The dark forest of exile: A Dandakaranya memoir and the Partition’s Dalit refugees

The background

In undivided Bengal, Scheduled Caste (SC) communities had begun to organize themselves into associations by the early years of the twentieth century and had initiated a demand for separate political representations and reservations in education and jobs. Such new forms of social mobility were certainly the culmination of British educational modernity that was perceived as a force to bring about desired changes in the caste-based Hindu society. A similar idea in the state of Maharashtra is documented in Jyotiba Phule’s Gulamgiri (Slavery, 1873); here, too, the British rule was perceived as benevolent since it offered educational and social progress to the depressed castes. ³ The Swadeshi movement of 1905, that began after Curzon’s announcement to partition Bengal, aimed to curb the use of British goods by popularizing indigenous products. This had made the Muslims and lower castes realize that the educated bhadralok Hindu nationalists had no interest in improving their economic status as these calls to boycott foreign products hurt the marginalized sections the most. ⁴ However, by the 1940s, under the concerted efforts of Syama Prasad Mukherjee and the Hindu Mahasabha, the natural alliance of the SCs and Muslims began to strain. Sekhar Bandyopadhyay states that immediately before the Partition, the “dalit masses […] were developing a greater identification with the Hindu community and this Hinduization, at least for the time being, overshadowed their caste identity” (2001: 153). Now, as the Mahasabha undertook various strategies for a Hindu mobilization, determined efforts were made to induce the SCs to record themselves as “Hindus” in the official census to counter the Pakistan demand. Comprising about 12.23 per cent of the total population in undivided Bengal, Dalits were perceived to be important stakeholders in the claim of a “Hindu homeland” (Bandyopadhyay, 2001: 154). The SC and tribal communities in Bengal affected by the Partition included the Namasudras, Poudriya-Kshatriyas, Chakmas, Santhals, and Rajbongshis, who inhabited some districts of Dacca (now Dhaka), Jessore, Barisal, Khulna, areas of the Chittagong Hill Tracts, Rangpur, Dinajpur, Jalpaiguri, and Cooch Behar. During the elections held in 1937, it was apparent that the Namasudra community had some political presence when the first coalition government under A. K. Fazlul Huq took oath in undivided Bengal in alliance with Jogendra Nath Mandal, a popular Namasudra leader of the Scheduled Castes Federation. This association with the Muslim League continued well beyond the partition of Bengal in 1947 with Mandal’s appointment as East Pakistan’s first Labour and Law Minister (Sengupta, 2017: 24–25). His continued presence in the country reassured the SC communities to remain where they were. Mandal had opposed the creation of a separate Hindu and Muslim Bengal through a vivisection, but his anti-Partition stance had little support on the ground; in reality, a majority of Dalits in Bengal had begun to back the creation of West Bengal as a Hindu-majority province under the Union of India (Bandyopadhyay, 2001: 184–185). With the actual division between India and Pakistan, certain other considerations gained momentum to thwart the political and electoral objectives of the SCs within East Pakistan. Soon after 1947, it became clear that the Mahasabha “was looking for ways to improve its future electoral standing in West Bengal” and demanded that areas in the eastern districts, like Barisal and Dacca, home to the Namasudras, be handed over to West Bengal (Chatterji, 2007: 35). However, the Boundary Commission, formed to oversee the disputed territorial demarcations between the two nations, rejected these claims and the SCs continued to remain in East Pakistan as a minority community in a Muslim-majority country. By February 1950, serious riots had broken out in many districts of East Pakistan; in Khulna, for instance, Dalit houses were burnt and its inhabitants harassed for being sympathizers of the Tebhaga Movement. ⁵ Within a few months, on 15 October 1950, Mandal submitted his resignation to the cabinet, “accusing the Pakistani government of communalism and anti-scheduled caste policies” (Sengupta, 2017: 27). He migrated to India soon afterwards.

