Südasien-Chronik - South Asia Chronicle 7/2017, S.

147-178 © Südasien-Seminar
der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin ISBN: 978-3-86004-330-1

Memories of Partition’s 'Forgotten Episode':

Refugee Resettlement in the Andaman Islands

UDITI SEN
USEN@HAMPSHIRE.EDU

KEYWORDS: PARTITION, ANDAMAN ISLANDS, MIGRATION, DISPLACEMENT,

ORAL HISTORY

147
On 14 March 1949, a motley bunch of 495 East Bengali refugees
arrived at the Kidderpore dock of Calcutta port from a transit camp at
Andul, where they had been collected from the various hastily set up
camps of West Bengal. Consisting of 132 families of whom 50 were
agriculturists, 22 were tanti (weavers) and 34 were sutradhar (carpen-
ters), they were the first batch of refugees to travel to the Andaman
Islands for resettlement1 (Special Correspondent. Purbobonger
Asrayprarthider Pratham Daler Andaman Yatra (The First Batch of
Refugees from East Pakistan Set Out for the Andamans). Anandabazar
Patrika. 15 March 1949). Though they were a tiny fraction of the
estimated 70,000 refugees who awaited rehabilitation in West Bengal,
Dr Bidhan Chandra Roy, the Chief Minister of West Bengal, hailed their
departure as a historic event. Along with the then Minister of Relief,
Nikunjabihari Maity, Dr Roy made it a point to be personally present to
see off this first batch, turning it into an occasion for propaganda. In a
speech delivered on the eve of their departure, Dr Roy wondered, 'In
the midst of such chaos, when things are so rushed, why are so many
people prepared to travel to a foreign land?' (ibid.).
The question was posed in the presence of nearly 500 refugees
ready to embark on the Steam Ship Maharaja for the Andamans, and
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logically speaking, should have been answered by them. However,

neither the assembled dignitaries nor the press had any real intention
of exploring the motivations or compulsions of the refugees. The goal
was to publicise the scheme and this was best achieved by speaking on
behalf of the refugees, by attributing to them motivations and aspira-
tions they may or may not have had. Thus, Dr Roy rushed in to speak
on the behalf of refugees, declaring that they were acting as 'agradut'
(forerunners) and 'banibahak' (heralds) of a new age. 'With new
enthusiasm, they hope to build a new island' (ibid.). This top-down
characterisation of destitute refugees as intrepid pioneers, who
apparently had ambitions of building a new kind of society and
economy in the distant Andaman Islands, was largely a publicity exer-
cise designed to counter allegations of forced dispersal of refugees
from West Bengal. In this particular case, the ill-repute of the chosen
destination as the infamous Kalapani (black waters) and a space of
exile and imprisonment heightened the political stakes.
The irony of thrusting a pioneering role upon this particular group of
refugees, who in effect were being displaced for a second time from
the land where they had sought shelter, was perhaps not lost on the
reporter. The published article, while faithfully reproducing government
148 hyperbole, also made it a point to note that this group of intrepid
pioneers included elderly men and women as well as infants, with
women and children far outnumbering able-bodied men (ibid.). The
Communists, who had already begun to champion the rights of
refugees, were far more direct in their criticism. They opposed all plans
of refugee resettlement in the Andaman Islands and accused the gov-
ernment of effectively getting rid of a politically volatile population by
banishing refugees to a life of extreme hardship in a remote location.
They gave little credence to repeated assertions by bureaucrats that
only 'willing' refugees were being sent to the Andamans. Thus, if the
Congress government was eager to re-imagine the refugees as
pioneering settlers, the left opposition imposed upon them the
opposite role of being hapless victims.
Unsurprisingly, the voices of the refugees are missing in the political
row over their fate. Subsequent historical research has echoed the
suspicions of the left opposition by characterising resettlement in the
Andamans as 'exile' (Basu Ray Chaudhuri 2000: 106-41) and the
entire process of dispersal of refugees outside West Bengal as 'a forced
exodus' (Chatterji 2007a). Ironically, though written with empathy for
the predicament of already uprooted families being 'frog-marched' to
remote locations for rehabilitation, this scholarship ends up reinforcing
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the victim stereotype of refugees and leaves no room for their agency
and voices (Chatterji 2007b: 995-1032; Chakrabarti 1999). This essay
draws upon oral history to bring the voices of the refugees into this
debate. Relying primarily on the reminiscences of refugees resettled in
the Andamans, it argues that a binary representation of the dispersed
refugees, either as exiles or as pioneers, fails to capture the com-
plexity of their lived experience of rehabilitation.

I: Forgotten by history: locating Andaman’s refugees within

partition studies

In the 1990s, historiography on the partition of India took a definitive

turn towards a history 'from below', that sought to privilege people’s
experiences and negotiations of the partition of India as opposed to an
analysis of the various factors leading to the partition of 1947 (Roy
1990: 385–408). While this was a welcome shift, in the past two
decades it has produced its own orthodoxies and blind spots. A
significant trend has been a reliance on oral history to recover and
bring to light 'subaltern' or plebeian perspectives on the partition of
India, such as the experiences of recovered women (Butalia 2000;
Menon & Bhasin 1998), urban squatters (Bose 2000), and refugees in
149
general (Talbot 2006; Bagchi 2003).
Unfortunately, much of this scholarship simplistically equated the
very fact of being a refugee with marginality or subalternity. The
inadequate attention paid to differences in class and caste background
amongst refugees runs the risk of reducing refugee experiences of
partition to an ahistorical and flattened whole. With the exception of
feminist scholarship grounded in an understanding of how patriarchal
values and policies shaped the experience of women, the dominant
narrative of refugee experiences continues to privilege ethnicity as the
most important feature in distinguishing refugee experiences. Much
has been said about the different experiences and 'characters' of
Punjabi and Bengali refugees, within official and semi-official reports
(Rao 1967; Gupta et al. 2002). Recent scholarship has explored the
wide regional variation in how ordinary people experienced partition
(Ansari 2005; Butalia 2015; Chatterji 2007a; Roy 2012; Zamindar
2007), thus, to some degree shifting the focus from Punjab.
Comparatively little has been said about how the experience of
middle class and educated refugees from dominant caste background
varied from the experiences of poor refugees from subordinate caste
groups, within the same ethnic or linguistic group. When it comes to
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Punjabi refugees, Ravinder Kaur’s scholarship is an exception to this

