ABSTRACT
The Partition of 1947 did not solve the problem of nation-making for both the countries, India and Pakistan. Rather it created more. Partition-like situation continued to be reproduced in next three decades after Partition and states continued to produce displaced people who migrated to the other country in search of safety, security and livelihood. Yet after 73 years of Partition, the struggle for home, habitat and identity had never stopped for the first, second and third generations of the displaced refugees in both the states along the Bengal borderlands. Now they became a diaspora community who prefers to live in a ‘make-believe’ world. With this background, this chapter aims to highlight the struggle of the Hindu and Muslim refugees, to and from the Bengal borderlands. The key focus of the chapter would be to depict a picture on the migration and settlement pattern/s of the Bengali Hindu refugees settled in eastern and north-eastern states of India, and Bengali/non-Bengali refugees, permanently rehabilitated in the then East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). It attempts to understand how these two diasporic communities tried to negotiate with the altering socio-economic-political situations and could survive amidst changing policies, politics and stands of respective governments and mentalities of the masses in their own ‘promise-lands’, which were apparently created for them.
