ADRIFT IN THE BAY, AT HOME IN THE ISLAND: POST-PARTITION ‘SETTLER WOMEN’ IN NEIL ISLAND, BAY OF BENGAL

Andaman Islands, located in the Bay of Bengal and straddling the margins of South and Southeast Asia, is separated from the Indian mainland by almost one thousand kms from the mouth of River Hooghly. The Islands are a central point of convergence of national-international waters, marking the ‘liquid borderlands’ between South Asia and Southeast Asia, in the ‘sea of islands’ connected by historic ties to the places and people in Southeast Asia and in the continental mainland, that is, South Asia, alike. This eastern division of the Indian Ocean has remained distinct from the Indian Ocean World with its volume of migration, both climate-driven as well as due to the need for labour, which saw especially increased numbers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The three prominent phases in the history of the archipelago, that is, the British colonial period, the Japanese occupation period, and the post-Independence period, are marked by a commonality of desire to create an island ‘outpost’ in the Bay of Bengal. This ‘strategically-located’, hyper-masculine island-space, situated at the edge of the Indian nation, is the locus of the Indian nation-state’s geopolitical anxieties and international powerplay. Post-colonial acts of ‘integrating’ the nation-state’s territory goes hand-in-hand with the androcentric imagery of pioneering, productive, and patriotic settlerhood, toiling for the development of the nation.
The Islands have been the theatre of both colonial and post-colonial policies of ‘colonisation’ and social engineering. In the aftermath of India’s eastern Partition (1947), ‘residual’ Bengali migrant population languishing in the refugee camps of mainland India were recruited for transportation to Neil Island (now Shaheed Dweep) under the postcolonial state’s ‘rehabilitation’ scheme (1967-69). They consisted almost exclusively of lower-caste Namasudra population proficient in agriculture, fishing and allied activities. Rehabilitation revolved around the male head of the heteronormative family unit, who was the eligible recipient of land and other facilities to ‘settle’ themselves in the Island. The women who reached the Islands as part of the settler household units, however, were viewed merely as persons ‘attached’ to the male head. The ‘settler women’s’ lifeworlds have not been adequately represented in existing discourse. Drawing from archival sources and juxtaposing these ‘traces’ with oral narratives of the ‘settler women’, the thesis aims to address this oversight. The ‘settler women’s’ narratives of negotiating with the rehabilitation machinery; transportation and adaptation to the island ecology, establishment of settlements, and everyday struggle with scarcity; their claim-making as ‘Islanders’ and ‘settlers’; and finally, the close rooting of their identity with place, given the context of their Partition-consequent displacement(s) and altered ways of remembering, offer a rich framework for studying gendered accounts of migration, dislocation and formation of identities in post-Independence India.
The archipelago, owing to its ‘strategic’ location in the ‘frontier zone’, is at the centre of a series of ongoing development projects that raise grave concerns regarding the sustainability of the island habitats. The tectonically precarious position of the archipelago renders it vulnerable to natural calamities, and reckless expansion of tourism and allied industries pose a burgeoning threat to the island ecosystem. The contemporary sweep of changes is steadily shifting the Island’s ‘fluid geographies’ and with it the memories of the first-generation settlers. In the backdrop of these contemporary changes, the unofficial histories of statist ‘non-actors’ are central to developing an island-centric framework of gendered histories of not only the Partition, but more significantly, the Bay of Bengal region itself.