trend (Kaur 2006, 2007). When it comes to scholarship on Bengali
refugees, questions of class and caste difference are inadequately
addressed. We know from Mallick (1999) and Chatterji (2007a) that
Dalit or schedule-caste refugees, who were primarily Namasudras (a
largely rural depressed caste hailing from eastern Bengal, who mostly
follow the heterodox Matua sect, and used to be classified as
‘Chandals’ in the colonial census before 1911), were the last to leave
eastern Pakistan. They often survived violent communal attacks which
left them destitute. Lacking social and cultural capital, they were
pushed out of Calcutta and dispersed to far-flung and marginal lands
for resettlement, such as Dandakaranya2 and the Andaman Islands.
Very little is known about how dispersed Namasudra refugees rebuilt
their lives and identities outside West Bengal.
Existing scholarship on memory and identity amongst Bengali refu-
gees overwhelmingly focuses on dominant caste3 narratives of loss,
nostalgia and marginalisation (Chakrabarty 1996; Ray 2002). Even
when such scholarship is critical of the erasures and amnesias that lie
at the core of dominant-caste narratives (Chakrabarty 1996; Sen
2014), unless equal attention is paid to the voices and memories of the
150 dispersed refugees from subordinate castes, it risks replicating within
scholarship the marginalisation of Namasudras that characterised
politics and propaganda in post-partition West Bengal (Chandra,
Heierstad & Bo Nielsen 2016). This essay moves away from caste-blind
and Calcutta-centric scholarship on East Bengali refugees by focusing
on the experiences and reminiscences of refugees dispersed to the
Andaman Islands. Unlike the urban squatters who have captured so
much of the popular imagination around refugees, these refugees were
largely illiterate peasants who belonged to the Namasudra caste of
East Bengal.

Besides caste, a second blind-spot within partition scholarship is its

treatment of regions. There is an almost universal tendency of uncriti-
cally sticking to a geographical hierarchy. Certain regions, particularly
Punjab and the national capital of Delhi, are seen to be not only central
to the history of partition, but also representative of the "national" or
"Indian" experience. All other locations are explored primarily as
regional variations, marginal to the national experience. Thus, despite
growing research on the richness and diversity of how partition was
experienced in the divided provinces of Bengal and Assam, and its far-
reaching impact in numerous frontier provinces, such as Sindh,
Rajasthan, Kashmir and Tripura, the field of partition studies continues
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to privilege the violence and dislocation that characterised the partition

of Punjab as somehow representative of the "Indian" experience of
partition.

The partition of Bengal is studied in terms of its difference or

deviation from the Punjab model of genocidal violence followed by a
state-led exchange of population. If Bengal occupies the space of
regional variation of a so-called national narrative, every other location
is treated as either marginal to this history or the site of a "forgotten"
episode of partition in need of recuperation by historians. Partition
historiography has several examples of such recuperative exercises
(Copland 1998; Talbot & Singh 1999). The dispersal of East Bengali
refugees to the Andaman Islands and their eventual resettlement falls
into this latter category of a forgotten episode that unfolded in the
very margins of India—in a remote and forested archipelago located at
a vast distance of 560 miles from the mouth of the river Hooghly in
West Bengal. This hierarchical organisation of some spaces as more
central than others and the characterisation of some episodes as
"forgotten" begs some obvious questions: marginal to what and
forgotten by whom?
In effect, when historians treat certain geographies as more central
151
than others, they end up reaffirming a nationalist status-quo, where
northern Indian experiences and the actions and pre-occupations of
the political elite based in Delhi get to occupy the national space and
inform what constitutes a "national" experience as opposed to region-
al/ marginal ones. The characterisation of certain episodes of rehabili-
tation as "forgotten" is more problematic. It goes without saying that
the refugees resettled in the Andaman Islands have not forgotten their
journeys or their struggles to rebuild lives. To characterise refugee
resettlement in the Andaman Islands as a "forgotten" episode is there-
fore an act of privileging the role of the historian and the subjectivities
of her imagined audience, which is either the academy or an urban,
educated and Calcutta-centric readership, over and above the subject-
tivities of the very people the historian sets out to recuperate. The act
of "forgetting", especially when the forgetfulness is attributed to an
entire field of study or to popular memory, is far from a natural act.
Neither is the characterisation of some spaces as marginal and others
as central a given. Both are actively produced by social structures; and
are enabled and reinforced by contemporary politics. Therefore, to
locate the rehabilitation of Bengali refugees in the Andaman Islands
within partition studies in a manner that is not complicit with the social
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and political status quo must involve an attempt to understand the

processes by which this episode was forgotten and marginalised.
The geographical remoteness of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands,
located at the south-eastern edge of the Bay of Bengal is reinforced by
its inclusion within the political boundaries of India. The archipelago,
consisting of more than 300 Islands of varying sizes, forms a great arc
stretching southward for some 620 miles between Myanmar (Burma)
and the Island of Sumatra in Indonesia. The Andaman Islands are the
over-sea extensions of the submerged section of the Rakhine or
Arakan Range of Myanmar.4 After failed attempts between 1789 and
1796, these Islands were decisively claimed by the British in 1858,
largely in order to secure their dominance over the Bay of Bengal. It
gained infamy as a place of exile and colonial repression due to the
establishment of a penal settlement around Port Blair and the eventual
construction of the Benthamite Cellular Jail (Sen 2000; Vaidik 2010).
Its inclusion within independent India, as a directly governed type D
province in 1947, and as a union territory since 1956, was technically
based upon the imperial administrative convention of ruling the Islands
as part of the British Raj. By 1947, Indian nationalists had also re-
imagined the islands as a redemptive space of Indian nationalism,
152
sacralised by the long imprisonment, torture and death of radical
nationalists, especially the revolutionary terrorists. A majority of the
revolutionary terrorists imprisoned in the cellular jail came from the
province of Bengal, and it is this history, rather than its remote
location alone that led most Bengalis to characterise the Andaman
Islands as a place of exile.
It is unlikely that the Andaman Islands evoked the same terror as
kalapani (black waters) either amongst the Burmese labourers, who
were valued as skilled forest workers, or amongst the Oraon, Munda
and Kharia tribes of the Chota Nagpur region of Bihar, who were
recruited as coolies on six-month contracts by the Catholic Labour
Bureau in Ranchi since 1918 (Zehmisch 2012). In other words, sending
Bengali refugees to the Andaman Islands was politically controversial
because specific histories of labour migrations had linked the Islands to
the province of Bengal in particular ways. For most Bengalis, the
Andaman Islands was a space associated with exile and imprisonment
alone, while Burma, another overseas and frontier territory, has long
animated the Bengali imagination as a space of adventure and
opportunity.5
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As early as 1949, Dr Bidhan Chandra Roy had started insisting that

since the refugee crisis was born of a national decision to partition
India, it would be unfair to expect West Bengal to shoulder the entire
burden of rehabilitation of refugees from eastern Pakistan. While he
was active in arranging the dispersal of refugees to the provinces of
Bihar, Orissa, Tripura and the princely state of Coochbehar, his admini-
stration did not initially look to the Andaman Islands as a possible
destination. The Islands were brought to the notice of the government
of West Bengal by an unexpected request received from H.J. Stooks,
the Deputy Secretary of the short-lived Development and Rehabili-
tation Board,6 enquiring if West Bengal would agree to send some
refugees for resettlement to the Andaman Islands if a grant of Rs
1,300 was made available (Andaman Files, NAI, 1947). Dr. Roy readily
agreed to this proposal.

