Unpacking Refuge: Caste and Labour in Partition-Induced Forced Migration in Asansol, West Bengal

The Partition of British India (1947) marks a crucial chapter in South Asian history. Scholarship, particularly from West Bengal, India, reveals that dominant narratives have largely ignored caste-based differences in the experiences of displacement and rehabilitation, creating homogenized national memories. Official narratives often portrayed Partition as a necessary cost of independence, with refugees being blamed for their own plight. In response, upper(ed)-caste male refugees constructed a counter-narrative of victimhood and struggle, asserting their rights to citizenship. This narrative, coupled with rising communist influence, positioned refugees as the new proletariat in Leftist politics, erasing distinctions of caste, class, and gender. State policies on refugee rehabilitation, however, were often caste-blind or actively discriminatory, further marginalizing lowered-caste refugees. This paper explores these dynamics through an ethnographic study in Asansol, West Bengal. The lowered-caste migrants, relocated to Asansol to serve as cheap labour for industrial development, faced ongoing hardship, exacerbated by industrial closures and labour informalization. Women from these families, excluded from formal labour, were forced into devalued, caste-based work, a pattern that has persisted across generations. The structures of caste, then, have rendered lowered-caste refugee families as marginalized ‘quasi-citizens.’ Unlike upper(ed)-caste refugees, they have struggled to overcome the consequences of Partition and become integrated as ‘successful’ citizens; in a context where the degree of citizenship has been increasingly defined as being inversely proportional to one's economic dependence on the government and directly proportional to one's performance of ‘caste-moral respectability’. But, in a teleological fashion, their insufficient capacity to display adequate citizenship has only reinforced their de-valuation as labourers.