Kaustubh Mani
Sengupta
(Kaustubh
teaches history at Bankura University, West Bengal, and can be reached at kaustubh.sengupta@gmail.com)
This essay looks at the variety of ways the refugees became a part of the urban work-force in post-partition West Bengal. Government schemes could not provide for everyone. The desertion from the government camps is quite well-known. The government was keen to disperse the refugees from the bulging population of Calcutta to avoid a breakdown of the system. But the solution of dispersal faced immense resistance from the refugees and the various refugee organizations. Dispersal and consequent desertion from the camps left the refugees on their own, without any aid from the government. They now had to fend for themselves. What happened to the people who were thus out of the pail of government rehabilitation scheme now? What is the story of those refugees who never went to the camps or were part of the colonies? Through a close reading of the autobiographies of Sadananda Pal and Manoranjan Byapari, I attempt to answer these questions.[1]
Pal was born in a family of potters in East Bengal.
He came to West Bengal before his parents migrated. He was supposed to set up
the family on this side of the border, and then the entire family would
migrate. He, along with his brothers, tried their hand in various trades, but
could not establish their business. They were in a better condition than the
camp-dwelling refugees, and found a place to stay on the eastern fringes of
Calcutta. They had some capital to start a business, knew certain people who
could help them. But these were often not enough to sustain them in the new
land. Pal, among other things, worked as a tailor, learned to make sweets,
hawked betel leaf, set up a stationery shop. He ultimately moved back to his
ancestral profession, and started making pots on a small scale. He faltered on
these activities, could not learn the tricks of the trade enough to continue
with one business. But he kept on trying various ventures to make a living. The
urban informal economy gave him the opportunity to try his hands in different
jobs. This made him look for other avenues of income. His condition was not as
bad as those refugees who had to take shelter in government camps and rely on
the doles. On the other hand, he was not a part of the early, mostly
upper-caste migrants who could establish colonies in and around Calcutta. He
thus occupies an interesting place in the narratives of rehabilitation of
refugees in post-partition West Bengal. Government accounts or community-memories
do not have room for these individual voices. But they open up a new dimension
of the process of rehabilitation where individuals had to negotiate with a
range of actors, identities, and situations to make their space.
Byapari was born sometime in 1950-51
in Barishal. He came to West Bengal with his family within a couple of years.
From Sealdah station they were sent to Shiromonipur camp in Bankura. But soon
they left that camp and went to Ghola Doltala ex-camp site in 24-parganas.
Byapari spent a couple of years there. Then he left the camp in search of job.
Thus began his wandering life with a variety of vocation and experience of many
lifetimes.
Byapari gives detail description of
the camps he stayed in. The infrastructure was inadequate to say the least. In
Shiromonipur, for more than two thousand refugees there were only two
tube-wells to obtain water for drinking. There was a dispensary with one doctor
but with hardly any medicine. A primary school was opened but it did not run
for long. The residents had to live in tents, there were no huts. The notorious
heat of Bankura was life-threatening for them. Child mortality rate was very
high in the camp.
After leaving the camp-life, Byapari
went on to a number of odd-jobs to survive. Looking for a job, he went to
Calcutta, Siliguri, Guwahati, Darjeeling, Lucknow, Kanpur and Dandakaranya. He
worked in domestic households and tea-stalls, became a coolie, pulled a
rickshaw, assisted a truck driver and a cook, swept floor in a city school.
Abject poverty, exploitation of the employer or sheer misfortune pushed him
from one place to another. He came back to West Bengal and got embroiled in the
extremist politics. He got arrested and was sent to prison.
He learnt reading and writing from a
fellow prison-inmate. He was fortunate to have a helpful police officer who
encouraged in his endeavours. After his release from the prison, he started to
pull a rickshaw and a fortuitous encounter with Mahasweta Devi changed the
course of his life. She asked him to write in the journal Bartika. He wrote many books subsequently depicting the life and
experiences of the dalits.
Byapari is conscious of his identity
as a dalit refugee. He constantly reminds his readers the injustice and
violence he had to face from upper caste people. His depiction of refugee camps
shows the wretched condition in which the refugees had to stay. But he clearly
makes a distinction between the upper caste and lower caste Hindus who were displaced
from East Pakistan. He categorically states that the bhadralok refugees did not want the dalit refugees to stay in the
numerous colonies that sprang up in and around Calcutta. While the triumphant
narratives of the genesis and consolidation of these colonies are abound in
literature now, Byapri’s narrative shed light on the process from an opposite
end. He argues that the bhadralok refugees
had prior contacts with the government which facilitated their way into the
urban life while the lower caste refugees became the victims of the faulty
rehabilitation policies of the government and had to languish in the camps.
The condition of the government camp
forced Byapari to desert it. He eked out his living from various corner of the
country. His wandering years were traumatic. But on the other hand his
peripatetic life opened up new avenues for him; he had the perseverance to
study in jail and then start writing. In a sense, he could overcome the initial
difficult years by moving out of the government schemes. While on one hand this
shows the failure of the government rehabilitation schemes, on the other it
also marks the reconfiguration of identity. While he was supposed to become an
agriculturalist according to government classification, his desertion from the
camp led him to become ultimately a part of the informal sector of urban labour
force.
These narratives point to the
limitations of the policies of the government. Byapari and his family left the
Shiromonipur camp at Bankura although they had nothing to fall back upon once
they came to Calcutta. But they preferred to eke out a living in the city
rather than face the hardships in the camp. This desertion can make us think of
the countless people who were not accounted for in the government registers.
The government had a classificatory scheme, with men and registers at Sealdah
station, marking the migrants with their location, profession and caste. But
there were lots of people outside this pail of government database, who did not
have proper documents to travel. Thus they took other routes. They did not
belong to the paper regime of the government. Sadananda Pal travelled to India
without any paper. He was successful in going back also, before returning to
India with proper visa.
Secondly, if we look at the way
these people try to find a job, we realise that they were ready to move beyond
their family profession. Pal did not want to become a potter, and in West
Bengal he did a range of other things before settling down to make clay pots
again. This shows that profession could be changed, people were ready to take
up new avenues. Government rehabilitation schemes missed this attitude.
[1] Sadananda Pal, Eka
Kumbha:Ek Udvastu Kumbhakarer Matimakha Atmakatha, Kolkata, 2009; Manoranjan
Byapari, Itibritte Chandal Jibon, vol.
1, Kolkata, 2012.
