DIVIDED LANDSCAPES, FRAGMENTED IDENTITIES: EAST BENGAL REFUGEES AND THEIR REHABILITATION IN INDIA, 1947-79 Gyanesh Kudaisya zyx Centre for Contemporary Studies, Nehru Memorial Museum & Library, New Delhi ABSTRACT zyxwvut The partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 was followed by the forced uprooting of an estimated 18 million people. This paper focuses on the predicament of the minority communities in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) who were uprooted and forced to seek shelter in the Indian province of West Bengal. It considers the responses of Indian federal and provincial governments to the challenge of refugee rehabilitation. A study is made of the Dandakaranya scheme which was undertaken after 1958 to resettle the refugees by colonising forest land: the project was sited in a peninsular region marked by plateaus and hill ranges which the refugees, originally from the riverine and deltaic landscape of Bengal, found hard to accept. Despite substantial official rehabilitation efforts, the refugees demanded to be resettled back in their “natural habitat” of Indian Bengal. However, this was resisted by the state. Notwithstanding this opposition, a large number of East Bengal refugees moved back into regions which formed a part of erstwhile undivided Bengal where, without any government aid and planning, they colonised lands and created their own habitats. Many preferred to become squatters in the slums that sprawled in and around Calcutta. The complex interplay of identity and landscape, of dependence and self-help, that informed the choices which the refugees made in rebuilding their lives is analysed in the paper. INTRODUCTION In August 1947, the transfer of power in the Indian subcontinent after almost 200 years of colonial rule was marked by momentous events which have come to be known by the unfortunate term “partition.” Two nation-states, India and Pakistan, were created along religious lines. People, lives and property were greatly affected as the new boundaries led to what was then conveniently described as the “exchange of populations” or forced migration and uprooting of over 18 million people amidst unprecedented violence and disorder. Estimates of casualties vary enormously, but contemporary accounts put the number of deaths in the range of a quarter to one million. z zyxw zyxw Punjab and Bengal, the provinces that were divided, experienced the disruptions of partition most acutely. The bulk of the killings took place in Punjab where, on both sides of the newly-created borders, the minority communities were almost Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, Vol. 17, No. 1 (1996), 24-39 East Bengal refugees and their rehabilitation, 1947-79 zyx zy 25 zyxwvutsr zyxw completely uprooted and forced to seek refuge elsewhere. Events in Punjab were so dramatic that they tended to monopolise attention so that developments elsewhere, most notably in Bengal, have been given relatively little scholarly attention. This paper makes a beginning towards redressing this historiographic imbalance by looking at events that took place in Bengal following partition. It focuses on the predicament of the minority communities in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) who were uprooted and forced to seek shelter in the truncated Indian province of West Bengal (Fig. 1). It considers the manner of the refugee exodus and the responses of the Indian federal and provincial governments to the challenge of refugee rehabilitation. A study is then made of the Dandakaranya project (Fig. 2) which was initiated in the late 1950s to resettle East Bengal refugees by colonising forest land, and it is in the context of this resettlement scheme that questions of identity and landscape are analysed. Partition marked the high point in the fragmentation of Bengal’s landscape and of the identity of its people. Several elements made up this identity: climate, soil, language, religion, customs, and food. Prior to partition, the distinctions in the identities of the people inhabiting Bengal were “fuzzy.” The religious distinctions that existed were subsumed under the larger panoply of a Bengali cultural and linguistic identity (Ahmed 1981; Roy, 1983; Eaton, 1993). Bengalis spoke the same language, although its usage and idiom in the west was closer to Sanskrit, while in the east it was embellished by Urdu terminology which was increasingly being preferred. There were, of course, differences in accents, but these were superficial, and in education, commerce and business, the same Bengali language was used. Further, there existed a strong commonality in terms of marriage and social customs, although in finer details there were some differences (Roy, 1983). Food habits and entertainment patterns, caste and class structures were similar. Ecological variation in the two regions was slight: East Bengal received higher rainfall and was criss-crossed by canals and rivers which played an important part in peoples’ lives. “The whole of Bengal”, observed the geographer Oskar Spate, “ha[d] a common structural history and a very similar way of life based on rice ... [Bengal] had for some centuries possessed an historical entity [and was] a linguistic and cultural unit focused on Calcutta” (Spate & Learmonth, 1954:571). It was this distinctive cultural landscape which was celebrated in verse by the Bengali poet and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) in his famous song Amar Sonar Bangla ( M y Golden Bengal).l Writing on the integrity of Bengal as a unified cultural landscape, the Bengali historian Sir Jadu Nath Sarkar observed on the eve of the partition: Here in the two halves of Bengal the population is absolutely one by race, language, and manner of life, they differ only in religion .. . Religion keeps the people of East Bengal internally divided, exactly the same way as in West Bengal by forbidding dinner, marriage and worship together. Both sects in both areas speak the same language, write the same alphabet, and have so long read and composed the same literature. The Hindus and Muslims of Bengali origin have lived together side by side in peace for so many centuries that it is now impossible to draw a clear cut geographical line dividing the Hindus from the Muslims (Amrita Bazar Putriku, 8 July 1947). However, as the political mobilisation for a separate Muslim state gathered momentum in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the larger Bengali cultural and linguistic identity increasingly came to be fractured along sectarian and religious lines (Gordon, 1978). As a result, when partition occurred in 1947, most people increasingly looked upon themselves as Hindus or Muslims first and Bengalis afterwards (see Das, 1991; Chatterji, 1994). Partition left neither of the two Bengals a strong unit. A one-man boundary commission, consisting of the British jurist, Sir Cyril Radcliff, drew up a boundary line across undivided Bengal, which had zyxwvu A translation of the full poem can be found in Greenough (1982:9). Gyanesh Kudaisya 26 zyxw LEGEND _____ -.