In the years that followed, he proceeded to pressurise the central

government to reserve all or most available 'empty' land in the Anda-
man Islands for rehabilitation of Bengali refugees (Sen 2009). His
requests were denied. But in practice, the central government in Delhi
and the bureaucrats who administered the Andaman Islands on their
behalf repeatedly turned to the refugee camps of West Bengal between
153
1949 and 1952. Their goal however was not to rehabilitate refugees,
but to recruit settlers and labourers for the Islands. Back in 1949,
Bengali refugees were the last group of people to be considered as
potential recruits to rescue a failing plan of post-war reconstruction of
the Andaman Islands that had been designed in 1945 keeping ex-
servicemen in mind. The scheme was thrown open to East Bengali
refugees only after refugees from Punjab were found to be unwilling.
Thus, despite Dr Roy’s willingness to publicise the dispersal of refugees
to the Andaman Islands as an instance of successful rehabilitation, in
reality, the impetus for taking refugees to these remote Islands came
from the administrators of the Andaman Islands whose plans of devel-
oping the Islands had hit a roadblock due to unavailability of labour.

Once a clear line of supply had been established between the

refugee camps of West Bengal and sites of settlement in the Andaman
Islands, an integrated scheme of colonisation and development of the
Andamans was launched in 1952. This scheme constituted the core of
planned developmental activities in these Islands during the first and
second plan periods. Its basic impetus was to expand agricultural land
by clearing forests and to set up new villages peopled by willing
settlers from the mainland. Though, in theory, the plan was open to all
 FOCUS

Indians, Bengali refugees constituted over 85 per cent of the

agriculturists settled in the Andaman Islands between 1952 and 1961.
These years were in fact, if not in name, the heydays of refugee
rehabilitation in the Andaman Islands. After a lull of few years, there
were isolated schemes of resettling refugees in the Andaman Islands
between 1965 and 1970, but nothing to match the scale of the earlier
period, when no less than 52 new villages were established across the
length and breadth of the Andaman Islands, often to the detriment of
the indigenous tribal communities, especially the Jarawas (ibid.). Yet,
it is precisely during this period that reports and propaganda around
refugee resettlement in the Andaman Islands dries up.

Image 1: Young Refugees Headed for Andaman Islands.

154

Source: Jugantar Newspaper, 27 May 1950.

Source: Jugantar, 27 May 1950.

Between 1949 and 1951, the dispersal of refugees to the Andaman

Islands was regularly in the news in Calcutta. The Anandabazar Patrika
and Jugantar, both popular vernacular dailies, reported diligently on
every new development regarding the dispersal of refugees to the
Andaman Islands. Besides keeping readers informed on the number of
families setting out, the date of their journey, and the government
propaganda around it, both the newspapers took to publishing
photographs of the refugees setting out for the Andaman Islands.
Photographed with the ship in the background, either at the moment
of embarkation or just before, these images offered a stark contrast to
the stereotypical image of the hapless East Bengali refugee—uprooted,
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impoverished and reduced to the indignity of living on the railway

platforms. For example, a photograph of a handful of young refugee
men, including several 'abhibhabokheen jubok' or boys without guard-
ians, who had volunteered to join a work-force in the Andaman
Islands, was published in the Jugantar on 27 May 1950. All the
'refugee boys' in the photograph pose by facing the camera directly,
unencumbered by any belongings. Many cross their arms in front, in a
posture suggesting resolve (see image 1).

Image 2: Stylised Sketches Representing the Helplessness of

East Bengali Refugees.

155

Source: Jugantar, 4 May 1950.

The same newspaper ran a campaign to raise funds for refugees from
4 May 1950, where the appeal for generous donations was accom-
panied by stylised representations of the misery and abjection of the
Hindus of East Bengal. Entitled "Jiboner Hok Joy" (Let Life Emerge
Victorious), this series of sketches, accompanied by appeals for help
represented the entire spectrum of East Bengali Hindu society, include-
ing agriculturists, fishermen, traditional drummers (dhakis), gold-
smiths and weavers in states of abjection. The text and accompanying
images were designed to evoke sympathy, even pity. Take for
 FOCUS

example, the fourth and fifth advertisement in the series of at least 15

which were titled ‘the indignity of camp life’ and ‘the providers of rice
(annadata) do not get rice today’ (see image 2). From the contrast
between these images, it seems Dr B.C. Roy was not alone in
dreaming of a second Bengal in the Andaman Islands.
Between 1949 and 1951, Bengali refugees leaving for the Andaman
Islands embodied a hope for new beginnings and a belief that govern-
ment schemes, though inadequate and delayed, could deliver results if
implemented properly. Press reports of 21 refugee families returning
from the Andaman Islands in 1949 had, for a period, put the entire
scheme under question (Andaman Files 1947b). However, by 1951,
there was little doubt that the resettlement of refugees in the
Andaman Islands was largely a success. On 17 March 1951, the
Anandabazar Patrika published a half page report celebrating the
'Heartbeat of new Life' (Natun Praner Spandan) in the Andaman
Islands ('Natun Praner Spandan (The Heartbeat of New Life)' 17 March
1951). The report claimed that refugees resettled in the Andamans
'plough their fields, grow crops and bring home the golden harvest of
paddy and fresh vegetables.' This verdict was seconded by Jugantar,
which was by far the most vocal advocate of refugee rights and there-
156 fore, also a harsh critique of government policies. This early consensus
on successful rehabilitation in the Andaman Islands paradoxically
paved the way for its disappearance from the press.
The pattern of dispersing Bengali refugees to the Andaman Islands
took shape between 1948 and 1951. During these early years of West
Bengal’s refugee crisis, dispersal outside West Bengal was yet to be
discredited in the public sphere. The news of the suffering of Bengali
refugees resettled in Orissa began trickling into West Bengal, carried
by refugees choosing to return to Calcutta, in late 1951 (Bandyopadh-
yay 1970). Desertion from rehabilitation sites in Bihar and Orissa
became a pattern between 1952 and 1954 (Chakrabarti 1999), and the
infamous Dandakaranya scheme designed to disperse all remaining
refugees in the camps of West Bengal was launched in December
1957. The Communist opposition to dispersal of refugees outside West
Bengal gained strength from these policy failures between 1953-54
and 1959.

