Resumo de The Marginal Men - Prafulla K. Chakrabarti

With the publication of The Marginal Men in 1990, a new chapter was opened in the study of the aftermath of Partition of Bengal .It is a very comprehensive and provocativework. Prafulla Chakrabarti reconstructed the untold story of the sufferings ofthe refugees from East Pakistan and theirunbelievable struggle for resettlement in rich details with rare mastery overthe subject. He primarily focused on three aspects. Firstly, he depicted indetail the miserable conditions of the millions of uprooted and displacedpersons from East Pakistan, the waves of migration, the policy adopted by theGovernment of India as well as the state for their relief and rehabilitation;giving us a vivid description of the suffering of the refugees in governmentcamps and colonies, on railway platforms and pavements. Secondly, hereconstructed the politics of the refugee resistance under the leadership ofUCRC backed by the Marxist left parties. The crystallization and politicizationof the refugees drastically changed the political equation in West Bengal. The refugeesemerged as a potential political force in Bengalpolitics. It took a concrete shape from the late 1950s and became the majorsource of the growing strength of the leftist opposition in the state duringthe 1960s and brought about a sea change in the contours of its political life.The most interesting and debatable aspect of the study is its final and thelast section - the relationship between the refugees and the left. Chakrabartishows that the refugees were initially unenthusiastic about the left partiesand quit naturally drawn towards the Congress, the party in power. Graduallythey were disillusioned about Congress initiative in refugee rehabilitation andactively joined in the opposition force. The left parties steadily penetratedamong the refugees and built their organizational base. The outcome was theformation of the UCRC, a coalition of most of the left parties in West Bengal. In 1959 the UCRC was taken over by the CPIand later the CPI-M firmly established its control over the organization. Therefugees extended their whole-hearted support to the left in their politicalmobilization and were supported by the left in their struggle for survival, inturn. To Chakrabarti, the CPI or the CPI-M was not the vanguard of the workingclass. As there is no real working class in the Marxist sense in West Bengal,it was the refugees who brought the left to power in West Bengal. The refugees were used by the left parties as pawns intheir power game and these parties were refugeeized in turn.Chakrabarti?s thesis ishighly debatable and to some extent self-contradictory. It is very difficult tobelieve that the refugees were used by the left just as a ladder to reachpower. It `is too simplified and superficial to be accepted. The refugeesyndrome does not fully explain the political turn over in West Bengal. As one political scientist has rightly observed, themethodological problem of this brilliant narrative lies in the author?shalf-hearted application of the class approach to disentangle the refugee-leftnexus in post-Independence Bengal politics. Inhis efforts to dodge economic determinism, the author unconsciously chooses toenter the blind alley of political determinism, thus throwing the baby of classanalysis with the bath water of dogmatic Marxism in the process. Thismethodological volte-face has derailed the author from the track of objectivehistoriography and induced him to make an overtures to Bengali chauvinism, ifnot also to pro-Hindu sentimentalism----an overture absolutely unworthy of sorigorous and painstaking a piece of research work. However, there is no denying the fact that TheMarginal Men remains a comprehensive and indispensable work in thisfield of study even today. Moreover, it is the first work of a professional historian on the impact of Partition in the east. Professional historians hadrarely crossed the chronological barrier of 1947 and the post-Independence era. It had been left totallyto the other social scientists to carry out their research on the area. The Marginal Men is an exceptional work in this context too. It stimulated the present generation historians to step into an unexploredfield of study.

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