-.- Provincial and Province-State boundaries District and inter- State boundaries .--..--** Boundary claimed by Muslim League yun zyxwvu zyxwvutsrqp ---- Boundary claimed by Congress and Sikhs - Boundary by Radcliffe Award a zyxwvutsrq zyxwvut 100kn Muslim majority districts Source: Modified from Spate (1948:13) Fig. 1. Divided Bengal. East Bengal refugees and their rehabilitation, 1947-79 27 VlNVl zyxwvutsr zyxwvutsrq zyxwvutsr zyxwvutsr Source: Author's own. Fig. 2. Major Bengali refugee resettlement sites. 28 zyxwvutsrqp zyxwvuts Gyanesh Kudaisya a total area of 203,028 sq kms, to create two separate entities-East Bengal, which formed the eastern wing of Pakistan, and West Bengal which became a province of independent India. The resulting 2,736 kms long boundary line cut across Jessore, Nadia, Malda, Dinajpur, and Jalpaiguri districts of Bengal and Sylhet district of Assam. This arbitrary boundary line mostly ignored factors such as communications and railway links, water channels, cultural and pilgrimage sites, location of industries and vital strategic factors. West Bengal was left as a rump of about 88,060 sq kms and a major portion of Sylhet was appended to it from neighbouring Assam to bolster its overall land size. It got a population of 24.3 million, of which nearly 17 per cent were Muslims, and it became India’s smallest and most overcrowded state with a high degree of urban concentration around the Calcutta area (Sen & Banerjee, 1983). With its enormous urban concentration on Hooghlyside, soon to be swollen by the tide of incoming refugees, West Bengal became a food-deficit area, its agriculture being qualitatively as well as quantitatively inferior to that of East Pakistan (V&l, 1950). As far as East Bengal was concerned, the Radcliff award gave it an area of 141,158 sq kms and a population of 41.8 million people (based on the 1941 census) which represented only 40 per cent of the area, but almost 60 per cent of the population of the pre-partition Bengal and Assam provinces. depending upon changing bilateral ties between India and Pakistan as well as upon community relations between Hindus and Muslims in East Bengal (Lahiri, 1964). This process of gradual displacement continued throughout the 1 9 6 0 ~In .~ 1981, the Government of West Bengal’s Refugee Rehabilitation Committee estimated the number of East Bengal refugees within the state to be at least eight million or one-sixth of the population of the state (Government of West Bengal, 1981:1). The East Bengal refugees looked upon themselves as the “victims of partition” and regarded it, as Bengalis, to be their basic right to seek refuge in the part of Bengal which now lay in India. Having faced persecution and intolerance in East Bengal, they believed that it was their legitimate and rightful claim to seek rehabilitation within West Bengal which they now regarded as their natural habitat. Most of them therefore initially came to Calcutta, the region’s metropolis and the seat of the provincial government. zyxwvu REFUGEES IN WEST BENGAL Partition left 1I .4 million or 42 per cent of undivided Bengal’s Hindu population in East Bengal. In 1947, at the time of partition, only 344,000 Hindu refugees came into West Bengal and the hope lingered among the minorities of East Pakistan that they could continue to live there peacefully. However, these hopes were dashed as the East Bengal minorities increasingly faced persecution and intolerance (Guha, n.d.). Between 1948 and 1955, large numbers of Bengali refugees crossed into India (Singh, 1957, 1965). With the exception of 1953, the annual flow was at least 180,000 with a considerably larger flow of 1.5 million in 1950 (Government of India, 1948-58). The refugee influx fluctuated quite considerably, However. the West Bengal Government’s response to the refugee influx was characterised by the absence of planning. It was also conditioned by the class character of the refugees. Hindu upper and middle classes typically had contacts, through educational and kinship links, in Calcutta and could enter professions and trades in their new surroundings. These groups were able to rent or buy properties in and around the Calcutta area with their own resources and did not really need to depend upon the government. In the 1940s, when it was mainly these groups who came into West Bengal, the authorities did not feel seriously burdened by the refugee influx. Although relief camps were opened, only a small percentage sought shelter there. However, from the early 1950s onwards, the authorities were faced with a different class of refugees who belonged either to the lower urban strata or came from the East Bengal countryside. This change in the character of the refugees aggravated the problem for the authorities, The in-migration continued beyond the mid-1950s. Official statistics, although not totally reliable, certainly indicated an increased trend where the numbers varied from 6,000 to 250,000 annually. East Bengal refugees and their rehabilitation, 1947-79 not just in terms of the numbers making claims upon the government but also in the resourcefulness which they displayed in rebuilding their own lives (Guha, 1959). As the 1950s dawned, the West Bengal Government’s refugee problem increasingly became worse and assumed crisis proportions. Accommodation in government-run camps became cramped and scarce, dole queues extended and the sight of refugee families living on Calcutta’s pavements became commonplace (Chatterjee, N., 1990). At the the federal level, the government responded by a series of initiatives which aimed at preventing a large-scale exodus of minorities from East Pakistan. Several inter-dominion conferences were convened in the late 1940s and early 1950s between India and Pakistan which sought to prevent a complete “exchange” of the minorities (Rao, 1967). However, these initiatives did not stem the tide of incoming refugees. The West Bengal Government, as a result, took the view that the refugees were not its sole responsibility but, rather, a burden which ought to be shared jointly among the federal government and those of the neighbouring