In 1947, a new international border cut through the deltaic plains of Bengal. A consequence of India's partition along religious lines, Radcliffe's line divided Bengal—the largest and most populous province of British India—between India and Pakistan. Over the next two decades, between twelve and thirteen million Hindus and Muslims crossed that border between East and West Bengal as refugees, looking to rebuild their lives in the “right” nation. Millions of others instead stayed where they were as uneasy minorities, but among them countless numbers were internally displaced.
In 1971, civil war broke out in East Bengal when Bengali nationalists fought Pakistan's army in one of the most brutal conflicts in recent times, and another ten million people fled to India. When the war ended many were able to return home,Footnote 1 but a second wave of violence then swept through what was now the independent nation of Bangladesh. This time its target was Urdu-speaking “Biharis,”Footnote 2 most of them partition refugees, who were believed to have collaborated with the Pakistani regime the war had overthrown. Thousands of them died in grisly reprisals against their community. A few were able to escape abroad, and most of those who remained inside Bangladesh were internally displaced. To this day, many live in the makeshift camps set up by international agencies after the 1971 war.Footnote 3
Two surges of nation-making thus tore through the fabric of Bengal in the latter half of the twentieth century, generating some of the largest migrations in recorded history. One notable feature of these upheavals was that the overwhelming majority of the refugees they produced have remained within the region. Most of those that crossed international borders went just across the Radcliffe line to neighboring cities, towns, and hamlets in the other part of Bengal; only between 1 and 2 percent migrated to the West in this period, most of them to Britain.
More arresting are the patterns of movement and settlement in this diaspora. The largest numbers of the post-partition Muslim migrants in Bengal, who are the focus of this study, crossed no international border and remained inside the Indian province of West Bengal. Many have been internally displaced and ghettoized.Footnote 4 A considerable number gravitated close to the new border that divides India from Pakistan/Bangladesh (see Map 1).Footnote 5 Smaller but nonetheless significant numbers of Muslims, perhaps three to four million, have migrated to East Pakistan since 1947.Footnote 6 Of these, maybe half moved to urban centers, but only to some specific towns and they shunned others.Footnote 7 Most of the rest resettled in clusters on the Pakistan side of the mainly rural border. In consequence, the border area—at 4095 kilometers one of the world's longest borders—has become a 100 kilometer-wide zone populated mainly by displacees and refugees (see Map 2).
Map 1 Migration of Muslims from West Bengal, Bihar, and Assam to East Pakistan, 1946–1970.
Map 2 Internal displacement of Muslims in West Bengal, India.
Prima facie, then, the Bengal diaspora appears to lend powerful support to Aristide Zolberg's two most significant claims: first, that “nation-making is a refugee generating process,”Footnote 8 and second, that the vast majority of the world's refugees since the Second World War has stayed on within their regions of origin within the developing world, with only a tiny minority migrating to the countries of the industrialized West.Footnote 9 Zolberg also observed that most of the world's refugees have remained close to the borders of their countries of origin. In this respect too, Bengali migrations exemplify these larger global patterns.
This essay, a product of an inter-disciplinary and international team research project on migration in Bengal since 1947, explores why the Bengal diaspora followed these patterns. It draws on oral testimony gathered from 226 migrants in different settings in India, Bangladesh, and Britain (see Table 1).Footnote 10 I will suggest why some Bengalis crossed borders and others did not; why most moved short distances within the delta; why so many huddled in the long shadows of the new national borders; and why so few embarked on a passage to faraway places in the West. I will explore the complex calculations that migrants made about whether and when to leave and where to go. By uncovering the subtle interplay between migrants’ agency and structures of coercion, and between histories of mobility and of attachment, in the shaping of their choices, we can illuminate how the recurrent patterns identified by Zolberg were produced in a regional context of critical but unexplored significance.Footnote 11
But my aim is not simply to reinforce Zolberg's thesis. His focus is upon refugees who have crossed international borders, and that obscures other fascinating and important patterns, including those of internal displacements within new nation-states. One question that refugee studies have not adequately addressed is why some stay on while others flee—we need to understand the inertia of those who would or could not move during great upheavals. Hence this study is as concerned with stasis as it is with movement. It follows that one imperative of this essay is better to understand the nature of the brakes upon “cumulative causation” in the migration process. In a brilliant and influential essay published in 1990, Douglas Massey argued that a dynamic interplay between processes gives migration, particularly across borders, “a strong internal momentum.”Footnote 12 Massey placed migrant networks at the heart of the process of cumulative causation, since they minimized the risks and maximized the advantages associated with migration. Yet by uncovering the forces of inertia that persuade many people to stay where they are even when they are in danger, and by highlighting the fragility of some networks, I will suggest that this persuasive model needs to be tested and qualified.
Another key question I will address is the impact that new national borders have on older forms of mobility in this region. I draw on historical research to tease out the continuing interconnections between historic patterns and micro-mobilities and more recent regional, national, international, and trans-oceanic migrations.Footnote 13 In doing so, I challenge the assumption that “forced migrations” caused by political upheavals such as partition are fundamentally different phenomena from the “economic migrations” driven by the demands of labor markets.
For these reasons, the unit of analysis is a region, the Bengal delta, which possessed a complex history of internal and trans-oceanic migration long before it was divided.Footnote 14 After 1947, neither government in divided Bengal took pro-active steps to rehabilitate refugees, and hence this region (unlike the Punjab, where government intervened vigorously in rehabilitationFootnote 15) is an ideal context to study the agency of migrants as they sought to rehabilitate themselves.
The migrants whose stories form the basis of this study are without exception Muslims. There are sound reasons for this focus. Almost all Bengalis who migrated to the United Kingdom after partition were Muslims and, given that our purpose is to connect and compare international, regional, and local mobilities, a focus on Muslims enables secure comparisons to be made. Nevertheless, the conclusions are relevant for non-Muslims as well, since Bengali Hindu migration during the same period followed an almost identical pattern.Footnote 16
In what follows I will argue that the delta's migrants tended to have very particular bundles of assets, competences, or dispositions, which are described, after Bourdieu,Footnote 17 as “mobility capital.” Bengal's migrant communities were seen to display distinctive characteristics relative to the general population. These included relatively high levels of literacy or other portable skills (in many cases artisanship and hereditary craftsmanship) and some transferable assets. Migrants tended to be youthful, able-bodied, and healthy, and their numbers included more men than women. All our migrants proved to have dense networks of contacts garnered through, and obligations earned by, personal histories of mobility. By contrast, those who stayed behind tended to lack some or all of these attributes, or were held back by complex ties or countervailing obligations. Furthermore, we will see that the makeup of a migrant's particular bundle of mobility capital influenced the trajectory of his or her movement. People with similar assets and competences tended to head toward similar destinations. Choices that puzzled observers at the time prove intelligible when viewed from this analytical perspective.
“NATIONAL” MOBILITY: MIGRATION TO URBAN CENTERS IN THE NEW NATION-STATE
Commenting on the first (1951) census of independent Pakistan, the census commissioner of East Bengal, like his counterpart in West Bengal,Footnote 18 was baffled by the sheer numbers in which refugees flocked to a few particular towns. These included Dhaka, the new capital of East Pakistan, as well as Dinajpur, Bogra, and Rajshahi, all administrative hubs close to the new border with India.Footnote 19 The railway townships of Syedpur and Parbatipur to the north were also favorite destinations, as to a lesser extent was Chittagong, a large and growing port city in eastern Bengal (see Map 1).