The 1960s were characterised by political controversies over the

forced dispersal of 'new migrants'7 to Dandakarnaya and the
mismanagement of the project. A more dynamic analysis of refugee
rehabilitation in West Bengal reveals these important shifts in policy
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and in public perceptions of West Bengal’s refugee problem (Sen forth-

coming). During the late fifties and the early sixties, desertions by
Bengali refugees resettled in Bihar and Orissa, the squatters’ agitation
to hold on to their new homes in Calcutta and the grandiose plans of
the Dandakaranya project occupied centre-stage. At the same time,
largely successful rehabilitation of small batches of refugees ceased to
be newsworthy and the Andaman Islands gradually disappeared from
the news.
However, its simultaneous disappearance from public memory in
Calcutta cannot be explained without taking into account the socio-
economic divisions within East Bengali refugees. The vast majority of
the refugees who could overcome government apathy and hostility to
carve out a place for themselves in Calcutta were educated and middle
class refugees from dominant castes. In contrast, 90 per cent of the
refugees dispersed to the Andaman Islands were illiterate and poor
peasants belonging to the Namasudra community (Sinha 1952; Sen
2009). After the loss of a common geography, no familial or social ties
bound together these two sections of the refugee population. Thus,
over time, despite the ascendancy of refugee politics in Calcutta and
the proliferation of refugee narratives in various areas of public life,
157 the resettlement of refugees in the Andaman Islands became a
forgotten episode.

Settlers of "empty" lands: towards a history from below

Though the Andaman Islands consist of over 300 islands, the entire
archipelago can be broadly divided into three zones—the Great
Andaman, the Little Andaman and numerous outlying islets, many of
which are unnamed and uninhabited. The Great Andaman region is an
archipelago consisting of the North Andaman, Middle Andaman,
Bratang, South Andaman and Rutland Islands. The history of
resettlement of Hindu Bengali refugees from East Pakistan in the
Andaman Islands largely corresponds to the attempts to develop and
'colonise'8 the Great Andamans in the two decades after independence.
Colonisation of Great Andamans spread from south to north and from
coastal valleys and bays in the east to sites further inland and
westwards.
There were three clear phases of refugee re-settlement in the
Andamans. The first phase began in 1949 and continued till the end of
1951. The refugees who arrived in the Andamans during this period
were settled entirely in the South Andaman Island, in villages located
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progressively further from Port Blair. This was a period of experiment-

ation in terms of policy and the terms and conditions of settlement
varied widely from one batch to the next.

The second phase began in 1952, when piecemeal schemes of

settlement gave way to a decade long policy of colonisation of land in
the Andaman Islands. In 1952, the Government of India inaugurated
the Colonisation and Development Scheme that offered attractive
packages of loans and land grants to agriculturists from the mainland
of India, who were expected to expand agriculture into hitherto forest-
ed regions. This policy formed the core of state-led development in the
Andaman Islands during the first and second five-year plan periods.
Though in theory these schemes were open to all, the vast majority of
settlers and colonisers driving this scheme forward were Bengali
refugees, recruited from the numerous camps strewn across West
Bengal.
This period, between 1952 and 1961, constitutes the heydays of
refugee resettlement in the Andaman Islands when 2,413 families of
Bengali Hindus displaced from East Pakistan were resettled in the
Andaman Islands. While this is a small fraction of the thousands who
had sought refuge in West Bengal, it constitutes about 85 per cent of
158
the total number of families settled in the Andaman Islands over this
crucial decade (see Table 1). In other words, Bengali refugees were
the main force driving forward the Colonisation and Development
Scheme in the Andaman Islands that permanently and radically trans-
formed the demography and ecological balance of these Islands.
The third and final phase of refugee resettlement commenced in
1962, with the discontinuation of the Colonisation and Development
Scheme. In the decade that followed, both the method of agricultural
colonisation and Bengali refugees, as the principal colonisers, fell out
of favour with policy-makers as the primary means of developing the
Andaman Islands. Nevertheless, this decade saw nearly 700 refugee
families settled in the Andaman Islands through two one-off schemes,
signalling a return to ad-hoc measures. It is important to remember
that between 1949 and 1970, there was no official policy for
rehabilitation of Bengali refugees in the Andaman Islands. The
refugees had to don the mantle of pioneering settlers and pass
scrutiny as being suitable for the conditions of the Andaman Islands in
order to gain access to land and loans (Sen, forthcoming).
There was considerable debate and discussion over the details of
various schemes of settlement between various levels of admini-
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strators and bureaucrats involved in shaping policy. For example,

though the policy to settle the Andaman Islands using agriculturists
from the mainland of India originated within the Ministry of Home
Affairs, it was born in the context of an acute shortage of labour faced
by the local administration of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the
immediate aftermath of Independence/Partition. The actual details of

Table 1: Displaced families settled in the Andaman and Nicobar

Islands, 1953-1971.
Year State of Number Area of Region of
Origin of Settlement Settlement
Families
1953 East Bengal 97 Ferrargunj South
Andamans
1954 East Bengal 438 Rangat Middle
Kerala 35 Betapur in Andamans
Rangat
1955 East Bengal 390 Ferrargunj & South and
159 Rangat Middle
Kerala 37 Andamans
Tamil Nadu 4 Rangat Middle
Rangat Andamans
Middle
Andamans
1956 East Bengal 357 Diglipur North
Kerala 52 Diglipur Andamans
North
Andamans
1957 East Bengal 221 Diglipur North
Pondicherry 4 Rangat (Betapur) Andamans
Middle
Andamans
1958 East Bengal 194 Mayabunder North
Kerala 6 Ferrargunj Andamans
South
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Andamans
1959 East Bengal 217 Mayabunder North
Tamil Nadu 14 Diglipur Andamans
Bihar 120 Rangat North
(Baratang) Andamans
Middle
Andamans
1960 East Bengal 250 Mayabunder North
Tamil Nadu 17 Diglipur Andamans
Bihar 64 (Milangram)
Diglipur
(Ramnagar)
1961 East Bengal 228 Port Blair South
Kerala 14 (Havelock) Andamans
Bihar 13 Port Blair South
Diglipur Andamans

160 North
Andamans
1967 East Bengal 323 Mayabunder North
(Billiground) Andamans
1969- East Bengal 375 Little Andamans Little
1971 Andamans

Source: Figures compiled from various files of the Andamans Section of the Ministry of Home
Affairs, Government of India, National Archives of India, New Delhi.

each settlement scheme saw considerable discussion and wrangling

over costs between the Ministry of Home Affairs, the Finance Ministry
and the Ministry of Relief and Rehabilitation. Once Bengali refugees
emerged as the overwhelming majority amongst potential settlers, the
Chief Minister of West Bengal, Dr B.C. Roy also intervened frequently,
proposing that all newly cleared land should be 'reserved' for Bengali
refugees alone. There is no dearth of records on these debates over
policy in the archives (Andaman Files, NAI, 1947, 1947b and 1948).
However, the records reveal very little of the actual implementation of
these policies, or the experience of Bengali refugees, who were thrown
 FOCUS