states. Extensive deliberations were, therefore, held among officials to prepare plans for the dispersal of refugees outside West Bengal. The West Bengal case was that post-partition demographic changes and disruptions had made it the smallest and the most densely populated state within India, its population density rising by over 12 per cent. Its regional economy, particularly the jute sector, had suffered great disruptions and it did not have the resources to bear the additional burden of relief and rehabilitation (Lahiri, 1964). Moreover, the land-person ratio in West Bengal was already precarious and could endure no further agricultural colonisation or expansion. Muslim emigration as a result of partition had been negligible and, in any case, there was very little evacuee property which could be redistributed among the incoming refugees as the Muslims who had left West Bengal belonged to the poorer strata. The West Bengal Government claimed that, in overall terms, it did not have the necessary resources at its disposal to take on the additional demographic burden caused by the refugee influx. It argued that the burden of accomodating refugees must be distributed equitably, including federal government financial zyx 29 support and the hosting of refugees by the neighbouring states (Roy, 1964). However, i n spite of extensive official consultations, the plans for the dispersal of refugees outside West Bengal did not fructify. Certain states, in particular Assam, refused to host the Bengali refugees. The states of Bihar and Orissa showed some willingness, and there was also talk of resettlement in far-away areas like Hyderabad and Mysore. However, such talk was not matched by positive action and often it amounted to nothing more than lamenting the inherent difficulties involved in the dispersal of the refugees. The official discourse on the issue tended to make claims about the “inordinately parochial” character of the Bengalis and their unwillingness to be rehabilitated outside Bengal (see Statesman, 29 July 1952). zyxw Within West Bengal, a public campaign developed against turning the refugees out of the Bengali-speaking areas. A large and influential section of Bengali intellectuals and public figures criticised the government’s attempts to disperse the refugees. They argued that the potential existed within West Bengal for the successful rehabilitation of all Bengalis who had sought refuge there after being persecuted in East Pakistan. In 1950, the Bengal Rehabilitation Organisation, led by Syama Prosad Mukherjee, claimed that there existed 0.6 million ha of cultivable wasteland within West Bengal which could be profitably used for agricultural colonisation and settlement of refugees. Mukherjee further asserted that possibilities existed for land colonisation schemes in proximate areas like Manipur, Bihar and Tripura. Similarly, the eminent Bengali intellectual Radha Kamal Mukherjee estimated that the uncultivated land (excluding current fallow) amounted to 6.9 million ha in Assam, 2.6 million ha in Bihar and 1.1 million ha in West Bengal. He demanded that Bengali refugees should be settled in “contiguous Bengali speaking areas” and that the West Bengal Government had “primary and special responsibility” in this regard (Mukherjee in Chaudhary, 1964:ii). Mukherjee and his associates campaigned vigorously for the acceptance of a comprehensive non-official plan for refugee rehabilitation. Their plan envisaged the development of satellite towns and industrial centres within a radius of 80 kms from Calcutta to 30 zyxwvutsrq Gyanesh Kudaisya create auxiliary and small-scale industries to generate the necessary employment for the refugees. Such a plan, it was asserted, “will be much sounder economically than sending the refugees to distant and unfamiliar agricultural zones.” This non-official plan, it was claimed, would “lead to a proper balancing and redistribution of population” and thus “refugee rehabilitation and regional development can aid each other” (Mukherjee in Chaudhary, 1964:iii). The official attempts of sending the refugees outside West Bengal were denounced as “banishment” and the strongest language was used to criticise the authorities: Squatter colonies represented a form of selfrehabilitation by the refugees. A typical example of such self-rehabilitation was the Manohar colony near Calcutta. The colony exemplified initiative and enterprise: the refugees organised the reconstruction of all aspects of their lives on a co-operative basis. Upon arrival, each refugee family was registered by the colony’s central committee once a fee of Rs 10 per household was paid.3 Plots were then allotted to enable each family to construct a hut. Hut-making was carried out as a collective activity. The day-to-day management of the colony was done by its central committee (Statesman, 3 April 1950). The squatter colony at Madhyagram, established 19 kms from Calcutta, was another typical example of refugee enterprise. In this colony, the committee ran an upper primary school and organised co-operatives of carpenters and weavers. Residents helped each other in building houses and making locally produced goods and services available at cheap rates. So successful was the Madhyagram enterprise that a press correspondent thought it had the “chances of developing into a prosperous suburban town” (Statesman, 18 May 1950). zyxwvu zyxwvutsr The present plan of rehabilitation without making classifications of different categories of refugees and haphazardly distributing them to different states of India, in an atmosphere not congenial to their health and spirit ... is sure to result in a large number of physical and spiritual deaths and even those who will survive will not be able to preserve their language and culture as Bengalis (Chaudhary 1964:16). SQUATTERS AND SELFREHABILITATION By the mid-l950s, a long-term plan for the rehabilitation of Bengali refugees within or outside West Bengal had still to be formulated. The Government’s efforts had not gone beyond providing relief to the incoming refugees. In the absence of any meaningful plan, a large number of refugees started organising various co-operative activities which aimed at establishing refugee colonies on vacant public land. The movement to forcibly occupy public land (jubar dhakhal andolan) and building squatter colonies started in the late 1940s when groups of refugees began to take over public spaces for shelter (Chakrabarti, 1990). Such groups usually worked at night, earmarking plots and erecting thatched shacks with amazing speed. Colony “committees” thereafter