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HISTORY
Dwaipayan Sen
HISTORY 10/AUG/2017
The Wire’s #PartitionAt70 series brings a number of stories, through text and
multimedia content, that will attempt at drawing a comprehensive picture of
those weeks and months when entire geographies and histories changed
forever.
Namasudras
constituted the
bulk of the
refugees that
swelled the camps
the governments
of India and West
Bengal
constructed to
accommodate
those seeking
asylum from humiliation and depredations in the east, spiking the population
density of an already fairly saturated geography. Maintaining these camps and
their residents placed exceptional pressure on the cash-strapped state and thus
was born the alibi of “non-availability of land,” marshalled by caste Hindu
Congress politicians to make the case for their rehabilitation beyond the
boundaries of their jurisdiction. Proximate states had extended a helping hand,
but there were limits to such generosity. By the late 1950s, the refugee
movement (mobilised, in no small part, by organisations affiliated with Leftist
opposition parties) confronted a state determined to evict them, amidst
mounting tensions. In a manner that recalled the colonial state’s dealing with
mass anti-colonial protest, and eerily if faintly reminiscent of the rounding up
of the European Jews, Namasudras were faced with the full coercive might of
the Nehruvian state to ensure their removal from West Bengal: the
imprisonment of prominent leaders, police brutality, sexual violence, the
withholding of doles and allowances to induce the willingness to leave,
dispersal of protestors beyond city limits to prevent their recombination,
forced evacuations on trains beyond the borders of the state. The consequence
of such actions was to effectively decimate any chance of contiguity in
Namasudra existence. From being concentrated in four districts in eastern
Bengal, by the early 1960s they found themselves scattered in sites tracing an
arc as far afield as the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Orissa, Madhya
Pradesh, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh, unlikely guests in cultures far
removed to their own.
There were those amongst them who attempted to return to the more familiar
terrain of West Bengal upon discovering surroundings and being assigned a
home inhospitable to a people accustomed to the riches of deltaic land. On
doing so, they were met with further state violence, but this time under the
agency of those they once followed. Most notorious of course, and supremely
ironic and janus-faced, was the manner in which the CPI(M) government dealt
with refugees who had camped in Marichjhanpi in the Sunderbans upon
escaping from their designated habitations in the late 1970s. Having
strategically utilised Namasudra migrants in their bid to topple the Congress,
once in power, the caste Hindu communists unleashed a reign of police terror
on those who refused their plans for them, resulting in the death by some
estimates of nearly 400 individuals, the loss of property and already scarce
resources, and the molestation of women. Marichjhanpi, a name that has
become metonym for caste atrocity in Dalit activist circles, remains a painful
if poignant reminder of the disposability of precarious lives even by those
committed, at least in theory if not in practice, to their well-being.
It has indeed been a “long partition” for the Namasudras of eastern India.
Even today, the shadow of that divide touches the lives of those who are yet to
been granted citizenship under suspicion of being illegal migrants from
Bangladesh, or the deeds to the small parcels of land they acquired through
their own initiative. And they have of course also contended with that other
great partition in their everyday lives – that of casteism, its unrelenting
prejudices and exclusions. That they have endured such insurmountable
circumstances is a tribute to the resilience of the human being. Yet one is not
entirely sure of the value of such comforting pieties. As Lawrence Langer’s
studies of testimonies of holocaust survivors suggest, the assumption that the
coordinates of morality remain intact after the prolonged experience of
unearthly trauma may not be appropriate. Accounts that seek to redeem the
human spirit partake of a moral compass unavailable to those who have
experienced systematic dehumanisation. Despite the modest gains
Namasudras have wrested in the decades since Partition and independence, it
is hard to think of another community that has suffered as much for the wages
of freedom, but are yet to earn its dividends; certainly, neither wholly or in
full measure, nor, for that matter, very substantially. The steep price they paid
for Partition was entirely out of joint with the essentially negligible role they
played in reaching the fateful decision.
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