into the unenviable role of being pioneering settlers in a remote and

forested Island.
In the annual settlement reports, the entirety of the experience of
the refugees sent to the Andaman Islands are reduced to a set of num-
bers—numbers resettled, numbers who deserted, acreage of land
allotted, amount of paddy harvested and records of births and deaths.
I turned to oral history to understand the motivations and experiences
of the refugees resettled in the Andaman Islands. In 2007, I conducted
interviews with 34 respondents who were spread over different villages
in South, Middle and North Andamans and were identified largely
through snowball sampling.9 Their reminiscences produced an alter-
native archive of memory that added texture and life to dry statistics.
It also allowed a nuanced exploration of agency and identity amongst
the refugees resettled in the Andaman Islands. This section combines
official records with the archive of memory to reconstruct the history of
refugee resettlement in the Andaman Islands from below.
The interviews reveal a range of strategies employed by refugees to
adjust to their new lives. These included reliance on familial networks
and quasi-familial ties forged in camps; determination to recreate a
familiar cultural world through initiating festivals and building temples;
161
adoption of new skills, such as hunting, and shifts in diet to include
deer. While a recent study privileges the role played by the Matua faith
in forging a sense of home (Mazumdar 2016: 170-200), in these inter-
views, religiosity was one of many factors that influenced refugee life
and not the dominant factor. Running through the diversity of strate-
gies employed by the refugees in negotiating the regime of reha-
bilitation was the shared experience of crossing the kalapani to an
unknown land. This section ends with a brief description of this shared
experience that sets the stage for the richness and complexity of
individual refugee reminiscences that resists simplistic generalisations
of victimhood or exile.
For the refugees, the journey which terminated in the islands had
begun in their native villages in East Bengal. The vast majority of the
refugees settled in Andamans came from the districts of Barisal,
Jessore and Khulna in East Bengal. They began their journey on foot
from their ancestral villages. Families travelled by boats down the
interconnected canals and rivers to the nearest railhead. Most of the
interviewees took the train from Khulna town towards West Bengal,
and entered India at the Bongaon border. Some travelled to Sealdah
station, while a few entered India on boats, through the extensive
 FOCUS

network of water transport in deltaic Bengal. In the course of this long

crossing, the refugees had to endure routine surveillance and harass-
ment from petty officials in East Pakistan.

Ironically, reaching India marked the beginning of a new pattern of

displacement. Often refugees were forced to spend days, even weeks
squatting on railway platforms or on the pavements until authorities
took them to camps. Most of the respondents recalled an aimless
existence of being shifted from one camp to another for several years,
before they were offered any scheme of permanent rehabilitation.
Every single respondent highlighted their 'choice' of Andamans, vehe-
mently denying any suggestion of state coercion. The scholarship
which characterises the resettlement of camp refugees in marginal or
remote lands outside West Bengal as coercion or 'exile' fails to take
into account the impact of this constant and prolonged displacement
upon the choices made by refugees.
Displacement, as these memories illustrate, could not always be
equated to a distinct act of uprooting or a decision to leave. For these
refugees it became their very existence. Once a family entered a
refugee camp, they lost control over their next destination or course of
action. The same refugee family could end up in work-site camps,
162
which were mostly tents pitched in open fields, a warehouse converted
into a camp or an abandoned jute mill. Moreover, the West Bengal
Government followed a policy of frequently shifting the refugees from
camp to camp, largely to prevent the politicisation of refugees through
contact with local politicians. For many refugees the decision to go to
the Andaman Islands offered a way out of this pattern of perpetual
dislocation and the day-to-day ignominy of life in camps.

The refugees who were finally selected for resettlement in Anda-

mans were collected from various camps of West Bengal and taken to
a transit camp in Calcutta. Here, the government of West Bengal
distributed agricultural implements, utensils and even musical instru-
ments amongst the families; thus, combining practical aid with an
attempt to boost the spirits of these pioneers (Bandyopadhyay 1970:
148-55). The journey to Andamans on the Steam Ship Maharaja, the
only ship which plied between the mainland and Andamans till the
1960s, lasted three nights and four days. Once the refugee families
reached the Andaman Islands, their experience varied. The first ever
batch to be taken to the Andamans were allotted abandoned fields,
largely ready for cultivation. Later batches of refugees were either put
 FOCUS

to work immediately in clearing land, or housed in temporary camps

while they awaited land to be cleared by the Forest Department.
The camps consisted of long two-storied barracks built of bamboo,
cane and leaves, divided into ten rooms. The vast majority of refugee
families, who were resettled under the Colonisation and Development
Scheme, lived in such camps for months—waiting for the local autho-
rities to disburse the lands promised to them. Years of struggle
followed, against the jungle, wild animals and the isolation of the
remote settlements, to carve out sedentary agrarian life. It is this
struggle that the refugees resettled in the Andaman Islands spoke of
most when interviewed in 2007.
In order to understand the meaning of this particular pattern of
remembering, it is necessary to understand the nature of memory as a
historical source. Memory is by no means a mimetic source of the past.
In re-telling their experiences of building a new life in the Andaman
Islands, the refugees I interviewed were obviously narrating experien-
ces that felt relevant to their current identities. Moreover, their
reminiscences were provoked by my questions and coloured by my
presence—as an outsider, a mainlander and a young unmarried
woman. Most of my respondents were over the age of sixty, which also
163
increases the possibility of error born of misrememberings. Yet, cross-
referencing refugee reminiscences with more conventional sources,
such as government records, settlement lists, newspaper reports and
anthropological surveys revealed an extremely high degree of accuracy
in some basic facts.
All the refugees resettled in the Andaman Islands called themselves
'settlers'.10 Specific details of their process of settlement loomed large
in their accounts suggesting that a settler identity had largely over-
written their trauma of displacement from eastern Pakistan by the time
the interviews were conducted. As a rule, the respondents remember-
ed the year they were brought over to the Andaman Islands, even
identifying themselves as 54 batch, 61 batch and so on. Refugees who
travelled together on the S.S. Maharaja were seldom settled in the
same village. They were scattered across different small villages in
smaller groups ranging from five to twelve families. Despite this
scattered pattern of settlement, refugee respondents from one 'batch'
kept track of each other. All my interviewees rattled off the names and
locations of other 'head-families' who belonged to the same batch.
Most respondents also had the total number of families settled in their
own village memorised. All of these points towards a cohesive identity
 FOCUS

amongst the Bengali refugees resettled in the Andaman Islands and an

awareness of their role as settlers and agricultural pioneers.

II: Voices from the Andamans: tales of 'old men' and equal
women

There are two ways to approach the reminiscences of refugees that I

collected from various villages in North, Middle and South Andaman
Islands. Firstly, it is possible to analyse the interviews collectively, to
extract dominant themes and shared concerns that reveal the contours
of this hybrid identity of refugee-settlers in the Andaman Islands.
Secondly, it is also possible to argue that each interview reveals com-
plex and contingent negotiations of the regime of rehabilitation that is
inadequately captured by the shared theme of settler identity. I have
already explored the contours of a shared settler identity that can be
revealed through reading refugee reminiscences collectively elsewhere
(Sen 2011).
However, this essay has not just sought to explore the history of
refugee resettlement in the Andaman Islands, but has also highlighted
the persistent reduction of complex refugee lives to flattened roles of
164 being exiles, pioneers or merely, forgotten. In keeping with this critical
theme, this section presents selections from two separate interviews, a
man and a woman, resettled in two different villages of the Middle
Andaman Island. Their voices, translated and minimally edited to aid
legibility, reveal aspirations, perceptions and negotiations that exceed
the scope of the questions asked. This section is an invitation to the
readers to encounter, albeit in a mediated form, the unique ability of
oral history to "speak back" to the researcher, thus resisting
unidimensional representation of subaltern groups (Portelli 1981;
Samuel & Thompson 1990).

