Freedom and its Enemies: The Politics of Transition in West Bengal, 1947-1949

Abstract

The fiftieth anniversary of Indian Independence became an occasion for the publication of a huge body of literature on post-colonial India. Understandably, the discussion of 1947 in this literature is largely focussed on Partition - its memories and its long-term effects on the nation. Earlier studies on Partition looked at the 'event' as a part of the grand narrative of the formation of two nation-states in the subcontinent; but in recent times the historians' gaze has shifted to what Gyanendra Pandey has described as 'a history of the lives and experiences of the people who lived through that time'. So far as Bengal is concerned, such experiences have been analysed in two subsets, i.e., the experience of the borderland, and the experience of the refugees. As the surgical knife of Sir Cyril Ratcliffe was hastily and erratically drawn across Bengal, it created an international boundary that was seriously flawed and which brutally disrupted the life and livelihood of hundreds of thousands of Bengalis, many of whom suddenly found themselves living in what they conceived of as 'enemy' territory. Even those who ended up on the 'right' side of the border, like the Hindus in Murshidabad and Nadia, were apprehensive that they might be sacrificed and exchanged for the Hindus in Khulna who were caught up on the wrong side and vehemently demanded to cross over. And of course, eventually, millions did migrate in a bid to find security among their co-religionists. By June 1948, there were about 1.1 million refugees in West Bengal. But almost all who lived on the borderlands, whether they fled or stayed, suffered dislocation of one sort or another - to family and kinship ties, jobs, trading connections - in other words, to almost every aspect of their everyday lives. The traumas of displacement, the bloodshed, the arduous journeys of the refugees to Calcutta's Sealdah Station, and from there to government camps or squatter colonies, the rapid politicisation of the displaced, and their emotional remembering of the villages they left behind, have all been chronicled with empathy in recent years. Partition and its memories thus dominate the contemporary historiography of 1947 in West Bengal.