Partition, Bengali refugee critiques of postcolonial state and capitalism, and the subaltern origins of the Cold War in India, 1947-50

The British Raj came to a formal end on 15 August 1947. In the years following the bifurcation of British India into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan, between 11 and 18 million people migrated to escape sectarian pogroms at the hands of the majority population. By 1950, many South Asian – specifically, Bengali – refugees radically critiqued decolonization. Theorizing from their experiences of proletarianization, East Bengali refugees argued that decolonization had been incomplete. The postcolonial Indian state was a neocolonial state allied to Western imperialism. Refugees imagined themselves as part of a worldwide struggle between Anglo-American imperialism and Sino-Soviet-led socialist anti-imperialism. Refugees assembled in hundreds and thousands across the Indian state of West Bengal to overthrow regimes of big private property. They condemned the operations of money economy. They aimed to overcome capitalism. Inspired by Chinese Communists, they built a vast framework of confederal democracy uniting refugee camps and colonies—a ‘refugee polis’. This essay offers a socially thick intellectual history of this epic transformation, which delegitimized the postcolonial Indian state, and dramatically drew the country, through struggles waged by refugees, into the tumult of the Cold War. It provokes us to visualize the subaltern origins of the Cold War in India.