© 2023 IJRAR September 2023, Volume 10, Issue 3 www.ijrar.org (E-ISSN 2348-1269, P- ISSN 2349-5138) Hostile Homeland and Uprooted Life of Namasudras Refugees: Relocating Migration and Misery in Late Colonial Bengal Mansi Bose Research Scholar Department of English and Modern European Languages, University of Lucknow, Lucknow Abstract: This paper offers an in-depth examination of the historiography and repercussions of the partition of the Indian subcontinent, with a particular focus on the often-overlooked experiences of Dalit refugees in Bengal. It delves deep into various aspects of partition, such as its impact on various communities, the influence of caste and class in refugee experiences, and how these narratives are represented in literature and cinema. The paper underscores the complexity of partition's effects on diverse communities and the necessity of acknowledging the struggles faced by marginalized groups, like Namasudras, amid this significant historical event. It emphasizes the need to incorporate a variety of voices and perspectives in the study of partition and its aftermath, shedding light on the multifaceted nature of this traumatic event. Additionally, this paper highlights the enduring challenges and obstacles faced by Dalit refugees, even long after partition, emphasizing the ongoing struggle for recognition, rights, and social justice. Overall, it offers a compelling exploration of the partition's profound and lasting impact on the subcontinent and the importance of understanding its consequences for all segments of society. Keywords: Partition, Dalit Identity, Migration, Displacement, Trauma, Anguish, Namasudras, Marginalization, Human History. “This light, smeared and spotted, this night-bitten dawn This isn’t surely the dawn we waited for so eagerly This isn’t surely the dawn with whose desire cradled in our hearts.” (Faiz 53) The historiography of partition of the Indian subcontinent usually considers this event within an authentic setting of contention over space and identity between two communities - the Muslims, from one viewpoint, and the Hindus, on the other; the Sikhs add a further layer of difficulty to a generally worked on binary. All inward differentiation in light of gender, caste or religion is imploded to introduce the two contending groups as homogenous sub-continental classes addressing two particular social and political identities. In case the gender unevenness in this historiography has now been somewhat redressed, numerous different voices still stay quiet and unheard. In investigating this consequence of Partition, many voices have been recuperated, yet many are still to be explored. Ravikant and Tarun K. Saint in the Introduction of Translating Partition (2001) state that the best of the literature that emerged in the wake of partition bears the imprints of the struggle to grapple with pain and suffering on a scale that was unprecedented in South Asia. As Urvashi Butalia has brought up, “In its almost exclusive focus on Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims, Partition history has worked to render many others invisible. One such history is that of the scheduled castes, or untouchables” (Butalia 235). IJRAR23C2841 International Journal of Research and Analytical Reviews (IJRAR) 632 © 2023 IJRAR September 2023, Volume 10, Issue 3 www.ijrar.org (E-ISSN 2348-1269, P- ISSN 2349-5138) Identities established in well-defined social relations are politically expressed in particular verifiable conjunctures, and hence conjunctural moves frequently bring about the dislodging of one character and vocalization of another in ensuing reconfiguration of identity issues. Bhisham Sahani in his work Aaj ke Ateet, translated as Today's Past: A Memoir (2015) by Snehal Singavi says, “Sometimes history is extremely painful… sometimes, yes, it gives you strength” (Translator's Introduction). As the residents of Pakistan and India commend their independence consistently, the commemoration of partition and its myriad impacts on their lives and those of their predecessors stay a sobering and miserable work that inconveniences any simple valorising of hard-won anti-colonial sovereignties. Ostensibly one of the focal insights arising out of this tremendous corpus of reflection is exactly how complex was the human experience of this watershed in the South Asian past. Narratives of pre-partition and post partition have implied and affected the endless individuals whose lives were drawn willingly or not into its bedlam is a subject that has drawn the consideration of researchers, artists and literati. In exploring the aftermath of partition, especially in Eastern India the general imperceptibility of the Dalit still perseveres, even though there is presently rich writing on Partition in Bengal. Among the governmental issues that prompted Partition, Joya Chatterji's Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition. 