Developing Terra Nullius: colonialism, nationalism, and indigeneity in the Andaman Islands

This article explores in detail the legal structures and discursive framings informing the governance of one particular ‘backward’ region of India, the Andaman Islands. It traces the shifting patterns of occupation and development of the Islands in the colonial and post colonial periods, with a special focus on the changes wrought by independence in 1947 and the eventual history of planned development. It demonstrates how intersecting discourses of indigenous savagery/primitivism and the geographical emptiness was repeatedly mobilised in colonial era surveys and post-colonial policy documents. Post colonial visions of developing the Andaman Islands ushered in a settler-colonial governmentality, infused with genocidal fantasies of the ‘dying savage’. Laws professing to protect aboriginal Jarawas actually worked to unilaterally extend Indian sovereignty over the lands and bodies of a community clearly hostile to such incorporation. It questions the current exclusion of India from the global geographies of settler-colonialism and argues that the violent and continuing history of indigenous marginalisation in the Andaman Islands represents a de facto operation of a logic of terra nullius

The myths refugees live by: memory and history in the making of Bengali refugee identity

Within the popular memory of the partition of India, the division of Bengal continues to evoke themes of political rupture, social tragedy and nostalgia. The refugees, or more broadly speaking, Hindu migrants from East Bengal, are often the central agents of such narratives. This article explores how the scholarship on East Bengali refugees portrays them either as hapless and passive victims of the regime of rehabilitation, or eulogises them as heroic protagonists who successfully battle overwhelming adversity to wrest resettlement from a reluctant state. This split image of the Bengali refugee, as victim/victor, obscures the complex nature of refugee agency. Through a case-study of the foundation and development of Bijoygarh colony, an illegal settlement of refugee-squatters on the outskirts of Calcutta, this article will argue that refugee agency in post-partition West Bengal was inevitably moulded by social status and cultural capital. However, the collective memory of the establishment of squatters’ colonies systematically ignores the role of caste and class affiliations in fracturing the refugee experience. Instead, it retells the refugees’ quest for rehabilitation along the mythic trope of heroic and masculine struggle. This article reads refugee reminiscences against the grain to illuminate their erasures and silences, delineating the mythic structure common to popular and academic refugee histories and exploring its significance in constructing a specific cultural identity for Bengali refugees

Refugees and the politics of nation building in India, 1947-1971

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Spinster, Prostitute or Pioneer? Images of Refugee Women in Post-Partition Calcutta

This paper explores the various images or stereotypes regarding Bengali middle-class refugee women that circulated in post-partition West Bengal. It identifies four main discursive images or constructions of refugee women: as bodies vulnerable to rape and dishonour; as economically and socially marginal members of society who could by definition, not be rehabilitated; as unequal participants in the refugee movement whose contributions were seen as ‘inspirational’ and symbolic, rather than substantive; and last, but not the least, as bread-winners who transgressed the proper role of women as home-makers. Polite society in Calcutta most frequently lamented the fate of refugee women who worked either by highlighting their deprivation of being a spinster, or their ignominy of ‘sinking’ to prostitution. Juxtaposing the ubiquity of these images against census records which show no statistically significant changes in livelihood patterns of middle-class women in Calcutta, this paper argues that these images had little to do with the choices faced and lives negotiated by refugee women. Instead, they reflected the anxiety of Bengali refugees regarding their social status, ideals and traditions in the context of the displacement and social dislocation wrought by partition. This anxiety was inevitably displaced to the bodies of women, whose imagined or real transgressions of ideal social roles were actively lamented, and thus devalued. This paper critiques historical scholarship that reads these images of women earning wages as evidence of reconfiguration of gender roles. It cautions against celebrating partition and its dislocation as a harbinger of women’s emancipation in West Bengal

Citizen Refugee: Forging the Indian Nation after Partition

This innovative study explores the interface between nation-building and refugee rehabilitation in post-partition India. Relying on archival records and oral histories, Uditi Sen analyses official policy towards Hindu refugees from eastern Pakistan to reveal a pan-Indian governmentality of rehabilitation. This governmentality emerged in the Andaman Islands, where Bengali refugees were recast as pioneering settlers. Not all refugees, however, were willing or able to live up to this top-down vision of productive citizenship. Their reminiscences reveal divergent negotiations of rehabilitation 'from below'. Educated refugees from dominant castes mobilised their social and cultural capital to build urban 'squatters' colonies', while poor Dalit refugees had to perform the role of agricultural pioneers to access aid. Policies of rehabilitation marginalised single and widowed women by treating them as 'permanent liabilities'. These rich case studies dramatically expand our understanding of popular politics and everyday citizenship in post-partition India