Caste Atrocities on Double Marginalized Dalit Refugees of Bengaland Their Unfinished Traumatic Pangs: Its Unburial by the Literary Artists Jatin Bala, Manoranjan Byapari, Adhir Biswas, and Amitav Ghosh

Abstract

The Partition of India in 1947 engendered a violent socio-political and demographic massacre in the bifurcated segments of Bengal - East and West. The Hindu minorities of East Bengal were forced to flee from their ancestral home and to take shelter in West Bengal before, during and the following decades of partition. The ‘upper caste’ refugees of them got legalized colonies and Government assistance here. Rather, the ‘dalit’ sector among the refugees were to live “prisoners’ life” in resettlement camps and majority of them were also exiled in the hostile ‘alien’ lands of other states. Their dual identities of gaining a new global nationality of a newly formed country (India) and the simultaneous loss of the local identifier in the vernacular as ‘desh’ (the village in East Bengal which had their roots) is the site of trauma. This traumatic pangs are increased manifold when despite the new identity (albeit without identification) there is marginalization on two aspects - one for being a refugee and the other for being a dalit. Yet, the voices of pangs and sufferings of these double marginalized refugees are kept silenced in the caste Hindu dominated literature. The paper, therefore, attempts to dig out the pangs of the double marginalization of these neglected dalit refugees through the literary reflections in the works of Jatin Bala, Manoranjan Byapari, Adhir Biswas, and Amitav Ghosh.