The Fort of Freedom: A study of ‘Refugeehood’ through the formation of ‘Azadgarh Colony’

Sucharita Sengupta

(Sucharita is a researcher at Calcutta Research Group. She is working with Paula Banerjee on refugee politics in West Bengal as a part of CRG-RLS project on Popular Movements in West Bengal and Bihar. This article is a part of this research. Sucharita can be reached at sucharitaseng@gmail.com)

  In this essay I reflect upon the history charted by persons who were turned into ‘refugees’ or Bastuhara (the homeless) overnight after the independence of India. These colonies were illegal in nature. By not reducing the refugees from East Bengal into victims, this paper will examine the role of refugees in settling themselves in a new society through forming localities of their own by force (Jabardakhal Colony), emerging in the process as an economically productive subject. Azadgarh Colony in this paper is studied closely. It provides a glimpse of the individual negotiations that refugee leaders made in building colonies, their politics in asserting their sphere of influence over a certain area and the political tussle between the left and right wing political parties. We shall rely mostly on the memoir of Indu Baran Ganguly, a firebrand refugee leader who played a decisive role in establishing the Azadgarh Colony. Ganguly was an active member of the undivided Communist Party of India (CPI). He left the party in 1942. But he rejoined the party in 1948, the year when he came to Calcutta with his family as a refugee^[1]. The CPI then was trying to build up a strong opposition against the government and the refugee issue provided them with much needed instrument to articulate and mobilize their protests through forming groups and organizations, for instance, the ‘United Central Refugee Council’ in 1950. Ganguly mentions in his memoir that their rebellion against the Congress government in West Bengal embodied a glory that was larger than the pain they bore for the partition. Expressing apprehension on how historians will read partition history and interpret their memories, Ganguly in his memoir states that for him the history of refugee movement in the 50s was not solely of losses. It was instead a history of emancipation and stupendous success of winning over all odds to emerge powerful citizens of a new state.

      Ganguly’s memoir is interesting because it brings out the nuances of clashes among refugees over their political affiliations, the structure of power blocks they formed and using emotions to legitimize forceful occupations of lands. On one hand it reflects negotiations with the locals (in this case Muslims), on the other hand it also tells us about the tensions between neighbouring colonies, different political parties and ideologies. Each colony had an individual committee associated with a political party. For instance, Ganguly mentions that after being part of forming the second squatter colony in Calcutta, the Deshabandhu Nagar Colony in 1949, he was residing in the deserted house of the then prominent Muslim leader and zamindar Ghulam Ali Minar near Tollygaunge in exchange of a rent of Rs.50. The entire neighbourhood belonged to Ghulam Ali and poor Muslims, most of whom shared cordial relations with Ganguly. By this time Ganguly had re joined the CPI and he was being aided by the party to pay the rent. Incidentally CPI was declared illegal in March 1948. The party could not continue to pay the rent for long resulting into a scuffle between Ghulam Ali and Ganguly. Taking advantage of this situation, one group approached him to make false papers to confiscate the entire plot. They tried to evoke anger in him by saying refugees were forced to leave their land in East Bengal for the Muslims and hence ‘snatching’ their land was their right. Ganguly, in his own words, was a man of high morals and could not accept this proposal. It is clear from this narrative that for refugees like him, forming colonies through force in deserted lands was certainly not illegal but making false papers to confiscate the same was. Here Ganguly portrayed his conflict with Ali as an absolutely non-communal one, related solely to the payment of rent. Another day, Santosh Dutta, a fervent supporter of the refugee cause and main architect of the first squatter colony in Calcutta – Bijaygarh- along with Dhirendranath Roy Chaudhury, famously known as Kalabhai came to visit the area Ganguly was residing in. Both were famous freedom fighters and were supporters of the Congress. Apparently, they told Ganguly that they wanted to make the area an extension of the Bijaygarh Colony. On the same evening, he was approached by a rival group of Santosh Dutta, belonging to the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP), to build an independent colony there, which will have a new committee with Ganguly as the new President. Ganguly apprehended that giving the plot to Bijaygarh Colony would make Santosh Dutta more powerful and resourceful. Hence Ganguly took up the proposal of forming an independent colony and this is how the ‘Azadgarh Colony’ was formed^[2]. These plots of lands were then divided among refugee families on a first come-first served basis in exchange of a rent of Rs. 10. This is the history of the formation of the ‘Azadgarh Colony’^[3]. Members of the Azadgarh colony did not compel the Muslims living in the neighbourhood to evacuate the land but members of Bijaygarh colony, as says Ganguly, attacked them and they were forced to flee the entire area. Later, few residents of the Bijaygarh Colony came and helped Ganguly in building the colony and complained about concentration of power and corruption among few leaders within the colony^[4]. There were repeated clashes between the Azadgarh and Bijaygarh Colonies and Ganguly himself was attacked by some residents of Bijaygarh mainly because he was a communist and since he formed an independent colony there instead of giving the plot to Bijaygarh^[5].
      Although Bijaygarh Colony is in paper the first squatter colony established by refugees, Ganguly rejects this claim owing to the nature of its establishment. He echoes what Prafulla Chakraborty writes in The Marginal men, about the formation of Bijaygarh Colony. Chakraborty says that the Colony was made possible due to the help it received from the government and that Santosh Dutta had taken verbal permission from both Jawaharlal Nehru and Bidhan Chandra Roy before establishing it with the help of Jadavpur Engineering students and Jadavpur Refugee Association. So it cannot be called a ‘jabardakhal colony’ or illegal squatter of the refugees. It was neither illegal nor legal as the tacit support of both Nehru and Roy cannot be denied in establishing Bijaygarh, writes Chakraborty[6]. Uditi Sen writes “the dispute over Bijaygarh’s status” provides insights on the nature of refugee negotiations. It was the passive mode of protests that distinguished the Bijaygarh Colony from the rest. Santosh Dutta was very close to the Bengal Congress and also to a section of the elite Calcutta Society. The fact that Ganguly talked of a ‘secret pact’ between Santosh Dutta and Bidhan Chandra Roy reflected their differences in political outlooks and modes of protests. While colonies like Azadgarh adopted radical modes of protest, Bijaygarh refrained from violent opposition due to its allegiance to the congress and hence the clash between Indu Baran Ganguly, as mentioned in his memoir with leaders of the Bijaygarh Colony was only inevitable[7].