The commissioner might have been less mystified if he had considered the fact that, long before partition, these towns had been magnets for migrants. Since the late nineteenth century, “government bahadur,” the British Raj in India, had been not only the country's biggest employer but also a powerful motor driving the wheels of Indian mobility. The public services and their specialist branches had been manned at their lower levels entirely by Indians, as were the railways and the army. Public servants had typically circulated between Calcutta and the district towns in different “postings.” For many decades, East Bengal's subdivisional headquarters, towns that included Dhaka, Dinajpur, Bogra, and Rajshahi, had attracted white-collar migrants.Footnote 20 In the early twentieth century, railways were extended into eastern Bengal and Assam, chiefly to transport tea to the ports at Calcutta and Chittagong, and thousands of men were recruited from North India, particularly from Bihar, to build them.Footnote 21 Large railway townships sprang up around the huge locomotive workshops at Syedpur and Parbatipur.Footnote 22 So these were not just any towns: they were towns that before partition had drawn large numbers of migrants from the very regions that produced refugees after it.
The migrants who flocked to these towns prove to have had distinctive profiles. Before partition, they had been overwhelmingly city-dwellers or townsfolk. Of those who headed to Dhaka, most were well educated, some were exceptionally qualified, and a significant number had worked for government as part of the north Indian Urdu-speaking service elite, about whom so much has been written.Footnote 23 After partition, every government employee was offered the choice of serving either in India or in Pakistan, and most Muslims opted for Pakistan.Footnote 24
It is a mistake to perceive this choice as having been wholly “free,” however. The Calcutta killings in August 1946,Footnote 25 and particularly the communal violence in Bihar in October and November that year,Footnote 26 had already driven thousands of Muslims from their homes, and many who had survived these horrors had lost faith in the capacity of Hindu-dominated governments to protect them. Those reluctant to move—riots notwithstanding—were “encouraged” to do so by threats, often quite naked, from Hindu vigilantes,Footnote 27 and also by more insidious persuasions from the Indian government.Footnote 28 So these Muslim “optees,” as they were known in the bureaucratic jargon of the time,Footnote 29 faced subtle and not-so-subtle pressures to migrate to Pakistan. It also quickly became apparent that there were openings for them in East Bengal. In the first year after partition, over a million upper- and middle-class (bhadralok or “genteel”) Hindus had quit East Bengal for India.Footnote 30 In consequence, the government of East Pakistan faced a formidable challenge in trying to fill key posts in the administration vacated by Hindu officials. This gave educated Muslims many employment opportunities in the new state. And since Dhaka, the new capital of the state, was where most of these jobs were, that was where most of these highly educated migrants headed. These were people who had traditionally worked for the state, and the nation-state now became the chief facilitator of their mobility. As with the millions of ashraf (elite) refugees who went to West Pakistan at this time, many of the migrants interviewed in the present study felt drawn to the project of building Pakistan, and to put their skills at its services.Footnote 31
The migrants to nearby district towns across the border also tended to have middle-class backgrounds. Their assets before partition typically included medium-sized land holdings, some modest educational qualifications, and a little gold and cash. Several previously had held posts in these parts of eastern Bengal during their service careers, and had friends, relatives, or contacts there who could help them to migrate.
Anisa Banu is a schoolteacher at Syedpur in her early thirties. Her family's story reflects the complex mix of imperatives that informed their emigration to this particular town: “Our family is originally from Mungher [Monghyr] in Bihar. My grandfather was a railway employee and we had relatives here in Syedpur. My father's family came here in 1946 just after there were riots in Bihar. We came to the largest rail factory in Eastern India. My grandfather said, ‘We're Pakistani and we're going to go to Pakistan.’” Anisa's grandfather had connections at many points along the Eastern Indian railways and had family in Syedpur, “the largest rail factory,” and so there were persuasive personal and pragmatic reasons why he decided to go to Syedpur (and nowhere else) when riots broke out in Bihar. But also palpable in Anisa's testimony is her grandfather's strong identification with the idea of Pakistan, and it would be a mistake to overlook this. It remains difficult for “Biharis” in today's Bangladesh to speak of their family histories as “loyal Pakistanis,” so that Anisa volunteered this information is poignant and revealing.
In the early 1950s, Pakistan, like India, embarked on development designed to build a “modern” nation,Footnote 32 and families like Anisa's tied their own futures to that project. Anisa's father went on to work as a senior technician at the Power Development Board. In a suburb of Dinajpur town, not far from Syedpur, which is populated mainly by refugees, Jinnahbhai (actual name), the middle-aged and educated head of a local NGO, explained, “The place we are in is a satellite town—an uposhahr—it has quite a few engineering and administrative offices. Every immigrant was given a small flat with an attached bathroom and kitchen. The sewage system, electrification, water supply was all very modern.…”
The refugee rehabilitation regime, as Uditi Sen has recently noted, was an arena in which the Indian state forged many crucial aspects of its practices of governance,Footnote 33 and Jinnahbhai's account suggests that something of that drive—to turn refugees into model citizens of a modern state—was at work in East Pakistan. For their part, many educated mohajirs (as refugees in Pakistan were known) appear to have embraced the development project with enthusiasm: the very fact that Jinnahbhai's family named him after the Quaid-i-Azam says much about the depth of its attachment to the idea of Pakistan.
But state patronage, while important, was not the only force driving this wave of migration into specific towns in East Pakistan. Twenty-six-year-old Mushirul Huq's story shows how a complex mix of connections forged in “British times,” kinship networks, and access to capital enabled a family to make their move. In 1947, Mushir's family moved from the Benares region of North India to Parbatipur, a small railway town close to Syedpur: “My maternal grandfather was an army officer [who came over] from Benaras.… [His family] set up a confectionary shop in Parbatipur [sometime after 1947].… My [maternal aunt's son] was Parbatipur's Chairman.… My paternal grandfather used to work in a train-making workshop or a ‘loco-set,’ and came from India to Parbatipur around 1947.… Before 1971 [when the civil war forced this ‘Bihari’ family to flee Parbatipur] my father used to work at the Municipality or City Corporation of Parbatipur … he used to read and write well.”
