Abstract

The Independence of India was accompanied by the bloody massacre of partition of the country on the basis of religion. Suddenly the land in which one is born and brought up was dubbed by the state as not his own ignoring all sorts of attachments between the individual and the land. The individual identity was replaced with the collective identity of becoming “refugee”. There is a fundamental difference between the Punjab partition and the partition between India and West Pakistan. While the first one had a devastating effect and mostly stopped in the subsequent years following the partition, the letter continued for many years after Independence. The first influx of refugees that came from West Pakistan immediately after the Independence was wealthy and upper caste people who easily found their foothold in West Bengal. With the independence of West Pakistan and the emergence of the state of Bangladesh there was another wave of migration where the poor and people belonging to Namashudra castes were compelled to leave Bangladesh. But in many cases they were no longer accommodated within West Bengal which has a close proximity with the life they lived in their “old” country. Many of them were shifted to different parts of India without considering their language and cultural identity. Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide, set in Sundarban, recounts in its backdrop the tragic events of Marichjhapi massacre. The present paper, besides tracing the traumas of the partition to the refugees, aims to explore how they are constantly searching for their “home” in newly found land. The role of the State in dealing with the refugees is also discussed.