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[1] Indu Baran Ganguly, Colonysmriti : Udbastu Colony Pratisthar Gorar Kotha (1948-1954), Kolkata, 1997, pp. 4, 42-43.

[2] Ibid, pp 54-56.

[3] Joya Chatterji, “ ‘Dispersal’ and the Failure of Rehabilitation: Refugee Camp-Dwellers and Squatters in West Bengal”, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 41, No.5, 2007, pp.995-1032, p.996.

[4] Ganguly, Colonismriti, p.57.

[5] Ibid, p.112.

[6] Prafulla Chakraborty, Prantik Manab: Pashimbange Udbastu Jiboner Kotha (Bengali translation of his Marginal Men), Kolkata, 2013, p.39.

[7]Uditi Sen, ‘Building Bijaygarh: A Microhistory of Refugee Squatting in Calcutta’, in Tanika Sarkar and Sekhar Bandyopadhyay (ed.) Calcutta :The Stormy Decades, New Delhi, 2015, 416-418, pp.410, 411.

Outside the Pail: Refugees beyond Camp or Colony in Post-Partition Calcutta

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.

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[1] Sadananda Pal, Eka Kumbha:Ek Udvastu Kumbhakarer Matimakha Atmakatha, Kolkata, 2009; Manoranjan Byapari, Itibritte Chandal Jibon, vol. 1, Kolkata, 2012.

A Critical Analysis of the Category of the ‘Refugee-Woman’ in post-Partition Studies

Pallavi Chakravarty Ghoshal

(Pallavi teaches history at Ambedkar University, and can be reached at pal_phd@yahoo.co.uk)

Nearly a decade ago Gargi Chakravartty coined a new term in the historiography of partition studies in India—the ‘Refugee woman’. Before this intervention Urvashi Butalia, made a pioneering breakthrough in bringing out the voices of the women who had suffered the trauma of partition and who had for long been neglected in the study of independence and partition of the subcontinent. Partition history had till then been a study of ‘high-politics’ alone, neglecting what is now seen as the ‘human dimension’ of this greatest human tragedy experienced in the Indian subcontinent. Scholars like Urvashi Butalia, Ritu Menon, Kamla Bhasin, Gargi Chakravartty and Veena Das altered the course of partition historiography in India by introducing a gendered analysis of this traumatic episode in the subcontinent’s history.

 This article discusses the two images perceived of the post-partition refugee-woman in the Indian subcontinent: that of the victim, and that of the one who survived it all. Finally, I critically assess such perceptions regarding the refugee-woman, by raising the following questions: how did she perceive these roles assigned to her by the exigencies of the situation? Was she a willing participant to these roles or did she simply take these roles upon herself based on the dictates of the family, society, and nation?

