Book review: Deep Halder,Blood Island: An Oral History of the Marichjhapi Massacre

This important book by a journalist makes a remarkable attempt to restore a buried saga of monstrous brutality from the fringes of history to mainstream public conversation. Halder chronicles the massacre of lower caste Namasudra refugees in Marichjhapi, a mangrove island in West Bengal’s famed Sundarbans. He has strong emotional connections with this subject, as Mana Goldar, a Marichjhapi survivor, had stayed with Halder’s family during his childhood. The stories about Marichjhapi, which he had heard from Mana ultimately motivated Halder to publish this oral history.

In the colonial period, the Namasudras constituted the largest Hindu caste group in East Bengal. After the Partition in 1947, many lower caste families could not migrate from East Pakistan to West Bengal due to material constraints. Their migration, triggered by frequent communal violence, continued in waves. The Congress government in West Bengal, citing scarcity of land, re-settled most of these refugees from 1958 onwards in Dandakaranya, a place in Odisha and Chhattisgarh, far away from Bengal. The Left parties organised mass protests against this dispersal policy, but failed to stop it.

In 1977 the Left Front (LF) assumed power in West Bengal. As the LF leaders had been consistent advocates of settling all East Bengali refugees in West Bengal, in March 1978 about 120,000 refugees, mostly Namasudras, returned to West Bengal from Dandakaranya. Now, reneging on its earlier promise, the LF government forcibly sent them back. However, about 30,000 refugees mobilised by the Utbastu Unnayanshil Samiti (UUS) managed to reach Marichjhapi in the Sundarbans, where they established a settler colony (Bandyopadhyay, 2014: 261–2). In response, in 1979 the LF government first launched an economic blockade of Marichjhapi and then the refugees were evicted through a brutal police crackdown.

The story of Marichjhapi has not been adequately covered in academic literature. Only a handful of research papers exist and the first major academic paper (Mallick, 1999) described the huge difficulties faced by the author to get his work published. Faced with insufficient written records, Halder resorted to oral history to reconstruct the events at Marichjhapi.

The book is divided into nine chapters, each containing Halder’s conversation with one single individual connected to the massacre. Besides telling the stories of four survivors, Halder also presents the accounts of two journalists and a lawyer who fought for the refugees in the Calcutta High Court. One interesting chapter contains Halder’s conversations with the famous Dalit writer Manoranjan Byapari whose father died due to chest injuries inflicted during the massacre. Halder also talked to Kanti Ganguly, the LF Minister in charge of Sundarbans at the time of the massacre. Ganguly justified the police action, citing violation of forest laws by the refugees and claimed that less than 10 people were killed at Marichjhapi. Through accounts of survivors, Halder demolishes this claim and uncovers shocking details of unspeakable horrors and appalling savagery suffered by a harmless, peaceful group of dispossessed refugees.

The survivors’ accounts disclose that the economic blockade imposed in January 1979 through encirclement of Marichjhapi by police launches led to a severe shortage of drinking water and food, causing the death of several children. A tube well dug by the refugees was poisoned by the police. Whenever their small boats tried to break through the police cordon, their boats would be destroyed by the police. One survivor’s account reports how, hoping that the police would not attack women, once women were sent on boats to fetch water and food from an adjacent island. The police attacked all these boats and a few women were taken to the nearest police station and were gang raped for days before being released. Journalist Niranjan Halder discloses that even those selflessly helping the refugees were not spared. The police persistently pursued a doctor who used to visit Marichjhapi to provide medical services, forcing him to flee to Bangladesh and ultimately take refuge in Uttarakhand.

According to survivors’ account, in May 1979 the police force, allegedly accompanied by left cadres, arrived at Marichjhapi to evict the refugees. Thousands of huts were set on fire, women were raped, skulls of children were brutally crushed and people were shot indiscriminately; 5,000 to 10,000 people were allegedly killed, but to hide this, dead bodies were either dumped in deep forests or dropped into the river. It is widely believed by Sundarbans inhabitants that these corpses became food for the famous royal Bengal tigers, turning them into man-eaters, as they developed a taste for human flesh (Jalais, 2005: 1761).

Apart from revealing the scale of the massacre, this book seeks to discover the real intent behind the crackdown. It hints at two possibilities. Some testimonials suggest caste bias of the upper-caste dominated LF. This unsettling insinuation is not without some basis, as the LF leadership has remained overwhelmingly dominated by higher castes. According to Omvedt (1994: 183–4), the problem is not that the communist movement in India originated as Brahman-dominated, but that it remained Brahman-dominated. Dalit representation in the West Bengal Assembly and Cabinet during LF rule remained abysmally low. Scheduled Castes were rarely given the chance to contest from unreserved constituencies in both state and national elections (Guha, 2021a). Further, the refugee rehabilitation policy has often been accused of being influenced by caste prejudice. According to Dwaipayan Sen (2013), it is quite plausible that the attempts to rehabilitate the refugees outside West Bengal were motivated by the objective to prevent political regrouping of the well-organised Namasudra community.

Some accounts point out that the refusal of the Marichjhapi refugees to join the left parties’ patron-client network antagonised the LF leaders. The refugees did not ask for any relief assistance, apart from the right to settle in Marichjhapi. Within a few months, they constructed roads, drainage, a school, dispensary, market and a dike system to hold the tide, entirely through their own efforts. Many of Halder’s interviewees believed that the self-sufficiency displayed by the refugees was seen as defiance of the LF, an explanation which seems to have some merit.

Apparently, the communist parties in West Bengal greatly relied upon patronage networks for electoral success (Guha, 2021b). The dependence of economically vulnerable groups like small manufacturers, street hawkers, auto-rickshaw drivers and marginal farmers on government patronage for their livelihood was used by the left as a political resource to turn them into solid vote blocs (Sarkar, 2006). This created what Chatterjee (2004) calls a ‘political society’, where electoral support from vulnerable groups is extracted in exchange for ad-hoc entitlements, not akin to legal rights.

Lastly, Halder explores why Marichjhapi failed to attract sufficient public condemnation. His journalist interviewees and lawyer Sakya Sen tell him that vernacular newspapers were muzzled by threats to withdraw government advertisements, a major source of revenue, so the vernacular press possibly buckled under such pressure. However, Sakya Sen assures Halder that today it is impossible to hush up events like Marichjhapi. Sen is probably right, as a Marichjhapi-like playbook could not be put into effect to silence the media when violence happened in Nandigram and Singur during the last years of the LF rule.

Halder has produced a significant work of oral history. His intriguing textual strategy is both a strength and a weakness. He steers clear of temptations to follow the usual academic approach of relating incidents like Marichjhapi to standard theories concerning violence, victimhood and subaltern identity. Halder simply records the stories as told by those who fought and suffered. This lets the narration of the sufferers’ lived experiences direct readers to form their own opinion. However, those looking for a dense academic analysis will find Halder’s approach theoretically ungrounded and normatively vacuous. But by withdrawing his own voice, Halder offers an undiluted, unadulterated authenticity which only the voices of the victims can represent. Yet, while Halder withdrew his voice, he did not withhold his agency. He intervenes by posing questions in this unsettling book, ultimately forming a powerful and persuasive narrative, based upon the survivors’ shared experiences. This narrative hints at the interplay of political hypocrisy and social bias. It builds itself slowly in the minds of readers, thereby allowing them sufficient agency to form their own views.