supervised the laying and cleaning of drains and provision of water supplies. This movement for setting up squatter colonies spread across the eastern fringes of Calcutta in the late 1940s. By the early 1950s, squatter colonies such as Manohar and Madhyagram occupied a large part of the landscape of greater Calcutta. They stretched from Kalyani in the north to Sonarpur in the south. By the 1960s the squatter colonies spread to the west bank of the river Hooghly and the surrounding districts of Nadia, Malda, Jalpaiguri, and West Dinajpur. As a result, what was previously a rural hinterland of Calcutta was transformed in less than two decades into a huge urban sprawl (Chatterjee, P., 1990). It is estimated that there are now 2,000 bustees or slums listed in the Calcutta Municipal Area; counting Howrah, the total exceeds 3,500, with some two million occupants. In the Calcutta Urban Agglomeration as a whole, the number of bustee dwellers exceeds more than three million people. It is reckoned that each square kilometer of space in Calcutta is occupied, on an average, by 28,571 people. Over 51 per cent of the people live in thatched or semi-permanent dwellings, while the zyxwvutsr 3 At the current conversion rate, one US dollar is equivalent to Rs 34. East Bengal refugees and their rehabilitation, 1947-79 lowest income quartile occupy only 7 per cent of the city’s land (Bandhopadhyay, 1990). In all, 49 per cent of the city’s population live in its slums. Out of these slum-dwellers, about 87 per cent are migrants, with the East Bengal refugees constituting a large part of the population. While a large number of Bengali refugees opted for some form or other of self-rehabilitation, a sizable section, especially those who had been engaged in agricultural occupations before being uprooted, found it difficult to make a new beginning and to reconstruct their lives. They did not possess any skill or capital and wanted land for resettlement. These agricultural refugees came mainly from backward caste groups like the Namasudras who were primarily engaged in paddy cultivation, besides boating, fishing and carpentry. Colonial ethnographers described the Namasudras as a nonAryan caste which followed the Vaishnavite tradition of Hinduism (Mukherjee, 1957:101-06). Agricultural refugees in the 1950s aggravated the situation in West Bengal as they lacked money, contacts and skills and their weakened physical state left them with no choice but to join the dole queues and seek shelter in government-run relief camps. From the outset, the dominant political leadership of the ruling Congress Party as well as the officialdom displayed an ambivalent attitude towards the incoming refugees. The West Bengal elites believed that the refugees were an economic liability and that their rehabilitation would make enormous demands upon the meagre economic resources of the province and jeopardise its prosperity and future. Moreover, they increasingly took the view that generous relief and compensation on the part of official agencies would act as a magnet and attract more refugees from across the border. Those crossing the border were perceived as economic migrants and not as minorities who were being forcibly displaced due to persecution and harassment. zyx 31 Its genesis lay in official consultations that took place in 1956-57 and which led to the constitution of a high level committee to report on the feasibility of a scheme of land colonisation outside West Bengal for refugee rehabilitation. In June 1957, the committee’s recommendations were accepted by the National Development Council. As a result, a special government agency called the Dandakaranya Development Authority (DDA) was set up in 1958. The plan contemplated the development of an area of 202,020 sq kms, known as Dandakaranya in the Koraput and Kalahandi districts of Orissa and Bastar district of Madhya Pradesh. This area lies in a low plateau and is thickly forested. The region is marked by hill ranges and rocky outcrops and its indigenous population is predominantly tribal. While the region as such is characterised by extreme backwardness, it is rich in unexplored mineral resources and forest produce. The plateau dominates the region’s landscape, dissected by the Mahanadi River which crosses through its northern part and the Godavari River which flows through the southern part. Although these rivers are perennial, only a small portion of their water is used for irrigation. In spite of its rich forest and mineral wealth, Dandakaranya had always been isolated due to its poor accessibility and the self-sufficient nature of its tribal inhabitants. zyxwvuts zyx zyxwvutsr As Dandakaranya lies within the tropics, its climate is hot and humid. Over 80 per cent of mean annual rainfall falls within 100 days spanning June to September. Uneven rainfall makes all agricultural ventures dependent upon the vagaries of the monsoon. Streams are seasonal and dry up after the rains, underground water resources are deficient, and the soil is porous, lacking in plant nutrients and thus unable to sustain double-cropping. As Dandakaranya had a low indgenous population, the planners banked upon the availability of large tracts of virgin lands for colonisation by the Bengali refugees. In spite of the region’s unpromising physical features, its low population density was a crucial factor in its choice as a rehabilitation site. REFUGEES IN DANDAKARANYA It was in this context that the Dandakaranya project was conceived as a long-term solution to the problem of rehabilitation of the Bengali refugees. Within the Dandakaranya region, four resettlement zones at Umerkote, Malkangiri, Paralkote and Kondagoan were earmarked. In each zone, villages were set up for 40 to 60 refugee 32 zyxwvutsrqp Gyanesh Kudaisya families. Refugees were sent from camps in West Bengal by train to Raipur. From there, there were taken to the Mana transit camp, and then to worksite camps where they had to work on tasks such as land reclamation and road building. The idea was to familiarise them with hard labour before being taken to villages for permanent settlement. Upon reaching the village, each household was given a plot of roughly 2.6 ha and another 0.2 ha for gardening and a homestead. Further, loans were disbursed to facilitate the settling-in of refugees: these included a sum of Rs 1,700 for house-building; Rs 1,115 for the purchase of bullocks and implements; and Rs 150 for digging a well. In addition, a maintenance grant was also given for 12 months before the harvesting of the first crop. By 1965, over 108,000 ha of forest had been cleared