This family, which went on to become a leading family in the Bihari community in Parbatipur before 1971, had strong, preexisting links with both the army and the railways—two well-established vectors of mobility in the region—and had relatives well-connected in the municipal administration. These overlapping networks enabled them to move across the border, quickly establish themselves, and do well in their new setting. They also had enough capital to start a small business, assets typical of many other refugees who flocked to these border towns. Describing the suburb of Dinajpur where he lives, Jinnahbhai explained, “[This] is a place of migrants—especially of rich people, many from West Bengal: first and mainly from [West] Dinajpur [which remained in India], then Malda, then Birbhum and Calcutta; quite a few came from UP and Bihar too…. These people who came were rich; they did not necessarily ‘come with land’ but they bought cash and gold and started businesses here. Many got government assistance like loans and land to start factories because those who came from India had the know-how, since mainly the educated and the landed came.…”
Particularly revealing is Jinnahbhai's reference to know-how. He appears to be speaking not just of formal knowledge such as degrees and qualifications, but something more subtle and complex: worldly knowledge, about how to work the state, how to push for “loans and assistance,” how to get the licenses and permissions needed to set up small businesses, and a pragmatic understanding of how to deploy networks of kin, class, and caste to survive in a new place. Again, this echoes the adeptness of middle-class Hindu refugees in deploying all their connections to gain a foothold in their new setting, calling in familial and caste-based obligations as well as solidarities of class and region.Footnote 34
When pressed to explain what he meant about refugees “who came with land,” Jinnahbhai identified another trend, built around another kind of competence. This was particularly marked among refugees settled in small border towns. Many heads of migrating families were local magnates who had made deals to swap land with Hindus migrating in the other direction. Musa Ali, a young man of twenty-three who now works for a local association in Rampur, explains that his father, together with six of his brothers, migrated to East Pakistan in 1971. Musa's father was scion of a wealthy family in Malda in northwest Bengal that had owned 400 bighas, or over 100 acres, a sizeable amount in land-hungry Bengal. He had exchanged property with a local Hindu he knew who owned an estate of a similar size and who was anxious to move from East Pakistan to India during the civil war: “They came and lived with Ossini babu—he was a [Hindu] joddar [a “jotedar,” or petty landlord] who had 400 bighas of land.… We also owned 400 bighas of land in India (in Kaliaganj) so we got his land … and he got ours.… We also exchanged our leases (dalils).”
Faruq Hussain, aged sixty-seven, now the modestly prosperous owner of a rice-husking mill, came over in the same way: “In our village [in South Dinajpur] we exchanged land with [a Hindu landholder] who used to live in Parameshpur. They had about the same amount of land as us—45 bighas.… We came over because … we were being continually harassed. [The Hindus] never let us celebrate qurbani (animal sacrifice) … they used to play the drums loudly during namaaz (daily prayer) time and if we ever complained they would beat us up.”Footnote 35
The success of such deals depended critically on trust between the two parties to the exchange, trust which, in times of such extreme hostility between Hindus and Muslims, was itself a remarkable phenomenon. Suraiyya Begum's father, who had been President of the Union BoardFootnote 36 in Itahar in West Dinajpur, and who came over in 1956 after exchanging 450 bighas of land with Hindu landowners, “decided to settle in Borobondor because he had many Hindu friends and acquaintances here. It was one of my father's Hindu friends—a high court judge—who asked him to settle here. It was he who brought [my father] to his house and oversaw everything.” Migrants who were able to make such land exchanges either knew each other well, as did Suraiyya Begum's father and his friend, or were known for their probity. Their wealth was reinforced by robust local networks and reputations as “men of honor.” Such attributes were as crucial as their riches and formal qualifications were in enabling their migratory ventures, particularly when this involved exchanges of property where claims to title could not be legally enforced if trust was breached.
Thus most Muslims who migrated to urban centers and small towns in East Pakistan had rich and complex bundles of assets and competences. They possessed the goods of education, land, cash, and gold in varying amounts, as well as local standing, networks of contacts, and the know-how to deploy these assets to make their migrations viable. Indeed, they seem also ideal candidates for a move to Britain, where post-war shortages created a labor market for skilled manpower from the empire, and where pay and benefits were much higher than in the delta. But well-to-do Bengalis and Biharis seem not to have even considered this option; they chose instead to go to East Pakistan.
“Anonymous” is a landholder in his late fifties, from a modestly landed and literate family background, who left kinsfolk in India and was reluctant to reveal his name. When pressed to explain why his family decided to move to Pakistan, he was expansive about his own family's expectations in migrating to the new nation:
My forefathers decided to come here because this was Pakistan. The main fact was that Hindustan [India] was for Hindus and Pakistan was for Muslims. Around 1965 some Muslims from our village exchanged land and hearth [with Hindus crossing in the opposite direction] to come over to this part…. I was a student then, in class 8…. After putting into context the bleak future that we, as young men, would face in India, we came over. We will be able to claim our rights in Pakistan, we thought…. I am at peace here. I can travel all over Bangladesh and I don't feel afraid. I can also progress…. I can talk to our politicians, to the military—I feel I can actually go up to them and talk to them and that they will protect me if I ask them.'
His words reflect one of our study's most unexpected findings, namely the strength of the sense of entitlement among these migrants to the goods of national citizenship in Pakistan, and the extent to which this influenced their decision to migrate. A surprisingly large number of our interviewees, even those from small villages, had been actively involved in politics before partition, and they migrated not only because they wanted to place their skills at the service of “their” new nation but also because they believed they had a better chance of regaining their standing in a country that was “for Muslims.” Suraiyya's story put this into sharp focus: “My parents came in 1956.… My father was a landowner in Itahar; he was the Union President of Itahar.… We came over because after the country's division my father thought we would be better off in a Muslim country.… After coming here he was selected ward chairman because he was so influential. The government gave him that position. Later my elder brother was the chairman of the municipality for two years.”
Nafissa Begum's father was a highly educated schoolmaster with a Masters degree in history and an excellent command of English. He migrated after being passed over several times for promotions given to less-qualified Hindus: “He repeatedly asked his colleagues why he had not been promoted and he slowly understood that this was because he was Muslim. He then realized the future would be bleak for us [his children], that we wouldn't stand a chance as equals even if we were meritorious and did well at school, and so he decided to migrate to Pakistan…. This event happened in the 1950s, after which he resigned. We knew that in high posts in India the percentage of Muslims is practically zero.” In Nafissa's testimony we see just how much it rankled middle-class Muslims in West Bengal to see local Hindus who were “beneath” them being unjustly promoted over them. For many, it was this bitterness more than any simple cost-benefit calculation that drove them to migrate to Pakistan with their families. Their accounts lend support to Stark and Taylor's findings about the powerful role that a sense of relative deprivation plays in encouraging individuals and families to migrate.Footnote 37
Another recurring and related theme in these migrants' stories is an obsession with their dwindling status at “home.” Thus Abdul Rahim, whose landed family had come over in 1950, said that his “grandfather's elder brother … was the village headman (pradhan) but [after partition] nobody cared whether he was headman or not.” This theme also comes through in the determination these families demonstrated, when they migrated, to exchange like for like, whether in terms of their jobs, landholdings, or even specificities of bricks and mortar. Suraiyya Begum's father did not leave India immediately in 1947; he waited until he had finished the complex business of exchanging all his land, “so that he could initially have a foot in both sides whilst he moved his assets across,” and he moved only after he had built in Dinajpur a house of the same style and quality as that which he was leaving behind. Nafissa's father, the schoolteacher, waited patiently “for a good opportunity to present itself in relation to the selling of his land,” which he exchanged “with that of a Hindu gentleman.” Because that gentleman's house was of an inferior quality (“made of mud,” while his own house was a pucca, or brick structure), he made sure that he was compensated by an extra 10 bighas of land in the transaction.
This context of middle-class anxieties about the loss of status and the drive to regain it is key to understanding why so many Muslims from Bengal and Bihar chose to migrate to East Pakistan rather than to Britain, where few believed that they would be adequately “respected” or “recognized.” Only in Pakistan could they hope to achieve the dignity of full citizenship, and assuage their deep and painful sense of personal and communal dishonor. Of course it helped that there were vacancies they could fill in Pakistan, but that so many left several years after partition indicates that it was not just the immediate opportunities for advancement that drove them. These stories from the delta bear out Todaro's insight that in less-developed countries labor migration is driven less by wage differentials than by the probability of finding employment.Footnote 38 But they also suggest a rider, that migrants are influenced by expectations of finding employment commensurate with their standing, and by aspirations of upward mobility for their children. These less tangible benefits must be taken into account for a full understanding of why migrants leave home for other lands.
