Growing Up Refugee

Abstract

India's case is unique in the history of anti-colonial struggle: the independence from British rule that came after a long, popular, and difficult nationalist movement also meant for a vast number of its people banishment from homeland. The city that has been most affected by this sudden and violent traffic of people – by the author's estimate the biggest instance of human displacement – is Calcutta. Written in anecdotal manner, the paper blends the story of the author's growing up as a refugee boy and the refugee habitat's own transformation from wasteland in the southern outskirts of the city into an integral part of Calcutta's postcolonial scenario. The account is divided into three time zones. In the first two decades – the 1950s and the 1960s – a new community along with a hybrid subjectivity came into being. This section ('Community') tells stories of social bonds, boundaries, and violence, of memories of the life left behind, of the growth of a specific variety of 'urban' cosmopolitanism, of the local-governmental modes developed by the inhabitants in the face of state ambiguity and apathy, and of the early rise of the 'refugee' Left as the principal oppositional voice. The second section ('Violence') details the political violence of the early 1970s as part of the wider tide of Maoist challenge to the state, and investigates what this new combativeness meant to the community in terms of collective guardianship, social bonds and moral posturing, and of the strategies evolved to cope with the crisis. The third and final section ('Government') depicts the slow emergence of a postcolonial governmental space initiated by sustained efforts at development sponsored by the World Bank and the state. In the late 1980s, local people gained entitlement to their land. The local landscape changed dramatically as real-estate agents moved in, creating new networks of power and money.

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