Abstract
This paper problematizes the uncanny co-incidence between the 1943 Bengal Vagrancy Act and the Bengal famine. Given that quasi-religious itinerant lifestyles had always been tolerated in 'pre-modern' India, this paper looks into why a legislative intervention was required in 1943, that is only after the famine, to identify and marginalize the 'vagrant'. The paper argues that the initiative of rounding up the vagrants was basically directed towards sanitizing the cityscape of Calcutta. With the increasing modernization-urbanization of Calcutta, the ruling elites endorsed the principle of internal discrimination while they wanted to keep the rural underclass at bay. The paper examines how the ‘vagrant’ in the Vagrancy Act implicitly refers to the post-famine refugee and the stakes involved therein.
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