The Refugee-woman as the Victim:

Women were abducted, forcibly converted to the other religion, raped, and killed by the men of the ‘other’ community in the name of religion, as a message to the rival community. As noted by Urvashi Butalia, such an assault upon the body of the woman, was not an attack upon the woman alone, rather it was an attack upon the family, community, and nation of the woman. Thus, the body of the woman did not belong just to her, but it epitomised the trinity of family, community, and nation.

        

 However, the violence did not just end there, as the erstwhile protectors of the woman, now became her tormentors as well. The notion of honour diluted all notions of love and belonging, as now fathers, brothers, husbands, took upon themselves the responsibility of preventing the defiling of family honour and killed their own daughters, sisters, and wives, to save this ‘honour’ of the family, community, and nation. It is this very skewed notion of honour, that brought feelings of sorrow or anger instead of joy and relief upon a family when their daughter was returned to them by the efforts of a government-sponsored recovery and restoration project undertaken for abducted persons (children below the age of 14 and women of all ages). It is this very notion of honour which makes the Punjabi Hindu refugee proudly narrate stories of how the brave women of Punjab, of their families, ‘chose’ death over abduction/rape/forcible conversion to Islam, while, despite much prodding, they remain silent or feign ignorance about the women who survived this torment, deep within some also felt why did these ‘shameless’ women not die? Rajinder Singh Bedi’s Lajwanti and Amrita Pritam’s Puro, in different ways, epitomise these silent voices of the woman who were ‘restored’ and yet not accepted within their own family and home.

        

In Bengal, women were victims of not only direct violence but also subtle and discreet forms of violence. Any memoir of the Bengali bhadramahila during these troubled times would show how the routine violence was even more difficult to bear than the experience of direct violence. A first-hand account of this omnipresent fear in the minds of the Hindu women can be observed in Nalini Mitra’s statements: ‘It became increasingly difficult for me to pass through a locality infested (sic) by Bihari Muslims on my way to college.’ But it was only when in the workplace too, she heard obscene remarks being directed towards her, that she realised it was time to leave—‘At that instant I realised that it would no longer be possible to stay in my beloved motherland. How could one live in such a filthy environment?’[1]

       

The Refugee-woman as a Survivor:

This was the new image of the refugee woman which recent scholarship has unearthed, and this comes from a use of non-conventional sources and a re-reading of the conventional archive. However, it was not an altogether unexplored area as Bengali literary works and cinema had brought this aspect to light in the 1960’s itself. At a time, when narratives of gruesome and inconceivable violence from the west was dominating all popular memory in the works of Sadat Hasan Manto, Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud Capped Star), a novel by Shaktipada Rajguru, later brilliantly translated into a cult partition movie by the same name by Ritwik Ghatak, started bringing a change of perspective vis-a-vis partition and the refugee-women. It is this film which set scholars to find the many lost Nitas (the protagonist in the film: a refugee-woman who becomes the sole breadwinner of the family in post-partition Calcutta and in the process gives up her own desires and ultimately dies in the end). Hereafter, many such narratives of women giving up their own personal wishes, and becoming the sole breadwinners of the family started pouring out. Manikuntala Sen, in her memoir, notes that it was the women from East Bengal who taught the women of West Bengal to get educated and employed.[2] A survey conducted by the Directorate of National Employment Service, West Bengal, shows that in the post-partition period there was an increase in the demand for employment among women.[3]Similar narratives of the refugee woman from West Pakistan also started coming up.        

The Problem:

However, was it always a happy story of women empowerment at the end of a traumatic experience? Did these women ‘choose’ this life? Did it bring them the empowerment which is often assumed in these narratives? Was partition truly that violent break which set women upon a different path of their own? These are some questions one wonders when talking of this refugee-woman who became the sole earning member of the family.

        

 Meghe Dhaka Tara, the novel as well as the film, do not conceal the fact that Nita had a few desires of her own—be it higher education, marriage, motherhood, and perhaps something as basic as slippers for her feet or to visit the mountains, however with her father getting incapacitated, brothers not earning enough, she took upon herself to sacrifice all her wants and keep the family alive with her earnings. But the final scene in the movie, makes us ponder whether at all she wanted to make all such sacrifices or not—‘Dada, ami bachte chai!’ [ Dada, I want to live][4]

         Not all such narratives ended on a sad note, Bithi Chakravarti, would be a case in point. Like Nita, she too, was the sole breadwinner in the family and kept refusing marriage till her family had become financially stable. Unlike Nita, her partner waited for her and eventually they did marry.[5] But did she go back to work after marriage? This has not been explored.

