Hostname: page-component-6766d58669-6mz5d Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-05-23T09:29:34.005Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Dispositions and Destinations: Refugee Agency and “Mobility Capital” in the Bengal Diaspora, 1947–2007

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 April 2013

Joya Chatterji
Joya Chatterji*
Affiliation:
Faculty of History, University of Cambridge
*
jc280@cam.ac.uk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This study seeks to illuminate patterns of refugee settlement in the Bengali Muslim diaspora since 1947, which replicate global trends identified by Aristide Zolberg in new nation-states. Based on historical research and oral testimony gathered from over two hundred migrants in different settings in India, Bangladesh, and Britain, it suggests why some Muslims crossed borders after India's partition and others did not; why most moved only short distances within the delta; and why so many huddled in the shadow of the new national borders and so few traveled to the West. I uncover the subtle interplay between migrants' agency and structures of coercion, and between histories of mobility and of affect, in the shaping of migration choices, and explain how the recurrent patterns identified by Zolberg were produced in a regional context of critical but unexplored significance. The essay explores the impact of nation-state formation on older forms of mobility in the region, and the continuing interconnections between local micro-mobilities and regional, national, international, and trans-oceanic migrations. I suggest that the concept of “mobility capital” can help to explain not only patterns of migration, but also patterns of staying on. I conclude by questioning “cumulative causation theory,” which has inadvertently lent credence to fears that the developed countries of the West will be “swamped” by immigrants drawn from ever-expanding migratory networks based in the “third world.”

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 55 , Issue 2 , April 2013 , pp. 273 - 304
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2013

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

1 “Home” often had to be wholly reconstructed, since few communities survived the war intact. Kamaluddin, A. F. M., “Refugee Problems in Bangladesh,” in Kosinski, L. A. and Elahi, K. M., eds., Population Redistribution and Development in South Asia (Dordecht, 1985)Google Scholar.

2 The term “Bihari” has come to be used to describe all Urdu-speakers in the region, though by no means all of them come from Bihar. Md. Rahman, Mahbubar and Schendel, Willem Van, ‘“I Am not a Refugee’: Rethinking Partition Migration,” Modern Asian Studies 37, 3 (2003): 551–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The term has acquired pejorative connotations; hence my placing it within quotes.

3 Ghosh, Papiya, Partition and the South Asian Diaspora: Extending the Subcontinent (Delhi, 2007)Google Scholar; Ilias, Ahmed, Biharis, the Indian Emigres in Bangladesh: An Objective Analysis (Syedpur, 2005)Google Scholar.

4 I have described these processes elsewhere: Chatterji, Joya, The Spoils of Partition, Bengal and India, 1947–1967 (Cambridge, 2007), 188–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also see Bose, N. K., Calcutta, 1964: A Social Survey (New Delhi, 1968)Google Scholar; and Siddiqui, M. K. A., The Muslims of Calcutta: A Study in Aspects of Their Social Organisation (Calcutta, 1974)Google Scholar.

5 Ibid., 188–89; Census of India, 1961, vol. 16, part I-A, book (1) (hereafter 1961 Census of India), 222.

6 Kamaluddin, “Refugee Problems”; Rahman and Van Schendel, ‘“I Am not a Refugee.”

7 Census of Pakistan, 1951: Volume 3, East Bengal (hereafter 1951 Census of Pakistan), 39.

8 Zolberg, A. R., “The Formation of New States as a Refugee-Generating Process,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 467, 1 (1983) 24–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Zolberg, A. and Benda, P. M., eds., Global Migrants Global Refugees: Problems and Solutions (New York, 2001), 9Google Scholar. Also see, in the same volume, Suzanne Schmeidl's quantitative evidence supporting this assertion in her paper, “Conflict and Forced Migration: A Quantitative Review.”

10 Some of the project's interviews are available on its website: “Bangla stories” at http://www.banglastories.org/.

11 Schmeidl's dataset does not consider refugee outflows produced by India's partition, despite their scale. She does, however, include in her calculus refugee movement during the Bangladesh war. “Conflict and Forced Migration,” 70.

12 Massey, Douglas, “Social Structure, Household Strategies and the Cumulative Causation of Migration,” Population Index 56, 1 (Spring 1990): 3–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 3.

13 I thus develop, in a rather different context, the research agenda outlined by Moch, Leslie Page, in “Dividing Time: An Analytical Framework for Migration History Periodization,” in Lucassen, Jan and Lucassen, Leo, eds., Migration, Migration History, History: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives (Bern, 2005)Google Scholar.

14 Chattopadhyaya, Haraprasad, Internal Migration in India: A Case Study of Bengal (Calcutta, 1987)Google Scholar.

15 Randhawa, M. S., Out of the Ashes: An Account of the Rehabilitation of Refugees from West Pakistan in Rural Areas of East Punjab, Public Relations Department (Punjab, 1954)Google Scholar.