Each interview is prefaced with a brief introduction to the

interviewee, the context and location of the interview and a clear idea
of how much of the interview has been selected for publication. The
entire interview was conducted in Bengali, with the refugee-settlers
speaking in the dialect of their native villages, what is often referred to
as 'bangal bhasha' as opposed to formalised Bengali, which was the
language I spoke. While translating the interviews I have attempted to
retain the conversational tone, as much of the meaning of the
narratives shared are also expressed in pauses and repetitions. Words
have been inserted in parenthesis to complete incomplete sentences
only where it is a necessary aid to understanding.
 FOCUS

I have italicised the English words which were used by my inter-

viewees and had passed into their vocabulary untranslated in order to
give the readers a sense of the bureaucracy they had to negotiate as
refugee-settlers. There were occasional shorthand references to
significant places and people connected to the project of rehabilitation
in the Andaman Islands, which did not hamper communication during
the interviews but can be incomprehensible to readers. The meanings
of such references, such as 'Auckland', which is short-hand for the
Directorate of Refugee Relief and Rehabilitation located at 10A
Auckland Road, have been clarified in endnotes in order to maintain
the flow of the conversation.

Interview 1: Lalitmohan Pal of Madhupur village, Diglipur

Tehsil, North Andaman Island

Lalitmohan Pal was the head of the household of a refugee family

settled in the Diglipur region of the Andaman Islands in 1956 (Pal
Interview, 6 February 2007). He was a young married man in his early
twenties when he arrived in the Andaman Islands. I met him through
his neighbour, who worked at the guest house in Diglipur where I was
staying. The interview was in his living room, in a well-appointed home
165
made out of bricks and in the presence of a younger man, a relative,
who remained largely silent. Lalitmohan Pal spoke freely, clearly enjoy-
ing his role as an expert on local history. The first part of his interview,
where he narrates in vivid detail how he negotiated the colonisation
scheme in the Andaman Islands is reproduced below. His voice brings
us face to face with a refugee subjectivity that refuses any notion of
victimhood. The interview is also notable for the contrast between how
clearly he remembered every detail of his arrival in the Andaman
Islands and his vague and disinterested narration of his displacement
from East Bengal, which was a common feature of refugee
reminiscences in the Andaman Islands. The section printed below is
the first eight minutes of an hour-long interview.

US: Your name grandfather?

LMP: Lalitmohan Pal.
US: And when did you arrive?

LMP: I came in 1956, in April. It was the 6th day of the month of
Jaishtha, when I disembarked here.
US: How many of you were there?
 FOCUS

LMP: At that time, on the ship that is, we were sixty families. The
system then was such that…. Ok.11 The ground here was cleared the
year before. It was cleared by Ranchi labourers. The Forest Depart-
ment has 1900 labourers and they cleared as much land as they could.
After clearing, it was time to bring (settlers). Ours was the
Colonisation Scheme. We were brought here with a loan of Rs 1,730.
We enrolled our names in this scheme, while we were still in camps. At
the camps then… have you heard the name of our Rahababu?12
US: Yes.

LMP: And in Auckland office13 there was Keshtobabu. The two of

them went to camps and let us know—we are going to take people to
Andamans. Which of you want to go?

US: Which camp was this?

LMP: Ours was (in) Birbhum, near Bolpur town. Supur Ambagan
camp.
US: Ok.
LMP: Is it [referring to my hand-held recorder] recording?
US: Yes, it is.
166
LMP: Supur Ambagan camp [almost shouting to ensure his voice is
heard].
US: Speak normally, it will record.

LMP: Oh, ok. We arrived in Supur Ambagan camp in… eh...

nineteen…erm….um.... say, in fifty-five. Or thereabouts.
US: So that’s when you arrived in the camp?

LMP: Yes, the camp.

US: And before that, you were in East Bengal?
LMP: Yes, before that we were in Bangladesh. Well, not Bangladesh,
then it was Pakistan. We came direct—after doing migration.14 From
Sealdah we were taken the very next day to Supur Ambagan camp.
They put us there and pitched up tents. We lived in tents. After a year
of staying there, we got the call to go to Andaman. There were also
calls to go to other places. We did not enrol our names. We enrolled
our names for Andamans. We were eight families. We came here
together.
US: So, what made you opt for the Andamans?
 FOCUS

LMP: We opted for the Andamans because… Well, the year before,
there is this area called Nabagram in Andaman Islands. The families
there had arrived the year before. In that group there were two
households of the Pal family. We are Pals.
US: Ok.
LMP: They were our relatives. His [pointing to a relative sitting in the
room] grandfather’s younger brother was there. And there was
another man. Well, it’s not like you will know him by name, but he was
called Krishnapada Pal. They were four brothers. They wrote us letters.
They wrote that next year, this place called Diglipur will be cleared. It
is a large area and the quality of land there is good. Enrol your names
for settlement there. Where we are, we get 200 to 250 maunds15 of
paddy. Hearing all this, our families, we all, were attracted. It’s a good
place, good lands, large tracts, good area—hearing all this, we enrolled
our names (in the scheme). Well, many families enrolled their names.
But before bringing us here, they conducted an inquiry. So Keshtobabu
from Auckland and Rahababu came to conduct the inquiry—have you
heard of Rahababu?
US: Sadhan Raha? Yes, I have.
167 LMP: Oh yes. So how is Rahasaheb?
US: I have heard that he now lives in Kolkata. I have obtained his
phone number. I heard that he used to live in Port Blair, but now that
he is ill, he has moved to Kolkata.
LMP: Port Blair he had bought land there—even built a house. Now I
think he has sold it all off and left. It was close to the Airport.
US: I have heard he is in Kolkata. I have his contact details and will
get in touch with him once I return.

LMP: Ok. So, the inquiry in the camp was held in a tent. That was
the office. Sitting in that tent office they called everybody. At that
time, they cancelled a lot of people (meaning applications). So, a lot of
people were demoralised. There were seven Pal families there. Of this
seven, five were elderly men. So, they were calling the names one by
one. Their names came up earlier. They went. And all five were
cancelled. I am narrating the history for you.
US: Why were their names cancelled?
LMP: I am telling you. I am telling you the history.

US: Yes, please go on.