Blue-collar workers make up a large segment of the migrant populations in these towns and cities of East Pakistan. Many came from artisan communities and possessed skills in demand in the new “national” industries of Pakistan. They also had contacts—friends, relatives, and former colleagues—who helped them to relocate. Several had worked in the railways before partition, and the railways were the critical pathways along which they now moved.
Mohammad Shaffiquddin's story captures the particular mix of skills and connections that made this kind of mobility possible. He is a “Bihari,” who lives in Syedpur. Known locally as “Shaffiq Chacha” (Uncle Shaffiq), he is now in his seventies: “I was born in 1935 and came here on the 17th of August 1947 with my maternal uncle. He used to work at the rail workshop of Jamalpur…. [After he came over] he worked in a foundry workshop of the railways.… I used to be a rail power operator—my first port of call was Khulna, which I joined in 1963. After that I was transferred to Santahar—it used to be a big junction—again as a rail power [electricity] operator. From there I was posted to Pakshi Rail Office and then to Amnura, then to TNG Ghat in Gaibandha district, and from there in 1971 back to Santahar.” Indeed, it was the extensive and effective network of friendships and allegiances he had formed during the course of a peripatetic life on the railways that enabled Shaffiq Chacha—unlike the many Urdu-speakers who were killed at Santahar—to survive the horrors of 1971. During the riots, a former colleague gave him shelter, and later, when things had quieted down, helped him to get another railway job.
Another prominent group among the urban refugee population was mill hands, including many who were skilled weavers who had migrated to Calcutta from up country long before partition,Footnote 39 and then migrated again in the late 1940s and early 1950s, to East Pakistan, after anti-Muslim riots broke out in the mill districts of Calcutta and Howrah. In 1950, the Pakistan government established the East Pakistan Industrial Development Corporation, and during the 1950s and 1960s, seventy-four jute mills, thirty-six cotton mills, and ten sugar mills were established under its aegis, as were paper mills at Khulna, Karnafuli, and Paksi.Footnote 40 This created jobs for skilled weavers and mill hands in East Pakistan's rapidly growing industries. Under General Ayub Khan's regime (1958–1969), the Pakistani state began to invest in infrastructure and housing,Footnote 41 and skilled masons, plumbers, and carpenters were much in demand. Among the refugees we interviewed was Abdul Rasul, now of Chamra Godown Camp in Niyammatpur, who migrated from Bhagalpur in India to Parbatipur after partition. Abdul is “a carpenter, our whole gushti [lineage] is of carpenters.” Owais, originally of Shibpur in India, was a plumber with a sideline as a marriage-broker, a business through which he had forged contacts that facilitated his migration. During this period, Pakistan's army grew by leaps and bounds; and many of our respondents had relatives who were employed by the armed forces in various (though usually quite humble) capacities.
Most of these working-class migrants were employed by the Pakistani state in the railways or the army, or worked in state-backed private enterprises such as the jute and construction industries. Former railway workers are prominent among the group of “Bihari” people in Bangladesh who, since 1971, have described themselves as “Stranded Pakistanis” and have waged a campaign demanding “repatriation” to (west) Pakistan. They insist that they are Pakistan's “true” citizens, having migrated to East Bengal after 1947 in order to contribute to the building of the Muslim nation-state.Footnote 42 By contrast, the blue-collar migrants we interviewed made no such claims, and gave much more mundane accounts of their migration to the eastern wing of Pakistan. Their testimony suggests that they left India because partition and communal violence had rendered them physically insecure and economically vulnerable. They moved to Pakistan as refugees because they had contacts and connections forged “in British times,” through older forms of mobility, and because Pakistan appeared to offer them physical safety and some prospect of employment. They simply deployed old skills and old networks of mobility and adapted them to new circumstances. State formation and nation-building provided the context for their migration, but they appear to have been driven to move primarily by a pragmatic search for security and survival.
MIGRATION AND DISPLACEMENT IN THE RURAL BORDERLANDS
Radcliffe's border of 1947 cut through a landscape that was overwhelmingly rural. It passed through emerald paddy fields, dense thickets of bamboo and date palm, and forests of sal, across shallow fishponds and mangrove swamps, and along sluggish muddy rivers. Yet within a few decades of partition this bucolic setting was transformed in astonishing fashion and beyond recognition by dense settlements of migrants.Footnote 43 Today, refugees and the displaced cluster along both sides of its length; crowded villages of refugees jostle against the settlements of people who stayed and communities of the internally displaced.Footnote 44
Unlike the urban centers discussed above, before partition these agrarian tracts had hardly been magnets for migration, and in fact they tended to be zones of net emigration, exporting male migrants to other parts of the region.Footnote 45 In the last fifty years, though, they have been transformed into teeming zones of immigration, a fact that the authorities on both sides regard with bemusement and unease.Footnote 46
Since there have been few official enquiries or scholarly studies into this remarkable phenomenon, Annu Jalais, one of two research assistants on our project team, conducted over sixty interviews in villages in these borderland zones, both in West Bengal in India and in Bangladesh. Over fifteen months in 2007–2008, she crisscrossed the region, traveling dirt tracks on a motorcycle pillion, often the only motorized transport available in these parts.
One trend quickly became apparent from this extraordinary set of interviews. While almost all the migrants who cluster along Bangladesh's border with India are peasants, they tend to fall into two very distinct groups. The first is a large and very visible segment living particularly along the riverine border tracts in rural north Bengal, the so-called “Maldoiyas” or “Chapaiyyas,” a community of mobile agriculturists. They are professional practitioners of one of the oldest forms of migration in Bengal: reclaiming dried riverbeds and riverbanks (diyar: hence they are also known as diyarias). They also traditionally colonize for cultivation the new sandbanks and alluvial islands (chars) that are formed each year in the huge muddy rivers of the delta. This tradition of shifting cultivation and the colonization of new land has been practiced for many centuries in the Bengal delta and continued well into the twentieth.Footnote 47 Today, groups of Bengali cultivators, known collectively as bhatias, still specialize in colonizing and farming richly fertile tracts of land newly created or released by Bengal's wayward rivers.Footnote 48
A surprisingly large number of the borderland refugees turned out to be Chapaiyya peasants. They were especially prominent in the refugee villages in northern Bengal, where the river Ganges (known locally as the Padma) forms the border between the Indian district of Murshidabad and the Bangladeshi district of Rajshahi. One of these refugees is Ghazi, who is about forty-five years old and originally from Malda in India. He told his family's story:
As you must have realized, we are all [indicating the inhabitants of the villages in the area] from either of the two sides of the [river] Padma. The others have come from Murshidabad or Rajshahi. We have always been losing our land to the river; when that happens we move elsewhere. We were settled somewhere along the Padma, when we lost our lands [to the river] we settled in Murshidabad, from there we moved to Gangarampur, then Kaliaganj, and from there finally here in Ishwargram when we got khas land from the Pakistan government. We are all people from Chapai-Nawabgaj here.… We got this land only after we cleared this land and settled here.
