Contesting refugeehood: squatting as survival in post-partition Calcutta

Abstract

In the aftermath of conflicts, refugees are often treated as helpless victims of trauma in need of international aid and intervention. Refugees can and do however move beyond the culture of dependency to create sustainable existences within their new environments. While much attention is given to the politics of displacement, humanitarian intervention and human rights of refugees, little is written about the ways in which refugees actually live, particularly those who have chosen to settle themselves rather than allow outside powers to intervene in their settlement choices. This article looks at how the refugee settlement process has taken place in Calcutta in the aftermath of the 1947 partition, and how that process has very much been influenced by the trauma of losing social position in their ancestral country and the desire to regain it and belong to a new land.

Keywords:

• refugees
• partition
• Calcutta
• resettlement
• squatting
• colonies

Notes

1. Bengal was divided twice: first in 1905, when the Bengal Presidency was divided between East and West Bengal; and later in 1947 during the Partition of India. Bengali politics from 1905 asserted the idea of an undivided Bengal regardless of religious plurality and was based on the notion of a linguistic nationalism and a sort of natural history of the nation. See Chatterjee (1997) for further discussion.

2. A large part of the descriptions of the refugee colonies is based on personal interviews conducted with long-time colony residents. Many of these people had been in the colonies since their inception, and had often engaged actively in their establishment and in demanding refugee rights from the government.

3. Prafulla Chakrabarty, in his 1999 book The Marginal Men: The Refugee Power and the Left, talks about the refugeeisation of left politics in Bengal and how the CPI(M) could not break out of the model of UCRC agitation politics. He also states that refugees turned Calcutta into the city of processions and radical politics.

4. Manas Ray, personal communication.

5. It should be noted that the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrants was ratified by the minimum 20 countries in March 2003. The convention lays out principles of treatment and rights of economic migrants, although they are not adopted by the majority of countries in the world.