16 Of the ten million Hindu refugees who migrated from East Pakistan to West Bengal after 1947, 40 percent were drawn to cities, especially Calcutta, where they have tended to live in clusters. Like their Muslim counterparts, the remaining six million ended up on the Indian side of the rural border. Chatterji, Spoils of Partition, 105–208. Those who remained in East Pakistan/Bangladesh have also been displaced in large numbers, and have tended to cluster in ever-shrinking urban ghettos or in rural borderlands close to the frontiers of India. Nahid Kamal, “The Population Trajectories of Bangladesh and West Bengal during the Twentieth Century: A Comparative Study,” PhD diss., London School of Economics, 2009.

17 Bourdieu, Pierre, “The Forms of Capital,” in Richardson, J., ed., Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (New York, 1986)Google Scholar.

18 Census of India, 1951, vol. VI, part 1-A (hereafter 1951 Census of India), 305.

19 1951 Census of Pakistan, 39.

20 Chattopadhyaya, Internal Migration.

21 Ibid., 47.

22 Kerr, I. J., Railways in Modern India (Delhi, 2001)Google Scholar.

23 The classic work remains Robinson, F. C. R.'s Separatism among Indian Muslims: The Politics of the United Provinces' Muslims 1860–1923 (Cambridge, 1974)Google Scholar.

24 All but one of undivided Bengal's nineteen Muslim Indian Civil Service officers opted to serve in Pakistan. Chakrabarty, Saroj, With Dr. B.C. Roy and other Chief Ministers: A Record Until 1962 (Calcutta, 1974), 45Google Scholar. Nationally, only 12 percent of Muslim officers opted for India, and similar patterns were found in lower levels of the services. Government of India, Ministry of Home Affairs, 51(346)/ 48-Public.

25 Das, Suranjan, Communal Riots in Bengal, 1905–1947 (Delhi, 1993)Google Scholar.

26 Ghosh, Partition, 6–10.

27 In the summer of 1947, several Muslim policemen were murdered in broad daylight in Calcutta. No one was ever brought to book. Government of Bengal, Intelligence Branch, files 614/47, and 1123/47.

28 Government of India, Ministry of Home Affairs, F.40/5/48-Appts.

29 Rahman and Van Schendel, ‘“I Am not a Refugee.”

30 Chakrabarti, Prafulla, The Marginal Men (Calcutta, 1990), 1Google Scholar.

31 A classic exposition is Muhammad Ali, Chaudhuri's Emergence of Pakistan (New York, 1967)Google Scholar. Also see Siddiqui, A. R., Partition and the Making of the Mohajir Mindset: A Narrative (Karachi, 2008)Google Scholar.

32 The East Pakistan Industrial Development Corporation was set up in 1950. Ilias, Biharis, 61; Haines, Daniel, “Concrete ‘Progress’: Irrigation, Development and Modernity in Mid-Twentieth-Century Sind,” Modern Asian Studies 45, 1 (2011): 179–200CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 Uditi Sen, “Refugees and the Politics of Nation-Building in India, 1947–1971,” PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 2009.

34 See Sen, “Refugees,” ch. 3.

35 Nakatani's finding that many immigrants had exchanged land in this way is confirmed by this data: it was common in the rural borderlands. Nakatani, Tetsuya, “Away from Home: The Movement and Settlement of Refugees from East Pakistan to West Bengal, India,” Journal of the Japanese Association for South Asian Studies 12 (2000): n.p.Google Scholar

36 A Union was a group of taluks, the smallest unit of administration for revenue-gathering purposes in British India.

37 Stark, Oded and Taylor, J. Edward, “Relative Deprivation and International Migration,” Demography 26, 1 (Feb. 1989): 1–14CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

38 Todaro, Michael P., “A Model of Labour Migration and Urban Development in Less Developed Countries,” American Economic Review 59, 1 (1969): 138–48.Google Scholar

39 On artisanal mobility in South Asia, see Haynes, Douglas E. and Roy, Tirthankar, “Conceiving Mobility: Weavers' Migrations in Pre-Colonial and Colonial India,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 36, 1 (1999): 35–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 Ilias, Biharis, 61.

41 Daechsel, Markus, “Sovereignty, Governmentality and Development in Ayub's Pakistan: The Case of Korangi Township,” Modern Asian Studies 44, 1 (2011): 131–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42 Ilias, Biharis, 150–53; Ghosh, Partition, 50–56.

43 1961 Census of India, 222.

44 Author's interview with chief commissioner of police, Calcutta, July 2006.

45 1951 Census of India, 129, 248.

46 Author's interview with chief commissioner of police, Calcutta, July 2006; Schendel, Willem Van, The Bengal Borderland: Beyond Nation and State in South Asia (London, 2005)Google Scholar.