In the course of the interview it transpired that the fertile land on which Ghazi and his fellow Chapaiyyas are now settled had previously belonged to Hindus who had left for India. It is also evident that they have done rather well: “This place is good. You know the proverb about Dinajpur? It has ‘paddy piled up high, sheds full of cows, ponds brimming with fish (gola bhora dhan; goyal bhora goru; pukur bhora machh).’ People in this district are much happier than those in other districts; everything grows easily.” His mother, Bibi Ruha, adds, “After 1947 we Indians came over. We were living in Chapai and losing our land to the river; then one of us got word that this place was a forest and that if we reclaimed it, it would belong to us.”
Here, then, is a group with a distinctive form of “mobility capital.” They belonged to a very specific and localized network through which information about available land traveled fast. They had no formal literacy, but clearly belonged to a particular kind of information community, and they also had much experience in moving quickly and grabbing and clearing new tracts of agricultural land. Traditionally, this group lived in light bamboo huts that could be easily disassembled and reassembled. As Ghazi put it: “Our houses are usually temporary ones, look at the walls here, they are just woven bamboo bark. We can pack up and leave at the drop of a hat, whereas locals have heavy-set mud houses.” Unlike most of the delta's Sunni Muslims, moreover, Chapaiyyas did not revere the graves of their ancestors and had few religious attachments to place. In consequence, after partition they could cross the border with relative ease, and were quick to capture much of the best land vacated by Hindus moving in the opposite direction. They were able to respond swiftly to the opportunities created by partition and have done well. Bibi Ruha's two brothers have both been on the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, a sign of the family's newfound, albeit modest, affluence.
Two further points should be noted about the Chappaiyya “refugees.” They appear to be remarkably free of ideological baggage committing them to any nation, be it Pakistan, India, or Bangladesh. It is revealing that Bibi Ruha described her community, settled in East Pakistan/Bangladesh since 1947, as “we Indians.” Ghazi's daughter is married to Niaz, whom he describes as “an Indian.” Niaz's brother came over to East Bengal after partition, but then returned to India after his land was “lost to the river.” They appear to be remarkably pragmatic about taking whatever land they were given by the Pakistan government, but showed themselves no less ready to leave it behind if better land turned up elsewhere in India. Secondly, it is plain that they have a lively sense of entitlement to any land that they have reclaimed from nature and cleared by their own labors, harking back to longstanding customary practice in the region.Footnote 49 The Pakistan government for its part appears to have yielded to their claims, giving post-facto sanction to their actions that violate the law of property as well as crucial agreements with India.Footnote 50
The second group of rural migrants is erstwhile smallholders clustering in the border zones, and they have been much less fortunate. Before partition, they tended to be settled agriculturists cultivating small plots they owned or leased from others. They did not migrate to Pakistan immediately after partition mainly because they had few elements of mobility capital—no contacts across the border, few portable skills, and few possessions they could sell. Such meager assets as they did possess were rooted in the locality: their diminutive land-holdings, seldom owned outright, and to which their titles to cultivate were often insecure, and local networks of creditors who loaned them funds to invest in seeds or to tide them over lean times. Most of them were tied to “home” by a complex combination of bonds: the insecurity of their tenure, local obligations, networks of debt, and deference to local creditors and landlords. These peasants tended to leave their homes only under conditions of extreme violence and intimidation, often when they literally had to flee for their lives. Nearly all of our interviewees in the South 24 Parganas/Khulna border areas shared this profile. They had fled across the border during the riots of 1950 and 1964.
In Tengrakhali, Jaafar Ali Faqir said that his family, together with fifty or sixty neighboring households, had left together in 1964 when incoming Hindu refugees “started burning down our houses and fields.” His neighbor, Billal Ali Chowdhury, said that his own family, together with “seven or eight other houses … came here when our houses started being attacked by people throwing bricks and our paddy fields were burned down.” Gulam Mohammad Saif Ali of Koikhali gave a more detailed account of the circumstances under which his family took flight across the border: “We were among about five hundred households that fled over to Bangladesh during the 1964 riots. We used to live in Kalitala in Shamsernagar, and my father was the anchal pradhan [headman] there. Eight of my family members were killed that night. Had the rest of us not left we would have all been killed.… It was a Saturday and we had gone to the weekly market (haat) … [where] someone told us there was a plan to kill my father that very night…. As soon as we arrived we pitched tents and waited for the night to end.” The land on which they happened to camp that night turned out to be a barren plot that had belonged to a Hindu landlord who fled in the opposite direction, to India. In due course, the government allotted each household 3 bighas (about an acre) of the same land on which to settle. However, life proved hard for them: “Nothing would grow on this land. We had been cultivators in India but here we couldn't cultivate anything [because] the soil was so saline, so we used to fish and work as laborers in other people's fields.”
In the context of late twentieth-century Bengal, it was typical that any “spare” land was spare precisely because it was uncultivable,Footnote 51 since any productive land vacated by emigrant Hindus had been quickly snapped up by locals or the likes of the Chapaiyyas. Asked why, on the night of the killings, they chose to run to Koikhali and not somewhere else, Saif Ali explained, “We had a relative there, and we used to visit him as we just had to cross the river.”
In Saif Ali's story we see clearly the factors that predisposed people like him not to move at all or to hold on where they were for as long as possible. The world they had inhabited as agriculturists was extremely circumscribed: their relatives lived close at hand, their daughters and sisters married into homes in neighboring villages, and their longest journeys had been to markets only a few miles away. The nearby weekly market was their connection to the outside world, and also their main source of information: it was at the Saturday market that Saif Alis's family got wind of the plans to attack his family, too late to save eight of his relatives. Such assets as they possessed—cultivation rights, potential creditors—were rooted in these localities and could not be transferred to new places. Even if they were in reasonable health, they had no skills other than as cultivators, and they could not easily turn to other work except manual labor. Their bundles of “mobility capital,” then, were almost non-existent. So it is hardly surprising to find that the indebted rural poor were deeply reluctant migrants, and that, as will be seen, many did not move.
STAYING ON: GHETTOIZATION AMONG “NATIONAL MINORITIES”
Some refugees who have moved into Bangladesh's agrarian borderlands have done well, others poorly, but overall the comparison with the conditions of their co-religionists on the Indian side of the border is stark. These are mainly rural Muslims who, for a variety of reasons, could or would not move to Pakistan after 1947. They make up about 85 percent of West Bengal's Muslim population of sixteen million.Footnote 52 Most have either clung on precariously where they were, albeit in ever-shrinking spaces, or have been displaced to areas within West Bengal where more of their fellow Muslims live in densely concentrated and economically depressed clusters.Footnote 53
For these Bengali Muslims, “staying on” in India has meant a rapid downward spiral in prosperity, status, and security. Decades of communist government notwithstanding, they are among the most impoverished communities in the region. Statistics show them to be disproportionately likely to be uneducated, unemployed, or underemployed. Despite constituting about 28 percent of West Bengal's population, Muslims hold fewer than 2 percent of government jobs and less than 1 percent of all service-level jobs in the private sector.Footnote 54 They tend to live in desperately overcrowded spaces, with little or no institutional support. Their children are more likely than those of other communities to remain illiterate and they have shorter lives. Their daughters more often marry young and die in childbirth. Their sons, in disproportionately large numbers, fall foul of the law and spend years in prison.Footnote 55
Members of our research team found it much more difficult to gain access to these settlements and to conduct interviews there. Suspicion and even fear of our intentions were palpable. Annu Jalais was nonetheless able to conduct an extraordinary set of interviews with two branches of the same family: one branch had migrated to East Pakistan after 1947, and the other had not. The two branches had lost all contact with each other. These interviews suggest some tentative conclusions about patterns of staying on.
