ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the category of poorer migrants who settled on the peripheries whether geographical or social of a changing world. The historical effects of the fracturing of the subcontinent had a huge impact on migrants in and from the peripheries, but these have largely escaped scholarly attention. As Rahman and van Schendel have noted, the scholarship on partition in the east has been dominated by two themes: the relationship between the refugees and the state and the voices and identities of a particular group of refugees to West Bengal, the Bengali bhodrolok (the educated upper and middle class), with their often traumatic and nostalgic memories of a lost homeland in East Bengal. The citizenship status of Biharis still remained ambiguous, and activists went on to make another push to achieve voting rights in reality. On the theme of nomenclature, it is significant that Ilias described Biharis neither as Bengalis nor Muslims but as Indians.
