Midnight’s Descendants: South Asia from Partition to the Present Day. John Keay
migration did not, of course, prevent it. In 1947 the new border had yet to be marked, and was impossible to police since it wandered across existing roads and railways as capriciously as the annual floods. Wags quipped that Radcliffe could not have been sober when he wielded his red marker. Until new roads and rail tracks could be laid, India’s West Bengal was cut in two, and its north-eastern extremity in Assam (and beyond) was little better than an enclave, reachable only by air or by obtaining authorisation to cross Pakistani territory. Such authorisation was not impossible to obtain, and refugee trains continued to operate between Dhaka and Calcutta until 1965. Calcutta’s Sealdah station turned into a vast dormitory for displaced persons; public spaces throughout the city, and even private gardens, were similarly commandeered. Yet to many Bengalis this may not have been entirely alarming. Refugees often considered their displacement temporary, and expected to return to the homes and lands they had left behind as soon as circumstances permitted. At the time it seemed quite inconceivable that the economic, cultural and social links that bound the commercial and manufacturing centre of Calcutta to its productive eastern hinterland could simply be severed by constitutional diktat.
Hence, instead of the fraught and one-off mass migrations typical of the Punjab, in Bengal in 1947 ‘there was no immediate interchange of population, nor even panic’. In fact in India’s West Bengal ‘it was not till December 1949 that it became obvious that an influx of refugees from East Pakistan had started’.28 Thereafter the millions of comings and goings, sometimes by the same people, would extend over a period of years and eventually decades. How many crossed or recrossed, whether permanently or temporarily and whether coerced or voluntarily, it is impossible to say. In India such ‘refugees’ were quickly downgraded as ‘evacuees’ or ‘optees’. They might thereby be entitled to some minimal relief but they were not, as in the Punjab, afforded compensation in the form of land grants or rehabilitation expenses; such favourable treatment might have acted as an incentive and increased the flow. As a result, many incomers went unrecorded and the surviving tallies are far from complete.
Yet they kept on coming. A million or so Muslims crossed out of West Bengal and Assam to East Bengal in the first five years, many being originally from Bihar, from where they had earlier fled to Calcutta during the 1946–47 massacre in their homeland. It was thus their second such migration, though by no means their last; in the case of these Muslim Biharis the nightmare of dispossession would continue on down the generations. In the same period anything from four to ten million Hindus from East Bengal crossed into the Indian states of West Bengal, Assam and Tripura. The largest of these migrations took place in the 1950s and ’60s, prompted by the persecution of Hindus in East Bengal (early 1950s) and Muslim outrage over events in Kashmir (1963–65). Later disturbances, like the birth pangs of Bangladesh in 1971, that country’s first military coup in 1975, and the communal disturbances in India after the 1992 demolition of Ayodhya’s Babri mosque, would precipitate still other dramatic exoduses.