1932-1947 (1994) refers to the Dalits as minor actors in the unfurling political dramatization that was overwhelmed essentially by the Hindu bhadralok (or the upper-standing world-class). Aside from Sekhar Bandyopadhyay's works, Dwaipayan Sen has as of late touched on this issue. He, touches basically around the role of Jogendra Nath Mandal, who in 1943 had begun the Bengal branch of the All India Scheduled Castes Federation (AISCF), and blames Congress intrigues for what has been going on with the Dalit in those times of British rule. However, while Congress was unquestionably no genuine companion of the Dalit, the political issues of this period and Dalit inclusion in it had bigger intricacies and a larger number of actors than is usually perceived. Anirban Bandyopadhyay has likewise taken an opinion on Dalit politics in Bengal from 1945-1946, yet, he focuses more on Ambedkar's political race to the Constituent Assembly (CA) from the Bengal Legislative Assembly than on Partition issues in general. One group of Dalit pioneers, driven by Mandal, were against Partition and accepted that a Dalit-Muslim union was to the greatest advantage of the Dalit. There was another group which drew nearer to Congress and Hindu patriotism and requested a Partition of Bengal when it appeared to be impending that the entire of Bengal could go to Pakistan. Numerous Dalit workers in Bengal were trapped in this political vortex and became both - casualties and culprits of violence. Resisting uniformity, partition was accomplishment and misfortune; loss, uprooting and recuperation; empowering of an unexpected organization; resurrection and compromise; fear and awfulness; injury and alleviation, apparently, all at the same time. In collective imagination the event stays outlined as the political result of communalism; the religious community - whether Hindu, Muslim or Sikh - is the source of hopeless distinction. While there is no denying the proof of this proposition, what the ineluctable rationale of communalism darkens are the obvious varieties between how communities apparently inside the religions endured the weight of the event. Partition, so, did not bring the promised homeland to everyone. The Partition of India, which had different layers of meanings for individuals, addresses potentially the most challenged desultory landscape of South Asian historiography. The conventional understanding of the event, regardless of certain distinctions in accentuations, subtleties and semantics, has reliably contended that Congress had stood for a united India, while Mohammad Ali Jinnah and his Muslim League (ML) - which from 1940 started to advocate the two-nation theory - were liable for the miserable but avoidable vivisection of the subcontinent. These twin myths of Partition - the League for Partition and Congress for Solidarity - have been genuinely tested in revisionist historiography, which has contended that Pakistan's request was Jinnah's bargaining counter; what he truly needed was a free federation for India with independence for the Muslim provinces. Congress, with its inclination for a strong incorporated unitary state, acknowledged Partition as a vital cost to pay to get freedom on their conditions. Concerning Bengal, Joya Chatterji in The Spoils of Partition (2007) has convincingly shown how the Hindu bhadralok elite, with the support of the Congress and Hindu Mahasabha, organized a mission for Partition and the formation of a Hindu province in West Bengal. A few recent examinations on Punjab and Bengal show that the Partition movement did not simply remain an elite affair; the masses were similarly involved, especially when violence broke out in 1946. IJRAR23C2841 International Journal of Research and Analytical Reviews (IJRAR) 633 © 2023 IJRAR September 2023, Volume 10, Issue 3 www.ijrar.org (E-ISSN 2348-1269, P- ISSN 2349-5138) Parimal Ghosh characterizes the bhadralok of the colonial times as upper caste Hindu Bengalis having landed property and Western education as well as a code of moral leadership. Bhadralok is a variable social marker, which moved its onus historico-politically from gentry of riches and rack-rentier agrarian structure to cultural chauvinism that derived from a pride in Western education and inheritance of the Renaissance tradition in Bengal (Ghosh 435). Chhotolok alludes to those who were associated with labour, which showed up without shoes to cover their feet, umbrellas to safeguard their head and oil to lube their hair and skin. At the degree of social hypothesis, as given by the Brahminical framework, these were people without rice to fill their appetites or education to instruct them. The metropolitan elites, in their