and over 7,500 refugee families settled in over 184 new villages. By 1973, 25,209 families had been moved to the region of which 17,217 stayed while the rest returned to West Bengal, having failed to make Dandakaranya their home. Out of these, 16,197 households were engaged in agriculture and 1,020 in non-agricultural occupations. By the early 1970s there existed 302 villages with 10,750 houses. In all, 462 kms of main roads and 669 kms of link roads had been built. Although the total expenditure on the project had been Rs 537 million, the project had difficulty in persuading the refugees to leave West Bengal for Dandakaranya. A study suggested that “the Bengali farmers, less mobile and more deeply anchored in the unique ecological setting of their deltaic homeland, perceived the distances involved as a great deterrent. From the very beginning, they had little desire to move into the ecologically contrasted territory of peninsular India to reconstruct their life there” (Mukerji, 1985:101). The refugees’ perception of the distance of Dandakaranya from Bengal and their deep rooted reluctance to move out of Bengali-speaking areas impeded further resettlement. concentration in and around the Calcutta area had transformed the configuration of politics in West Bengal. The cause of the refugees had been taken up very strongly by the Communists in West Bengal. Communist cadres encouraged the refugees to occupy public spaces for shelter, colonise land in the villages, resist the stopping of doles and the closure of camps by the government. They also opposed government plans for the dispersal of these refugees to neighbouring states. Several important studies have drawn attention to the close link between the refugees’ agitations and the ascendancy of the Communists in West Bengal politics since the late 1960s. Zagoria (1969:115) observed: In the urban areas of West Bengal, Communist strength [did] not appear to be based on any particular caste or community. Rather, one of the main bases seem[ed] to be the several million “declassed” Hindu refugees who fled their homes in East Bengal after partition. These refugees constitute[d] about one-fourth of the West Bengal population and a substantial portion of the Calcutta population. They apparently voted for the Communists overwhelmingly. Here, it would seem, is a classic example of uprooted and declassed individuals supporting an extremist party in accordance with the model put forth by the proponents of the concept of mass society. zyxwvuts zyxw Another factor impeding the refugees’ move to Dandakaranya was the persistent campaign by the Communists who urged them not to go out of West Bengal but rather to demand resettlement within Bengal. The influx of refugees and their A recent study by Chakrabarti (1990) also presents substantial evidence which shows that the political ascendancy of the Left in West Bengal owed a great deal to the refugees and their struggles for rehabilitation. Chakrabarti argued that, while the Communists provided the refugees with leadership in their struggle for rehabilitation, the refugees provided the Communists with the mass support which enabled them to entrench themselves in the city of Calcutta, of which the whole of the truncated West Bengal became merely a hinterland after partition. Chakrabarti maintained that it was the refugees who performed the “vanguard” function in West Bengal and catapulted the Communists to power in the general elections of 1967 (Chakrabarti, 1990:405). As the refugees were largely centred around the Calcutta area, they tended to provide East Bengal refugees and their rehabilitation, 1947-79 potential vote banks to the Left parties. This is plausibly borne out by the electoral performance of the Left parties during 1951-67, when it was the city of Calcutta, rather than the Bengal countryside, which was their stronghold, a trend which has since reversed after 1967. However, Communist influence was just one of the factors in the refugees’ reluctance to go outside West Bengal. This unwillingness to go to culturally unfamiliar areas for resettlement must be understood in terms of the refugees’ state of mind. The refugees who were targeted for settlement in Dandakaranya were those who came to India in the mid-1950s and early 1960s. As mentioned earlier, most of these belonged to low caste Nurnasudru groups. Prior to their displacement, these groups had suffered long spells of persecution and harassment. An observer in 1964 described the minorities on the eve of their displacement as being “in a hopeless and hapless situation ...They are dehumanised, demoralised and degenerated human beings, having be[en] denied the right of citizenship and elementary human rights to live a peaceful social life ....Worries [welre writ large on their faces” (Lahiri, 1964:74). zyx 33 the chairman of the DDA for a brief tenure of 10 months in 1964. Gupta (1965a, 1965b, 196%) wrote a series of articles providing a fascinating picture of the untiring efforts made by the refugees to stand on their own feet inspite of the flaws inherent in the Dandakaranya project. He observed that the emphasis of the DDA was largely, if not exclusively, on agriculture, as almost 97 per cent of the refugee families were recorded as agriculturists. Although each family was given a considerable agricultural holding by East Bengal standards, the land had little potential in yielding sustainable crops. In his view, it was not the quantity of land, but its quality which was important. Soil surveys revealed that in the Pharasgoan sub-zone, for instance, “6 per cent of the plots were basically unfit for agriculture, 32 per cent were poor and submarginal, 53 per cent could be of medium quality if their moisture retention quality could be improved, and only 9 per cent were of good quality” (Gupta, 1965a:16). The overall finding of the soil surveys came as a revelation and Gupta discovered that “lands are not ideally suitable for the production of a satisfactory paddy crop except where the soil is of a heavy texture and low in situation[sic]” (Gupta, 1965a:16). This was particularly distressing to agriculturists from East Bengal to whom paddy cultivation represented not just a mode of subsistence but an entire way of life. zyxwvuts zyxw zyxwvu SETTLERS’ EXPERIENCES The refugees’ experiences after being uprooted and upon their arrival in West Bengal were far from pleasant. They were forced to live in cramped government-run relief camps. There, small sums were handed out to them as dole and they were given meagre family rations. In overall terms, they were treated as no better than