Bengali state and nation making: partition and displacement revisited

Bengali state and nation making:partition and displacement revisitedn

Shelley Feldman

The migration between India and Pakistanfollowing the Partition in 1947 remains one ofthe largest population movements in historywith an estimated 15 million people crossingthe new border between India and Pakistan.This extraordinary population movement isusually explained as the logical response to thecreation of a Muslim Pakistan – composed of anEast and West Wing – and a predominantlyHindu India. The period was characterisedby unimaginable ethnicviolence coupled with thehasty and barbaric experi-ence of border crossing in anow-divided Punjab, andthe slower, more continualflow of Hindus leaving EastPakistan1 for the Indianstate of West Bengal. Alegacy of the colonialproject, the partitioning ofIndia was not animatedby a desire for peace andself-determination, but byBritain’s need to withdrawquickly from the subconti-nent (Kumar 1997). The result was the establish-ment of two independent states, two distinctdevelopment projects, and the creation ofand identifications with two different nationalimaginaries.

This paper offers a brief overview of themeanings, consequences, and emergent issuesthat arise from the Partition in Bengal asviewed through the lens of displacement.Using the Partition as a frame as well as apoint of departure highlights critical themes

that have been given far too little place indiscussions of the particular forms of migra-tion and resettlement that accompany thepartition of nations. These themes also raisequestions that are elided or underestimatedin discussions of migration and displacement.For instance, research on partition is oftenlinked to sub-national movements that focusless on experiences of migration and dislocationand more on war or incompatible ethnic

differences. In other cases,partitions and other formsof dislocation are discussedprimarily for their contribu-tion to understanding andsolving problems accompa-nying resettlement and re-habilitation (e.g., the papersby Cernea and Kanbur inthis issue).

While these are sugges-tive areas of inquiry, a dis-placement analytic invitesus to consider the comple-mentary questions ofidentity, state, and nation

making in a post-colonial context of globalis-ing modernity. The context and historicalmoment of partition is one where nationalistrationalisation threatens the rule of reasonand causes incongruities and contradictionsin state and nation-making processes andconflicting identities for citizens. The solutionhas been to prioritise the stability of bordersand states in the development context follow-ing Bretton Woods. An analysis of theBengal Partition illuminates these processes

Shelley Feldman teaches DevelopmentSociology at Cornell University. Recentpublications on South Asia include: ‘‘In-tersecting and contesting positions: worldsystems, postcolonial, and feminist theo-ry’’, REVIEW 24(3), 2001, 343–371; ‘‘Ex-ploring theories of patriarchy: aperspective from contemporary Bangla-desh’’, SIGNS 26(4), 2001, 1097–1127;and ‘‘Metaphor and myth: gender andIslam in Bangladesh’’, in RafiuddinAhmed (ed.), Understanding the BengalMuslims: Interpretative Essays, OxfordUniversity Press, 2001, 209–235.Email: [email protected]

ISSJ 175rUNESCO2003. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600GarsingtonRoad, OxfordOX4 2DQ,UKand 350Main Street,Malden,MA02148, USA

by unsettling understandings of the partitionof states as legal outcomes or edicts andby linking them instead to the contradic-tions of modernity and processes of displace-ment.

Further, a displacement analytic invitesour attention to the tensions posed by thePartition since it challenges what had cometo be a ‘‘settled fact’’ after the undoing ofthe first Bengal Partition in 1905, ‘‘thatBengal was one and indivisible, regardlessof religious plurality’’; an idea ‘‘that shapedthe notion that territory and culture wereinseparably tied in a sort of ‘natural history’ ofthe nation’’ (Chatterjee 1997: 37). It was, more-over, a natural history built in the idiom ofa distinctly Hindu India but born out offraternal association between Hindus andMuslims, and a linguistic nationalism thatvalorised Bengal’s cultural unity. In these ways,the Hindu Bengali migrant offers a key trace onhow to understand the formation of state,nation, citizen, and subject.

The paper is organised around threecentral themes. I begin with a brief summaryof the meaning and backdrop of Partition,what might be called the antecedents ofdisplacement or the proximate conditions ofan emerging postcolonial state. In thesecond section I highlight selected key con-cepts that are unsettled by the displacementof Hindu Bengalis from what now wasEast Pakistan to West Bengal, particularlyCalcutta. The purpose of this conceptualsection is to unpack the conventional wisdomabout displacement, particularly as it is linked toquestions of state formation. The third themedraws attention to how the questions raisedabout resettlement provide a window on thestate and nation-making projects. This isespecially salient in drawing distinctionsbetween state and nation, recognising thatthe hyphenated nation-state often maskswhat is distinctive about each of these socialprojects. In this section, I gesture toward issuesof class and temporality, as the experienceof East Bengali migrants to West Bengalilluminate tensions of citizenship, identifica-tion, and a sense of belonging. My pointhere is not to offer new data on the migrantcommunity but to recast current under-standings of the Partition and displacement.

Partition: antecedents andcontext

The Partition was coupled with an anti-colonialstruggle against the British that led to acomplicated and sustained sense of displacementeven for those not technically relocated acrossthe newly established state border. The resultwas the challenging process of (re)makingcommunities among established residents andmigrants in new territories that navigated withinthe inter-state system of post-colonial rule.These migrations and in situ dislocations estab-lish the context for negotiating place amongimmigrants and those who remained ‘‘at home’’.In Bengal, the division between East andWest isespecially suggestive given the ways in whichreligion, ethnic identification, and place intersectto complicate the state-making and nation-making projects. For East Bengalis who choseto settle in the West, displacement drawsattention to the particular confluence of thevaried meanings of Bengaliness as a way toaddress how national communities are trans-formed, from a shared cultural heritage andnation, as in ‘‘we are all Indian’’, to a construc-tion of difference, outsider, and Other.

To date, interpretations of the 1947 IndianPartition assume the separation of Hindus andMuslims, a set of relations that are framedprincipally by the experience in Punjab. There,Partition is characterised by rape, mass murder,marauding, and wanton torture carried outagainst members of the opposite ethnic group(Aiyar 1995, Moon 1998). Its history is re-counted from the point of view of high politics(Jalal 1985), business and elite interests (Chat-terji 1995), in memoirs of those who livedthrough it, and in personal accounts, poetry,and novels of the horror and pain brought aboutby the experience (Bhalla 1994, Devi 1995,Sidhwa 1988, Zaman 1999). More recently,and with the distance that time often provides,ethnographies and family histories have sharedthe point of view of the women upon whosebodies the Partition was often played out(Butalia 1998, Menon and Bhasin 1998).

These narratives, often brilliantly evoca-tive, suggest that relations between Indiaand Pakistan, precisely about the questionof the incorporation in a new country ofa large number of migrants, are often left

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under-theorised even as they provide crucialevidence about the lived experience of theseemergent relations. Discussions of the determi-nants of the Partition, reports on the BoundaryCommission, and analyses of the policies andprogrammes that shape patterns of resettlementand rehabilitation similarly tend to elide aconceptualisation of the everyday practices ofthose who moved from East Bengal to Calcutta,other parts of West Bengal, and elsewhere inIndia.2 Also ignored are the processes ofnegotiation and compromise that shape rela-tions of incorporation or exclusion of new-comers to the country.

Not surprisingly, many Hindu Bengalimigrants to Calcutta and its environs hadprevious, long-term interactions with residentsand institutions in the city. This is becauseCalcutta was the focus of culture and the arts,medical provision, and education for manyresidents of the provincial towns and thecountryside, including those from East Bengal.Thus, the division between East Pakistan andWest Bengal, especially for the East Bengalibhadralok (educated Bengali middle class),which saw itself as the embodiment of Indianculture and bore the values of social reform,progress, and modernity, often meant a ruptureof the shared history and experience betweenkin members and of the institutional inter-dependence with those who lived outside ofthe city but, at a prior point in time, in thesame country.

To be sure, on 14 August 1947 one lived inundivided India and shared an understandingand identification with a national project, thestruggle for independence. On 16 August 1947one lived either in Pakistan or India, a distinc-tion that for some verged on the nonsensical,absurd, and incongruous; this is brilliantlyrecounted in Manto’s Toba Tek Singh (1994).For those who chose to move from their place ofresidence after that date, they were no longermerely changing residence, as in shifting fromone city to another for employment or educa-tion, but instead were risking immigrant orrefugee status in a place that had been, only theday before, part of a shared national space, theirhome. Moreover, since the demand for andachievement of Partition was premised on anotion of religious difference, it is not surprisingthat Hindus leaving East Bengal for the West

could be viewed as moving to a place where theybelonged.

Yet, this notion of belonging, and itsattendant rights and privileges, was in factdenied to these Hindu refugees. Unsettling thisnotion and that of identification with a religiousand ethnic community opens to question hownations, as distinct from states, are constructed,since it raises not only legal questions aboutcitizenship – in the first 5 years the border wasporous, passports were not yet required formovement between India and Pakistan, andcitizenship status was readily conferred – butalso about the meanings that people give toidentifications with community and its attendantrights and claims. Here, distinctions drawnbetween East andWest Bengali Hindus highlightthe heterogeneity of what, at first glance,appears as a single marker of membership,religion, and emphasises instead the intersec-tionality of markings that confer belonging toany social group.

If, as a Hindu, you instead chose to remainin the East, you were now positioned as part of aminority population that would increasinglydepend on a notion of pluralism – secularism –to support your rights and freedoms as a citizen.This new relationship to place would recast thepolitical and social landscape and reconfigurerelations of power and hierarchy, but would doso differently than if one was considered an(im)migrant. Interestingly, what is signalled bythe new status of the bhadralok as a politicalminority in East Pakistan was the unmasking ofclass relations that had been partially obscured,more discursively than in practice, in the guise ofreligion and its secularist and pluralist expres-sions.

Described as a symbiotic relationship be-tween landlords, moneylenders, and traders onthe one hand, and peasant farmers and share-croppers on the other, pre-partition East Bengalwas the breadbasket for a large part of theregional economy that was increasingly char-acterised by the monetisation of its agrarianbase. The prolonged depression of the 1930s, the‘‘callous exploitation of the grain-dealers in1943’’, and various efforts by political partiesto mobilise for agrarian change, helped to re-cast these relations (Bose 1986). Agrarianrelations also were reformulated followingthe riots that inflamed Noakhali and Tripura

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in 1946. According to Bose (1986), the riots canbe attributed to the political situation at the timeand the economic inequality between the twocommunities in certain areas. He was careful tonote, however, the contemporary view that thesedisturbances ‘‘have not been an uprising of onecommunity as a whole against the other’’ (Bose1986: 227–229, quoting from The Statesman, 30October 1946). But, these relations and episodesled to a shift from nationalism to an incipientcommunalism that altered the landscape justprior to the 1947 decree. It was not a fixed andalready given point of tension between twohomogeneous religious or social groups (Feld-man 2001).3

It also was during this period, and followingPartition, that Fazlul Huq’s peasant-populistKrishak Proja movement became a strongpolitical force aiding in reframing Islam as apowerful tool of agrarian solidarity and justice.In East Bengal this was also aided by the lack oforganic links between government and itsconstituents. As Chatterjee (1994: 259) notes,‘‘it is this perceptual distance which, whenfavourable structural conditions prevail in theorganised world of conflict between sections ofthe ruling classes, creates room for the manip-ulative operation of popular politics and charis-matic politicians’’. This mobilisation came in thewake of Jinnah’s 1940 call for Muslim unity anda two-nation solution, as well as in the context ofa Congress Party that increasingly drew on theHindu–Aryan tradition and a linguistic nation-alism that valorised Bengal’s cultural unity. Thisreligious-political idiom came to shape a regio-nal discourse that provided a critical context fora growing sense of insecurity among minorityreligious communities that lived within majoritypopulations, and set the stage for the transfer ofpopulations between India and Pakistan in 1947(Chatterjee 1997: 38–39).

Postcolony: catalysts andmovements

Estimates reveal that upwards of 5 millionpeople crossed from East to West Bengal duringthe period 1947–1970 (Haque 1995). In 1951,26.4% of Calcutta’s inhabitants had migratedfrom East Pakistan (Chatterjee 1990). Thismassive movement of Hindus from East Paki-

stan to West Bengal would become part of acontinuous, if episodic, exodus of Hindus to theWest, a migration that can be traced to specificaltercations or proximate catalysts in Pakistanas well as in India. These catalysts altered the‘‘imagined community’’ of both the East and theWest and forever fractured relations betweenvillage kin.

For some, the catalyst that provokedmigration was the violence of Direct ActionDay in Calcutta and the Noakhali riots in EastBengal in 1946, although these episodes did notresult in significant numbers of East Bengalisleaving for the West. The largest migration,estimated at more than 2.5 million, occurredbetween 1948 and 1950 following communalviolence in Hyderabad, India, and in Khulnaand Barisal in East Pakistan (Report of theCommittee of Review of RehabilitationWork inWest Bengal in Chatterji 2001: 102–103). No-table about these proximate catalysts are theconnections between unrest in India and Paki-stan, recognising that each provoked enoughfear and insecurity to encourage migration fromEast Pakistan to West Bengal. For others,however, migration was in response to policychanges, particularly the institutionalisation ofpassport and visa requirements for travelbetween the two countries, which threatenedthe free movement of people across the stateborder (Government of West Bengal in Chatt-terji 2001: 103).

These catalysts were contemporaneous withthe nationalist struggle against the British, andthe high politics of the decision to partition thecountry and to build independent states andnations; and they were premised on two contra-dictory projects. The first, the independencestruggle, depended crucially on the building of ashared, rather than a fractured, nationalistconsciousness, and on the inseparability ofterritory and culture that was echoed in Indiaby the Congress Party’s commitment to plural-ism and fraternity – within a hierarchy thatembraced both ‘‘natural’’ and those referred toas ‘‘adopted’’ East Bengali Hindu kin (Mukho-padhyay in Chatterjee 1997). The building of anationalist consciousness was exemplified by thesuccess and reach of the Gandhian SwadeshiMovement.

In contrast, the British commitment topartition was to rupture this unity. As Samaddar

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(1996: 1) points out, the Partition was aparticular form of decolonisation that wouldensure the ‘‘residuary existence of the colonialmode of power’’, affirm the ascendancy of thebourgeoisie in the region, and hold in check the‘‘anti-colonial radical masses’’. H. H. Risley, aBritish ethnographer-administrator at the time,made a similar assessment in reference to thepartition of Bengal in 1905: ‘‘Bengal united is apower: Bengal divided will pull in different ways. . . one of our main objects is to split up andthereby weaken a solid body of opponents to ourrule’’ (Chatterjee 1997: 36).

Said differently, building a successful anti-colonial movement sits uncomfortably with, andmay even contradict, a nation built on religiousincompatibilities4 since the former project de-pends for its success on a politics of crossing overdifference in the struggle against the colonialstate. However, it was the intersection of thesetwo events – a nationalist struggle and Partition -that came to shape and foster religious diver-gence rather than fraternisation, and enmityrather than solidarities in difference. In thebackdrop was British interest in the subconti-nent as a strategic and military site. Thiscontingent space provides a window to engagerelations of displacement and partition in inter-esting ways; by challenging the assumption of anunproblematic nation and state form, and byunsettling common interpretations of an alwaysand already extant state, and a coherent ifalways changing notion of the nation andnationhood. This challenge also questions thefixity of the state as coterminous with that of thenation and invites us to examine the practices weassociate with each as distinct projects.

Challenging the assumed fixity of the‘‘nation-state’’ the partition/displacement opticdraws our attention to the meanings andexperiences of displacement, whether forced orchosen, which, in turn, depend upon complexnegotiations with identifications, rights, andentitlements. Second, and perhaps more perti-nent to the discussion at hand, these contra-dictory imaginings complicate notions ofbelonging and migrant/refugee status in a placelike Bengal where being from West Bengal isassumed to be synonymous with being Hindu.5

This assumption frames not only the Other, thatis the East Bengali Hindu in Calcutta, but alsothe other Other, the Muslim, the one who is the

embodiment of and thereby serves to differenti-ate between the Aryan-Hindu nation of Indiaand Muslim Pakistan.

Recasting displacement

With Partition, religion became the definingcharacteristic of community membership and asuggestive trace for exploring constructions ofcommunity belonging. Religion provides a wayto ask questions about inclusion – who can beclaimed as part of either the Pakistani or Indianstate – and exclusion – the criteria used to denyrights within a particular state and how are theydifferentially conferred upon refugees, exiles,and migrants. In the first instance, inclusionrefers to both who can come into the commu-nity, whether it is defined by a state border withlegal controls or a community bounded bysocially accepted norms, and the relationshipbetween membership and rights. Posed this way,religion as a key marker of identity or identifica-tion illuminates how notions of state and nationare constituted politically and socially. It there-fore is important to chart the ways in whichreligion is actually used to mark a person’sidentity or to constitute how one identifies.These processes, in turn, can reveal emergentcontradictions in the different meanings attrib-uted to notions of ‘‘home’’, citizenship, andrights. In Bengal, this marking is complicated bya shared ethnic (as in being a Bengali) and spatialidentification.

The experience of displacement of HinduEast Bengalis into West Bengal is captured, forexample, in the need to reframe the familiar, ‘‘weare Bengali and share a common language andtradition’’, into what would come to be deployedas differences embedded in spatio-cultural dis-tinctions such as urban vs peasant/rural, cul-tured vs unsophisticated or backward, andlower- vs middle- or upper-class. For instance,despite the border being drawn on the basis ofreligious difference (a religious demography), allHindus did not choose to move to West Bengaland many remained in East Pakistan. Thiscomplicated the process of constructing theIndian national subject as the Hindu Bengali.Nor was the Partition a cultural divide sinceBengali culture and identification traversed theborder. Such contingencies highlight how Ben-


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gali as ethnicity and shared cultural practice, thecomplex meanings of a shared religion amongmigrants and long-term residents, and a sharedanti-colonial struggle constitute, in contradic-tory ways, national subject formation. Thus,even as the Aryan-Hindu culture associated withthe West was central to the project of ‘‘Other-ing’’ those from the East (as distinct from theMuslim Pakistani), the displaced did not nesteasily within this framing, and their difference –partially exhibited in the images of longing anddesire of their past in the East – is crucial forconstituting their place in the West (Chakra-barty 1995, Mitra 1990). These contingenciesreconfigure displacement and place-making toreveal the complicated processes of subjectformation – making difference out of thefamiliar as a necessary aspect of nation-making– and complement existing emphases on place-

making and assimilation of difference in thestudy of refugees (Malkki 1995).

This complication of identity and subjectformation has three noteworthy attributes. Thefirst is the use of the term displacement to refer tobeing in the wrong place at the time of Partition;that is, for some, having been born a Hindu inEast Pakistan meant one was automaticallydisplaced with Partition. Importantly, this un-derstanding is based on displacement as acondition of being a Hindu as if being a Hinduwere an existential condition, whether in EastBengal or elsewhere (Ghosh 1998: 33). Given theevidence of slow migration West, one canpresume that the sense of belonging in the Eastwas not experienced by all Hindus as a displace-ment or as a threat to their religious preferencesand practices, but rather increasingly became sowith the unrest and strife that shaped subsequent

Hindu evacuees leaving Torahimpur in East Bengal in November 1946. Keystone

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events. This latter understanding supposes achanging relationship of people to place, localconditions, and particular political realign-ments, that is, to particular and contingentexperiences that can both cause and derive fromdiverse forms of emotional, physical, economic,or social insecurity. The focus on insecurity onthe one hand, and existential being on the other,both differ from a third view that suggests that‘‘other than ourselves, our rooted selves, is ourother selves, our migrancy, our refugeeness’’(Minha-ha in Soguk 1999: 7).

The second complication refers to displace-ment in situ which is similarly linked to theexperience of threat, danger, insecurity, andoften, material loss. In Bengal we can identifythree broad types of in situ displacement. The firsttype refers to those who chose to remain in EastPakistan but who experienced a loss of status andperhaps opportunity, even if they did not losetheir property or employment. This loss wasassociatedwith amore competitive labourmarketas Muslims were offered positions previouslydenied them, increased rights for Muslims, andthe loss or forced sale of landed properties. Thesechanges altered the sense of security amongHindu families who remained and shifted thecharacter of social hierarchy in the country.

The second type of in situ displacementconcerns the 33.2% of Calcutta’s inhabitants (in1951) who were city-born and who, like theircounterparts in the East, had to renegotiate thenew demands on their lives due to increasedpressure on urban resources, particularly hous-ing, growing population densities, and an in-creasingly competitive labour market, eachcontributing to establishing the political contextfor their lack of support for immigrant rights. Forthem, the challenge was that the East Bengalirefugees were primarily middle class, urbane EastBengalis, from elite zamindar families, academics,or civil servants, among the most educated inEast Bengal, and thus most able to compete forthe top positions in the labour market once theysettled in Calcutta. Many had prior associationswith Calcutta and strong social and professionalnetworks and kin relations to facilitate theirresettlement. In these ways, not only wereimmigrants displaced in Calcutta, but so toowere residents who used their position and thisopportunity to shape particular articulations ofOtherness and difference.