inclination to seem to be steadfast functionaries to the British rulers and separate themselves from native folk culture, had coined the deprecating term chhotolok (in a real sense signifying small individuals rather than bhadralok or gentle people), and its equivalent itarjan (the 'unrefined one') for uninformed destitute. It had a foul undertone and was differentiated from what a 'decent Bengali' was. Dalits or Scheduled Castes established the majority of the refugees that expanded the camps of India and West Bengal built to oblige those looking for refuge from embarrassment and thefts in the east, spiking the populace density of genuinely saturated geology. By the end of the 1950s, the refugee movement (prepared by associations with Leftist opposition groups) defied a state determined to expel them amid mounting pressures. This recalled the colonial state's dealing with mass anti-colonial protest, and shockingly if faintly suggestive of the gathering together of the European Jews, Dalits were confronted with the full coercive might of the Nehruvian state to guarantee their expulsion from West Bengal: the detainment of conspicuous leaders, police severity, sexual violence, the withholding of allowances and stipends to actuate the willingness to leave, dispersal of protestors past city limits to forestall their recombination, constrained evacuations on trains beyond the states. The result of such activities was to destroy any opportunity for contiguity in Dalit presence. From being concentrated in four areas in eastern Bengal, by the mid-1960s they ended up dispersed in locales following a bend as far abroad as the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh, unlikely visitors in societies distant to their own. Some endeavoured to return to the more recognizable territory of West Bengal after finding environmental factors and being allotted a home inhospitable to people acquainted with the wealth of deltaic land. In doing so, they faced additional state violence, but this time under the office of those they once followed. Generally infamous and especially ironic, was how the CPI (M) government dealt with evacuees who had set up camp in Marichjhanpi in the Sunderbans. Having decisively used Dalit transients in their bid to bring down the Congress, the caste-Hindu communists released a rule of police fear on the people who declined their arrangements for them, bringing about the demise of almost 400 people, the loss of property and scarce resources, and the attack on women. The silence encompassing the slaughter was to go on for a long time except for stray endeavours that attempted to uncover the lies, trickery and treacheries that had come to connote Marichjhapi. Shaktipada Rajguru’s novel Dandak Theke Marichjhapi (1980-81) is the only full-length novel in Bengali that talks of Marichjhapi with candour. It is also not unexpected that this novel is no longer available for a long time now and it has never been important to mainstream literary canon in West Bengal. The brutality around Marichjhapi was more than the demolition of a group whom the state had abandoned. It was the underestimation of an abstract work that had been considered to uncover the brutal history of Marichjhapi and the creation of a culture of hushing dispute. Marichjhanpi, a name that has become a metonym for standing barbarity in Dalit extremist circles, remains an excruciating and impactful sign of the superfluity of dubious lives even by those committed, from a certain perspective to their prosperity. According to Anasua Basu Raychaudhury, relocation among East Bengalis from East Pakistan to West Bengal was fundamentally formed by three essential objectives - dhan (abundance/property), maan (honour/distinction) and praan (life). Those entering West Bengal between October 1946 and March 1958 were named old migrants' and were qualified for minimal government help. This comprised the upper-caste and highsociety Hindu migrants, who had little or no threat to the public economy and were hence the most liked. The subsequent group comprised migrants showing up between April 1958 and December 1963. The authority called them in-between migrants. This group predominantly included the service-oriented working class, who, regardless of their economic status, had the advantages of appropriate interpersonal interaction and schooling. Ranajit Roy claims that a great fragment among these middle and upper-middle-class individuals, who had prior had an association with Calcutta, did not enroll themselves as refugees, although they significantly added to the population in post-Partition West Bengal, Tripura and Assam (Roy 53). Owing to class and caste pride, they shunned looking for administrative assistance. At last, the government distinguished new migrants as the people