47 K. Ifthekar Iqbal, “Ecology, Economy and Society in the Eastern Bengal Delta, c. 1840–1943,” PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 2004.

48 In different parts of the region, they often have different local names that refer to their place of “origin”: chapaiyyas from the Chapai-Nawabganj tracts, maldoiyais from Malda, or mymensinghias from Mymensingh.

49 Iqbal, “Ecology.”

50 With the Calcutta and Delhi Agreements (of 1948 and 1950, respectively), the governments of India and Pakistan agreed that land abandoned by outgoing refugees in both parts of Bengal would be held and managed for them until they were able to return. Government of India, Ministry of External Affairs, F.8-14/48-Pak1; F.8-7/48/Pak-1; and F.3(49)-BL/1950 (secret).

51 Chatterji, Joya, “‘Dispersal’ and the Failure of Rehabilitation: Refugee Camp-Dwellers and Squatters in West Bengal,” Modern Asian Studies 41, 5 (2007): 995–1032CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

52 Siddiqui, M. K. A., Muslim Educational Uplift: How to Achieve this Goal? (Calcutta, 2008)Google Scholar.

53 Chatterji, Spoils of Partition, 181–94.

54 Siddiqui, Muslim Educational Uplift, 7; also see Seabrook, Jeremy and Siddiqui, Imran Ahmed, People without History: India's Muslim Ghettos (London, 2011)Google Scholar.

55 Volume I of papers submitted by the chief secretary of West Bengal to the (Sachar) High Level Committee on Social, Economic and Educational Status of the Muslims of India, 2005–2006, Nehru Library, Delhi.

56 Chatterji, Joya, “South Asian Histories of Citizenship,” Historical Journal, 55, 4 (2012)Google Scholar.

57 Siddiqui, Muslim Educational Uplift, 26.

58 Ibid.

59 Ibid., 23, 29.

60 Adams, Caroline, Across Seven Seas and Thirteen Rivers: Life Stories of Sylheti Settlers in Britain (London, 1987)Google Scholar; Choudhury, Y., The Roots and Tales of Bangaldeshi Settlers (London, 2003)Google Scholar; Balachandran, G., “Circulation through Seafaring: Indian Seamen, 1890–1945,” in Markovits, C. et al. , eds., Society and Circulation: Mobile People and Itinerant Cultures in South Asia 1750–1950 (Delhi: 2003)Google Scholar.

61 Ibid. Also see Sylhet District Gazetteer, 1905.

62 W. W. Hunter, Statistical Account of Bengal, vol. 3, 284; and Chattopadhyaya, Internal Migration, 57.

63 Ahuja, Ravi, “Mobility and Containment: The Voyages of South Asian Seamen, c. 1900–1960,” International Review of Social History 51 (2006): 111–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

64 Indian lascars earned between one-third and one-fifth of the wages that white seamen were paid for doing the same jobs. Ahuja, “Mobility and Containment.” On the constraints on the power of foremen or “jobbers” over Indian workers, see Chandvarkar, Rajnarayan, “The Decline and Fall of the Jobber System in the Bombay Cotton Textile Industry, 1870–1955,” Modern Asian Studies 42, 1 (2008): 117–210Google Scholar.

65 “Lascar agreements” denied lascars shore leave in North American and African ports; shipmasters could discharge lascars only in Indian ports, and England's Merchant Shipping Act of 1894 entitled ship owners to transfer even unwilling lascars to any other vessel so long as it was bound for India. Ahuja, “Mobility and Containment”; Balachandran, G., “Recruitment and Control of Indian Seamen, Calcutta, 1880–1935,” International Journal of Maritime History 9, 1 (1997): 1–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

66 Tabili, Laura, “We Ask for British Justice”: Workers and Racial Difference in Late Imperial Britain (New York, 1994)Google Scholar.

67 Ahuja, “Mobility and Containment.”

68 A Study of the Report of the Commission of Enquiry (Jabbar Commission) on Expulsion of Pakistani Infiltrants from Tripura and Assam. Government of India, Ministry of Home Affairs (New Delhi, 1964)Google Scholar.

69 Government of India, Ministry of Home Affairs, C.S. Section, 36/3-c.s., 1949; and MHA/F-I section, 199-FI.

70 Interviewed by Shahzad Firoz, Newham, London, 2009.

71 Bhabha, Homi, “The Third Space,” in Rutherford, J., ed., Identity: Community, Culture and Difference (London, 1990)Google Scholar; idem., The Location of Culture (London, 1994)Google Scholar; Brah, Avtar, Cartographies of Diaspora (London, 1996)Google Scholar; Appadurai, Arjun, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, 1996)Google Scholar.

72 McKeown, Adam, “Global Migration 1846–1950,” Journal of World History 15, 2 (2004): 155–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar.