Social Work, Refugees and National Belonging: Evaluating the ‘Lady Social Workers’ of West Bengal

Abstract

In the aftermath of Partition, the Government of India suddenly found itself to be responsible for a large number of refugee women who were not ‘attached’ to male guardians. The national government readily acknowledged the fate of these widowed, abandoned or abducted women as a sphere of feminine expertise and sought the active participation of prominent social workers such as Rameshwari Nehru, Mridula Sarabhai, Ashoka Gupta and Romola Sinha. Referred to as ‘lady social workers’, these women worked as volunteers and advisors to rehabilitate unattached women. Focusing on the voluntary service of social workers in West Bengal, and drawing upon the memoirs and personal papers of Ashoka Gupta, this article seeks to understand the limits and possibilities of this role. Was their role entirely circumscribed by the larger patriarchal vision of rehabilitation that treated ‘unattached’ refugee women as permanent liabilities of the state, or could they author policy that benefitted refugee women? Through a close reading of the solutions, schemes and reforms proposed by lady social workers, this paper suggests a complex relationship that resists such binaries.