The movement of SCs into West Bengal swelled in the years following Mandal’s immigration though other causes were also responsible. A severe food shortage, continued social harassment, and a lack of economic opportunities sapped the resolve of the SCs to remain in East Pakistan. With the upper-caste Hindus leaving for India, the Dalit artisans, fishermen, and agriculturists who were dependent on their patronage began to face economic deprivation. This exodus has been described in a contemporary news report:

[P]eople from villages in districts like Dacca, Chittagong, Rajshahi, Mymensingh, Bogra, and Rangpur say that large-scale movement of Hindus have started. Cattle, stacked paddy and corn, plough, and the land offer no more lure to them to keep to their village homes. […] village smiths, kavirajs, day-labourers, carpenters, namasudras, santhals — in fact every Hindu in East Pakistan is trying to move out. (Amrita Bazar Patrika, 1950)

In April the same year, a pact had been signed between the prime ministers of India and Pakistan to create a sense of security among the minorities, but the Nehru–Liaquat Pact was unable to stop the attacks on minorities. As a result, throughout the 1950s the exodus continued. The number of migrants soon increased with near famine conditions in parts of East Pakistan and the introduction of the proposed passport system in October 1952. Figures of lower-caste refugees migrating to West Bengal increased exponentially after the 1950s and resulted in widespread changes in government rehabilitation projects where caste remained an important category. The earlier arrivals to the state were mostly the upper castes with economic and social capital who found ways to rehabilitate themselves in refugee colonies in and around Calcutta (now Kolkata). By contrast, the arrival of lower-caste refugees who came much later was perceived as a major disruption, as West Bengal, one-third of its original size, could not rehabilitate a large number of Namasudra agriculturists, not only for lack of resources and space but also because of an unwillingness to help SC refugees. Though government policies did not state this in any obvious manner, the rehabilitation schemes mainly targeted the lower-caste refugees in camps who were too poor and helpless to resist a divide and dispersal policy in any significant way. Manoranjan Byapari, a Dalit writer born in Barisal (now in Bangladesh) but who migrated to West Bengal at a very early age, articulates this in his autobiography, Interrogating My Chandal Life:

[T]he millions of destitutes at the camps, desperate to ensure the daily meal, had neither powerful connections nor money. They were those who [were of] no use to the country. In reality these were the people who were like the unwanted unacceptable refuse that needed to be dumped somewhere. (2018: 21)

In official phrasing, “displaced persons” (DPs) referred to three categories of people: those who were homeless but not registered as refugees, those who were registered refugees but did not live in refugee camps or receive government aid, and the registered refugees who lived in camps and received government aid (Ghosh, 2000: 107–108). The Dandakaranya Project was mainly concerned with the third category, consisting of lower-caste refugees such as the Namasudras, Poundra-Kshatriyas, Sadgops, Jeles, and Malos who had arrived after 1952. The Partition had unsettled the regional economy, particularly the jute industry, and the West Bengal government claimed that it was unable to shoulder the burden of the continued “influx”. Calcutta, the capital city, was stretched to its limits with the sheer number of incoming refugees who changed the topographical appearance of many semi-urban areas into that of small towns. Throughout the 1950s, the state’s food situation was precarious, while the famine of 1943 was still fresh in people’s minds. Acute unemployment, rising prices of essential commodities, and a shortage of housing added to the government’s and popular perceptions that the state had taken more than its fair share of burden. Thus, by 1954, the West Bengal government increasingly aired the view that the “refugee problem” (read “the Dalit refugee problem”) was not its sole responsibility and must be shared by the central government as well as neighbouring states like Orissa (now Odisha) and Bihar.

