ABSTRACT
The concept of mobility capital helps to unravel the apparently confounding patterns of migration. It helps us understand not only migration itself, but also internal displacement and staying on. Two surges of nation-making thus tore through the fabric of Bengal in the latter half of the 20th century, producing some of the largest migrations and displacements in recorded history. By comparing different cases in a large and international study, this chapter suggests that mobility capital worked as an interdependent bundle of attributes to enable successful migration. The chapter suggests that, disproportionately when compared to the general population, the delta's migrants tended to have very particular bundles of assets, competences, or dispositions. Migrants who lacked one or another dimension of mobility capital or were tied by obligations to home, by contrast, tended to end up in impoverished communities of the internally displaced.