       

Asok Mitra problematises this idea of the woman’s ‘choice’ i.e. her willingness to take up the entire burden of the family upon herself, most poignantly in the following words—‘She has nothing to look forward to, she has nothing to plan for, except the short term arithmetic of how much to try to borrow from which neighbour or school colleague… [brothers would waste away the money earned by her in expensive restaurants, but she could not] for she was the leading earner in the family, and the entire salary she meticulously hands over to her mother. Nobody cares to ask how many saris she has…There is no question of marriage… you need a minimal glow of health even for divertissements like that. This Bengali girl is nobody’s desire… she has nothing to look forward to, spinsterdom, give or take a few years, is going to set in early…’[6]

      

An Annual Report of the Ministry of Rehabilitation mentions that marriage was the ultimate means of rehabilitating the ‘unattached displaced women’. One may also note that under the Government of India schemes, it was the family which was a unit of rehabilitation, not the individual. And families were further divided into those headed by the ‘able-bodied males’ those which were headed by ‘women’. The latter came under various categories of permanent liability and were taken care of in the permanent liability camps. If at all there was an individual unit for rehabilitation it was that of the ‘unattached woman’. Such women were sent to Women’s Homes, but hereto, the final solution to their rehabilitation was considered to be marriage. Thus, the patriarchal notion of state as protector was not betrayed even in the times of grave trauma and travail for the refugees.

     

Apart from the problem of choice and gendered notion in the scheme of rehabilitation, let us look at the issue of victimhood. We may ask can the question of survival be completely divorced from that of victimhood? This woman had been inflicted by the scars of partition violence and the misery of displacement. But her story of victimhood did not just end there as being a woman she became the most vulnerable victim of sexual abuse even after crossing over to what was being considered as safety in the new homeland. Beginning from the lack of private space in the cramped tents in the refugee camps to entering the flesh trade (willingly or being duped into it), the refugee woman became an easy prey even in these times which should have reflected more sensitivity from the public and the state. The workplace, too, was not free from harassment of various kinds: going to work itself was often accompanied by derisive looks or comments from men directed not just to these women, but also to the men of her family, who had allowed such a role reversal to take place.  

     

Of course, there are narratives of those women as well who found freedom in this whole traumatic experience of partition violence and displacement. For many, it was the first time that they had stepped out of the home and that they were earning for their families.

     

On the other hand, there is a class question involved as well in this glorification of ‘triumph’ after ‘trauma’. Women from the rural background and lower income groups had always been working to supplement the meagre family income. For them this toil was not a new found enterprise, rather, it was business as usual for them. They had even previously toiled in the farms, or worked as domestic help in pre-partition times. Their stories go unheard and unwritten. Even Rameshwari Nehru, the head of the Women’s Section (a special Board set up by the Government of India to look into the matters of the refugee-women) commented that it was easier to resettle the women from rural backgrounds or those who were not so educated as they were easily absorbed in the agrarian work or as domestic helps in the urban areas, it was the educated middle class women which were difficult to rehabilitate as it was difficult to find ‘suitable’ jobs for them.[7]

     

Further marginal to this narrative of victimhood and survival are the women from the lower castes. The story of rehabilitation of refugees is essentially that of the middle-class and upper caste refugees. Very little research has been done on the rehabilitation of the refugees belonging to the lower castes, and among them much less is known about the refugee-women of this caste.

    

To conclude, this article has tried to present how the category of ‘refugee-woman’ has been perceived in recent scholarship. I have also pointed out to the strengths and weaknesses of such an analysis and suggested further areas of research on this theme. The idea is to suggest that while research on this new category of the refugee-woman has certainly enriched our understanding of partition, it has also made a very significant contribution to gender studies and further opens up a greater avenue for studying the history of the oppressed in a new light.

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[1] Nalini Mitra (Director of the Refugee Rehabilitation Department of the West Bengal Government) interviewed by the research team, School of Women Studies, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, in Seminar, 510, Interviews.

[2] Manikuntala Sen, In Search of Freedom: An Unfinished Journey, Kolkata, 2001.

[3] ‘Employment among Women in West Bengal’ Directorate of National Employment Service, West Bengal, November 1958.

