BENGAL PARTITION REFUGEES AT SEALDAH RAILWAY STATION, 1950-60

SOUTH ASIA RESEARCH Vol. 42(1): 1–16 Reprints and permissions: in.sagepub.com/journals-permissions-india DOI: 10.1177/02627280211054807 Copyright © 2021 journals.sagepub.com/home/sar The Author(s) BENGAL PARTITION REFUGEES AT SEALDAH RAILWAY STATION, 1950–60 Anwesha Sengupta Institute of Development Studies Kolkata, Kolkata, India Abstract This article focuses on the Sealdah railway station in Calcutta, West Bengal, as a site of refugee ‘settlement’ in the aftermath of British India’s partition. From 1946 to the late 1960s, the platforms of Sealdah remained crowded with Bengali Hindu refugees from East Pakistan. Some refugees stayed a few days, but many stayed for months, even years. Relying on newspaper reports, autobiographical accounts and official archives, this article elaborates how a busy railway station uniquely shaped the experiences of partition refugees. Despite severe infrastructural limitations, the railway platforms of Sealdah provided these refugee residents with certain opportunities. Many preferred to stay at Sealdah instead of moving to any government facility. However, even for the most long-term residents of Sealdah, it remained a temporary home, from where they were either shifted to government camps or themselves found accommodation in and around Calcutta. The article argues that by allowing the refugees to squat on a busy railway platform for months and years, the state recognised a unique right of these refugees, their right to wait, involving at least some agency in the process of resettling. keywords: Agency, Bengal, Calcutta, East Pakistan, home, partition, refugees, state Introduction At midnight on 14/15 August 1947, colonial India was partitioned into India and Pakistan, the latter perceived and projected as a Muslim homeland, while officially secular India became the ‘natural’ nation for Hindus (Pandey, 1999). Widespread communal violence accompanied partition, leaving millions dead and violated, and many more displaced (Zamindar, 2007). While refugee migration across the India– West Pakistan borders occurred rapidly around the time of partition, migration 2 South Asia Research Vol. 42(1): 1–16 between India and East Pakistan developed differently (Ghosh, 2014), continued for decades and is still occurring (Ranjan, 2018: 9). By the end of 1962, West Bengal had received 4.26 million refugees from East Pakistan (Chatterji, 2007a: 998; Hill et al., 2005). This article focuses on early Bengali Hindu refugees who left East Pakistan and reached West Bengal in India, creating a very visible presence at Calcutta’s Sealdah railway station. Between 1946 and the late 1960s, the platforms of Sealdah remained crowded with refugees. How a busy railway station, as a space, shaped the refugee experiences is one of the central questions raised by this article. A closely related issue is what implications the act of waiting at this station had on the role of a stressed-out state faced with masses of refugees. The experiences of Bengali Hindu refugees have been extensively researched by scholars of partition, studying government-run relief camps and rehabilitation sites as well as squatter colonies that the refugees themselves set up in and around Calcutta (Chatterji, 2001, 2013; Sanyal, 2009; Sen, 2013). This scholarship established the heterogeneity of refugee experiences in West Bengal along the lines of class, caste and gender (Bandyopadhyay & Basu Ray Chaudhuri, 2014; Chakrabarty, 1990; Chatterji, 2007a; Sen, 2018). Sealdah remains almost invisible in this literature, despite receiving thousands of partition refugees as the terminal station for trains from East Pakistan, hosting many refugees for days, months and even years. Perhaps this lack of attention to Sealdah can be explained by its presumed temporariness, as the refugees who reached Sealdah were in limbo, supposed to go somewhere else, and certainly expected to move on. However, many refugees spent months, even years at Sealdah. Some waited for the government to shift them to a camp. Others waited at the station as they needed time and resources before they figured out where to go. This was a significant, distinct phase in their lives as refugees, since squatting at a busy railway station posed its own challenges and uncertainties, but also offered possibilities. Waiting is an important analytical category to understand the specific experiences of the refugees at Sealdah. Waiting is often seen as an experience of powerlessness, as ‘the capacity to make its subjects wait’ (Mathur, 2015: 143) becomes a technique of exhibition of power by the modern state. Waiting, as a ‘daily lesson in political subordination’ for poor and marginalised communities, could evoke anger, fear and a whole range of emotions, turning such disempowered people into a ‘state’s strongest and most articulate critics’ (Mathur, 2015: 143). Refugees waiting for asylum and rehabilitation in various parts of the world today suffer multiple anxieties, helplessness and powerlessness. The refugees at Sealdah experienced all these emotions, but this article also shows that Sealdah provided them with unique opportunities and elements of hope. Waiting at the platforms, for many, was not pure compulsion; there were elements of choice in it. Some refused government facilities in order to remain at Sealdah, not permanently, but they decided to wait for a reasonable job or a better nearby place to stay. Waiting, as Jeffrey (2008: 957) has argued, can also offer ‘opportunities to acquire Sengupta: Bengal Partition Refugees At Sealdah Railway Station, 1950–60 3 skills, fashion new cultural styles and mobilise politically’. Moreover, people ‘may come to prioritise long term over short term goals: they choose to wait’ (Jeffrey, 2008: 957), exercising agency. Since such observations were true for a section of the platform refugees, studying Sealdah provides an opportunity to critically understand the experience of ‘waiting’ as a choice, however limited. Further, this article also argues that the historical specificities of partition and the particularities of Sealdah gave the railway refugees a specific ‘right to wait’, which made them an exceptional population group. This article thus contributes to the belatedly emerging scholarship on South Asia’s partition refugees focusing on the various rights this population group possessed (Chatterji, 2001; Sen, 2018) and/or were made to negotiate. Situating the Refugees at Sealdah Sealdah is one of India’s busiest railway stations. On a regular day, it handles over 3 million passengers, as The Telegraph of 27 February 2020 observed. According to the Report of the Calcutta Terminal Facilities Committee (East Indian Railway Press, 1947: 39), an average of 37,700 ‘inward’ passengers reached Sealdah daily in 1945–46. The number of ‘outward’ passengers, boarding trains from Sealdah, would be no less. Since a large section of commuters travelled without tickets, the actual footfall was much higher, and the rush hours were particularly busy. In 1947, the railway authorities estimated 14,000 ticketed passengers arriving and departing from Sealdah Station during ‘office-time’ (East Indian Railway Press, 1947: 41). A wholesale market and a tram terminus right outside Sealdah station turned this locality into one of the most crowded parts of Calcutta. Into this already crowded railway station poured masses of partition refugees from East Pakistan. Since August 1946, various parts of eastern India were engulfed by communal violence and these upheavals triggered vast movements of people. Hindus left eastern Bengal, where Muslims were in a majority, and Muslims moved in the opposite direction in search of refuge. Sealdah became busy with migrants from late 1946 (Tuker, 1950: 177), but the refugee movements and the influx from East Pakistan intensified with partition. Prior to 1950, refugees reaching Sealdah were mostly from the upper echelons of society. Only a few stayed on the platform premises. When they did, such a stay was mostly very brief (Sen, 2013: 69), as most early refugees either had friends and relatives in the city or had adequate resources for finding better accommodation. In 1950, however, the refugee situation became worse as communal riots spread across East Pakistan and West Bengal. More than 1.18 million refugees reached West Bengal that year (Chatterji, 2007b: 112) and for the first time, the Dalit communities of East Pakistan, like the Namasudras, constituted a significant section among these refugees. Unlike the early migrants, they lacked the ‘mobility capital’ of relatively high levels of literacy or other portable skills, and some transferable assets South Asia Research Vol. 42(1): 1–16 4 South Asia Research Vol. 42(1): 1–16 (Chatterji, 2013: 279). Thousands squatted at Sealdah, waiting for government help or looking for a foothold in Calcutta. The Bengali newspaper Amritabazar Patrika monitored the estimated numbers of refugees at Sealdah, reporting 8,000 on 7 April 1950, more than 9,000 on 27 June, 12,695 on 22 July and about 10,000 in the first week of August. Sealdah remained crowded with refugees also after 1950. Numbers fluctuated, depending on the magnitude of the daily refugee flow and the pace of government action to shift people to camps. Ultimately, the government would need almost two decades before all partition refugees who had turned Sealdah into their ‘homes’ (Moorhouse, 1971: 308) had been resettled. The Times of India of 12 July 1951 reported 1,500 refugees at the station. On 7 October 1952, the same source estimated 5,000. On 17 October 1952, the Bengali newspaper Jugantar counted 11,917 refugees. The Times of India on 23 October 1952, only six days later, found only 2,000. On 23 July 1955, the same source counted 1,000 refugees, but noted also that on average 700 new refugees reached the station every day. The Times of India on 1 February 1964 still reported 6,000 refugees at the station, while all along, the act of waiting remained an unacknowledged phenomenon. Refugee Life at Sealdah: Difficulties Sealdah of the mid-twentieth century had 12 platforms, eight catering to suburban trains and four to long-distance trains. The four long-distance platforms were about 900 feet in length, of which 540 feet were covered. Among the other eight platforms, two had no roof at all, two had a 90 feet area covered and the remaining four had roofs that covered 480 feet. The lengths of these eight platforms varied from 585 to 600 feet (East Indian Railway Press, 1947: 48). The first challenge for refugees coming to Sealdah was to acquire some safe space at the station, ideally in a covered area. This could be immensely difficult, depending on the intensity of the daily influx. Jatin Bala (2018: 165), himself a Namasudra refugee from Jessore, who spent a few days at Sealdah in the mid-1950s, remembered: After much struggle we managed a tiny corner at the station. It did not have a proper shed. A part of it had a tin roof, the rest was under the sky. We kept our belongings and sighed. At least we have survived for now. After three hours of struggle and strategizing we had managed this. This was precious. [It was as if ] we were floating in the water, finally we got some land under our feet. We would not drown anymore. After securing a place in the station, the refugees had to find food, water and other necessities. Various charity organisations and the Relief-Rehabilitation (RR) Department distributed dry rations and cooked food to platform refugees. For instance, Kashi Biswanath Seva Samiti distributed cooked food for three months in 1949, but as their resources were limited, they could not continue indefinitely. The RR Department then approached the Ramakrishna Mission (RKM) to step in. Sengupta: Bengal Partition Refugees At Sealdah Railway Station, 1950–60 5 The Mission was allotted an empty field in northern Calcutta for cooking. Yet after a few weeks, RKM also gave up. The government, with the help of various NGOs, now distributed dry rations, mostly chida (flat rice) that required no cooking (Bandyopadhyay, 2014: 116–7). However, the long-term platform residents could not survive on a handful of chida. They made make-shift brick stoves outside the platforms, near the tramlines. Bala (2018: 167) remembered: We survived three days on chida and gur [jaggery]. But the amount that the NGOs were giving was not enough to meet the need. It was a question of survival. But there was no scope of cooking at the platform.… barda [eldest brother] got some wood. We went out and saw hundreds of brick stoves in between the tramlines. Two hundred or two hundred fifty men were cooking. We found one stove and started cooking khichdi [rice and lentil cooked together]. As cooking had to happen ‘outside’, it became a man’s job and the railway platform, in this odd turn of events, became the ‘home’, the ‘inside’. The platforms of Sealdah were a peculiar ‘home’. People stayed there with families and their meagre belongings; men went out of the station to cook, to participate in political rallies demanding rehabilitation and to look for work. But for women, the station did not have the privacy generally associated with home, making them particularly vulnerable, stared at by other refugees and passengers at the platforms. Everyday activities like bathing, washing clothes or breastfeeding often had to be conducted in public. The situation, graphically described in the second scene of Natun Yehudi [The New Jew], a popular 1951 play written by Salil Sen, is reflected in a mother-daughter conversation at Sealdah (Sen, 2003: 210): Mother: …you haven’t bathed all this time? Pari [the daughter]: Is it possible to bathe in the middle of all this? All around there are people, simply staring at me. All the time, who are you Miss, from where have you come— how many people are there in your family? And the fight for water; I won’t bathe. Mother: All right, all right, don’t bathe. You won’t die if you don’t take a bath for two days. It’s just your luck. We are camping in the street like gypsies—I never thought we would come to this. Pari’s mother hoped their Sealdah stay would be short. Very few refugees, however, had control over the duration of their platform residence. Some, after signing up for accommodation in government facilities, had to wait for their turn. This waiting period depended on the intensity of the refugee influx and the accommodation available at various camps. Bala (2018) remembered that the average waiting period was one to two weeks before the platform refugees could get accommodation in some camps. The authorities would periodically call out the names of the refugees due to be shifted to camps. If for some reason a family missed its turn, the waiting period could become indefinite. Bala and his brothers were taken to government camps South Asia Research Vol. 42(1): 1–16 6 South Asia Research Vol. 42(1): 1–16 within a week, mainly because of his elder brother’s persuasion skills (Bala, 2018: 172). But he remembered the pain of waiting (Bala, 2018: 173): When a family was called up for a relief camp, the members used to board the truck with whatever little they had. But the families who were not called up by the government kept waiting on the platforms, on footpaths, under the open sky. Some of them who survived were called later, some died in waiting. Death was a routine affair on the platforms. In the early 1950s, Sealdah had only two latrines for women and eight for men, presumably because most passengers were male. There were three tube wells supplying water in the platform premises (Bala, 2018: 166). This was perhaps sufficient for a railway station, but extremely inadequate for a sizeable settlement. Diseases spread rapidly. In 1950, when Sealdah was most crowded, Calcutta witnessed a sharp increase of cholera and smallpox. The Director of Health Services blamed the ‘unprecedented urban crowding caused by the refugee influx’ for this (Bandyopadhyay, 2012: 31). The Calcutta-based British Deputy High Commissioner noted in his weekly report on 20 April 1950 (Deputy High Commissioner Calcutta, 1950) that abnormally severe epidemics of cholera and smallpox are raging in Calcutta: ‘Whilst these diseases occur annually in epidemic form at this time of the year, the influx of refugees … largely accounts for the abnormal virulence of the outbreak this year’. The situation at Sealdah looked particularly acute. Calcutta resident Sisir Bhattacharya wrote to the editor of Jugantar on 28 April 1950: For the past few weeks there have been numerous cases of cholera and pox…. In front of the Sealdah station foods and drinks are prepared in the most unhygienic way and are kept uncovered …. Right now, Sealdah station is enormously crowded with refugees. They are buying these foods at low prices and becoming contaminated with these diseases.… the uncovered unhygienic food sold in the station and the uncleared dustbins are major sources of the diseases. On the previous day, this newspaper reported 480 cholera deaths in the city within a week, the highest number of cholera deaths in the last 25 years. The Times of India, on 9 August 1950, reported 88 deaths within a fortnight at Sealdah station itself. Bala (2018: 173) remembered: Every morning and every evening, the dead body carriers used to come to Sealdah station. They used to tie together four, seven or ten bodies and carried them away in the name of mass cremation. But no one could tell what happened to these bodies finally, in the name of mass cremation. For most refugees, waiting at Sealdah meant a daily struggle for basic survival. Still, many chose the platforms over government facilities. By the mid-1950s, Sealdah had Sengupta: Bengal Partition Refugees At Sealdah Railway Station, 1950–60 7 many long-term refugee residents and on 1 February 1964, The Times of India reported that some refugees had been staying at the station for more than a decade. These people were of two kinds. Some had refused to leave the station for government camps, while others had left the government facilities to return to the platforms to chart their own ways. For them, too, Sealdah was not a final destination. They waited there till they had figured out where to go. By refusing government facilities or fleeing from the relief camps, they tried to have some say in their process of settlement. Despite the uncertainties associated with life on the platform, these refugees chose Sealdah, as it had certain opportunities to offer, as discussed below. Refugee Life at Sealdah and Opportunities Sealdah station had the advantage of being in Calcutta, providing easy access to various parts of the city. Trains connected Sealdah to southern and northern parts of Calcutta, while Central Calcutta was a short bus or tram ride away. One of Calcutta’s largest wholesale markets was adjacent to the station. Calcutta and Sealdah could almost always accommodate another hawker, domestic helper, tailor, shopkeeper, mason or coolie. The city elites saw in the refugees a potential source of cheap labour, for work in their homes, factories and shops for a meagre salary, accommodation and/ or food. Newspapers like Jugantar regularly carried advertisements for cooks, live-in maids, tutors and shop attendants from among the refugees (Chakravarty & Chakravarty, 2013; Sengupta, 2017: 130–2). Waiting at Sealdah gave access to this vast informal labouring world. Some refugees living on the platforms opened small eateries and cigarette shops near the station, they hawked in the trains and took odd jobs in the city. Discussing some life stories of Dalit refugees who had spent days at Sealdah, this section elaborates how the station offered possible opportunities for its residents. Sadananda Pal, a Dalit boy from East Pakistan who had spent some nights at Sealdah and later wrote about it, described the mid-1950s station as ‘a mini East Pakistan’ (Pal, 2009: 57): There were many shacks outside the station—some were selling rice and lentils, some were selling paan [betel leaf ] and cigarettes. All those were owned by people from East Pakistan. Many shacks were used as residences by the refugees from East Pakistan. Everyone spoke Bangaal [a dialect and a cultural category to depict people from eastern Bengal/East Pakistan] and looked like Bangaal. It was a mini East Pakistan. Sadananda, the eldest son from a family of potters, was 14 years old when he came to Calcutta for the first time in 1954. The reason behind that journey was more personal than political, as a family feud made him leave his family. But the ongoing migration of his co-religionists from East Pakistan to India ultimately determined his destination. Many of his friends and relatives had already migrated. His own family was waiting for the opportune moment to leave and Sadananda knew that sooner or South Asia Research Vol. 42(1): 1–16 8 South Asia Research Vol. 42(1): 1–16 later they would be coming to India. A heated quarrel with his father acted as the trigger. He boarded a Sealdah-bound train from Goalundo, a major railway station and river port in East Pakistan, and after reaching there spent a night on the platform, the first time he encountered Calcutta. With its wide roads, numerous shops, trams and double-decker buses, and innumerable people, it intimidated Sadananda. In Sealdah, the ‘mini East Pakistan’, he found comfort. While this first stay in India was short, he returned to Calcutta some years later, this time better equipped. He had `200 and the necessary papers, his passport and a valid visa with him. He had come to stay. Sadananda’s earlier brief encounter with the city had taught him that Calcutta could offer more opportunities. Many like him were staying and working in the city. Vivekananda Pal, who had taught Sadananda in school and was his childhood hero in many ways, had recently moved from East Pakistan to the Jadavpur area of south Calcutta. Reaching Sealdah, Sadananda decided to look him up. He went to Jadavpur, Santoshpur and Rashmoni Bagan, areas now populated with refugees from East Pakistan, in search of Vivekananda. It took him days before he found him. All this while he slept on the Sealdah platform at night, eating at one of the ‘refugee hotels’ outside the station. He stayed at Sealdah with a specific purpose, making this not an empty, indefinite wait. Sadananda felt somehow at home, surrounded by many like him, looking for a foothold in the city. Adhir Biswas, another Dalit refugee who spent days in Sealdah as a child in 1967, remembered later how the children and women of his family used to pass the days at the station, while the adult males of the family went every day to search for affordable accommodation and suitable jobs. Despite immense difficulties, Sealdah offered excitement to a child. Biswas (2005: 28) wrote: Sisters in blue and white dresses visited the station. They waved at us. We used to go and say ‘prayers to Jesus’. They gave us fruits, breads, toffees from their bags…. The days we spent on the platforms were good days. We used to roam around. Sealdah North, even Sealdah South, this side, that side. So many people used to eat on the platform. We used to stand by them. We did not have to ask. Someone or the other would give us something to eat. One may read in this quotation a painful description of a hungry child begging for food. Adhir was perhaps too naive and innocent to understand any humiliation. To him, Sealdah seemed like a new world that could be explored. It was also the gateway to Calcutta, no less than a wonderland to him, ‘new country, new city. Double-decker bus, trams. Kalighat temple’ (Biswas, 2005: 30). As Adhir marvelled at Sealdah and the world outside it, his father and elder brothers kept looking for a place to live. Sealdah was a temporary arrangement, they knew, as Biswas (2005: 30) recounted: Barda told us that a piece of land was available next to the Birati station. We have to occupy it fast. It will cost us 400 rupees. But if we bargain, perhaps it will be 25 rupees less…. Sengupta: Bengal Partition Refugees At Sealdah Railway Station, 1950–60 9 Father prefers the room that is available in Motijheel slum. It is a tiny room with a courtyard and a pit toilet. Four of us will have to sleep in the courtyard. That will be difficult. But if we take that we will spend less. We will have to leave the Sealdah station at any moment. Mejda [the next brother] heard that the refugees were making the station dirty by defecating and urinating there. If we do not leave by tomorrow, they [the railway authorities] will beat us out. While fear of eviction was always there, Sealdah allowed the families of Sadananda and Adhir some waiting time. They did not know how long they had to wait or what would be their next destination. But it was not empty, purposeless waiting. The station and its surroundings provided the refugees a sense of familiarity, a space where networks were formed, contacts made and opportunities explored. Often the process of ‘buying time’ and building contacts involved exploitation. Refugee women were at risk as sexual favours were often asked from them by fellow refugees, platform authorities and NGO workers in exchange for food, protection against eviction or a promised job (Bala, 2018: 169–70). Biswas (2005: 27) remembered: ‘There were two police uncles who used to give my little nephew some bread. One day I saw them giving some money to my sister-in-law. When they were around, she always hid her face with her sari’. The money to the sister-in-law and the bread to her son, evidently, came in return for sexual favours. On paper, government camps and colonies offered the refugees a better life, with a fixed amount of ration and cash and designated tents to live in. Moreover, camps and colonies had primary schools and basic health centres. But in reality, government relief and rehabilitation sites mostly lacked even basic sanitary infrastructure, doles were irregular, and the refugees faced severe surveillance and restrictions. The camps and colonies were located in sparsely populated areas of West Bengal and neighbouring states. Refugees staying there had little scope to explore employment opportunities. They were indeed made to wait by the state. Unlike Sealdah, a camp or a colony did not hold the promise of temporariness, and therefore the possibility of a better future. One was simply stuck in a camp, safe but powerless. Consequently, many refugees ‘chose’ Sealdah, either refusing to accept the government’s rehabilitation offer, returning to the station or going to other busy railway stations like Howrah. Towards the end of 1954, among the 1,400 refugees at Sealdah, 200 were ‘deserters’. In mid-April 1957, according to ‘Refugee Affairs’, dated 15 April 1957, found in Folder 1 of the Prafulla Chakrabarty Papers at the International Institute of Social History at Amsterdam in the Netherlands, about 20,000 out of 30,000 refugees from Bettiah, Bihar, about 5,000 to 7,000 refugees from Kumardoga, Bihar and about 2,500 from Burdwan District of West Bengal had already taken shelter at Sealdah, Howrah Maidan and some footpaths of Calcutta and its suburbs. They were all Bengali Hindus from East Pakistan who had been sent to these destinations by the government of West Bengal. South Asia Research Vol. 42(1): 1–16 10 South Asia Research Vol. 42(1): 1–16 Chatterji (2001: 92), while writing about the self-rehabilitation initiatives of the bhadralok (elite Bengali Hindu) refugees, argued that by establishing squatter colonies, they exercised their ‘right to decide what form of rehabilitation they preferred’. However, clinging on to Sealdah, a section of the platform refugees, perhaps among the most vulnerable sections, actually showed similar agency in deciding their future. Public Reactions to the Sealdah Refugees When communal tension was high, like during the riots of 1950, the Hindu residents of Calcutta largely sympathised with Bengali Hindu refugees squatting on the Sealdah platforms. The presence of several charity organisations at the station premises attests to this support. But the refugees were also blamed, particularly in ‘normal times’, for obstructing the movement of people and commodities at the station, for being filthy and spreading disease. A page-long article by Ela Sen, in The Times of India on 14 July 1957, complained: Calcutta has its own Frankenstein—the four and a half million refugees … are now holding the city at ransom. It is impossible to enter from any direction without climbing over their heads. They are in possession of the railway stations.… At Sealdah station, on the east side of the city, the counter marked ‘Reservation’ is like some island in a vast sea of ragged, filthy destitution. The clerk and his clients are separated by thick masses of humanity. At first the would-be traveller looks around a little desperately, then he picks his way over sleeping children, bags full of rags that pass for clothes, before they [sic] can possibly arrange their [sic] reservations. There is an expression in Bengali, sangshar pete bosha, which can mean setting up home, but is also used to refer to clutter. The word sangshar means family and home taken together. As refugees reached Calcutta with their families and belongings (sangshar), they were seen as cluttering the city, setting up homes on footpaths and railway stations. In South Asia, railway platforms have always been the home of a few children and young adults who may have run away from home or had been trafficked, and of beggars and addicts. They were the ‘outcastes’ of society, staying at liminal spaces like railway platforms. What disturbed Ela was the presence of a large number of ‘regular’ people with their families and belongings at Sealdah. They were not supposed to be staying there. Ela also observed: Desperate and despairing this is a classless society. Each one has been ground down to an identical face—a face from which all distinguishing marks of education, culture or occupation have been effaced. No longer is it possible to tell the schoolmaster from the artisan, the postman from the peasant. Turning the station into their home, these refugees obstructed Ela’s mobility, but also disturbed her notions of home, social hierarchies and belonging. The refugees were Sengupta: Bengal Partition Refugees At Sealdah Railway Station, 1950–60 11 repeatedly described as dirty and diseased in contemporary newspapers, official reports and oral narratives. The high rate of mortality at Sealdah and the city’s rising cholera and smallpox cases explain such depictions. The refugees’ impoverished condition and lack of personal hygiene due to inadequate infrastructure made them ‘filthy’ and ‘dirty’ to the urban elite. These platform refugees also reminded cityresidents of the Bengal Famine of 1943, when thousands of famished people reached Calcutta from the districts in search of food. As toddlers, young women, men and old couples filled the platforms of Sealdah in late April 1950, the Calcutta-based British Deputy High Commissioner, too, observed that if the refugee situation should become uncontrollable, ‘the effects will be as bad as the 1943 famine’ (Deputy High Commissioner Calcutta, 1950). A news report in Amritabazar Patrika of 21 April 1950 described Sealdah as ‘veritable hell on earth’, where refugees were ‘emitting that odour which the famished crowd of ’43 used to spread wherever there was any congregation of theirs’. In 1943, the official surgeon of the British government had described the famine refugees in Calcutta as destitute, clad in filthy rags, and ‘a peculiar body odour emanating from them was often noticed…. refugees huddled together like cattle … all the main functions of life are performed here.… without even the pretence of partition or a curtain to shield their privacy’ (cited in Mukherjee, 2015: 129). Similar observations would be made by columnists like Ela Sen 14 years later to describe Sealdah’s partition refugees. Chakrabarty (1992: 544) observes that dirt and disorder were seen as ‘the two predominant aspects of open space in India’, both by colonialists and nationalists. The streets, stations and bazaars of India were dirty and filthy, with garbage piled up. While a section of the nationalist elite deplored this, many seemed indifferent. Kaviraj (1997: 98) suggested this was because ‘the Brahmanical concept of cleanliness and purity was quite different from the emergent Western ideas about hygiene’ [italics in the original]. In this worldview, the interior of a house was sacred and was routinely cleaned. The street, however, ‘was the outside, the space for which one did not have responsibility, or which was not one’s own, and it therefore lacked any association with obligation, because it did not symbolise any significant principle, did not express any values’ (Kaviraj, 1997: 98, [italics in the original]). But when a railway station became home to hundreds of refugee families, the boundaries between inside/outside, home/street became meaningless. This troubled the ‘Brahmanical’ mind that Kaviraj wrote about. To the more ‘citizenship-minded’ residents of Calcutta, the ‘dirty’ refugees of Sealdah were simply an eyesore and a threat to public health. Naturally, the government and railway authorities were eager to remove the refugees. Registration desks were set up at the platforms, where refugees were asked their names, family details and occupational history. They received a registration card and then were to be dispersed to various camps (Bandyopadhyay & Basu Ray Chaudhuri, 2014: 7). Registered refugees were asked to wait on Platform 8 for their turn, as Jugantar of 2 April 1950 reported. Yet the refugees, given their number, spilled over to other platforms and open spaces and into areas adjacent to the station. In 1950, South Asia Research Vol. 42(1): 1–16 12 South Asia Research Vol. 42(1): 1–16 and also afterwards, the RR Department arranged special trains and trucks to shift registered refugees from Sealdah to various camps within and outside West Bengal. However, speedy dispersal seemed difficult at times, ‘as the camps were found to be filled to capacity’, as The Times of India reported on 28 June 1950. Moreover, the rate of refugee dispersal often failed to match the rate of new arrivals. For example, while from a government press note we learn that by 14 July 1950 4,000 refugees had been taken to Orissa and Bihar from Sealdah station, around 13,000 more were squatting at the station, as Amritabazar Patrika reported on 15 July 1950. They would be taken to neighbouring states immediately, the press note promised. Truckloads of refugees were sent to districts that had so far received few refugees. During the peak of the refugee crisis, trains coming from East Pakistan were even stopped at border stations like Bongaon and Ranaghat, where thousands of refugees were offloaded, taken to nearby transit camps and then sent off to Orissa and Bihar in special trains, another mechanism to tackle the congestion at Sealdah (Sengupta, 2017: 134). Despite all these initiatives, Sealdah remained crowded. As many returned to the platforms from the camps and some refused to leave, the crowd kept swelling. The government coaxed them to go to government accommodation. In 1952, Purabi Mukherji, the State Deputy Minister for Relief and Rehabilitation, herself started staying at the station for a few days to supervise the ‘new plan’ of moving ‘trainloads of migrants … to the work-cum-rehabilitation sites in Birbhum and other western districts of the State’, as The Times of India of 8 October 1950 reported. Another strategy was to impose a ban on charity organisations working among platform refugees. These organisations were often accused of encouraging the refugees to stay. Hiranmoy Bandyopadhay, secretary of the RR Department of West Bengal, remembered: Suppose we had announced a particular date for transferring the refugees from Sealdah to camps, and a charity organisation would announce their clothes distribution programme on a day immediately after that date. The refugees, consequently, would refuse to go to the camps as they wanted new clothes. (Bandyopadhyay, 2014: 150). Though generally sympathetic towards the refugees, this official refused to see the flaws in his department’s initiatives. Neither did he acknowledge the agency of the refugees in refusing to leave the station. But apart from stopping the daily assistance from time to time, and occasionally demolishing the shacks of the refugees outside the platform premises, the government more or less accepted the refugees’ presence on the platforms of Sealdah. According to Jugantar of 5 May 1950, around 300 refugee-owned shacks were demolished by the police outside Sealdah station in early May 1950. The police action was severely criticised by this paper. Since no severe, consistent drive to ‘clear’ the station was undertaken by the government, many refugees who were convinced about the relative advantages of Sealdah stayed put for months and years. They waited at the railway platforms until they found alternative accommodation that suited their needs. Sengupta: Bengal Partition Refugees At Sealdah Railway Station, 1950–60 13 Doing so, they basically claimed the right to wait on their own terms. This right to wait was an exceptional right that could only be exercised in transitory spaces like a railway station, the pavement of a city or a camp, sites that were not seen as permanent residences or as a final destination by the inhabitants. Even the longest-staying refugee at Sealdah did not imagine the station as her permanent home. But not everyone occupying a transitory space like a railway platform could have this right. For instance, the same right was denied to a group of poor Muslims taking shelter in an open park, the Park Circus Maidan of Calcutta, during the 1950 riots. They were from Calcutta, displaced from their homes by the violence. Initially, the government made arrangements for a few tents and provided some dry rations until mid-June 1950. But then the government tried to shift them outside Calcutta, to the western district of Midnapur. According to a Press Note, dated 13 January 1951, File No - 9c1-1/51, Bundle No 4, List 119, Political C.R., held in the National Archives of Bangladesh, the concentration of so