India's independence from British rule did not bring news of adulterated happiness for the entire native population. The partition of India that followed it brought extreme difficulty for many. Division into two nations on the basis of religion meant migration of a huge number of people from India to Pakisthan (both East and West) and vice versa. The exodus was long and it continued till the late 50s. Needless to say it was heart-wrenching too, because it meant a lot of inhuman hardship for the migratory population. It included not only life and wealth loss that were immediately visible, but also intangible destruction of identity and self. One of the most prominent crises that these people faced was the loss of 'home'. However, it will be entirely naïve to consider this aforementioned home to be an architectural specimen of some economic value. It is certainly so, but more than that it has an emotional value too-connecting a man with his roots, conferring on him his much desired identity. Homelessness therefore means rootlessness and a lack of identity. The issue of homelessness has been a favourite with many postcolonial writers. For the purpose of this paper I have chosen the eminent Bengali novelist Shaktipada Rajguru's Dandak Theke Marichjhanpi (From Dandak to Marichjhanpi). The novel which deals with the theme of

India's independence from British rule did not bring news of adulterated happiness for the entire native population. The partition of India that followed it brought extreme difficulty for many. Division into two nations on the basis of religion meant migration of a huge number of people from India to Pakisthan (both East and West) and vice versa. The exodus was long and it continued till the late 50s. Needless to say it was heart-wrenching too, because it meant a lot of inhuman hardship for the migratory population. It included not only life and wealth loss that were immediately visible, but also intangible destruction of identity and self. One of the most prominent crises that these people faced was the loss of 'home'. However, it will be entirely naïve to consider this aforementioned home to be an architectural specimen of some economic value. It is certainly so, but more than that it has an emotional value too-connecting a man with his roots, conferring on him his much desired identity. Homelessness therefore means rootlessness and a lack of identity. The issue of homelessness has been a favourite with many postcolonial writers. For the purpose of this paper I have chosen the eminent Bengali novelist Shaktipada Rajguru's Dandak Theke Marichjhanpi (From Dandak to Marichjhanpi). The novel which deals with the theme of

It was the largest government massacre in independent India, but for thirty years it was forgotten. It involved two of the most venerable politicians in India, Prime Minister Desai and the Chief Minister of West Bengal, Jyoti Basu. In the nearly 4 decades since then much has been learned about it but the scale of the massacre and the reasons for it remain unknown. Eventually all the major ruling parties were implicated, or failed to investigate it. The attempts to uncover what happened speak to the difficulties of achieving human rights in India. No government agency or NGO investigated it and no government report in any language exists on the Marichjhapi massacre. What we know results from the efforts of a handful of individuals to publicize the massacre. Some things have not changed since the 1979 massacre; the deaths continue to be estimated at between 3 and 5 figures, with no progress made in identifying the victims or narrowing the wide range in estimates. The reasons for it are still a mystery, though numerous explanations of varying plausibility have been broached to explain it. Though historical interpretations continue to be advanced, the basic events are not in dispute. The Mughal conquest of India led to many Untouchables and lower castes converting to Islam. As independence approached religion became a mobilizing force for political change which resulted in partition of India and the creation of Pakistan. Hindus in East Bengal fled to the West while the Muslims in the West fled East. However as the Muslims and Untouchables were in a political alliance it was only when communal feeling turned against the Untouchables that they fled to India. As they did not have the assets of the middle class Hindus and landlords who had fled earlier, they became dependent on government assistance for survival. The conditions in the refugee camps in central India were considered appalling both by the media and the government's own reports. The Communist opposition in West Bengal took advantage of their plight to discredit the ruling Congress Party and demand their return to West Bengal, with the undeveloped Sundarbans Ganges Delta as a plausible resettlement area. This presented no problem until the Communists came to power in West Bengal, and the refugees took them at their word and began returning to Bengal where they set up a settlement at Marichjhapi in the delta on an abandoned government plantation. They had been encouraged to do so by Ministers in the Left Front government who visited the Dandakaranya refugee camps of central India. As the refugees had been subject to hostility from the local armed tribals who did not want encroachment on their land, and camp administrators who exploited them and stole government supplies, the offer was enticing. What the refugees did not know initially was that while the junior partners in the Left Front government continued to promote resettlement in West Bengal, the dominant Communist Party Marxist (CPM) would come to reverse its position and oppose it. The split in the Cabinet reflected long standing rivalries between different Left parties as they used state power to expand their influence at the expense of each other. As the refugees were geographically separated from West Bengal in Dandakaranya they did not understand the impact this would have on their fate.

This paper studies the 1947 Partition of India, more specifically the Partition of Bengal, which took place along with the Independence of India and Pakistan. Discourses around the Partition— an event of enduring socio-political significance — have predominantly focused on the moment of rupture that compelled individuals as well as their families to cross the Radcliffe Line. A common critical consensus is that the two most dominant themes that characterise the 1947 Partition are trauma and nostalgia, and these have multiple connotations for those who migrated during the Partition. This paper focuses on the Partition of Bengal and the argument that the vivisection of land initiated a process of cross-border migration that continued unabated for three decades. While scholars have mostly studied cross-border migration in Bengal against the backdrop of nationalism and nation-state formation, the paper intends to study the life-stories of refugees to determine if it is empirically productive to think of migration in terms of caste and not just the nation-state parameter. This paper studies caste against the backdrop of the Partition but does not restrict itself to a chronological reading of the history of caste in Bengal; rather it attempts to move beyond its epistemological determinations to see how ‘lived experiences’ can lead to an alternate canon formation that might interrogate the way narratives of displacement have been studied so far.

The struggle against untouchability, the religious history of Bengal, and the study of postcolonial displacement in South Asia can hardly be considered without paying attention to a roughly two-hundred-year-old low-caste religious and social movement called Matua. The Matua community counts at present fifty million followers, according to its leaders. It is scattered across a large area and connected through a trans-local network of preachers, pilgrims, institutions, print, and religious commodities. Most Matua followers are found in West Bengal; in southern Bangladesh, where the movement emerged in the 19th century; and in provinces where refugees from East Bengal have resettled since the 1950s, especially Assam; Tripura; the Andaman Islands; Uttarakhand; and the Dandakaranya area at the border of Orissa, Chhattisgarh, and Madhya Pradesh. Building upon an older Vaishnava devotional stream, the religious community initiated by Harichand Thakur (1812–1878) and consolidated by his son Guruchand Thakur (1847–1937) developed hand in hand with the Namashudra movement for the social upliftment of the lower castes. Rebelling against social marginalization and untouchability, and promising salvation through ecstatic singing and dancing, the Matua community triggered a massive mobilization in rural East Bengal. Partition and displacement have disrupted the unity of the Matua movement, now scattered on both sides of the hastily drawn Indo-Bangladesh border. The institutional side of the Matua community emerged as a powerful political subject, deeply entangled with refugee politics, borderland issues, and Hindu nationalism. In the 21st century, the Matua community represents a key element in electoral politics and a crucial factor for understanding the relation between religion, displacement, and caste, within and beyond Bengal.