The dark forest of exile: A Dandakaranya memoir and the Partition’s Dalit refugees

Abstract

The Partition of India in 1947 has often been studied through the lenses of territoriality, communal identity, and the high nationalist politics of the attainment of the two nation-states of India and Pakistan. However, the history of nation-making is inextricably linked with the account of Dalit communities in divided Bengal, their aspirations and arrival in West Bengal, and their subsequent exile outside the newly formed state to a government-chosen rehabilitation site called Dandakaranya in central India. From the 1950s, the Dalit population of East Pakistan began migrating to West Bengal in India following their leader Jogendra Nath Mandal who had migrated earlier. Subsequently, West Bengal saw a steady influx of agriculturalist Dalit refugees whose rehabilitation entailed a different understanding of land resettlement. Conceived in 1956, the Dandakaranya Project was an ambitious one-time plan to rehabilitate thousands of East Bengali Namasudra refugees outside the state. Some writings on Dandakaranya, such as those by Saibal Kumar Gupta, former chairman of the Dandakaranya Development Authority, offer us a profound insight into the plight of Dalit refugees during post-Partition times. This article explores two texts by Gupta: his memoir, Kichu Smriti, Kichu Katha, and a collection of essays compiled in a book, Dandakaranya: A Survey of Rehabilitation. Drawing on official data, government reports, assessments of the refugee settlers, and extensive personal interaction, Gupta evaluates the demographic and humanitarian consequences of the Partition for the Dalit refugees. These texts represent an important literary archive that unearths a hidden chapter in the Indian Partition’s historiography and lays bare the trajectory of Scheduled Caste history understood through the project of rehabilitation and resettlement in independent India.