[4] Nita develops tuberculosis and is sent to the sanatorium, she is aware that she cannot live long and it is a final outburst from her where she expresses this desire to live.

[5] See Bithi Chakravarty interview in Jasodhara Bagchi and Subhoranjan Dasgupta (Eds), Kolkata, 2003, pp.150-154.

[6] Asok Mitra, ‘Take a Girl Like Her’ in Calcutta Diary, London, 1977, pp.16-20.

[7] From Rameshwari Nehru Files, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Delhi.

The Other Side of Partition Migration and Rehabilitation: Minority Displacement and Dispossession in Bengal

Subhasri Ghosh

(Subhasri teaches history at Asutosh College, Kolkata, and can be reached at subhasrighosh@yahoo.co.in )

        In the annals of 1947 Partition historiography, communal riots occupy a pivotal position. On the Bengal side, the corpus of works essentially focuses on how the mayhem triggered by the 1946 Great Calcutta Killing spurred a whole train of communal frenzy in eastern India, prior to independence and the “riots, which preceded partition gradually petered out after the Proclamation of Independence.”[1] Post-independence, the Barisal riots of February 1950 occupy a pre-eminent position in Partition literature, being the catalyst of the largest mass migration in a single month in the eastern sector. Deviating from this high politics of communal violence, but nonetheless pregnant with far-reaching consequences, this paper attempts to explore a somewhat ‘sporadic localised’ riot in Howrah in March 1950. While the Barisal riots of those days grabbed the headlines, the riot nearer home failed to garner much attention.

Trouble broke out in the third week of March in 1950. The jute belt along the bank of the river Hooghly was the worst affected. The then Additional District Magistrate of Howrah, Asok Mitra recounts, that on 24 March a few Muslims were killed. Situation worsened to reach its peak on 25-26 March when around 16 Muslims were killed, following which military was summoned to control the situation on 28 March. Between the evening of 27 March and the early mornings of 30 March, from the lanes and by-lanes of Ghusuri locality of the town, the mutilated bodies of around 60 Muslims were recovered by the district administration. Situation calmed down from 30 March with no further report of casualties.[2]

This ‘localised’ riot was pregnant with consequences of great depth. The riot, carried out with the covert support of the government was meant to act as a pressure tactic to force the Prime Minister of Pakistan Liaquat Khan to come down to Delhi for peace talks. Moved by the plight of the Muslims at Howrah, Liaquat Khan declared on 29 March that he would reach Delhi on 2 April for peace talks. The very day rioting stopped. Asok Mitra laments, “…it is a tragedy that in order to bring Liaquat Khan to Delhi, it was necessary to instigate riot in Howrah.”[3] The Commission of Enquiry formed to enquire into the 1950 riots, headed by Ms Mridula Sarabhai very eloquently, in the context of the Howrah riots, pointed out, “Personal experience of the Howrah episode confirmed my doubt…the flaring up in the industrial areas was a planned affair abetted by the local authorities. Those who were behind it appeared to be confident of support from the higher quarters. This was substantiated by the Government’s action in not taking steps against those…the manner in which the officers behaved left no doubt that they were involved in it.”[4]

Also, the larger issue at stake was the rehabilitation of the burgeoning stream of Hindu migrants from across the border.[5] The ulterior motive of the government was to rehabilitate the Hindu migrants, by evicting the Muslims and instilling fear psychosis so as to prevent their return for good. As Sarabhai notes, “On the eve of the Inter-Dominion talks…the policy of the Government seemed to have changed overnight…everywhere the District Officers were busy provoking the Muslims…to migrate to Pakistan.”[6]Ironically, while the Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru was crying hoarse in the Parliament on the persecution of the minorities in East Bengal, in West Bengal, too, the minorities suffered from insecurity as is evident from these incidents. Not only Howrah, but minorities in Hooghly, Nadia, too suffered the same fate in active connivance of the administration. The then Relief and Rehabilitation Commissioner, Government of West Bengal, Hiranmoy Bandyopadhyay opines in the context of Nadia, “If the refugees had not occupied these abandoned plots and houses, I shudder to think how the Government would have shouldered the burden of accommodating thousands of refugees in the relief camps.”[7] Thus Hindu rehabilitation at times became co-terminous with minority persecution, eviction and displacement and the minorities became pawns in the political power play.

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[1] Prafulla K. Chakrabarti, The Marginal Men: The Refugees and the Left Political Syndrome in West Bengal,”  Kalyani , 1999, p. 6.

[2]Asok Mitra, Tin Kuri Dash, Vol. III, Kolkata, 1997.