Shahid and Jalal Gazi are brothers, originally from the village of Kalitola in the southeast corner of present-day West Bengal. After partition, Shahid together with many other members of the family migrated across the border to Kalinchi in East Pakistan, but his brother Jalal did not. Today Jalal (age about ninety-five) is too ill to be able to say much, but his son Fakhruddin Gazi fills in the gaps in his story:
We are originally from Kalitola. The Hindus expelled us from there and so we came here [Dokkhin Parghumte] where we had family. Our whole place in Kalitola used to be Muslim. Then one day [around 1950] some refugees who had come from the other side announced that Muslims would not be allowed to live there, that they would have to leave.… They went from house to house, sometimes, raped and looted, at other times burned down our homes and our granaries…. My elder brother … felt he would not be able to keep his honor and left for Khupdipur [across the border].… At that time all the Muslims of Jogeshganj, Parghumte, Kalitola, Samshernagar, and Gobindokati left this place.… Our family's land used to stretch all the way to the river, now it ends with the field that surrounds our homestead…. One by one, all of my uncles left. But my father Jalal Gazi, being the eldest, stayed back to look after the mosque and the graves of our ancestors.
Today the community is reduced to about fifty people crammed into four homesteads. It is clear that this Muslim family was once quite well-to-do, well educated, and well connected. After riots began in 1950 most of the clan went to Pakistan. Those who stayed behind did not lack contacts there, and indeed they had many close relatives and contacts that had made good on “the other side.” But they stayed in India because they were bound to “home,” either, as in the case of Jalal, by responsibilities to the graves of his ancestors, or by the need to care for the elderly and infirm, or by their own infirmity. Fakhruddin and Hamidullah Gazi, respectively the son and nephew of Jalal Gazi, have stayed even though there are very few opportunities for them in the locality, and even after Fakhruddin was “kicked out” of his job at the local school after being passed over for promotion in favor of a less-qualified Hindu. They have to look after the old man, who is sick and frail. “Previously,” Fakhruddin said, “we all wanted to leave as our leaders all left, but it is not so now. We can't go and neither do we want to go.”
As we can see, their decision to stay has resulted in a catastrophic downward spiral in their wealth and status. The landholdings of this once well-to-do clan have shrunk to one small field; the younger men in the family are either unemployed or inappropriately employed, and they are deeply pessimistic about their prospects. Interestingly, they have lost contact with their kinsfolk across the border. National borders, even ones as relatively porous as those separating India from Bangladesh, and attempts to control movement across them, have undoubtedly played a part in this. Since the Enemy Property Act came on the statute books in 1967, maintaining contact with “enemy” aliens across the border has been an enterprise fraught with danger,Footnote 56 and this may explain why two brothers, separated by partition, had neither seen nor heard from each other for several decades. It was only when Annu Jalais took news and photographs of Jalal over to Shahid in Bangladesh that contact between them was reestablished (see Image 1).
Image 1 In Bangladesh, Shahid Gazi sees an image of his brother Jalal for the first time in decades. The brothers had lost contact after Shahid crossed over to East Pakistan after partition (photo by Bengal Diaspora Project).
Their story reveals a critically important point overlooked by much of the literature on networks: namely, that networks atrophy and rupture in adverse circumstances. After the blood brothers lost touch with each other at a moment of upheaval and chaos, the ties between them withered. For the family members who had stayed behind, assets had been stripped, and the familial networks that might have facilitated their movement no longer existed: “We can't go and neither do we want to go.” Among the less mobile, then, it seems that an initial reluctance to move can foreclose their opportunities for migration at a later date, keeping people like Fakhruddin and Hamidullah Gazi stuck in their unenviable locations.
Our research suggests that “stayers-on” in the cities are no better off, whether in West Bengal in India or in Bangladesh, their different trajectories since partition notwithstanding. These communities have been squeezed into ever more densely packed ghettos where they enjoy few facilities or opportunities. A recent study of Muslims in contemporary Calcutta showed that four out of every five now live in overcrowded slums, where entire households (averaging 6.65 people)Footnote 57 sleep, eat, and work in tiny one-room shacks, averaging less than 120 square feet in size.Footnote 58 Their levels of literacy are exceptionally low. Fewer than one in ten have any “chance of getting admitted to any kind of educational institution, [whether] recognized or unrecognised, or unaffiliated or public.” Dropout rates among the few lucky children who are admitted to schools are estimated to be as high as 80 percent. These urban communities survive mainly by self-employment in family-run businesses where they work for pitifully low returns embroidering gold thread onto cloth, making paper goods like kites, binding books, and producing cheap leather goods.Footnote 59 The communities to which the internally displaced interviewees belong have been impoverished not just by the discrimination they continue to face in the labor market, or by the loss of their properties, but by the emigration of those members who had the wherewithal to leave, taking with them such “mobility capital” and the economic and cultural assets that the community once possessed.
In Bangladesh, urban “stayers on” among the “Biharis” gave a vivid sense of the compulsions that persuaded them to cling on, however precariously, where they were. In the troubles of 1971, Salima's husband, who worked in the railways, was tortured by a mob and eventually died from his injuries. She was left with very young children to care for. Using her contacts, she managed to get from Syedpur to Dhaka, to the Town Hall Camp where some members of her family, including her divorced sister, had huddled together for safety. Even though Salima's father and brother migrated from Bangladesh to Pakistan, the sisters stayed behind. They live together in a tiny shack in the Camp, where they do piecework as garment embroiderers to earn a few takas (or rupees) to support their families, and jointly care for their children and grandchildren, one of whom suffers from severe disabilities. Why did Salima stay? In the first instance, it was to care for her wounded husband. After his death, soon after the 1971 war ended, she calculated that, as a single woman with very small children, one of them disabled, she would be better able to survive in Dhaka where she had some networks of familial support. (Even as the interview was being conducted, one of Salima's female relatives who lives nearby dropped in to help her complete her quota of piecework on time.)
Mehrunissa Khatun, a “stayer-on” in Syedpur, in 1971 also had two very young daughters, one age three years, the other six months. The family was one of hundreds that, during the troubles, fled from a smaller railway colony of Parbatipur to the much larger neighboring town of Syedpur, seeking safety in numbers. At this point, one of Mehrunissa's sisters was able to migrate with her husband and children to Pakistan. But Mehrunissa's own husband was bed-ridden (“he used to cough up blood”), and she had to care for him, as well as her children, until he died of tuberculosis in 1978. She has since managed to support her family by working as a maidservant in the house of a Canadian aid worker. Like Salima, Mehrunissa has kinsfolk in Pakistan but could not migrate because she had to care for others. She still lives in Chamra Godown Camp in extremely reduced circumstances. Neither Salima nor Mehrunissa are in contact with their relatives in Pakistan.
What stands out in these life histories is that those who stayed on despite threats to life and limb did not always lack contacts or access to networks that might have helped them to migrate. But they did lack one or more other vital dimension of “mobility capital.” Strikingly, most “stayers-on” we interviewed had physical disabilities or health problems that were more dramatic impediments than were any lack of literacy or skills needed for employment. Or if they were able-bodied themselves they had powerful countervailing obligations to care for the vulnerable or infirm, whether infants, the ill, the aged, or the disabled. Many, but not all, of those who stayed behind for such reasons were women.