Moreover, fearing that the migration wouldbe long-term, efforts were made by residents tounderplay and limit support for refugees in thehope of dissuading others from seeking perma-nent residence in the West (Chatterjee 1990).Relief was viewed solely as a stop-gap measure,and permanent rehabilitation was judged to beunnecessary. Efforts were also made to persuadeDhaka to deploy psychological measures torestore confidence among Hindu resident mino-rities in hopes of reducing the fear that encour-aged migration in the first place (Chatterji 2001).Over time, access to state support was limited byestablishing a very narrow window on when newresidents would be recognised as citizens orresidents to qualify for support, excluding able-bodied men from access to relief, and requiringdocumentation that often was unavailable tothose who either left the East in haste, or assumeda return to East Bengal in the future.

A third type of in situ displacementconcerns the experiences of immigrants orrefugees once in Calcutta and other parts ofIndia. For example, East Bengali Hindus whochose to settle in Calcutta, on the presumptionof a shared Bengali and religious identificationand an urban way of life, experienced a loss ofstatus vis-a-vis resident Hindu Bengalis even ifthey did not necessarily face the loss of income,property, or employment. In fact, for many earlymigrants, property was sold in East Bengal andpurchased in and around Calcutta in order tomediate a potential loss of material resources.For this group, despite being both Bengali andHindu, and initially of the bhadralok class whosaw itself as ‘‘the (y) embodiment of Indianculture and nationality’’ (Ghosh 1998:33), wereimmediately identified as different and definedas udbasti or without an ancestral home.

Ironically, in Calcutta, East Bengalis pre-sumed they weremoving to a place that would benon-threatening, to a place where they wereassumed to ‘‘belong’’, and yet they nonethelessbecame the iconic refugee. This making ofdifference – of bangals (East Pakistanis) andghotis (Indian Bengalis) – exposes how processesof accommodation begin to create new subjectsthat set the context for access to resources,rights, and entitlements. This mark of differencewould eventually reveal itself in how migrantswere accommodated into the Calcutta commu-nity and how they were politically organised. It


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reveals as well how members of the ‘‘Indiannation’’ – including an undivided Bengalipopulation who had just struggled for nationalindependence – renegotiated their place asmembers of a newly independent but dividedstate. Lastly, it revealed how relations ofaccommodation as well as new regimes ofregulation and control (such as those broughtabout by the institutionalisation of passportsand increased sanctions of those caught), createda new sense of insecurity for Hindus who choseeither to remain in the East or to migrate(Feldman 2001). This latter form of controlserved as both a threat and a catalyst for Hindusto leave East Pakistan at the time.

In these diverse ways, the Bengal Partitionilluminates the uneven temporal and spatialprocesses of displacement by drawing attentionto patterns of population movement that maynot be in response to a single, catastrophic event,but which nonetheless are crucially tied to howwe understand the social and political conse-quences of state intervention and emergentrelations of exclusion. In these cases, stateintervention is neither limited to a decree orsingle action, as in forced resettlement tied tothe siting of a mega-project, but rather corre-sponds to a series of negotiations that force orencourage people to leave their places ofresidence or leave them vulnerable in theirextant location. These negotiations of belong-ing can be understood as the need or desireto move in reaction to real or imaginedinsecurity, or the loss of physical safety andprotection that was once assured. The dramaticand long-term processes of displacement ofHindus from East Pakistan to West Bengal canbe said to run along each of these domains, oftensimultaneously.