[3] ibid, p. 122.

[4] West Bengal State Archives (WBSA), “Statement of Smt Mridula Sarabhai”, No File No., 1950.

[5] Between 13 February 1950 and 23 July 1950, an estimated 15,51,820 Hindu  migrants poured into West Bengal.

[6] “Statement of Smt Mridula Sarabhai”

[7] Hiranmoy Bandyopadhyay, Udbastu, Calcutta, 1970, p. 73.

Introduction

Cartoons published in the infamous French magazine, Charlie Hebdo, brought the complexities of representation and politics to the fore, in the recent past. In the cartoon depicting a drowned immigrant figure next to a Jesus like figure walking on water, was also the legend, “Christians walk on water, Muslim children sink”. Yet another featured dead Aylan Kurdi’s figure, next to a McDonald type advertisement.

The detractors were quick to condemn Charlie Hebdo’s overtly racists and insensitive cartoons, while the magazine’s editors and several others pointed out at the satire inherent in their representational practices. They claim, the satire was not directed at the migrants themselves, but Europe’s response, inadequate, to the migrant crisis.This debate points at the complexities inherent in the ‘circuit of culture’, pointing at the tensions between signifying practices, modes of production, consumption, identities and regulations.

The current issue of Refugee Watch Online seeks to tease out the politics inherent in cultural representations of migration and forced migration, From the differential and evocative use of a term to the popular imaginary of a space definitively forming an identity and a desire in the universe of Malayalam cinema, to the imaginative use of borders and crossings in search of a supportive and irreverent Europe— this issue brings together a host of articles reflecting on the representations of migration across mediums, spaces and modes.

The articles in this issue are as follow (click on the links below):

The Gulf on the Malayali Big Screen: An outline history

IO STO CON LA SPOSA: A Video-Graphic Review

Migrations and Identities: A Study of Sea of Poppies

Harraga: Snapshot on A Migration and Its Representation

Fratricide: A Review.

Mein Hoon Yusuf Aur Yeh Mera Bhai: The Story of a Real People

Book Review: The Agartala Doctrine : A Proactive Northeast in Indian Foreign Policy, Subir Bhaumik

Samata Biswas (bsamata@gmail.com)

The Gulf on the Malayali Big Screen: an outline history

Mohamed Shafeeq K. 

(Shafeeq teaches Comparative Literature at University of Hyderabad and can be reached at shafeeq.vly@gmail.com)

The first Malayalam movie to refer to what is called the Gulf came out in 1980, and was called Vilkkanundu Swapnangal – Dreams for Sale (dir. M. Azad). Who did the selling was not clear, but there were clear buyers, the Malayalis being foremost among them. Written by M.T. Vasudevan Nair, the movie begins with a voice-over telling us

[how] we [were] always attracted by the promise of a land where we can harvest gold.  Once upon a time it was Ceylon, then it was Malaya. In the last one decade there have been stories doing the rounds of a land where you end up being rich if you somehow, even selling off the roof over your head, you can manage to reach there. Thousands of youth now found a dream to cherish – Dubai.

The movie depicts the hardships and perils of the journey of the days then where many did not even make it to the other shore alive.  It also offers other conclusions:  as the protagonist of the movie, Rajagopala Menon, discovers, (i) Gulf can make you rich beyond your dreams, (ii) but all the richness of it, the villa there, the house in Kerala – none of it – can help you win your love, Sridevi, who would bang the door of her crumbling Nair tharavadu (feudal household) on your face, and (iii) there are more migrants on the way. The movie offers glimpses of what Dubai used to be back then and is thus a rarity.

IO STO CON LA SPOSA: A Video-Graphic Review

Tommaso Manfredini

(Tommaso is a Doctoral Student in the Department of French and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, Columbia University and can be reached at tm2538@columbia.edu)

EU Regulation 604/2013 remains the latest attempt at legally harmonizing the processing of asylum-seeking and protection claims across all EU Member States. Its origin can be traced back to the 1990 Dublin Convention (ratified in 1997), followed by the Regulation’s original 2003 draft which, through several amendments, led to the adopted text of 2013. Commonly known as “Dublin Regulation” or “Dublin III”, the regulation establishes that the Member State where applicants first lodge a status application is responsible for reviewing that claim. This means that an asylum-seeker has only one chance and, formally, one choice: he or she must lodge their application in the country where they would like to be admitted and eventually reside. “Lodging an application”, however, is not exactly an act of free will. In theory, an application for asylum will be filed on behalf of an undocumented migrant whenever and wherever this person comes into contact with a European state representative. If a person enters the EU through Italy but wants to live elsewhere, as is the case of the characters in Io sto con la sposa, he or she must make their way to the country of their choosing without being intercepted by “state representatives”—police, train controllers, highway patrols, etc.Io Sto con la Sposa is thus a statement about and against the growing inadequacy of the Dublin Regulation and its power of fragmenting the purportedly borderless space of the European Union.

