for funding my doctoral project in the ini-
tial years which helped me go about working in the archives and libraries
without having to worry about a job. I thank my students, my friends and
colleagues at Hooghly Mohsin College, Keshiary Government College and
Bankura University who have helped me to go off the hook whenever I
needed to work on this project. I am deeply indebted to everyone at the
National Library, Kolkata; the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library,
New Delhi; the National Archives, New Delhi; the West Bengal State
Archives, Kolkata; the Special Branch, Kolkata Police; and the departmen-
tal and central libraries of the University of Calcutta for giving me access
to their collections and providing me with all the assistance that I needed
while working. I am grateful to the School of Women’s Studies, Jadavpur
University for giving me access to the Ashoka Gupta files. I realised that
writing a book and publishing it are two different things, altogether. I sin-
cerely thank Aakash Chakrabarty, Brinda Sen and their team at Routledge
for taking care of the nitty-gritty of the publishing process and for being
patient with me.
I thank my sister and my brother-in-law for keeping the house running
while I worked and for having faith in me. I thank my friends, old and new,
far and near, for lending me their ears when I needed them most, for dis-
cussing and critiquing my ideas, bearing with me and for making all the
adjustments to fit my schedule in all our plans together. I could never hope