beggars. No efforts were made to create employment opportunities. Rather, they were pressured to move out of West Bengal for rehabilitation in Dandakaranya under threat of their rations and dole being stopped and camps shut down. Lack of alternatives in West Bengal and persistent cajoling by the authorities forced a sizable number of families to move to Dandakaranya in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s. Once in Dandakaranya these settlers experienced a number of difficulties. An extraordinary account of the settlers’ life is provided by S.K. Gupta who was The poor soil quality and inadequate irrigation made agriculture “a gamble in the rains” (Guptrt, 1965a:25). However, the DDA preferred big and costly irrigation schemes and was indifferent to the potential of minor irrigation. The full irrigation potential of the big hydro-electric schemes was never realised due to project delays and noncompletion which therefore adversely affected agricultural yields. Gupta found from a detailed analysis of agricultural output from 1960-61 to 1963-64 that yields had been extremely low. In one zone, he found that agriculture was so poor that people gave it up as a bad business and sought alternate means of survival. Overall, instead of addressing the problem, DDA officials blamed the Bengali refugees for their “bad husbandry or laziness”, their “camp sluggishness” and their sentimental preference for paddy cultivation (Gupta 1965a:23). Gupta’s own experience in 34 zyxwvutsrq zyx Gyanesh Kudaisya Dandakaranya had, however, been quite different. He found that, “there [welre undoubtedly a few slackers, especially among those who were not traditionally agriculturists, but by and large the cultivators [welre inherently hard-work when there [was] at all any prospect of wrestling a fair yield even out of reluctant soil” (Gupta, 1965a:16). In his view, the cultivators were hardworking and even willing to experiment with broadcast, rain-fed, shortduration varieties of paddy and other crops like groundnut, tobacco and mesta. If the agricultural prospects for the refugees were bleak, the opportunities for alternative sources of employment were equally hopeless. Nonagricultural rehabilitation was foredoomed to failure as it was limited to providing a loan for starting a trade and some cash advance for building a house, both of which had to be made good within three months. Gupta (1965b:64) observed: It is obvious that industries r[an] by the DDA ha[d] been extremely amateurish, uneconomical, reckless about wastage of time and raw materials, and unconcerned about costs, with losses mounting up annually, with employment at a low level and sporadic because of occasional closing down of units, and with wages scandalously low for the large majority of employees. In addition, there was growing evidence that the Dandakaranya project was flawed in other respects too. No master plan was ever prepared for the region resulting in slow and unco-ordinated infrastructuraldevelopment and even basic facilities like electricity were not available to the settlers. Further, there was a slippage of project targets, especially in house building and road construction activities. The shortage of drinking water in a large number of villages became a major grievance of the settlers, as was the failure to grant the refugees patta (title) rights to the land and homestead allotted to them. More seriously, the families which moved into Dandakaranya discovered that they could not practice fish culture which was important to them. Yet another factor contributing to the settlers’ sense of unease was the adversarial relationship in which they found themselves vis-a-vis the indigenous adibasi (tribal) population. When the project was conceived, the planners did not take into account the ecological and cultural setting of the indigenous people. The very choice of Dandakaranya as a resettlement site within the heart of a tribal homeland showed a lack of regard and foresight on the part of policy-makers. The planners assumed that the settlement of agricultural communities like the Namasudras from East Bengal, who were well versed in paddy cultivation, would have a “demonstration effect” on the so-called “primitive” inhabitants of the region4 One study suggests that rehabilitation plans and their implementation by official agencies “ignored the inherently contradictory nature of tribal and peasant outlooks. The peasants had a vested interest in land while the tribals regarded the forest as a common resource. The settlement operations encroached on tribal lands and succeeded in driving the tribals out ....The little tribal world of Dandakaranya had escaped centuries of social development and had survived as a partially closed eco-system....The region came into limelight ...when it was picked out, all of a sudden, as one of the potential areas for the resettlement of displaced persons” (Ahmed, 1985:73). There is considerable evidence which suggests that the policies of the DDA were such that they “destroyed the tribal social and economic formations without replacing them by a viable alternative” (Ahmed, 1985:73). zyxw zy DESERTIONS AND RETURN TO BENGAL Long-standing grievances of neglect, apathy, and unsympathetic treatment by the local agencies and officials contributed to the overall sense of alienation which the refugees experienced in Dandakaranya. In 1965, 1,040 families left; followed by 862 families in 1965. Between 1966 and 1972, 1,600 families, and between 1972 and 1978, another 10,923 families had deserted the settlement. In 1978-79,however, there occurred events which were zy The Dandakaranya region was largely inhabited by the Gods who practiced shifting cultivation. East Bengal refugees and their rehabilitation, 1947-79 almost apocalyptic as far as the Bengali refugees were concerned. During January to June 1978, a wave of desertions took place from Dandakaranya. Around 120,000 refugees sold off their cattle and belongings to return to West Bengal where a Leftist government had recently returned to power and which they hoped would take up the “unfinished task” of their rehabilitation in West Bengal seriously. Reporting this massive desertion of the Dandakaranya settlement, a news report described the process as “migration in reverse gear.” The returning refugees, the report observed: present a picture of gloom at the Jagdalpur bus stand and at the Raipur railway station. Men, women and children in tom rags have a look of infinite sadness on their faces. Heavy the sorrow, as the poet has said, that bows the head when love is alive and hope is dead. They