Joya Chatterji

The Fashioning of a Frontier: The Radcliffe Line and Bengal's Border Landscape, 1947–52

The partition of India is customarily described in surgical metaphors, as an operation, an amputation, a vivisection or a dismemberment. By extension, the new borders created in 1947 are often thought of as incision scars.

SOUTH ASIAN HISTORIES OF CITIZENSHIP, 1946–1970

After partition, minorities in South Asia emerged as a distinct legal category of citizens who were not fully protected by the states within which they lived. The power of South Asias nation-states over their ‘minority-citizens’ far exceeds their sovereignty over ordinary citizens, and the capacity of ‘minority-citizens’ to resist this power was broken, this article will show, by a series of draconian executive actions. But ‘minority citizenship’ was not simply a product of ‘bureaucratic rationality’, as some have suggested, or even of ‘governmentality’. On the contrary, it was produced by complex, often violent, interactions between government and a range of non-state actors, who forced their own ideas of nationality, justice, and entitlement on to the statute books. Citizenship in South Asia thus proves to have a complex parenthood, with ‘civil’ and ‘political’ more entangled, and mutually constituted, than some theorists would have us believe. India and Pakistan continued to be bound together by migrants and migration even as their discursive claims seemed to pull them ever further apart.

‘Dispersal’ and the Failure of Rehabilitation: Refugee Camp-dwellers and Squatters in West Bengal

In September 1950, the Government of West Bengal dispatched 500 Hindu refugee families to the village of Jirat in Hooghly district. It intended to build a camp there permanently to house these refugees, who had fled from East Bengal in the turbulent aftermath of the partition of India. Some forty miles from Calcutta, Jirat was situated on the west bank of the River Hooghly. It had once been a substantial and prosperous village, significant enough to earn a mention in Rennells Atlas of 1786, where wealthy people built large homes and temples. Indeed the ancestral home of Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee—educationist and politician, founder of the Hindu nationalist Jana Sangh party, and ironically, one of the most vociferous champions of the Hindu refugees in Bengal after partition—was situated in the village. In the 19 th century, however, the river had changed its course and Jirats population was ravaged by a particularly virulent strain of the dreaded ‘Burdwan fever’. By 1950, when the refugees arrived at Jirat, the village had long since been abandoned, its waterways choked with silt, its ponds filthy and overgrown with water hyacinth, its great buildings crumbling and derelict. A rare ‘empty’ corner in crowded West Bengal, the Government of West Bengal deemed it to be an appropriate place to house and rehabilitate two and a half thousand refugees: men, women and children.

Partition Studies: Prospects and Pitfalls

Partition, unquestionably a pivotal event of the South Asian twentieth century, has become a subject of great significance in its own right. 1 Studies of partition began with a profound reexamination of why it happened; 2 they gathered momentum as scholars looked at the provincial and local roots of the drive to divide India; 3 and the subject took a big step forward when oral histories revealed how women and men experienced the traumas of its bloody upheavals, the violence of “the burning plains of the Punjab” becoming a metaphor for partition itself. 4

The Bengal Diaspora: Rethinking Muslim Migration

Recent decades have witnessed the growth of a new interest, both scholarly and political, in migration and diaspora. This book focuses on three groups of Muslim Bengali migrants. One group had migrated across international borders after partition and settled in Britain; the second had crossed borders but had settled in the neighbouring nation state of East Pakistan/Bangladesh in South Asia itself; the third had crossed no borders but had been internally displaced within West Bengal in India, or within Bangladesh after it was formed in 1971.

Secularization and 'constitutive moments': insights from partition diplomacy in South Asia

This essay proposes an argument – on the face of it, both outlandish and paradoxical – that the violent upheavals of partition, which divided British India along religious lines, encouraged trends towards secularization in India and Pakistan. In the very months when the subcontinent was engulfed in religious conflict, both countries took significant steps to produce common institutions – indeed a common statecraft -- to manage mass migration and lawlessness across the new borders that divided them. I suggest this process secularized both states simultaneously in specific, admittedly partial, but remarkably similar, ways.

On Being Stuck in Bengal: Immobility in the ‘age of migration’

Immobility raises awkward questions for theorists of migration. From their standpoint, migration is unusual behaviour that requires explanation. Its obverse—staying in place—is seen as an ‘obvious’ state of affairs that calls for no explanation. Yet assumptions about the ordinariness of immobility are insecure. For one thing, we know a great deal more about the mobile societies of early modern Asia; for another, Asian mobility in the era of high imperialism is much better understood. Yet despite these cumulative gains in our understanding of the scale of mobility in early-modern and modern Asia, and its acceleration in ‘the age of migration’, immobility continues to be seen as the ‘obvious’ state of affairs. This article suggests some preliminary answers to ‘the immobility paradox’, based on a study of the greater Bengal region. By analysing the impact of the intensifying links, in the late colonial era, between Bengal and the global economy, it shows that this varied widely for different people, in ways that had a profound bearing on their capacity to move. The article develops the notion of ‘deficits’ which worked to inhibit the mobility of particular groups and individuals. Physical frailty and obligations of care, it shows, were crucial factors in shaping immobility. Relations of gender and generation, and the inequalities embedded in these relations, produced ‘overabundances’—of obligations to people and places—that tied certain people down. Finally, it hints at the reasons why, and the ways in which, stayers-on have grown poorer.

Book Reviews : ARUN MUKHERJEE, Crime and Public Disorder in Colonial Bengal 1861-1912, K.P. Bagchi and Co., Calcutta, pp. 320, Rs. 250

on painstaking research into an impressive array of sources. It puts together information culled from the inaccessible record rooms of the Intelligence Branch and the library of the Inspector General of Police to present an authoritative statistical and aggregative account of crime trends in Bengal. The book is divided into two parts: the first deals with crime and criminals while the latter half focuses on public disorder. In the chapters that constitute the first part, Mukherjee presents some surprising statistics which throw into disarray many common preconceptions about crime. We learn thus, that the ratio of crime to population remained remarkably static in these five decades, despite the upheavals of urbanisation, industrialisation and large-scale migration. The statistical evidence linking crime with urban over-crowding and migrant labour proves to be very tenuous. Rather than