IJRAR23C2841 International Journal of Research and Analytical Reviews (IJRAR) 634 © 2023 IJRAR September 2023, Volume 10, Issue 3 www.ijrar.org (E-ISSN 2348-1269, P- ISSN 2349-5138) who were Dalit exiles who entered India between 1 January 1964 and 25 March 1971 until the 1970s. The Dalit refugees were qualified for recovery provided that they looked to resettle beyond West Bengal since they were monetary burdens. For the previous waves of old migrants and in-between migrants, the purposes for relocation were the fear of losing dhan (abundance/property) and maan (honour/distinction). Conflictingly, for the 'new migrants', containing individuals from the lowest castes of Bengal - the Namasudras, Sadgops and Poundras – the sole reason for relocation was praan (life). Drawing their livelihood from land as cultivators, new migrants were those who had no secured employment in West Bengal, which suggests that they had surrendered to an uncertain, desperate life after Partition. Shelley Feldman perceives middle-class Bengali settlers as the primary articulators of melancholic feelings of Partition. The stories they build take the state of a virtual myth while praising the unadulterated East Bengali past and lamenting the inadmissible West Bengali present. The sentimentalization in these works has helped the bhadralok immigrants to gather colossal power in the new socio-political arena. They often allude to a specific idealistic vision of the countryside East Bengali home, without tending to the common landowner and worker relationship, from which sprout the seeds of sectarianism and disdain. Concerning the literary portrayal of Bengali refugees, it was only the voice of the bhadralok class that was heard, which represented all segments of exiles. The Bengali exile cannot be developed as a homogenized phenomenon, having a place only with the bhadralok class. Such a portrayal screens the non-bhadralok Dalit and Muslim evacuee's voice, which the East Bengali bhadralok had socio-economically oppressed till before the partition. The portrayal of Dalit refugees’ encounters in post-partition West Bengal through Adhir Biswas' Bengali memoirs Deshbhager Smriti (Memory of Partition) (2010) and Allar Jomite Paa (Stepping on the Land of Allah) (2012) and Manoranjan Byapari's autobiographical work Itibritte Chandal Jibon (2012) translated as Interrogating My Chandal Life: An Autobiography of a Dalit (2017) contrast from that of the prototypical East Bengali 'gentleman' as both Biswas and Byapari are from the caste of Naapit (barber) and Chandal (outcaste) respectively. As immigrant first-generation Dalit literates, their points of view of the post-Partition times make a field of information beyond the standard East Bengali bhadralok ideas, which have been managing Bengal Partition accounts and memory. Byapari's family belongs to the untouchable community of the Mandals, from Turukkhali close to Pirichpur, in the district of Barisal (presently in Bangladesh). After Byapari's grandfather faced a loss in his business, the villagers humorously changed their family name to Mandal with Byapari (merchant). He says that his father was glad to be a Namasudra of Kashyap Gotra, inferring that the Mandals kept away from their past Brahminassigned caste insignia of Chandal. Byapari's family relocated to India to keep away from the approaching communal riots that went on in East Pakistan even after the partition. Byapari recalls the predicament that his family faced while leaving for the new country. On the one hand, the family felt uncertain about remaining back as a minority and on the other, it feared severing all ties with the old Muslim companions and entering the Hindu majority territory of India. Alok Bhalla, in the ―Preface‖ of his Partition Dialogues: Memories of a Lost Home (2007) refers to Hannah Arendt in his regard. He opines that the first loss which the rightless suffered was the loss of their homes, and this meant the loss of the entire social texture into which they were born and in which they established for themselves a distinct place in the world. As a young refugee in India, his days were spent mostly at railway stations, refugee camps, in Dandakaranya and the Jadavpur hinterlands, and in various places in India, where he worked and searched for random jobs. Byapari's account is fundamentally about the obstacles he faced in postPartition India. Adhir Biswas was born in Jessore's Magura region in a barber family. His writing shifts between recollections of the two Bengals. His books Deshbhager Smriti and Allar Jomite Paa have short impressionistic scenes. Biswas' Allar Jomin is rather a fanciful understanding of Calcutta, prevalently from a country and naive perspective of a Dalit. It gives a futuristic vision and expectation for resettlement in a far-off and