Citizen Refugee
Forging the Indian Nation after Partition

Explores how refugees were used as agents of nation-building in India, leading to gendered and caste-ridden policies of rehabilitation.

Uditi Sen (Author)

9781108425612, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 30 August 2018

300 pages, 8 b/w illus. 2 maps 5 tables
23.5 x 15.8 x 2 cm, 0.56 kg

This innovative study explores the interface between nation-building and refugee rehabilitation in post-partition India. Relying on archival records and oral histories, Uditi Sen analyses official policy towards Hindu refugees from eastern Pakistan to reveal a pan-Indian governmentality of rehabilitation. This governmentality emerged in the Andaman Islands, where Bengali refugees were recast as pioneering settlers. Not all refugees, however, were willing or able to live up to this top-down vision of productive citizenship. Their reminiscences reveal divergent negotiations of rehabilitation 'from below'. Educated refugees from dominant castes mobilised their social and cultural capital to build urban 'squatters' colonies', while poor Dalit refugees had to perform the role of agricultural pioneers to access aid. Policies of rehabilitation marginalised single and widowed women by treating them as 'permanent liabilities'. These rich case studies dramatically expand our understanding of popular politics and everyday citizenship in post-partition India.

Introduction
Part I. Framing Policy: 1. Unwanted citizens in a saturated state: towards a governmentality of rehabilitation
2. Harnessed to national development: settlers, producers and agents of Hinduisation
Part II. Rebuilding Lives: 3: Exiles or settlers? Caste, governance and identity in the Andaman Islands
4. Unruly citizens: memory, identity and the anatomy of squatting in Calcutta
5. Gendered belongings: state, social workers and the 'unattached' refugee woman
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Refugees & political asylum [JFFD], National liberation & independence, post-colonialism [HBTR], Postwar 20th century history, from c 1945 to c 2000 [HBLW3], 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW], Asian history [HBJF]