 FOCUS

LMP: I could hear them talking amongst themselves—'old man, old

man'. Meaning, these are elderly people. I could understand that they
were telling each other. That these were 'old man', meaning elderly
people. How would they cope in the Andaman Islands? Meaning, one
would have to shovel and hoe and dig and weed. They will not be able
to do it. They were old men. They were past middle age. Two of us
were young. Atul Pal of that house (pointing at the house next door)
was there was me. We were about twenty-eight or thirty years old. We
had not gone in yet. We were observing. We saw that their names had
been cancelled. Later, when they called my name—Lalitmohan Pal! I
responded from outside the tent—Sir! We won’t go. Why? They said.
You see, they could see we were young. So, they asked, why won’t
you go? Why won’t we go? You see, saheb, we are seven households
in the Pal family. We want to go together. You have cancelled five of
us. What will we two achieve by going?
US: I see.
LMP: So, then they said, who all were there? I said here…. the
names you cancelled just now—Mahendra Pal, Sarat Pal, Aswini Pal,
Rasik Pal. The people you cancelled. We seven want to go together. If
you take all seven, then we two will go. If not, we won’t. Call them,
168
call them back, they said. So they called back the five. Included those
five names first. Then the two of us went inside. Then we came. This is
the history of our coming from there.

Interview II: Mrs. Kalipada Mondal of Janakpur village, Rangat

Tehsil, middle Andaman Island

I arrived unannounced in Mrs. Mondal’s home, which had been pointed

out to me by another settler I had interviewed in a neighbouring
village. Her husband, Kalipada Mondal was unwell and unable to talk,
which is why Mrs. Mondal agreed to speak in his stead (Mrs. Mondal
Interview, 4 February 2007). Though she was too shy to give me her
full name, she proved to be an eager interviewee and her answers
were full of anecdotes, reflections and detailed descriptions of how
things were in 'those days'. The Mondals arrived in the Andaman
Islands in 1954. Mrs. Mondal was married and the mother of two small
children at that time. The interview was conducted on the porch of her
mud hut, on a sunny afternoon, with Mrs. Mondal occasionally dis-
appearing inside to check with her husband that she was getting her
dates right. Printed below are two disconnected sections from a forty-
minute interview. In the first section, she narrates her experience of
 FOCUS

coming to the Andamans, which blurs the line between choice and
coercion. Her voice also highlights a gendered experience of displace-
ment and resettlement, where the focus is on the intimate everyday
texture of life instead of an attempt to narrate events of larger
significance.
US: So, did you come by rail or by boat?

Mrs M: We came by rail.

US: So did you receive any documents when you got off on this
side?

Mrs M: No, we did our migration and came. So, after doing our
migration, we became refugees.
US: How? By getting your names written on some list?

Mrs M: Yes. After we reached Sealdah, the government took us to a

camp and admitted us there.
US: Which camp was this?
Mrs M: Kashipur Camp.
US: Did you have to stay in one room with many people?
169
Mrs M: Oh yes, many! In one room there would be fifty families.
US: Wow! Was it a big room?
Mrs M: Oh, huge! These were huge rooms. It was a warehouse I think.
I say this because there was dirt and grime all over the place—it would
get on to our clothes, our bodies.
US: From the walls?
Mrs M: From the walls, from the floors! What more can you expect of a
warehouse? Who can tell how old that place was? [laughs]
US: So how long did you live there?
Mrs M: We stayed there for six months.
US: What about food?
Mrs M: They gave us food. Rice, flour, pulses. We cooked and we ate.
US: How did you cook?

Mrs M: In coal ovens.

US: Did they give you the coal?
Mrs M: No. That we would buy.
 FOCUS

US: Where did you get the money for it?

Mrs M: From the dole money. They gave us some dole, can’t
remember how much. Maybe Rs 12 or so.

US: And that sufficed?

Mrs M: Yes, we made do. That’s how we managed there, before
coming (here). My two children—they were constantly ill. And the
numbers that died (there)! Daily two car-loads were taken, one in the
morning and one in the evening. And in that fear…
US: In that camp?

Mrs M: Yes!
US: Was there any arrangement for doctors, or medicines?
Mrs M: Yes, sort of. But it was not enough. Pox, measles, what we call
basanta (small pox), fever—all sorts of illnesses.
US: Was it mostly children?
Mrs M: Yes. Children were most susceptible. Seeing all this… my kids,
they would just not recover from illnesses. My eldest son, he had
fever, infact, he had pneumonia twice. Then he had pox. Then my
170 daughter came down with temperature. Seeing all this, we said, we
have come here with our children. Now if we lose them sitting in the
camp….
US: I see.

Mrs M: In this situation there was a chance to enroll our names for this
place. That’s when my old man put his name forward. And we came
away. Actually, I did not want to come to the Andamans. (I thought)
it’s the Kalapani, so far, impossible to return from, across the seven
seas…
US: You were scared?
Mrs M: Yes, I was scared. Then, one day, they showed us a movie.
They showed us a bioscope on the situation in the Andamans.
US: Who screened this?

Mrs M: (Somebody) from the government. People were reluctant to

come.
US: At Kashipur camp?
Mrs M: Yes, yes. Seeing that, I said to myself, no, that’s a land of
golden harvests—such beautiful crops of paddy, coconut trees,
 FOCUS

betelnut trees, giant pumpkins. I mean, everything that was grown

around Port Blair, they showed us all that. And I said, yes, if we go
there we can survive. So, we came to the Andamans.

US: So, all those illnesses you spoke of, once you arrived here, did
you suffer from any?
Mrs M: No! For the first decade or two we were very well.

US: There were no major diseases?

Mrs M: There were no illnesses at all! I used to feel very happy then.
See (I would think), if we had stayed on in Kolkata who knows how
many medicines we would have had to take. And the medicines we
were given in the camp… well, how do I explain. There were no proper
doctors. We would buy the medicines we needed from the market. But
money was a problem. We did not have enough. So, I worked as a
maid in different houses. The little that we made helped us to get the
medicines we needed. But none of us could stay healthy for long. It
was a closed space, hot, and who knows for how long the place had
been abandoned. This is where we used to live. It was a life without
the daily sandhya16 or lamp-lighting, or any puja. We are Hindus, you
see. All we managed inside the camp was Shitala puja.17
171
US: The women organised this?
Mrs M: Yes, us girls and wives. We did it together. Basanta (small pox)
was widespread. That is why we would do this particular puja.
US: And what about here?
Mrs M: Oh, here we do it all.

US: So what do you feel, who is better off today? Those who came
to the Andaman Islands or those who stayed on in Kolkata?
Mrs M: Oh no, I am much better off for coming to the Andamans.
Cause here, there is no fear of theft or robbery. Here, the value of a
woman is equal to the value of a man. I am (for example) an old
woman. Yet, there is not a month when, even after completing all my
household work, I do not earn two to three hundred rupees. I keep
hens and ducks, I grow vegetables. I always have enough money for
my own needs. I don’t have to ask my sons. My sons work too. As did
my old man. With all this, we manage quite well. We may not be rich,
but we do not suffer.
US: There is no scarcity in your household?
Mrs M: No. We have not felt want.
 FOCUS

US: Did you face scarcity in East Bengal?