The Dandakaranya Project and Saibal Kumar Gupta

West Bengal’s incapacity to rehabilitate thousands of Namasudra and Poundra-Kshatriya refugees was openly discussed in official circles particularly since these agriculturalist refugees would require arable lands for resettlement. This led to a major change in West Bengal’s relief policies; classification of refugees was now done with a priority on occupations, undoubtedly an enormous task. This idea was stressed by the then Rehabilitation Minister in the West Bengal Cabinet, Renuka Ray, in a 1958 article titled “Rehabilitation of Displaced Persons”:

With the increasing influx, by 1954, it was found that it was no longer possible to fit in the new comers [because they] have come to a state whose economy has suffered even before partition as a consequence of a major famine in 1943 and the impact of the war and turmoil that took place on the eve of Independence. (Ray, 1957–1967: 2)

The Dandakaranya Project took shape in early 1956 to resettle the East Pakistani SC refugees outside West Bengal. Dandakaranya, the “dark forest” of the epic Ramayana and the abode of the demon Dandak, was an isolated area that received uneven rainfall, with a self-sustaining tribal population and inaccessible hilly terrain. It was not the ideal choice to resettle farmers who had once cultivated a riverine land with surplus rainfall, but the area’s low population density made it an advantageous refugee rehabilitation site. On July 1958, at the Rehabilitation Ministers’ Conference it was decided that displaced families would start leaving for Dandakaranya from January the following year. ⁶ As opposition by various Left parties to the resettlement plans continued, the government decided to give the refugees the option of either going to Dandakaranya or leaving the currently occupied government-aided camps after accepting dole for a period of three months. Meanwhile, the rehabilitation work for Dandakaranya was expedited and the first batch of Namasudra refugees was transported from camps in West Bengal to Raipur in Madhya Pradesh, central India. From Raipur they were taken to transit camps in Mana and Kurud, and then to worksite camps where the refugees worked on land reclamation projects and road building. From these camps they were finally brought to the newly set up villages for permanent settlement.

Saibal Kumar Gupta was appointed the chairman of the Dandakaranya Development Authority to oversee the project and he served in that post from 1962 to 1964. In a section titled “Proshongo Dandakaranya” (About Dandakaranya) in his memoir Kichu Smriti, Kichu Katha (Some Memories and Words; 1994), he discusses the plight of Dalit refugees even before the start of their journey to a faraway campsite. Gupta’s official assessments of the rehabilitation processes in Dandakaranya were published in a series of essays in Economic Weekly in January 1965 after his resignation, and later compiled into a book, Dandakaranya: A Survey of Rehabilitation (1999). Both are seminal works on the Dandakaranya rehabilitation project, the largest of its nature in post-Partition India. This scheme has never seen a systematic investigation by historians or social scientists though it remains central to an understanding of the social, economic, and political journey of Partition’s Dalit refugees in West Bengal. Gupta’s writings on Dandakaranya contain, to date, one of the few official accounts of why the project, gigantic in scope and ambition, failed to take off. They have enormous value, therefore, especially because of his dual role as eyewitness and as official who steered the project in its initial years. Gupta begins the Dandakaranya section of his memoir by stating how the Dalit refugees who entered the state were given short shrift:

Right at the beginning we must take the case of West Bengal. This state is overpopulated and there is hardly any space for further increase. Whether it is agriculture or industry, it is impossible to find means of livelihood here: we can understand the truth of this, if not wholly, at least partially. But the way people, who had crossed the border, were packed into trains without giving them a moment’s respite and sent to Dandakaranya was insupportable. […] The imaginary picture of Dandakaranya that was held up in front of these people made many of them think that Dandakaranya was a place of “milk and honey”: almost a paradise on earth. (1994: 123)

In the series of memory narratives that form Kichu Smriti, Kichu Katha, loosely bound together with descriptions of the project as well as his own evaluation as it unfolded on the ground, Gupta investigates a rehabilitation plan that was hurriedly conceived and even more hurriedly executed. He describes the families that lived in camps being packed into trains, often without essential aids, and sent to the transit camp at Mana:

