This article seeks to recover the experience and agency of refugee women during the process of rehabilitation after Partition, focusing on technical training.2 It explores the ideas that underpinned the process of rehabilitating refugee women in the immediate years following the Partition of India in August 1947, within the Bombay state.

This article offers an explanation for the defeat of Jogendranath Mandal and the Scheduled Castes Federation in the context of partition-era Bengal. Departing from analyses of Scheduled Caste integration, it explores the Federation’s efforts at creating an independent political platform through a strategic alliance with the Muslim League. To this end, it traces Mandal’s and the Federation’s trajectory through the following key moments: the anti-Poona Pact day and Day of Direct Action, the 1946 election, Dr B.R.

In 2005 Rev. Michael Roden, the vicar at Church of England church of St Mary’s in Hitchin (a small town about 30 miles north of London) was invited to India to give a series of sermons to Indian Church of England congregations. He was struck during his visit by the scars in Indian society that he thought were the remnants of Partition’s aftermath. His visit set him thinking about the ways in which Partition has shaped British as well as Indian and Pakistani society, and about how little people in the UK know about the calamitous results of British policy at the time of decolonization.

Partition and post-colonial migrations—sometimes voluntary, often forced— have created borders in South Asia that serve to oppress rather than protect. Migrants and refugees feel that their real homes lie beyond the borders, and liberation struggles continue the quest for freedoms that have proved to be elusive for many. States scapegoat refugees as “outsiders” for their own ends, justifying the denial of their rights, while academic discourse on refugees represents them either as victims or as terrorists.

There are around one lakh refugees residing in India, and close to 25,000 living in
Delhi itself. Due to various human rights abuses, severe restrictions on basic
freedoms and widespread poverty within the States of Afghanistan, Burma and
Tibet, a large number of population of these countries have fled to neighbouring
countries in quest for protection and survival. Some 9,000 Afghans; 4,200 ChinBurmese and; 6,000 Tibetans are currently living in uncertain conditions and are
dependant on other agencies to protect them.

This paper tries to lay bare the intertwined histories of rehabilitation of the refugees from East
Pakistan and the development of the city of Calcutta in the initial decades after the partition of
British India. Calcutta has attracted people from outside from its inception. Calcutta of the late eighteenth century has been described as a ‘contact zone’, where people from various fields and
countries, of varied descent, came to the city with their specific knowledge practices.1
With the

The partition of the Indian Subcontinent 70 years ago, when the British rule ended in August 1947, has generated much interest in the American and British press and television recently. Surprisingly, there has not been any significant discussion on the matter in Bangladesh.