Refugee migrations witnessed during and after the Partition of India in 1947 was one of the largest in the history of human displacement. On the eastern side of the country, which shared a border with the then East Pakistan, forced migrations in fact continued for a prolonged period, from 1946 to 1971 and even beyond. The social character of these migrations were quite complex and depicted a peculiar hierarchy, as the social elites, the bhadralok migrated early largely under a perceived fear of alienation and attack by the Muslim majority of East Pakistan rather than experiencing actual violence, while the dalit sections, the ordinary people from the lower caste and tribal communities migrated much later, after 1950, when they became targets of massive communal violence and vandalism. However, most of the received historiography, until very recent interventions, on the social impact of partition seeks to establish a rather ‘levelling’ discourse of victimhood for the displaced population as it believes that the perils of territorial dislocation and the resultant forced migrations had universally affected all sections of the Hindu minority. Thus, such a discourse fails to capture or perhaps deliberately seeks to overlook the fundamental differential impact of Partition on different sections of the displaced population. One of reasons being, narratives of distinctive dalit experiences are hardly found on record, either in the official archives, newspapers or personal memoirs and autobiographies. Very recently, anthropological studies on refugee colonies, research on different categories of refugees have deconstructed the myth of a universal refugee. This essay attempts an anthropological study to explore and analyse some of these ‘differing’ narratives collected from the low caste, Namasudra settlers of a refugee village in West Bengal.
