Bengali State and Nation Making: Partition and Displacement Revisited

In: International social science journal: ISSJ, Heft 175

Abstract

This paper explores the meanings, consequences, and emergent issues that arise from the 1947 Partition of Bengal as viewed through the analytic of displacement. The central themes addressed include state formation and nation building as the Partition was concurrent with an anticolonial struggle that led to the establishment of two independent states, India and Pakistan. Highlighting the place of Bengal at this historical juncture, I show how East Bengali refugees in Calcutta complicate state and nation formation by unsettling notions of religious and ethnic identification and experiences of belonging. Their shared language, syncretic Bengali traditions, involvement in a collective nationalist struggle, and often common experiences, unmask the contradictions of the state and nation-making projects. These contradictions make processes of exclusion and inclusion, social rights, and boundary maintenance key sites of negotiation and part of a process that is not completed with the political establishment of nation-state boundaries. The interpretation offered here suggests that varied negotiations, networks,and pathways of displacement shape loss, resettlement, and rehabilitation among different classes of migrant and that national subject formation is a contingent process that did not, and cannot, depend upon fixed identities and identifications. 33 References. (Original abstract - amended)