This article engages with the politics of the production and representation of spatial identity in the light of one of the most violent massacres in the history of refugee rehabilitation in India, post 1947 Partition – the Marichjhapi massacre of 1979. The Marichjhapi massacre has escaped public scrutiny for almost two decades. It came to public attention as recent as the late 1990s. This paper will go beyond recollecting ghastly incidents at Marichjhapi (one of the many islands of Sundarbans) and highlight the relationship between politics, spatial injustice and the vulnerability of the peripheral locations within states. The first part of the article looks at the ways in which Forest Laws were misused against the refugees. The way international debates on forest preservation appropriated the reality of the massacre of the lives of refugees in Marichjhapi is what this part discusses. The second part of the paper looks at the discourse of social injustice as an outcome of the production and representation of ‘space’ in the context of the events at Marichjhapi. Drawing from Lefebvre's conceptions of organisation of space and its influence on social relations, I have argued that both justice and injustice become visible in the specificities of places. Thus the understanding of the interaction between space and societies is essential to the understanding of spatial injustice. Often, the politics of caste identities are at the heart of such spatial injustice as the Marichjhapi massacre testifies to. I have concluded my article with a discussion of spatial injustice from the perspective of borderlands or places located on territorial margins of the state. The materiality of a state's presence depends on the ways its powers are defined at the borders. Thus the location of a space on the borders and its consequent representation makes it far more vulnerable to the violence of state power than it otherwise would have been. The massacre at Marichjhapi was an outcome of a distortion in the representation and definition of that power. My main arguments are: first, instances like Marichjhapi challenge and redefine dominant discourses on state–subject relationships, providing, in the process, fresh perspectives to the understanding of such binaries as insiders/outsiders, inclusion/exclusion, us/them etc. Second, creation of a spatial identity constitutes the convergence of multiple, often conflicting, identities as social identities, ethnic identities and institutional identities, mostly with a fatal outcome. Third, geographical location of spaces has a lot to do with the formation of spatial identities and is decisive in shaping spatial justice. Finally, instances like Marichjhapi are subaltern narratives that are neither acknowledged by elite nationalist historiographies nor even by the existing subaltern schools. They need to be understood to be able to understand the process of nation-building.
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Jan 1, 2017
Raji Thomas 
Open Access