foreign metropolitan milieu, especially as it was procured among the landless workers, who had no contact with Calcutta. The high hope with Calcutta in Biswas' writing and how the information on effective retention inside its limits helped a village family's status can be perceived from the instance where a youth from Magura finds a job in one of the city's vest industries with a promising pay (Biswas 14). Sunil Ganguly's Arjun (1987) and East-West (2000) are based on the misconception about the bhadralok's downfall of status after arriving in a threatening Calcuttan milieu. In Arjun, the Dalit girl Labonyo cannot transcend what is happening and is assaulted by goons, while Arjun, a splendid student and an upper-class refugee in the same settlement has an affair with a rich West Bengali girl, so the caste and gender-based rules IJRAR23C2841 International Journal of Research and Analytical Reviews (IJRAR) 635 © 2023 IJRAR September 2023, Volume 10, Issue 3 www.ijrar.org (E-ISSN 2348-1269, P- ISSN 2349-5138) become clear. It is hence justifiable that Dalit outcasts did not have a place in the elite migrants' scholarly and social exhibitions of nostalgia. The former's marginalisation recommends that there never was a solitary refugee experience beyond caste and class lattices, as addressed by middle-class Bengali settlers. The conservative hierarchical plans in the refugee camps and colonies likewise helped to discredit this declaration of unified memory. Jatin Bala was born in Jessore district of East Bengal. He had confronted the viciousness of the Bengal partition in each sense. Crossing the boundary with his family, he went through years of shifting between refugee camps under horrifying circumstances in West Bengal. His autobiography Shikarh Chhenrha Jeeban (Root Severing Life) (2010) has its commitment as unique as Daya Pawar's Baluta (1978), P. I. Sonakamble's Athavaninche Pakshi (1979) and Anand Yadav's Zombi (1987). Shikarh Chhenrha Jeeban is a work of history from beneath, a depiction of exile life. From 1954 to 1963, he lived in three refugee camps - Kunti Transit Camp, Bhandarhati Work Side Camp and Balagarh Refugee Camp. The everyday reality of refugee camps has been uncovered in this book in such a way that it becomes an unmatchable contribution to Dalit partition literature. The government had no uniform process to resettle the exiles in West Bengal, particularly in Calcutta. For the less fortunate rural sections, Calcutta had turned into a metonym for unfulfilled expectations and broken hearts. Adhir Biswas in the Foreword of Allar Jomite Paa says that one day he sees countless villages inside the city. He turns the leaf of time. From village to city, from city to village. From one country to another. Crossing the bogs, he attempts to step on Allah's soil, attracting the fragrance of the air. Manoranjan Byapari makes a more unambiguous statement about the heterogeneity of outcast identity that forestalls the formation of a cohesive East Bengali narrative. While the bhadralok immigrants' declarations intermittently centre on how they had been interpreted from a place of wealth to a place of defilement through Partition. However, Byapari's camp experience, when contrasted with his previous East Bengali life, is not completely distressing: Back in East Bengal, the poor lower caste person would not have much opportunity to become literate. Only desiring to learn was not enough. Here such an opening is present. A school has been started with the governmental initiative right inside the camp. All the camp children study here. (Itibritte 30) Adhir Biswas' “Bed Number Atash” (“Bed Number Twenty-eight” in Allar Jomite Paa) talks about government hospitals and sanatoriums in post-Partition Calcutta, where Biswas as a poor Dalit kid looks for a break and strives for his everyday meal. His desire to remain back in the hospital, despite its filthy environment, and contrasting the choice of sufficient food with that of unremitting work and liabilities back home, address the slum allotted refugee homes as machines. This correlation of camp life with a previous life in East Bengal, which places the latter in negative shades, is not only disconnected but very problematic for the idealistic imaginings of 'homeland' in bhadralok memories. In popular memory, it is a story of misfortune and violence past imagination. However, its portrayal in writing as well as in Bengali Cinema has also been lacking. “Refugee camps are non-existent. The rootless has faded away to oblivion. Their poverty, struggle and desperate attempts to stay afloat don't inspire screenplays... The trauma of displacement is a subject everyone knows about... but no one revisits on screen”, Srijit Mukherji told The Times of India on January 12, 2017. Other than Ritwik Ghatak's trilogy