Decoding Displacement as Dalits: The Study of the Effect of Partition on the Namasudra Community

At a recent workshop on negotiating the politics of translating Dalit literature that was held in Barasat, one of the main discussions centred on the fact of how Dalit literature from Bengal had been relatively unknown and ignored in the literary canon of India up until the beginning of the twenty-first century. Manoranjan Byapari, a popular figure among contemporary Bengali Dalit writers, pointed out passionately how the Partition of the country had been the central reason behind this factor. “Nobody has borne the brunt of Partition as we have, ” he had lamented. Among the thousands that had been a part of the mass exodus to and from the newly formed countries in the wake of Partition, a large section had comprised of one of the largest and well-organised Dalit communities known as the Namasudras (previously referred to as the Chandals). Most of them had moved from the districts of Faridpur, Jessore, Khulna and Barishal in East Bengal, in the hope of finding a new home in India. Instead, they had found themselves relocated to uninhabitable distant lands under the West Bengal government refugee rehabilitation schemes. Some had refused the offer outright and lost their government aid. Others had taken it only to return back to Bengal in no time after having failed to adjust in these new places. Many others had also tried to rise in revolt only to be violently snubbed, as evident in the case of the Marichjhapi incident. Weakened by the widespread scattering that these events had led to, the community had hardly found any scope to voice itself until very recently. Many representatives from the community have now come forward to redress this gap by forming a platform where stories of such atrocities can be shared and spread. Byapari's autobiography Itibrittye Chandal Jibon is one such text that has managed to do this through the narration of his own personal experiences. My paper will try to study the burden of displacement, relocation and rehabilitation that the Partition brought about in migrants like those from the Namasudra community, who were anyway at a disadvantageous position by virtue of their marginal position. In order to do so, I will closely follow Byapari's text, reading it alongside Sekhar Bandyopadhyay's Caste, Protest and Identity in Colonial India: The Namasudras of Bengal, 1872–1974 which tries to historically situate this untouchable community's struggle right from the very beginning.