The introduction of frontier formalities to some extent regulated this ebb and flow. Passports became mandatory in 1952, immigration certificates in 1956 and visas after 1965. Yet such obstacles also served to divert the tide of migrants away from the regulated crossing points to the 2,700 kilometres of poorly patrolled frontier in between. The real number of migrants thus became more incalculable than ever. Pocked with enclaves and punctured by waterways, the border in the east remained decidedly ‘soft’ and, in the eyes of many, only quasi-legitimate. As late as 1950 no less a figure than ex-Chief Minister Husayn Shaheed Suhrawardy saw nothing odd about attending Pakistan’s Constituent Assembly in Karachi while continuing to make his main place of residence in India’s West Bengal, in fact in a salubrious part of Calcutta. Similarly Nurul Amin, the then Chief Minister of East Bengal, continued to rely on his old physician in West Bengal for medicine. The latter was none other than Dr B.C. Roy, the Congress Chief Minister of West Bengal; ‘and would you believe it, when Nurul Amin’s gout was very bad, he came to Calcutta just for an hour by plane for a consultation’, reported an East Bengali informant. ‘Despite the riots [of 1950], the two are still good friends.’29
If ‘Partition is both ever-present in South Asia’s public, political terrain and continually evaded,’ this may in part be because, in the east as in Kashmir, it is still being enacted.30 Indeed in Bengal a degree of population movement appears to be endemic. Once somewhat unfairly described as ‘a rural slum’, East Bengal in 1947 had no industrial base; even its cash crop of jute was dependent on West Bengal’s processing mills. Its population stood at around forty-two million, of whom about eleven million (i.e. 26 per cent) were Hindus, mostly lower-caste agriculturalists and artisans but with an influential landowning and commercial elite. On the other hand, across the border, India’s West Bengal, along with Assam, had just six million Muslims, about 16 per cent of their total population, most of these being landless labourers or urban poor. Additionally, West Bengal embraced Calcutta, India’s largest industrial and commercial centre, while the tea plantations in the Darjeeling hills and Assam afforded a further source of employment. In Bengal as a whole, therefore, the post-1947 movement of peoples was overwhelmingly one-way, from east to west, Pakistan to India; and although triggered by sectarian killings or the fear of such violence, it was often lubricated by more practical considerations such as economic advancement, employment opportunities, educational advantage or marital ties.
This was nothing new. The east–west flow, the rural–urban drift, and the quest for improved livelihoods may be rated permanent features of the Bengali economy. As a result of the 1943 famine, Calcutta already hosted a large refugee population before Partition. Floods and agrarian distress in East Bengal/Bangladesh would replenish the resettlement camps of both Calcutta and Dhaka with depressing regularity. Distinguishing between political refugees and economic migrants is here problematic.
How to cope with the influx of often destitute and traumatised millions taxed both successor governments, so detracting from their ability to conduct the business of administration. In the Punjab, on both sides of the border, the problem had been somewhat eased by the availability of land. Since most migrants were agriculturalists, landholdings vacated by uprooted Punjabi emigrants were hastily re-allocated to grateful Punjabi immigrants. This ensured continuity of food production and warded off famine. It also created tenacious settler communities whose intransigent attitudes towards their former country of residence would bedevil future Indo–Pak relations and be compared to those of Israeli settlers on the West Bank. But in West Bengal it was different. There was almost no available land. The smallest of the new India’s provinces, West Bengal was also much the most densely populated and had the highest rate of unemployment. Prospects for the incoming flood of refugees were grim.
In the immediate aftermath of Partition it was Delhi that had been convulsed by the levels of violence and displacement expected of Calcutta. Refugees from Lahore and other cities in West Pakistan, many of them Sikhs, poured into the capital, there to spread horrific tales of the violence they had either suffered or witnessed at the hands of Muslims in what was now Pakistan. Naturally this excited hostility towards the city’s large Muslim community and brought calls for revenge. The patriotic crowds that had hailed Independence on 15 August were baying for blood by the end of the month. Muslims, regardless of whether they supported Pakistan or had any intention of moving there, found themselves liable to be massacred in the streets; their homes were appropriated, their womenfolk molested, their businesses plundered and torched.
As the mayhem extended from Old Delhi to New, some 60,000 Muslims sought refuge behind the high walls of the Purana Qila, a craggy ‘old fort’ that supposedly complemented Rashtrapati Bhawan at the opposite extremity of Rajpath; others encamped round the Taj-like tomb of the Mughal emperor Humayun or barricaded themselves in quarries on the ridge to the north-west of the city. Until mid-September ‘the Indian government regarded these camps as the responsibility of the Pakistan High Commissioner’. He, however, was ‘hardly in a position to move out of his house’, noted the relief worker Richard Symonds. In ‘places that could not properly be called camps but rather areas in which humanity was dumped’ eminent families squatted side by side with once-prosperous shopkeepers from Old Delhi and never-rich Meos from nearby villages like