Migrations and Identities: A Study of Sea of Poppies

Samata Biswas

(Samata teaches English at Bethune College and can be reached at bsamata@gmail.com)

“...the Ibis was not a ship like any other; in her inward reality she was a vehicle of transformation, travelling through the mists of illusion towards the elusive, ever-receding landfall that was truth”(422-423)[i].

Set in the 19^th century, immediately before the first Opium War, Sea of Poppies chronicles the journey of Ibis, from the coast of Calcutta to Mauritius. Central to the novel is Ibis, once a vessel that carried slaves, now fitted for human cargo, and later, for opium. It brings together merchants, indentured labourers and their guards, convicts undergoing a sentence of kala-pani, lascars who ply their trade, one white woman trying to build an independent life in another country, a black man passing as white- the link between the different sections on board etc. The narrative is at pains to underscore the idea that on board the ship, everyone, especially the marginalised are part of a unified community of forced migrants irrespective of the reasons behind their migration and their previous situations in life. This article teases out the tensions inherent in the creation of a homogenous migrant identity.

Harraga: Snapshot on A Migration and Its Representation

Baya Yantren 

(Baya is a Law student at McGill University and she can be reached at baya.yantren@gmail.com)

Harragaحراقةis a word that has many meanings, that has its own sounds, its images, its texts, and most of all it is a word that has claimed its own bodies. Derived from the classical tri-literal root حرقmeaning 'to burn', this word has an even longer history, a history which has impregnated the word with metaphor.

Harraga is one of the current methods of irregular emigration:  though its name is ‘el harga’, it is the person who does it that is called ‘harrag’, the plural of which is the term ‘harraga’. It is this word that has gained much media attention and has come to mean both the phenomenon and its candidates. Harraga is a phenomenon that, more than any other form of irregular immigration—by virtue of its physical weight and its and symbolic meanings—puts into question the state, and this time on a global scale. 

Algerian Migration

Since the publication of Abdelmalek Sayad’s The Suffering of the Immigrant, much has changed in the ways of emigration from Algeria, North Africa and, more generally, from around the Mediterranean. The traditional pattern of emigration from Algeria that automatically translates into immigration to France has been put into question, and the validity of the traditional Paris-Montreal-Algiers triangle of Algerian migration has been interrogated. It remains, however, that the migration of Algerians to France still was numerically the most important inflow of non-EU population to France in 2012. If the predominance of Algerian migration to France remains, the past thirty years have nonetheless witnessed a marked change in migratory fluxes.

Fratricide: A Review.

Madhurilata Basu

(Madhurilata teaches Political Science at Gurudas College and can be reached at basu.madhurilata@gmail.com)

Director: Yilmaz Arslan

Cast: Erdal Celik, Nurretin Celik, Xevat Gectan

Running time: 90 mins

‘As moths drawn to the light, many took the road to the Promised Land’, hoping that, ‘at the end of the tunnel, shines the light of money…’

The movie Fratricide (Brudermode; Germany: 2005), tries to capture the aspirations of migrants in Europe, in this case an unnamed German city, their struggles at various levels— to have a life, to live with dignity and be accepted as well as the struggles of competing with other migrants for assimilation. Yilmaz Arslan's Fratricide, traces the journey of a young Kurdish shepherd boy, Azad (Erdal Celik), to Germany, with the help of his elder brother’s (Semo, Nurretin Celik) money, in order to support their struggling family.

When Azad is all set to leave in a truck full of teenage boys or young men from nearby villages, all suited up, Azad’s father picks up some soil and puts it in his shabby coat pocket. At that moment, the words of a fellow passenger that in a new land one might lose a brother to find another,  might seem to be harsh, based on the timing, but as the film unfolds, it would seem that harsh is another name for the reality in Azad’s life. On arrival in Germany, Azad stays in some kind of a refugee shelter. He comes to know that Semo has become a pimp and he, unlike his brother, sets off to earn his living by shaving beards and trimming the nose hair of the customers from a neighbourhood hangout. It is at the shelter that Azad meets Ibo (Xewat Gectan), an orphaned Kurdish boy and forges a friendship and brotherly attachment towards him.