It is difficult to ascertain a list of all the confusion that was created by the over eagerness to send the family receiving dole within twenty-four hours if possible to a place outside [West] Bengal. The huge exercise meant that names, professions, age were not compiled properly, there were mistakes in the counting of family members and in many cases it was not ascertained if the family members had been separated from each other. […] The promise to supply essential items like clothes and utensils before the journey often remained unfulfilled and later it was impossible to correct such mistakes. (1994: 124)

Gupta’s text is explicitly critical about the chaos in campsites resulting from governmental apathy and a lack of preparedness to address the actual physical well-being of the Dalit refugees in Dandakaranya — a potent mix that doomed the project to failure even before it could take off:

Through newspaper reports, it is now common knowledge that a huge population arrived in Mana and hundreds of refugee families faced indescribable hardships [in Dandakaranya]. At first they were accommodated in cement buildings; later tents and open spaces were used as tin-roofed huts were quickly assembled to house the refugees. In large tents, four families lived side by side; sometimes where the space was just enough for one, more than two or three families lived squashed together. There was no privacy, no space for intimacy, the same well served water to both men and women. […] Water was scarce and people defecated anywhere. Cholera turned into an epidemic and it took more than three months to control the situation; meanwhile, children and old people died in large numbers, and as the summer heat rose, one by one, people began to abandon the refugee camps. This number soon climbed steadily. (1994: 125)

As Gupta’s writings testify, initially it was proposed that the project would encompass 80,000 square miles comprising of contiguous districts culled from the states of Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, and Andhra Pradesh. However, public discourse around the resettlement of Bengali refugees in this area and its possible political and economic fallout could have been responsible for the states becoming wary of the project. Andhra Pradesh refused to part with the promised swathe of fertile land along the Godavari river. The areas that finally remained within the project’s scope were Orissa’s Malkangiri, Koraput and Kalahandi, and the Bastar region of Madhya Pradesh. With this, the total available zone was recalculated to be 30,000 square miles, of which a large portion of the terrain was hilly with dense forest cover (Gupta, 1994: 136–137). The subsequent slow pace of clearing the land to establish roads and refugee settlements meant that there was a great distance between each habitation with little connectivity between them. The scanty rainfall of the area and the lack of irrigation facilities added to the sluggish start to agricultural rehabilitation. It was also apparent that the refugees had to “make do with the worst lands, hitherto regarded as uncultivable” (Gupta, 1999: 18). Writing about the project’s failure as a result of the absence of political and bureaucratic will in Dandakaranya: A Survey of Rehabilitation, a text that he compiled later, Gupta asserts:

The development of Dandakaranya was undertaken to solve an almost intractable human problem — the rehabilitation of a large number of refugees who were uprooted from their homeland in East Pakistan, victims of a political decision to divide the country in which they were not consulted. […] Dandakaranya was expected to provide a home for the residuary refugee population in camps or elsewhere for whom there was supposed to be no more room in West Bengal. More than twenty-two crores of rupees have already been spent and further expenditures are in the offing, but barely 7,000 families have been given rehabilitation of a sort in the course of five or six years. What is the end result of all this expenditure of time and money? What are the prospects? It is time that a proper assessment was made and people saw Dandakaranya without any blinkers. (1999: 11)

The idea behind the Dandakaranya Project had been to give a new start to the displaced refugees who would run cooperatives and better manage their resources and lives. It was believed that this would send a message to the rest of the country as the refugees would, in the long run, bring about a society free from social and caste inequalities. Alok Kumar Ghosh in his introduction to Gupta’s 1999 book expands this theme:

The ideas of [the] authority about rehabilitation of the refugees were very conservative. It was due to their lack of courage for new experiments that they lost Dandakaranya a golden opportunity of developing [agricultural] cooperatives. Here at Dandakaranya everything was being built up from […] scratch. Every family was given equal facilities in land and other things. Here they were away from the old societies, split by class and caste conflicts based on differences of property and social status, where intense jealousy in social life made functioning of cooperatives almost impossible. So at Dandakaranya, the experiment in building up a new outlook could not be made. If successful, it could carry a new message to the entire country. But it was a false hope. (Gupta, 8)

