Refugees, Border and Identities: Rights and Habitat in East and Northeast India

Abstract

T he movement of people to seek refuge or to search for greener pastures has always been politicized in the narrowly built identity of nation-states. In South Asia, this has led to unending debate on ‘who we are’ and ‘where have we come from’, making it a high-octane politicized conceptualization of ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’. The partition of the subcontinent only exacerbated this crisis of identity. The State–refugee relationship is different from the local-refugee dynamics. Locals often treat refugees as an economic burden. This is noticed in the context of Afghan refugees in Pakistan, Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka in Tamil Nadu, Lhotshampas in Nepal; all of them are treated as unwanted economic burdens and threats to identity. The Eastern part of the subcontinent witnessed birth pangs twice: in 1947, with the birth of Pakistan and in 1971, with the emergence of Bangladesh. The partition of Bengal and its impact on the border and the borderland, not surprisingly, has attracted many researchers given its relevance to contemporary politics. Scholars such as Joya Chatterji (1994), Willem van Schendel (2004), Debjani Sengupta (2016) and Malini Sur (2021) have examined the issue and its various contours from different vantage points. Anindita Ghoshal’s Refugees, Border and Identities: Rights and Habitat in East and Northeast India is a refreshing addition to the existing scholarship on the subject. Refugees, Border and Identities not only deals with the delicate question of identity that refugees negotiate every day but also compares and contrasts the impact of the flow of refugees to the three states bordering the then East Pakistan—West Bengal, Assam and Tripura—following the partition in 1947. The flow of refugees to India did not stop after 1947; it has been continuous—partly due to the communal tensions in East Bengal/Bangladesh and partly dictated by relatively better economic opportunities in West Bengal. The context of each migration has defined the states’ approach to the settlement of refugees. For the refugees, in turn, it has been a ghettoized existence, to being relegated to the ‘other’—the uncultured, low-class Bengalis who can pollute the culturally curated Bhadralok samaj (society of gentlemen). They sought safety in numbers and this gave birth to refugee colonies. The book is divided into five chapters explaining the process of settlement of partition-affected refugees in West Bengal, Assam and Tripura. The refugees were Strategic Analysis, 2021 Vol. 45, No. 4, 336–338, https://doi.org/10.1080/09700161.2021.1938946