Mein Hoon Yusuf Aur Yeh Mera Bhai: The Story of a Real People

Maithreyi Karnoor (Maithreyi writes reviews for The Hindu, and can be reached at maitreyi.karnoor@gmail.com)

An earlier version of this review was published in The Hindu, April 29, 2016.

Ethnic violence on a gargantuan scale happens in another continent; a huge war is fought whose victory doesn’t undo the death and destruction on either side; mythology is invoked; meetings are held by a few powerful men in closed rooms in a far away country and a ‘solution’ is found by which you and your family will pay for the damage by giving up your home – your land, your loved ones, your dreams.

When one cannot explain the occupation of Palestine to a six year old convincingly, without losing one’s own convictions in the process, it is stupefying – shattering – when a six year old tells you this story himself.

All Yusuf, wants to do is play with his older brother and experience an innocent joy and warmth in the intense love story between his brother and his lover Nada. He wants to eat chocolates and let his brother fill his eyes with dreams of the future – in a home full of warmth and love. But Yusuf is flung violently in a story framed by colonialism, world wars, partitions and migration. People are forced out of their homes, many lose their loved ones. Yusuf’s brother is killed and Yusuf spends many years meandering through refugee camps living a life of confusion and pain, until he is found by Nada, a woman who would have been his sister-in-law in another destiny. What follow are emotions resonating with tenderness – mixed with the pain of loss and nostalgia – that tell a gripping story of the futility of war.

Renowned artist from Kolkata, Sanatan Dinda won the first prize at the World Bodypainting Festival 2016, Portschach (Austria). The theme of the final round was ‘Propaganda’ (control of the public mind) wherein Dinda portrayed the image of Aylan Kurdi who’s corpse was  washed ashore on Turkey’s sea beach. The message ‘immigration is not a crime’ was painted on both hands of the model. According to Dinda he represented the issues of ‘internally displaced person’ through the portrayal of Aylan.

Photo courtesy: The Times of India

Book Review: The Agartala Doctrine: A Proactive Northeast in Indian Foreign Policy, Subir Bhaumik

Snehashish Mitra

(Snehashish is a research assistant at Calcutta Research Group and can be reached at snehashish@mcrg.ac.in)

In the annals of history, today’s northeast region (NER) of India has been a frontier region without any clear cut boundary or borders. Territories were marked by a few kingdoms like the Ahoms, Koch, Manipur and Twipperah (today’s Tripura), while ethnic demography was equally influential in controlling resources. Until the dawn of independent India’s rule, the region witnessed frequent border shifts & orientation, while internal reorientation has continued through formation of new states and autonomous councils as a response to security centric agendas and aspirations of autonomy along ethnic cum indigenous lines. As per the design of partition in 1947, the NER shares borders with multiple nations of southeast Asia. Therein the foreign policy of India holds multiple ramifications for the northeast region. With options of India being limited on the Western front due to unfriendly Pakistan, unstable Afghanistan and turbulent middle-east, India has recently focused on expanding bilateral ties with the eastern neighbours; though northeast India didn’t figure in India’s Look East policy in the 1990s, around 2008 it has started to gain importance in the imaginaries of India’s geopolitics as it aspires to shift from security centric governance to trade centric governance in the northeast.   Tripura deserves a special mention with regards to its proactive nature in engaging with its immediate foreign neighbour . Thus the choice of the book title by veteran journalist Subir Bhaumik has in a way acknowledged Tripura’s role by including Tripura’s capital Agartala within the title.

‘The Agartala Doctrine’ brings together a myriad range of articles which encompasses the local dynamics of the region by focusing on Assam and Bhaumick’s own inputs on Tripura, and stretches out to the multiple dynamics of foreign policies, sub-regional bodies like ASEAN, BIMSTEC etc.[1] Bhaumik  introduces the readers by giving a critical overview of India’s recent foreign policy and how domestic politics also play a pivotal role considering West Bengal and Tamil Nadu’s stance on international issues. Bhaumik then goes into the detail of Tripura’s tryst with migration, insurgency, ethnic autonomy and relation with Bangladesh and aims to formulate few guiding principles of India’s foreign policy drawing from Tripura’s experience. Bhaumik locates the success of the Tripura’s decision making in the past and hence roots for the ‘Tripura Line’ for appropriate response of India’s foreign policy which is actively pursuing the Eastern neighbours.