many people in this park was declared a danger to public health. The local authorities argued that government could not allow the city’s parks to be breeding grounds for cholera and smallpox. But these displaced people refused to go to Midnapore and wanted to stay at Park Circus, till they could go home. The government, unwilling to allow them to wait, stopped the provision of food. Even then the Muslims chose to stay on, doing odd jobs in order to survive. Finally, as the same press note confirms, they were forcibly evicted from the Park Circus grounds in early 1951 by the government. Thus, not all population groups had the right to wait, even when they occupied transitory spaces. The platform refugees of Sealdah enjoyed the ‘right to wait’ because of the historical specificities of the partition. But the division of British India did not create two homogeneous nation-states in terms of religion, complicating the question of national belonging for religious minorities in India and Pakistan. Despite accepting the principle of jus soli as the basis of citizenship, both India and Pakistan continued to discriminate against religious minorities through various policies and practices after 1947 (Zamindar, 2007). On the other hand, following the religious logic of partition, India and Pakistan accepted that they had certain responsibilities and accountabilities towards the subcontinent’s Hindus/Sikhs and Muslims respectively, irrespective of their citizenship (Chatterji, 2012; Van Schendel, 2002). This understanding complicated the respective state’s relationship with partition refugees and still affects crossborder migrants now (Ranjan, 2018). In the 1950s, Bengali Hindus reaching West Bengal saw relief and rehabilitation as their right. Their Hindu identity, which made them vulnerable and powerless in East Pakistan, and from 1971 onwards in Bangladesh, turned them into rightsbearing individuals in India. The governments of West Bengal and India acknowledged their responsibilities towards these refugees. Yet, when these government authorities failed to meet the rehabilitation needs of refugees, they also accepted certain exceptional rights of these individuals including, as this article argues, the strategic waiting on Sealdah station platforms. South Asia Research Vol. 42(1): 1–16 14 South Asia Research Vol. 42(1): 1–16 Scholars have highlighted how Bengali Hindu refugees reaching West Bengal forcibly occupied Muslim houses and mosques, using vacant private and public properties to establish squatter colonies (Chatterji, 2005; Sanyal, 2009, 2013). The government accepted these occupations and eventually recognised the occupants’ rights on these properties, as not doing so meant fierce resistance from the refugees and adverse reactions by the state’s Hindu residents. The squatters were, however, mostly elite refugees with high ‘mobility capital’. As elaborated in this article, the less-privileged refugees of partition who stayed at Sealdah and waited for better days could also exercise certain rights, like the right to wait. Keeping in mind how busy and important Sealdah was as a railway terminus, and given its central location in Calcutta, this was indeed an extraordinary right to claim and to have. Conclusions While it was often mentioned in passing in academic and popular literature that thousands of Bengali Hindu refugees had to stay at Sealdah after coming from East Pakistan, the station as a settlement site has not been studied critically by partition scholars. The present article addresses this gap, describing the refugee situation at Sealdah in the 1950s and 1960s, difficulties faced by these refugees, opportunities they had, reactions of the public and government responses towards them. Being functional, busy public railway platforms, the infrastructures at Sealdah were clearly inadequate for the refugees’ daily needs, with crucial gender dimensions. But the platforms also provided these refugees with many opportunities. They provided them with temporary, yet potentially long-term refuge and remained a waiting spot. This act of waiting, however, did not necessarily reflect powerlessness, uncertainty and hopelessness. The refugees spent time pleading with the government for quick rehabilitation, building social and political networks in the process, while also looking for jobs and accommodation. Allowing the refugees to stay at Sealdah for a long duration, though not permanently, the state, too, acknowledged their ‘right to wait’, as an exceptional right that could be exercised only by a particular population group and in a particular location. Thus, this article’s focus on waiting at Sealdah problematises the complex relationship between partition refugees and the postcolonial Indian state in West Bengal during the 1950s and early 1960s. Waiting was not a passive, imposed scenario, but often a consciously chosen strategy to maximise the chances of making a fresh beginning. Tolerating the exercise of such refugee agency, however, also meant that the new-born overworked state had to give up some control of the processes of refugees’ resettlement and could not simply disperse new arrivals to distant locations to make them wait there in a disempowered position. Persisting in making their own arrangements, and if necessary, simply waiting on the platforms of Sealdah railway station, the partition refugees exercised their own agency to rebuild their lives. 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