Representation of forced migrants: a case study of the east bengali migrants to West Bengal
The paper wishes to address one of the key themes of the volume—the representation of the self and the other. The theme will be studied in the backdrop of the forced migration from East Bengal (present Bangladesh) to West Bengal (in India) following the vivisection of British India into two nation-s...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | deu |
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Conserveries Mémorielles
2013-03-01
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| Series: | Conserveries Mémorielles |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/cm/1490 |
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| Summary: | The paper wishes to address one of the key themes of the volume—the representation of the self and the other. The theme will be studied in the backdrop of the forced migration from East Bengal (present Bangladesh) to West Bengal (in India) following the vivisection of British India into two nation-states—India and Pakistan—in 1947. The event triggered off large-scale cross-border migration on the Bengal and Punjab sector in India, with as the surging tide of uprooted mass lashing the shores of these two states. Concentrating on the Bengal side, the paper will try to capture the many-faceted representations of the migrants through the lens of the ‘self’ and the ‘other’; the guest and the host, i.e. the local people of West Bengal and the migrants from across the border. Culling information from Government documents, autobiographies, oral interviews and memoirs, the paper will focus on how each perceived the other and whether more than half a century and subsequent generations later such perceptions have undergone any change.The representation of the ‘Bangals’, as the Bengali Hindus from East Pakistan are popularly referred to as by the ‘Ghatis’ (Bengali Hindus of West Bengal), in the latter’s psyche, too, is multi-faceted—sympathy towards the migrants, at being uprooted from their ancestral home, antagonism at being ‘the Government’s favored son’ in terms of job reservations and financial help which in turn fostered the feeling of ‘outsiders infringing on our rights, occupying our lands and making life miserable for us.’ Coming towards the other end of the spectrum—how did the migrants view themselves? Did they, too, consider themselves as unjust victims of the political power-play? Did they, too, view the Government as the benevolent patriarch and accept the help offered to them without so much of a whimper? Did they view the local people as cold and indifferent? In other words did they subscribe to the representations of the Government and the locals or did they construct an identity of their own? These are some of the aspects of representation of forced displacement of the Bengali Hindus from across the international border, which have been dealt with in the course of this paper. |
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| ISSN: | 1718-5556 |