ABSTRACT
Historians of the Partition of India broadly acknowledge that the demographic upheaval that followed in its wake permanently altered the faces of the capital cities of South Asia. Numerous histories of specific refugee colonies of Calcutta, or of specific endeavours of place-making by refugees, such as establishing a market, a school, or initiating a community-run Durga puja already exist. These range from popular Bengali pamphlets, autobiographies and amateur histories to more organised scholarly endeavours relying on the collection and interpretation of interviews. This chapter, while drawing upon several such histories of Bijaygarh colony, is substantively different from this genre of history writing that functions within an additive logic of recovering marginal histories and recording for posterity people's experience of Partition 'from below'. Bijaygarh colony was born as the unauthorised occupation of a wireless centre and barracks built for Allied soldiers during World War II in Jadavpur region of 24 Parganas.