Embedding state- and nation-making in the postcolony

Characterised as ‘‘an ignominious scuttle’’, thePartition of India was executed on 15 August1947, ten weeks after it was announced (Jalal1985).6 The scuttle refers both to the dramaticconsequences of a less than adequately plannedinvocation of division and to a process of stateformation characterised by the allocation intotwo different states of a once integrated bureau-

cratic apparatus. Ironically, as Jalal (1995:10)suggests, the initial success of the British colonialproject was its ability to negotiate a ‘‘politicalunity with a singular and indivisible sovereignty(y) among diverse peoples inhabiting thedomains of quasi-sovereign regional rulers’’.The division led to fragile civil administrationsin both countries, each fraught with uncertaintyabout its personnel asmembers of the civil servicewere given the choice of where they would live ata time when massive upheaval and dislocationcalled for political coherence and the securing ofsocial order. Responses to this fragility requiredthe development of a full administrative cadreand lines of command, the rationalisation ofresource allocation to differentministries, and theestablishment of new administrative structuresincluding those which were to address resettle-ment and rehabilitation.

Interestingly, some have suggested that for(West) Pakistan the state was made, essentiallycreated into being with the naming of Pakistanas an independent country. What was required,however, was for Pakistan to make itself into anation (Ali 1993). For East Pakistan, in contrast,despite its colonial relation to the West, thestate-making process involved creating an in-stitutional apparatus and bureaucratic rationa-lisation in the context of extremely limitedresources, including establishing an elite andprofessional cadre and securing representationwith the central government. Three salientdistinctions help explain differences in the twoWings relevant to our discussion of East Bengalimigrants. The first is the lack of resourcesavailable in Bengal as a result of its distancefromWest Pakistan and its characterisation as abackwater. While East Pakistan was the bread-basket for Pakistan as a whole, with Partition itwas left with no industrial base and limitedrepresentation in the Constituent Assembly.

Second is the absence of a strong adminis-trative and institutional apparatus, since manyof the resources that were to be shared betweenDhaka and Calcutta never arrived in Dhaka,and many of the civil servants opted for Indiarather than remain in the provinces. Third,Bengalis who spoke Bengali and identified withthe larger Bengali culture found efforts to buildthe Pakistan state and a shared national projectin contestation with their ‘‘national’’ identifica-tion. This led, almost immediately, to struggles

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between East and West Pakistan over thenational language and eventually, to a liberationmovement whose roots can easily be located inthese early struggles of identification as Bengali(Harun-or-Rashid 1987; Umar 1992). It led, aswell, to complicated understandings of themeaning of a Bengali nation and to identifica-tion with Bengal and Bengaliness.

Also interesting in Bengal is the fact that theborder that was ‘‘produced’’ by Sir CyrilRadcliffe and the Boundary Commission in1947, which plotted the boundaries that wereto ‘‘contain’’ and differentiate between aMuslimPakistan and a Hindu India, is considered, bymost accounts, to be an arbitrary divide ofcommunities, villages, families, kin, and eco-nomic resources (Hodson 1985). Although thelogic of Muslim dominated areas was deemed tobe the appropriate dividing line,such thatMuslim areas were ‘‘given to’’ Pakistan, andHindu areas were assumed to remain part ofIndia, divisions are never neat and have been asource of continual political negotiation, asexemplified today in the struggle over Kashmir.

These relations and processes of state andnation formation under the Partition, then, canbe said to unsettle definitions of states as alreadyconstituted and pre-formed or only as outcomesof sub-national movements. Instead, it insists ona view that accounts for the processes ofestablishing an institutional apparatus, organis-ing the legitimacy of rule, and framing ahegemonic project that justifies the developmentstate. Analysing processes and relations of stateformation, in other words, demands that wechart the complex social practices that unfoldover time to create a bureaucratic apparatus anda system of regulation.

From this perspective, states are viewed asaccomplishments of emergent, mutually exclusivespatial locations, territorially bounded units thatare fixed within borders and which come toembody distinct institutional practices and formsof political, social, and moral regulation. Na-tions, too, are accomplishments, contingentproducts of struggles for one form of collectiveidentification. Since, as Max Weber underlines,the nation is not coterminous with the people of astate, nations, too, are socially constituted arenasthat draw distinctions between insiders andoutsiders, ‘‘inventing traditions’’ in a process(nationalism) and a product (nation-state) of

power and/or rule (Hobsbawm andRanger 1983)constructed within heterogeneous territories.