This suggests, counterintuitively, that while networks, cash, know-how, and skills are important elements of mobility capital, good health is vital. It also points to the role of personal, familial, and religious obligations as constraints on people's ability to join a stream of refugees. These stories indicate, moreover, that the capacity of networks to sustain cumulative patterns of migration, in and of themselves, needs to be reconsidered.
“IMPERIAL” MOBILITY: MIGRATION TO BRITAIN
Set against this backdrop, it can be seen just how exceptional an enterprise it was for peasants from Sylhet to migrate so far from home and make their landfall in London. Much is already known about the migration of Bangladeshis to Britain, about how, when, and why young men from the rural central lowlands of Sylhet began to go there.Footnote 60 But this essay suggests that the challenge is to explain, not so much why some Bengalis migrated to Britain, but rather why so few did so during this period of mass migration in the delta. To begin to understand this we must revisit some aspects of their history.
Before partition, Sylhet was not part of Bengal, but rather a district in the province of Assam in British India. Historically, however, the people of this marcher region had close ties both with Bengal to the west and Assam to the east,Footnote 61 and these had persisted and indeed been strengthened during British rule. In the late nineteenth century, demographic pressures encouraged some young Sylhetis to emigrate, in two separate streams: eastwards to find jobs on the British-owned tea estates of Assam, and westwards, downriver by the Surma and Kashiara to Calcutta and Hooghly to seek work as boatmen and other employment in the big city.Footnote 62 Some found work as lascars (or seafarers) in the British Indian merchant marine, and they soon came to occupy a lowly niche as fire-stokers in the boiler rooms of steamships in a highly segmented labor market. A complex recruitment system soon sprang up that gave contracts, typically of two years, to young men from Sylhet (and which, as Ravi Ahuja acutely observes, also contrived to keep people from other parts of Bengal and India out of this monopoly.Footnote 63 That system was dominated by a troika of Sylheti hostel owners (bariwallahs) who put the lascars up, several to a room, while they waited in Calcutta for work on the ships; port foremen (ghat serangs); and ship serangs who recruited men for particular shipping lines in return for a share of their future pay. The serangs and bariwallahs were all from the same region of Sylhet, frequently from a cluster of neighboring villages. Through this system, many lascars became embroiled in complex relationships of debt and obligation to particular bariwallahs and serangs, debts on which they could not easily renege.
For their part, ship serangs had strong incentive to closely monitor the lascars they had recruited, since they owed their own jobs to their white employers' faith in their “customary” (and supposedly “Asiatic”) command over the workforce. The serang had another powerful motive to prevent lascars from jumping ship in that “losing” one would mean the sarang would also lose his cut from the absconder's future wages, and furthermore would have to square the matter with all of the other stakeholders—the ghat serangs and bariwallahs—who were also owed a share of the sailor's meager pay packet.Footnote 64 As Ahuja has shown, this complex web of bodily control, debt, and obligation—as much as the highly punitive shipping laws and immigration rules that deterred “Asiatics” from breaking their contracts or disembarking at European and American portsFootnote 65—explains why so few lascars jumped ship at London. One must also consider the life that awaited absconders: two years of evading arrest, the challenges of surviving while on the run, and the growing racism in white seamen's unions against lascars,Footnote 66 not to mention loneliness, London's long winters, and the ever-present specter of destitution. Sailors who weighed these against the great costs to themselves and their families of their running away had little incentive to do so. Each year between 1900 and 1947, some fifty thousand Indian seamen passed through British ports. Of these only a few dozen jumped ship and stayed in Britain, mainly in London.Footnote 67
After partition and independence, however, workers from Sylhet were abruptly cut off from Assam's tea gardens, since Sylhet became part of East Pakistan and Assam was given to India. From 1948 onward, the government of Assam began to put pressure on “outsiders,” particularly Muslims, to leave the state, and Sylhetis were among the thousands forced to return to East Pakistan.Footnote 68 Partition also cut Sylhet off from Calcutta, which was now the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal. India soon made it clear that Pakistanis (as the Sylhetis were now classified as being) were no longer welcome in its merchant marine.Footnote 69 As these two traditional streams of migration were disrupted by partition, and many Sylhetis were forced to return to their district, some began to consider how they might deploy their networks and knowledge of the world to migrate elsewhere in search of work. A few ended up in Britain, mainly because they had heard through the grapevine that work was to be had in the mills and factories in the north.
These migrants tended to be people who had little money or education but did possess exceptionally rich and far-flung networks established over a century of traveling on the high seas and living outside their home districts. Almost all were young, male, and able-bodied. The great majority returned home after a stint abroad. Only a handful stayed on, usually for personal and idiosyncratic reasons, for instance a love affair with an English woman, or a falling out with fathers and uncles, or getting into trouble with the authorities back at home in Sylhet.
Mohammed Fazlul Huq's family's history reflects many threads in this typical pattern. Fazlul, who claims to be 102 years old, now lives along the Dinajpur border where he owns a small plot of land. He was born in Calcutta's docklands area of Khiddirpur (formerly Kidderpore): “We were four brothers and three sisters. My father … was a lineman on the Indian railways. I grew up on the docks of Khiddirpur [Calcutta]—they used to moor and repair ships in front of our house, the ghat [dock] door was right in front of our house. Under the British I worked on the steamers [on the] Arenda … a huge ship.… [During World War II] the Japanese blew it up.” While working on the ship as an “oilman,” Fazlul traveled “to London, Africa, Rangoon, Singapore, Jeddah.… I went on the Hajj from Jedda; this was in British times.”
Fazlul came from a remarkably peripatetic family. His said his forefathers were originally “Khans,” (possibly Afghans); one ancestor had married a local woman in Noakhali in Bengal and settled there: “My father [was one of] six brothers. The eldest settled in Barisal and died there. The next two stayed in Noakhali and died at home in our village, [but] my father left Noakhali for Noagaon in Assam [and got a job in the railways]. The fifth died young, also in Noakhali. The youngest, Hamid Khan, worked on a steamer, married a mem [white woman] and stayed over in London. I heard they had two sons and owned a wine shop. The mem was crazy about my uncle; she never let him return.” That his lascar uncle had stayed on in London was seen as an aberration by Fazlul and the rest of his family, who put it down to his infatuation with a crazy white woman.
Fazlul Huq was the only one of several siblings to have become a lascar, and like most seafarers of his generation he returned to Bengal after the war ended to set up a small business, as a tea stall owner. The rest of his brothers also traveled in search of work, but they stayed closer to home: one worked for government; a second was in private service as a clerk; and a third was a preacher, or maulvi. His sisters all married men who lived in Assam in India, where the family had established links through their father's career in the railways, and where they had moved after partition: “I joined my parents in Assam when our house in Calcutta's Khiddirpur was taken over by the Indian Government. The Indian Government said, ‘No place for Muslims here, go to Arab,’ and then they started burning our houses and so Jinnah said I'll break India and give a piece of it to Muslims.” Later, (presumably when the Assam government started to expel Bengali Muslims, soon after independence), “We shifted to the Bengali side because they spoilt [raped] our mothers and sisters and started exploiting us and so we fought against them.”