say that their love for West Bengal is alive as their hope about Dandakaranya is dead. The refugees say that all their Dandakaranya days were dark and dreary ...Refugees say they are deserting because of the humiliating conditions in which they lived (Secular Democracy, 1978:31). zy zyx 35 was not realistic, and that their problems would be solved in Dandakaranya itself. However, in April 1978, about 25,000 refugees managed to not only return, but also set up a cooperative settlement at Marichjhanpi, a 53 km long and 13 km wide uninhabited island which lies in the Ganga-Bramhaputra delta in the Sunderbans region in West Bengal. There, the refugees established fisheries, workshops, small-scale cottage industries, bakeries, a dispensary and a primary school. They built roads, a water treatment plant to ensure the supply of drinking water, set up shops and tried, in as many ways as possible, to be completely self-reliant of all outside agencies. The West Bengal Government looked upon the initiative of the refugees at Marichjhanpi unfavourably and was not disposed to tolerate the existence of their settlement. The refugees’ initiative was declared an “illegal encroachment” on forest land in an area earmarked for the protection of endangered tigers. The Government gave an ultimatum to the “illegal” occupants of Marichjhanpi to leave the island by 31 March 1979. When these warnings were not heeded by the refugees, the authorities started an economic blockade on January 26, 1979, preventing the movement of essential goods and people and even the supply of drinking water. When the refugees tried to go to the mainland, their boats were scuttled by police launches. The inhabitants of the settlement were tear-gassed, their huts razed to ground, and fisheries destroyed in the violence which eventually broke out between the police and the refugees (Mallick, 1993:97-103). While the police claimed that only two people died as a result of firing, there were reports that, in all, 36 refugees were killed. The refugees themselves claimed that 239 died from eating food unfit for human consumption, 136 died of starvation, 128 went missing in “police action”, 150 were injured in baton attacks, 500 were jailed and 24 women were subjected to “humiliating abuse” (Statesman, 14 May 1979). Eventually, the West Bengal Government ordered a forcible evacuation of the island in which a 1,500-strong police force took part between 14 and 16 May 1979. At last, the Left Front Government was able to claim that it had succeeded in “freeing” zyxwvutsr However, the refugees found to their utter dismay that the Left Front which now controlled the reins of state power in West Bengal turned its back upon them. “The chickens have now come home to roost”, was how the situation was discribed by an observer (Secular Democracy, 1978:31). The Left Front leadership looked upon these returning refugees as a potential liability who would damage the prospects of an economic recovery and divert scarce resources. The Government attempted to stop the refugees’ trek to West Bengal. The chief minister, Jyoti Basu, appealed to the refugees to go back. Interception points were set up en route to persuade and, if necessary, coerce the refugees not to persist in their journey from Dandakaranya to West Bengal. A large number attempting to reenter the state were forcibly sent back: in August 1978 the West Bengal Government claimed that it had succeeded in sending back 63,213 refugees who had “deserted” Dandakaranya by “persuading” them that their demand for resettlement in West Bengal 36 zyxwvutsrq zyxwvut Gyanesh Kudaisya Marichjhanpi from the illegal encroachment of “deserters” from Dandakaranya. CONCLUSION With the suppression of the Marichjhanpi settlement and the forcible return to Dandakaranya of the East Bengali refugees, another chapter had ended in the refugees’ continuing quest for rehabilitation. While the refugees could not succeed in holding on to the settlement, the message that resounded from Marichjhanpi was loud and clear: that state-sponsored rehabilitation of Bengali refugees had been nothing short of a farce, culminating i n the appalling failure of Dandakaranya. A committee of the Indian Parliament which investigated the Marichjhanpi incident, deprecated the DDA for “callous neglect and unimaginative, lackadaisical and bureaucratic approach in handling problems of displaced persons and in executing the development projects taken up for their resettlement” (Indian Parliament, 1979:88). While there was a confession of failure, the political will to take up the unfinished challenge of rehabilitation was still lacking. In retrospect, the conclusion seems inescapable that official policies in West Bengal did not go beyond providing relief for the refugees. This relief mainly took the form of providing temporary shelter in government-run camps and handing out dole and rations on a daily basis. Official policies lacked a long-term perspective. No attempt was made to undertake mass housing schemes nor was anything substantial done to create employment opportunities for the refugees. Till the Dandakaranya scheme was formulated in 1957 as a panacea for all the troubles of Bengali refugees, nothing was done to colonise land for agricultural resettlement, or to create rural employment opportunities, or to provide training and vocational skills to absorb the refugees in new occupations. An overall developmental ethos was lacking in the Government’s approach to the problem of rehabilitation. Faced with such a situation, Bengali refugees across the social spectrum were forced to find their own solutions for rebuilding their lives. The several millions who poured into West Bengal in the late 1940s and 1950s and thereafter had to take recourse to selfrehabilitation. The upper and middle clases were able to successfully rebuild their lives without depending upon official agencies. However, refugees from the poor strata and those from the countryside had no choice but to depend upon government agencies for succor and relief. When their expections of help and support from the Government were not adequately fulfilled, the disadvantaged refugees had no option but to find their own solutions. Squatting on public land and the setting up of slums in and around Calcutta was just one creative solution which they worked out, and undoubtedly it represented to them, a method of self-rehabilitation. As it happened, it became the most widespread form of self-rehabilitation in West Bengal, and the most visible proof of this is to be found in the squatter colonies which are found everywhere