Meghe Dhaka Tara (1960); Komal Gandhar (1961); Subarnarekha (1965) and Chinnamul (1950), there are not many one can review. The fame of Srijit Mukerji's Rajkahini (2015) -remade as Begum Jaan in Hindi - pulled together the conversation on partition and its portrayal in Bengali film. In Bengali films, other than Ghatak's movies, there is not any portrayal of the predicament of the Partition refugees. Furthermore, only one — Subarnarekha — addresses the subject of the Dalits and the destiny they endured due to the cartographic surgery. This is strange because the post-Independence Bengali writing is loaded up with stories of refugees, a huge number of who filled the state till the 1971 conflict, and into Calcutta, influencing each aspect of life, from culinary practices to metropolitan infrastructure. Ghatak was a thoughtful eyewitness to their situations. In his films, it is caste biases — combined with smashing poverty — that make way for the misery of the character(s). Ishwar (Abhi Bhattacharya), an outcast from Eastern Pakistan, sensitive to music, hopeful, has no doubts about embracing Abhiram (Satindra Bhattacharya) — the child of a lowerstanding bagdi widow — into his home. But when his sister, Sita (Madhabi Mukherjee) becomes hopelessly enamoured with the boy he cannot acknowledge their marriage. IJRAR23C2841 International Journal of Research and Analytical Reviews (IJRAR) 636 © 2023 IJRAR September 2023, Volume 10, Issue 3 www.ijrar.org (E-ISSN 2348-1269, P- ISSN 2349-5138) Abhiram's mother, played by Gita Dey shows up in two scenes, both portraying two huge episodes in the entire history of Bengali Dalit exiles. In the first, she is denied entry into the refugee camp where Ishwar and Sita are staying — purportedly as she is from Dhaka and this camp is populated by individuals from Pabna. The genuine explanation is her caste, as becomes apparent promptly thereafter. She is abducted by the thugs of the landowner of the camp and nobody comes to save her. In the other scene, a little later in the film, she gets off a train and dies at the station where Ishwar, Sita and Abhiram live. Abhiram sees her and recognizes her, revealing his caste and prompting the later episodes in the film. The train is a significant image as it is destined for Dandakaranya. Dwaipayan Sen in "How the Dalits of Bengal Became the 'Worst Victims' of Partition", The Wire (10 August 2017) writes: Namasudras were faced with the full coercive might of the Nehruvian state to ensure their removal from West Bengal: the imprisonment of prominent leaders, police brutality, sexual violence, the withholding of doles and allowances to induce the willingness to leave, dispersal of protestors beyond city limits to prevent their recombination, forced evacuations on trains beyond the borders of the state. The Dandakaranya woodland in Chhattisgarh was a well-known send-off destination and there were numerous others, in Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Andaman and Nicobar Island. However, the people who believed these empty guarantees experienced the police brutalities of 1979 in Marichjhapi - perhaps the earliest illustration of the Communist Party of India's (Marxist's) severe concealment of any type of contradiction or resistance. Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide (2004) highlights the event in some detail, yet the bhadralok writer dealt with his pet undertaking of environmental change and avoided the episode of caste brutality. It was supposed to be produced into a film, featuring Abhishek Bachchan, Rahul Bose and Zuleika Robinson, as per a 2006 report by India Today. Nothing appears to have happened to it — similar to the lost, quiet voices of Dalits in Bengali films. The portrayal of Dalit refugees is a subject yet to be investigated and added to the current Bengal Partition scholarship, whose fundamental focus is the afflictions of the middle-class migrant bhadralok. It is a conspicuous contention that the subaltern, whose voice could be reached just through colonizers' papered records, is incapable of talking as discussed in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's Can the Subaltern Speak? (1988). As Ranajit Guha notes in “Negation”, since colonial times, education implied preparing the sahukars, zamindars and the sarkar with misleading devices of strength, to such an extent that annihilating documents that reported labourers' obligations were a concomitant part of the subaltern mutinies: “Writing was, thus, to him, the sign of his enemy, and ‗favoured the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment” (Guha 52). In India, such rebellious movements were reprisals of the deterrents imposed by the authority on Dalit education and involved verbal reversals like the use of harmful and abusive social talks. In that