The Refugee City: Partition and Kolkata’s postcolonial landscape

In 1966, the writers of the Basic Development Plan for the city described Calcutta as a ‘metropolis in crisis.’ It was a description given in despair probably keeping in mind the city’s chequered history of urbanization. This urbanization was externally imposed by the English to meet the needs of a colonial economy and de-linked from the developments in the rural areas.¹ The decade of the forties was characterized by major movements in population that stretched the limits of the city and its civic amenities, particularly the great famine of 1943 which took a toll of 6 million lives and pushed hundreds of people to seek relief into the city and its suburbs. After the Partition, the refugee movement greatly influenced the urbanization of the city because their sheer numbers transformed villages or semi urban areas to towns. In Calcutta, 25% of the metropolis agglomeration were refugees and between 1941 and 1951, Calcutta’s overall population density jumped by 20% while in areas with a large refugee presence like Tollygunj, the density increased by almost 141% within that same period.²