The haunting of homelands: inversion of the ‘migrant crisis’ in the war over Bangladesh

This paper undertakes a narrative study of ‘The Exit Plan’ by Khademul Islam and Sarbajit Sen from the collected anthology of graphic narratives edited by Vishwajyoti Ghosh titled This Side, That Side: Restorying Partition: an Anthology of Graphic Narratives. It is a story of a Bengali Muslim family from East Pakistan who are confined in West Pakistan during the height of the civil war in 1971. The paper argues that the text inverts dominant narratives of ‘migrant crisis’ by shifting the focus from victimhood to migrant agency, decision-making, and survival as forms of resistance. Rather than reproducing familiar frameworks that position refugees as passive subjects of crisis, the narrative reconfigures migration as an ongoing and negotiated process shaped by colonial histories of conflict. Drawing on Border Studies and Critical Refugee Studies, the paper reads the afterlives of the Partition of the Indian subcontinent as a form of hauntology – a division that has time and again come to haunt the fragmented land, with the Bangladesh War being one such manifestation. Additionally, while attending to panel composition and visual structuring, it treats framing as a compositional strategy rather than a primary theoretical lens. In doing so, the article positions the graphic narrative as a site of activism that not only represents displacement but actively reorients the terms through which such histories are understood.