light, the Dalit refugees' education conveys a noteworthy charge informing the explanation 'from beneath', by drawing in with their socio-authentic sentiment about Partition. Dalit Bengali writings show why and how the purported chhotolok's admittance to knowledge brings the bhadralok to speak with the literary-cultural subtleties of the non-bhadralok. The need to examine Dalit narratives happens because the notable oeuvres of Bengal Partition have generally addressed a certain positive figure of bhadralok Hindu refugees. Such abstract undertakings have neglected to integrate or legitimize the cultural shock among the impoverished underclass immigrants in the materialistic lifestyle of Calcutta. For the Dalit researchers, Sonar Bangla (Golden Bengal) does not proclaim the same romanticized sentimentality as in the bhadralok migrants' memory, as the former portrays ages of naturalized abuse and biased politics in pre- Partition East Bengal. Along these lines, since it is difficult for such an amateur group of literates to assume the point of view of the standard bangal (East Bengali) migrant subject, Dalit compositions do not support a counter-talk only about ghoti (West Bengali natives). The caste and class digressions make them extraneous to such hackneyed contentions or binary identities. A few social researchers and historians, like Ranabir Samaddar, Suranjan Das, Shekhar Bandopadhyay, Mark Juergensmeyer, Joya Chatterji, Ravinder Kaur, and Dwaipayan Sen have examined the socio-historical issues of caste and community relating to Partition, with regards to Punjab and Bengal. However, the writing on Bengal Partition still has to shift from the specific bhadralok viewpoint. The Partition of India in general, and the Partition of Bengal have not received their due thought in Indian historiography, and it is the researchers' call to supplement the amnesiac memory of these experiences. Having said that, on account of Bengal, seeing the outcasts as a IJRAR23C2841 International Journal of Research and Analytical Reviews (IJRAR) 637 © 2023 IJRAR September 2023, Volume 10, Issue 3 www.ijrar.org (E-ISSN 2348-1269, P- ISSN 2349-5138) consistently marginalized group is fallacious. There have been examples when a section from the refugees converged and possessed the centre stage of Calcuttan culture. One of the significant focuses missed in these bhadralok records is the Dalit exiles' point of view and subjectivity. Therefore, the second-generation Dalit evacuees becoming proficient and returning to the set of experiences is a necessary step in saving the memory of Partition from soaked, conservative sayings. Dalit encounters, as addressed in Bengali Dalit narratives, hinder elitist and nostalgic sayings. Writing produced according to Dalit's points of view improves the understanding of Partition's afterlives. They make the conversations all the more balanced, less lopsided, and with new vistas of aesthetic and moral perspectives. It has been a never ending saga of partition for the Dalits of Eastern India. Indeed, even today, the shadow of that breach touches the existence of the people who are yet to be given citizenships under doubt of being illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, or the deeds to the little land they obtained through their efforts. Furthermore, they have been battling with that other kind of partition - that of caste, its persistent biases and exclusions within society/community has resulted in unfavourable conditions is an accolade for the resilience of humanity. However one is not completely certain of the worth of such ameliorating pities. Accounts that try to reclaim the human soul participate in an ethical compass inaccessible to the people who have encountered systematic dehumanization. Despite the modest gains Dalits have rested in a long time since Partition and Independence, it is difficult to consider that a community has languished a lot over the wages of freedom, and is yet to acquire its profits; unquestionably, neither entirely nor in full measure, nor, for that matter, very considerably. The steep cost they paid for Partition was totally out of joint with the essentially insignificant role they played in arriving at the fateful decision. REFERENCES [1] Bandyopadhyay, Shekhar.1993. “A Peasant Class in Protest: The Namasudras of Eastern Bengal, 18721945”. Caste and Communal Politics in South Asia. Edited by Suranjan Das and Shekhar Bandopadhyay, South Asia Books. [2] Bhalla, Alok. 2007. Partition Dialogues: Memories of a Lost Home. Oxford IndianPaperbacks. [3] ---.2004. Caste, Culture and Hegemony: Social Dominance in Colonial Bengal. Sage Publications. [4] ---. 1990. Caste, Politics and the Raj: Bengal 1872–1937. K.P. Bagchi and Co. [5] ---. 1997. 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