Dandakaranya had other problems that were endemic to the project. The infrastructure, promised publicly by the Indian government, failed to materialize. Electricity was largely unavailable in many of the settlements and there was often an acute shortage of potable water. The lack of medical infrastructure and poor living conditions led to frequent outbreaks of diseases with high death rates that disconcerted the refugees. Dandakaranya, the mythological dark forest to which Rama had been exiled, appeared to the new settlers less as a land of “milk and honey” and more of a place of banishment (Sengupta, 2011: 104–107).

Where do we go from here?

In his introduction to Dandakaranya: A Survey of Rehabilitation, Alok Kumar Ghosh writes: “The history of independent India, to a large extent, is the history of partition. Dandakaranya, a direct consequence of the phenomenon, is today both a history and a polemic” (quoted in Gupta, 1999: 9–10). This idea underlines the contention that the events of 1947 do not simply imply the territorial, religious, and political separation of Hindus and Muslims with involuntary evictions and migration of people. Instead, India’s Partition must further be assessed to understand the often neglected or obscure resettlement/rehabilitation issues it brought about — of journeys done and redone, of forced exiles and false arrivals, of separations and belonging — whose after-effects are felt in contemporary political and social lives even today. In West Bengal, particularly, the dispossession of lower castes and marginalized communities have played a major role in the state’s political existence even when, for years, caste had been discounted as an important issue in the bhadralok public sphere. It can now be clearly understood that the united electoral power of the refugees in West Bengal that had ushered in the long rule of the Left Front government in the decades following the Partition had only swept aside the marginalization and disenfranchisement of the Dalit refugees (Chakraborty, 1997: 140–179). For a large number of such families who deserted Dandakaranya and returned to the state of West Bengal, the Partition meant a different experiential and affective reality, bringing about changes that were the foundation of long-term practices of citizenship, belonging, and memory. Every member of the displaced Dalit families from East Pakistan had their own Partition experience, and their life stories as well as memories often played out dimensions of smaller partitions such as continual migrations and continued separations from family members. These affective experiences of pain, trauma, and nostalgia remain unarticulated in India’s Partition history. In the decades after 1947, Dalit migrants to West Bengal arrived when rehabilitation projects were slowly winding down. Their numerical strength, perceived as electoral capital by many political parties, somehow failed to leverage concrete social and economic gains as thousands of lower-caste refugees were pushed out of the state. This further displacement of a whole people, cutting across gender and age, followed by resettlement in a new place, forms one of the important social and cultural realities that can be perceived in the post-Partition years in West Bengal. Compelled to leave their homes in East Bengal and then persuaded or threatened to leave for a refugee site far away from everything familiar was a recurring reality for many Dalit families in the 1950s and 1960s (Byapari, 2018: 25–39). Even if it is assumed, for the sake of argument, that the government aid received was adequate for resettlement, the questions that remain are many. How did the refugees manage to sustain themselves in sites that were marginally better than disused tracts of land? Did the women of the family take up an equal burden of economic activities as the men? What befell the fate of school-going children? Did the elderly contribute to the family’s survival? All these questions and more remain deferred because there is no realistic answer documented in historical archives. The only way to glean some understanding is to look into texts like those by Gupta that share a “profound disquiet” about the state of things in Dandakaranya because “human distress on a large scale is much too serious a matter to be passed over in silence either to feed official complacency or to save reputations” (1999: 12). ⁷

