The politics of condition: East Pakistani refugee narratives of self-reliance and resilience in West Bengal (1947–1970)

The essay examines the oral history narratives of refugees who migrated from erstwhile East Pakistan to West Bengal in the decades following the 1947 Partition. Diverse groups of refugees settled in different sites like refugee camps, squatter colonies, government-sponsored settlements, and residential areas. It studies the oral reminiscences from multiple sites by employing Mikhail Bakhtin’s framework of self-consciousness, voices, and polyphony. In doing so, it highlights the inherent plurality of the narratives, arguing, at the same time, that these oral recollections collectively exhibit how the refugees conditioned the politics of their respective surroundings. Such a reading moves beyond the rhetoric of violence and trauma, marking the refugees’ active engagement with the varied locations through acts of cooperation, resistance, and enterprise.