in urban West Bengal. An alternative for the Bengali refugees lay in their taking advantage of the opportunities that existed outside West Bengal. In their quest for rehabilitation, the refugees naturally showed a preference to be settled in Bengali-speaking areas. Several successful pockets of rehabilitation outside the province testify that the Bengalis could be as enterprising and mobile as any other displaced group and were not averse to going outside Bengal. One example of this successful rehabilitation was in Tripura, where about 88,000 Bengali refugee families settled. Tripura could be regarded as a cultural extension of the Bengal landscape, having been a part of undivided Bengal in colonial times. A second major rehabilitation site was even further afield in the Terai and Ganga Khadar in Uttar Pradesh (Randhawa, 198451-61). Here, due to the initiative of the provincial political leadership, an ambitious scheme of land colonisation was undertaken to rehabilitate partition refugees, including 4,000 Bengali refugee families (Indian Parliament, 1957555). The third distant area where Bengali refugees settled was in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands which settled 2,576 Bengali refugee families (Bose, 1983: 177). These examples of successful rehabilitation outside Bengal contest the stereotype embedded in official discourse which attributes the failure of refugee rehabilitation to the inherent parochialism of the refugees, their East Bengal refugees and their rehabilitation, 1947-79 unwillingness to settle outside Bengal and their lack of mobility and enterprise. In a recent study of contemporary East Bengali migration, Bengalis were described as “global migrants”, highly energetic and adaptable individuals who transcend cultural barriers to successfully carve out niches for themselves even in faraway alien lands (Gardner, 1995). Perhaps it is appropriate here to address the question of “ethnic” stereotyping which is embedded not only in official discourse but also in the uninformed stories about the partition refugees. The official history of the Ministry of Rehabilitation depicted the Bengali refugee “as a creature apart” who was described as “a bundle of apathy, impervious of the rehabilitation effort bestowed upon him”: he was caricatured as “rebellious and obstructive”, who demanded “the impossible [i.e. the] rehabilitation in West Bengal itself’ (Rao, 1967:141-43). On the other hand, the Punjabi refugee, also a victim of partition, was portrayed as having qualities of enterprise, resilience and selfesteem; someone too proud to depend upon others and willing to travel anywhere to seek a better life. “Phoenix-like the displaced Punjabi farmer has risen out of the ashes”, described Randhawa (1954: 1 1 1) in his account of the Punjab refugees. I have argued elsewhere that the contexts of uprooting and refugee rehabilitation were strikingly different in Punjab and Bengal, and it is these differences, rather than the ethnic stereotypes, that need to be explicated. In Punjab, the rehabilitation effort was successsful precisely because the energy and creativity which the refugees displayed in rebuilding their lives could be harnessed by the state into patterns of rehabilitation that harmonised with integrated social development (Kudaisya, forthcoming). The Bengali refugees also showed tremendous dynamism and zeal but there was no matching effort on the part of the state to rehabilitate them. The “failure” of refugee rehabilitation in Bengal was, in fact, the failure of the state: whatever rehabilitation took place in the province was largely selfrehabilitation by the refugees. The refugees made colossal efforts to rebuild their lives, but in the absence of any integrated planning, there was considerable social dislocation and environmental costs, the blame for which can hardly be fixed on them. It may also be observed that the exodus from Dandakaranya and zyx 37 the “freeing” of Marichjhanpi are mere markers rather than terminal points in the Bengali refugees’ continuing search for survival. This struggle continues to this day, not only in the squatter colonies of Calcutta or the villages of Dandakaranya, but in the Sunderbans delta, the Assam valley and Tripura where, without any government assistance, the refugees have cleared forests, colonised agricultural tracts and created settlements based on co-operative enterprise and ~ elf -help. ~ But what about Dandakaranya and the refugees’ flight to Bengal? Why could the refugees, after all, not settle in Dandakaranya? Was it their cultural identity and their sentimental attachment to the Bengal landscape that proved to be the impediment? We have already seen the difficulties that Dandakaranya presented as a rehabilitation site. It is perhaps important to recognise that the refugees’ overall experience of state-sponsored rehabilitation was alienating. The “desertion” from Dandakaranya must be seen as a positive choice by the refugees towards self-rehabilitation, rather than enduring the endless humiliation and frustration which statesponsored rehabilitation entailed. The withdrawal from Dandakaranya showed a search for selfrehabilitation and for dignity by the refugees. It represented, above all, their desperate attempt to build a home and to recreate a world which lay in shambles. The landscape on which this home was to be built was naturally conditioned by images of Sonar Bangla (Golden Bengal). “This landscape was the work of the mind” (Schama, 1995:6) and was imprinted in the collective memory of the refugees. The El Dorado which the Bengal landscape represented to them, and their desire for an abode within it signified, not so much a precise geographical location, but a state of mind.6 zyxwvut zyxwvuts zyxw On the demographic upheaval caused by the gradual influx of population in the north-eastem states and the resulting problem of ethnic reassertion, see Weiner (1978). 6 Schama (1995:6-7) argued that landscape is perceived through the “mind’s eye...for although we are accustomed to separate nature and human perception into two realms, they are in fact, indivisible. Before it can ever be a repose for the senses, landscape is the work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much as from strata of memory as from layers of rocks.” 38 zyxwvutsrqp zyxw zyx Gyanesh Kudaisya ACKNOWLEDGMENTS An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the 9th International Conference of Historical Geographers (Pre-Conference Symposium) on “Landscape and Identity” held in June 1995 at Singapore. 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