Final reflections

In contrast to analysis of the state in terms of itscreation by decree and subsequent institutionalpractices – as often applied to the partitioning ofthe Indian subcontinent into the independentstates of India and Pakistan – I have examinedstate formation as a socially constituted, histori-cally embedded process accompanied by dis-tinctive processes of nation-making. I have doneso by denaturalising the state and by employinga displacement analytic to reveal how theseprocesses and practices unfold. The 1947 Parti-tion of India, particularly the division of Bengalinto East and West, is an especially suggestivesite for engaging these processes since it is animportant conjuncture in the migration historyof the region and crucially depends on specificinterpretations of who and what constitute boththe state and the nation.

The relationship of Hindus in East andWestBengal also provides the specific empirical terrainfor querying the complex and heterogeneousidentities that constitute membership in commu-nities and fashion relations of inclusion andexclusion. I have argued that the making ofnations and communities depends on a criticalunderstanding of the experience of belonging, andthat the notion of belonging is not a claim butrather an accomplishment of historically contin-gent relations constituted locally as well astransnationally. Partition helps to focus on thisprocess of marking and belonging by constitutingthe place and meaning of migrant and refugee. Inso doing, the placement of the (im)migrant isrevealed as constituted through relations ofpower and inequality that complicate processesof state formation and the meanings thatconstitute the nation. In undivided Bengal, forinstance, the Bengali nation – composed of whatwould eventually become Bengal and Bangladesh– was presumed to share, even if in complicatedrelations of diverse social groupings of class,religion, and ethnicity,7 particular cultural refer-ents, including a shared language, literature, andpoetry. As Samaddar (1997: 23) points out, ‘‘todeceive ourselves of the pangs of proximity, wehave changed categories into opposites:migration


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is infiltration, border trade is smuggling, empathyis interference (y) neighbourhood is ‘nearabroad’’’.

What is offered by this formulation of theconstruction of the Other is that, while theborder was drawn to distinguish betweenreligious communities, the experience of thosewho migrated to West Bengal was one ofexclusion that depended on creating culturaldifference in ways that could contain theanxieties and not challenge the desires oflong-term residents. This making of differenceestablishes the context for the political andinstitutional practices associated with the ac-commodation, rehabilitation, and resettlementof migrants into new communities and enclaves.

Finally, a view of Partition that accountsfor these processes of making states, nations,and difference challenges elite histories of theperiod (as event); suggests the insufficiency ofuncovering even subaltern voices to offer a moreadequate interpretation of the period; is atten-tive to the ways in which the mark of the colonialregime continues to be inflected in relationswithin the postcolony; and posits instead theneed for a processual and contingent accountthat focuses on Partition as a critical eventwhose consequences continue to reverberate inthe ethnic violence in India today and thetensions that continue between India andPakistan.

Notes

nThis paper draws on fieldworkin Bangladesh, Spring 1999, thatwas supported by the AmericanInstitute of Bangladesh Studies.Special thanks to Chuck Geisler,Louise Silberling, participants inmy graduate seminar in statetheory, and a collaborativeseminar on displacements, fortheir creative thinking onquestions of nationalism, stateformation, and displacement.

1. The territory included under thename East Pakistan was EastBengal prior to 1947 and becameindependent Bangladesh in 1971.

2. For an exception see Chatterjee(1990) and Ghosh (1998).

3. It is crucial to emphasise thatthe shift from nationalism tocommunalism, that is, to ‘‘com-

munal difference’’, was realisedthrough a set of practices thatwere generalised to ‘‘the wholecommunity’’ and then usedto support a rationale forinstitutional change.

4. This is not to suggest that thecontradiction was resolved withthe formation of two nations,logically constructed on Jinnah’s‘‘two nation theory’’, but ratherto signal how the two-nationtheory was legitimated – as asolution for the assumed inherentincompatibility of religiousdifference.

5. The connection between beingan Indian and being a Hindu isqueried in the work of Chatterji(1996) and Pandey (1999).

6. Following Radha Kumar,Partition can be viewed moreas ‘‘a backdrop to war than itsculmination in peace’’(Kumar 1997: 26) since itsituates the on-goingstruggles that have characterisedrelations between India andPakistan since 1947, and theeventual struggle forBangladeshi independencefrom (West) Pakistan in1971.

7. Notably absent from thepresent discussion, but crucialfor an understanding of stateand nation building, are othertribal, ethnic, and religiouscommunities in the region, e.g.,Shantal, Magh, and Chakma,Biharis, and Christians.

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Bengali state and nation making: partition and displacement revisited

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