Here, then, is a family that had lived for several generations by various forms of circulatory migration. The partition of British India into two hostile countries had ruptured some of the routes along which they had traditionally moved, and closed off some of their old options. But they continued to deploy those that remained open. (So Assam, albeit in India, remained part of their shrinking canvas of opportunities.) They also developed new alternatives and diversified their strategies for survival in the changing context after 1947. Migration to the West was one of them, but it clearly was not the easiest, or only, or even the favored option. Migration to the “right” nation-state afforded more opportunities for work in line with their aspirations and sense of status, enabling many members of the family to rise from their blue-collar backgrounds to join the lower ranks of the “respectable” service classes.
This suggests that the model of “mobility capital” can help explain an apparent paradox, namely the fact that after partition the boldest migrations to the distant West were undertaken not by those with the greatest reserves of economic and cultural capital, but instead by people with little money, no literacy, and no competence in the English language, who were part of networks of far-flung connections, who had richly layered histories of mobility, and who were young and strong and had few onerous obligations back home. Even among this small, select group, staying on in the West permanently or semi-permanently was not the norm, and most harbored the dream of an eventual return home. Nor was it the case that once one member of the family or network group had established himself in Britain, the rest followed automatically in his wake, as network theorists of “cumulative causation” have suggested. For most that possessed such networks, by far the preferred strategy was to explore other, less risky avenues to achieve security and higher status in their region of origin.
Jubair Ahmed's story reinforces this point. Jubair, who runs a takeaway food business in Newham in London, is the son of a lascar who worked on the supply ships that serviced the Royal Navy during the Second World War. His father got this job through one of his own maternal uncles, who was also a lascar “in an English ship.” After being discharged from the merchant marine in 1945 at the age of sixteen, Jubair's father worked for eighteen years in the steel mills at Scunthorpe, frequently returning to Sylhet to his wife and family. Jubair's grandmother and his younger uncle eventually joined Jubair's father in Britain, to look after him when his health began to fail. His older uncle stayed on in Bangladesh until his death.
Born in Sylhet in 1965, Jubair is one of four siblings. He was educated to college level in Habiganj, where the family was doing well: “My father was a good earner. Before father came here [to Britain], our financial condition was good. He multiplied it. Everyone was happy.” None of his siblings wanted to move to Britain. Nor did his father intend to bring them to join him there: “We [were] not interested; my elder brother didn't want to come. My father was also not interested to bring us.”
At college, however, Jubair got mixed up with student movements against the Ershad government, and his mother, concerned for his safety, urged her husband to take him to Britain:
I was involved in politics in Bangladesh. I was not interested in coming to London. My father kept pushing me; a visa was issued, extended, and expired—once, twice, three times, five times, seven times. Last time, in 1984, during the movement against Ershad, people were being arrested in Habiganj. Everybody wrote to my father telling him to bring me to London, or else I would be sent to jail. My mother also pressured my father to bring me here.… “You send him ticket, then you see,” mother told father like this. Father sent ticket to me. Then I came, otherwise the ticket would be a loss.Footnote 70
So Jubair ended up in Britain, essentially as a political refugee, although he moved there along a network that had been established long before by previous generations of his family who had been sojourners or “economic” migrants. His siblings did not follow him there: twenty-five years later, his older brother and sister still live in Bangladesh.
CONCLUSION
The aim of this study of the migration of Muslims in Bengal since 1947 has been to see whether it elucidates patterns of refugee settlement identified by Zolberg in new nations since 1945. Like many zones of migration in the late twentieth century, Bengal had been administered as a single unit in the British Empire, but was divided between two successor states with the transition from empire to nation. It became one of the world's most significant zones of migration after 1947, producing refugee flows on a scale rarely witnessed before or since. The essay suggests a framework for understanding these patterned flows from a comparative and global perspective.
I have proposed the concept of “mobility capital” to help explain patterns not only of migration, but also, significantly, of internal displacement and staying on. Most post-partition migrants we interviewed had rich and complex bundles of mobility capital; all had local or supra-local contacts or connections that they deployed to facilitate their movement. All had personal prehistories of mobility, and ties of affection and obligation accrued on these journeys. Many had the less easily measurable “know-how”—the capacity to work the system and their assets to their best advantage. Most were knitted into knowledge communities through which they learned of both dangers and possibilities.
The migrants interviewed all possessed these different elements of mobility capital to varying degrees. Moreover, the constituent elements of each migrant's particular bundle appear crucially to have shaped his or her choice of destination: migrants with similar types of bundles tended to end up in similar places. Particular dispositions among migrants, then, appear to draw them to matching destinations. Migrants who lacked one or another dimension of mobility capital or were tied by obligations to “home,” by contrast, tended to end up in impoverished communities of the internally displaced.
By comparing very different cases in a large and international study, this essay has showed that mobility capital worked as an interdependent bundle of attributes to enable successful migration. The life stories of our informants demonstrate that the lack of one or more elements of the bundle—above all, the basic fact of one's own good health or that of ones dependents—could make all the difference between staying on, being internally displaced, or moving abroad. Among the elements that make up this bundle, moreover, actual monetary resources prove not to have been as critical as we might expect, as shown by the effective moves made by the cash-poor Chapaiyya peasant migrants we interviewed. Nor was literacy as important as one might imagine, as evidenced, again, by the stories of the Chapaiyyas, but also by those of many lascars.
Scholars of migration will not be surprised to learn that networks played a crucial role in enabling migration in and from Bengal. Indeed, every migrant we interviewed was tied into complex webs of overlapping, historically established networks. But so too were many people who did not move at all, and were unable or reluctant so to do. It seems that networks, by themselves, were insufficient to enable migration in the Bengal upheavals, let alone to produce it. This is important to recognize, given the powerful influence that “cumulative causation” and network theory have exercised over a generation of scholars of migration. These posited that once a critical mass of people from a particular source had migrated abroad, migration would continue until every member of their network joined the pioneers in the West. But when the tiny number of Bengali migrants in Britain (or indeed the few Bihari migrants in Bangladesh) is studied alongside the vast majority in the diaspora who stayed on in their region of origin, a very different picture emerges. It is plain that great numbers of people who could have (and, according to this theory, should have) moved abroad to join their kin have not done so. They have instead made highly complex personal choices to stay on in their region of origin, or not to move at all.
Looking closely at how these networks worked in practice has revealed something else: how networks could atrophy and rupture, and also how important they were in limiting and constraining migrants' choices and their trajectories of movement. The networks were not neutral spaces, easily penetrable by “outsiders,” and those we studied were closed arenas in which hierarchy was perpetuated more frequently than challenged, and status was reconstituted more often than subverted. These points were well understood in many classical studies of migration, but they need to be underscored in the current intellectual context (certainly in South Asian studies), in which theories of diaspora valorize networks and “diasporic spaces” as sites of radical possibility.Footnote 71
Finally, this research has raised doubts about one of the most persistent assumptions of migration studies by undermining the notion of a clear conceptual distinction between “forced” migrants (or refugees) and economic migrants. All the migrants we interviewed straddled this divide. All moved, or stayed on and were internally displaced, within a context of nation formation, ethnic discrimination, and religious violence, and in this sense were classic “refugees.” But all of them moved in “grooves,” as Adam McKeown has vividly described them,Footnote 72 created by older forms of “economic” mobility. Put differently, the “refugees” studied were all people drawn from communities that historically have been itinerant, whether for economic, political, cultural, or even environmental reasons, and when faced with physical violence or threats to their livelihood and status during partition riots and civil war, they possessed the wherewithal, often in itself partly a product of past movement, to move to safer and more propitious settings.