Mrs M: Oh yes! I have seen a lot of scarcity there. The salt-water
came in (to our fields). It ruined our crops. We just could not grow
paddy anymore. And then there was the fear…
US: Fear of what?
Mrs M: Fear cause the Muslims would make off with beautiful Hindu
girls.
US: You saw this?
Mrs M: Yes! But (more importantly) there was no justice.

US: What happened if you complained to the police?

Mrs M: If we complained, they would say, well, this is Pakistan. Why
don’t you do this—they have taken one, why don’t you go and bring
two of theirs?
US: What!? The police would say this?
Mrs M: Yes! Bring two of theirs! This is what they would say. There
was no justice.

172
Conclusion
Refugee resettlement in the Andaman Islands, when viewed "from
below", through the eyes of those who donned the mantle of "settlers"
of these remote Islands can no longer be contained within a narrative
of exile. Most refugees decided to opt for the Andamans for complex
reasons, which are difficult to anticipate without recourse to oral
history. For some refugees, their ability to move with friends or
extended family gave what Calcutta-centric histories have perceived as
"exile" a texture of planned and willing colonisation of land. By
contrast, the abysmal conditions in refugee camps meant that for
many, the "choice" to go to the Andaman Islands was made in coercive
circumstances. However, all respondents retained a sense of having
control over their own lives and were impelled by a will to survive and
to rebuild lives. Nothing could be further than the gross caricature of
Bengali refugees reiterated in various official publications, where they
are portrayed as embodiments of corruption, dependence and apathy.
I have argued that the framing of refugee resettlement in the
Andaman Islands as a forgotten or marginalised episode does little to
expand our understanding of this history. If anything, it betrays a
Calcutta-centric view of partition’s aftermath. Yet, the act of forgetting,
 FOCUS

this time, by the refugees resettled in the Andaman Islands, becomes

key to understanding their identity. The refugees resettled in the
Andaman Islands spoke vividly of their life in camps and of their
struggle to rebuild lives in the Andaman Islands. They had
comparatively little to say about their lives in East Bengal. None
betrayed the kind of nostalgia for lost homes that has become near
synonymous with refugee identity. In the Andaman Islands, the
experience of bringing virgin land under the plough had allowed a
refugee identity to be over-written by a settler identity. Moreover, the
longing for East Bengal as a land of plenty is not as accessible to poor
and Dalit refugees. In the Andaman Islands, poor Namasudras
constituted the bulk of the resettled refugees. Their caste identity, and
possible experiences of deprivation or oppression in the past would
naturally mitigate against nostalgia. This specificity is crucial to
understanding the distinctive pattern of refugee memory in the
Andaman Islands.

Endnotes
1
These refugees were part of a scheme to resettle 200 families in the Andaman Islands. The
details of this scheme can be found in Andaman Files, NAI. 1948.
173 2
The Dandakaranya project was launched in 1957 and designed to solve West Bengal’s 'problem'
of an unwanted and extra population of refugees. It envisioned using refugees as agricultural
colonisers and labourers in order to develop the districts of Bastar in Madhya Pradesh and
Koraput and Kalahandi in Orissa, which were all regarded as backward areas in need of
development.
3
Within the context of Bengali society, Brahmins, Baidyas and Kayasthas constitute the socially
and politically dominant castes.
4
Deryck. O Lodrick. n.d. Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Union Territory, India,
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/23488/Andaman-and-Nicobar-Islands
[Retrieved 20 June 2017].
5
See for example the escapades of the revolutionary nationalist hero, Sabyasachi in
Saratchandra’s classic novel Pather Dabi (The Demand for a Way) which was first published in
1926.
6
This was constituted in February 1948 to integrate the work of refugee rehabilitation, at this
time, focused largely on refugees from Punjab, with national development.
7
All those who entered West Bengal from eastern Pakistan after 1964 were called 'new migrants'
in official parlance.
8
The words "colonise" and "colonisation", when used in the context of the Andaman Islands,
referred to expansion of agriculture and the settlement of new villages. This is the sense in which
colonisation was used in official records and this paper uses it in this limited sense. However, it
can also be argued that refugee resettlement in the Andaman Islands amounted to internal
colonialism or settler colonialism. The latter debate is not addressed in this paper.
 FOCUS

9
Snowball sampling, which is also known as chain-referral sampling is a method of recruiting
research participants by asking existing participants to identify others. In oral history, this is
particularly suitable for identifying participants from within a close-knit or pre-existing social
group, where members know of each other. In the Andaman Islands, the refugees who travelled
to the Islands from the mainland on the same ship or at the same time period knew of each
other, given that they had been the only settlers on the land at that period.
10
The word "settler" had passed untranslated into Island Bengali, along with other words like
"head family", which also originated in policy.
11
The three dots in the interviews indicate the pause or the search for narrative continuity
through words by the speaker during the conversation with the author. They do not indicate the
omission of parts of the interviews' contents (which are indicated as [...]). These dots have been
kept in order to retain the conversational tone of the interviews.
12
Sadhan Raha joined the Andaman administration as a tehsildar (a revenue department officer
who oversees a revenue district, known as tehsil) in 1949. He was later promoted to the post of
Assistant Commissioner of the Settlement Division of Middle Andaman and played a key role in
the selection and resettlement of refugees in Middle and North Andaman Islands.
13
The Rehabilitation Directorate of the Government of West Bengal was located at 10 Auckland
Road and came to be known as the Auckland Office amongst refugees.
14
This refers to Migration Certificates which were introduced in 1952 to control the influx across
the Bengal border. All refugees from East Pakistan had to obtain this in order to enter India
legally.
15
Maund is the anglicised name for a traditional unit of mass used in British India, which had
considerable local variations. Following standardisation, it is now equal to 37.3242 kilograms in
174 India and Pakistan.
16
The common ritual in Bengali Hindu households of marking the twilight hour between day and
night by offering prayers to the household deity and blowing a conch.
17
Shitala or Sitala is an ancient folk deity widely worshipped by many faiths in different parts of
South Asia, including Bengal, as the pox-goddess. She is the goddess of sores, ghouls, pustules
and diseases.

Bibliography
Primary sources

Andaman Files, National Archives of India. 1947. Development-

colonisation, settlement: proposal to settle West Punjab refugees
in Andaman Island, File No. 259/47- AN. New Delhi.
Andaman Files, National Archives of India. 1947b. Administrative
report on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands for the period ending
15/10/49, File No. 53/10/49- AN. New Delhi.
Andaman Files, National Archives of India. 1948. Financial sanction for
scheme of resettling 200 refugees, File No. 8/1/50-AN. New
Delhi.
 FOCUS

Interviews

Interview with Mrs. Kalipada Mandal, 4 February 2007. Janakpur

Village, Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

Interview with Lalitmohan Pal, 6 February 2007. Madhupur Village,

Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

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