Memoir and history nourish each other. Both are, in particular ways, and with different objectives, dependent on imagination and remembering. This intimacy is revealed in Gupta’s historically embedded autobiography, Kichu Smriti Kichu Katha, where the author is both the narrator and a witness to his times. His memoir thus becomes a palpable form of historical testimony as it intertwines personal and professional experiences with political and cultural contexts. Both his texts on Dandakaranya are a culmination of the application of varied lenses and disciplinary methods. Gupta assesses the demographic and humanitarian consequences of the Partition on displaced families based on official data, government reports, evaluation of the conditions of the refugee settlers, and extensive personal interaction with the new residents over many months: in journalistic terms, he can be called a whistle-blower. While his memoir is more of a remembrance of events, the compilation of essays is expository: it garners official reports and his own knowledge to paint the true, bleak picture of the project, and lays bare facts and figures hidden from public sight that belie our political and moral complacency about doing “right” by the deprived and marginalized. The two texts differ epistemologically: one is based on memory and the other on recorded facts. Yet both serve to focus on an important aim, that is, to highlight the bitter realities of a rehabilitation project which, instead of embracing “all aspects of life”, was used “in the narrower sense of economic rehabilitation” (1999: 12). In both the narratives, Gupta is present in his alert, attentive avatar: he meticulously records the psychological and moral fallout of deprivation and pauperization that he notices among the refugees in Dandakaranya. He exhorts the government to undertake economic rehabilitation because “economic deprivation is closely linked to the poverty of the soul” (Gupta, 1994: 141). The two texts also use similar narrative strategies where the personal and the public seamlessly merge into each other. For instance, Gupta states that a discussion of the agricultural practices of the refugee families (of which he had first-hand knowledge) is to be juxtaposed with official statistics (1994: 143) for a fuller understanding of the issues at hand. This literary strategy of merging the official and the quotidian brings to both the texts a cumulative sense of ethical urgency that is overwhelming. However, even though Gupta is deeply committed to making the Dandakaranya Project successful and is enormously sensitive to the plight of the refugee families, his texts contain a silence that is symptomatic of the erasure evident in public memories of the Partition’s Dalit refugees. In his assessment, Gupta is concerned more with class than caste: in fact, he hardly ever mentions the lower-caste status of the refugees in Dandakaranya even though he stresses their differing livelihoods. He makes an impassioned plea to treat the refugees with dignity and asserts their right to be rehabilitated not as victims, but as agents of their own lives. However, there is no direct reference to the fact that it is the nature of the project, aimed at rehabilitating lower-caste refugees, that made it so blatantly unique. He uses the euphemism “ordinary folk” (“sadharonlok” in the original Bangla) to gesture at their caste status and pinpoints a larger malaise of social indifference to their plight, both as people and as refugees:

They are ordinary folk, and refugees on top of that: who is bothered with their sorrow and happiness? Why do we see this deep-seated ignorance? Why this indifference? They are also Bengalis like us. They speak with a thick accent, but they speak the same language. One reason is that if someone remains hidden from our sight they also disappear from our minds. (1994: 130)

Gupta’s writings present a wholly human perspective on aspects of rehabilitation and resettlement carried out on a gigantic scale in independent India. The new nation’s ideological leaning towards a Nehruvian socialist welfare state must have influenced many officials like Gupta, and we can understand the enormity of the task that many like him continued to carry on against great odds to rebuild the country. Yet the silencing of caste, at least in his published writings, creates an aporia in his narratives that is deeply symptomatic of the discourse of rehabilitation in India. The Dandakaranya Project played out exactly the indices of caste oppression common even in contemporary times: with no access to drinking water, medicine, livelihood, and education, the Dalit families were in a sense truly “banished” to the dark forests, half forgotten by the state and erased by society. In a newly independent India where equality was an enshrined principle of the constitution, the pervasive inequalities of caste had profound ramifications in the official policies of resettlement and rehabilitation. What happened in Dandakaranya has significant contemporary resonance today. Questions relating to citizenship, identity, and belonging that are enmeshed with caste keep the Dalit experiences in Dandakaranya politically charged even so many years after the division of their homeland. ⁸