“Millions of babies in pain
Millions of mothers in rain
Millions of brothers in woe
Millions of children nowhere to go”
—Allen Ginsberg (September on Jessore Road)
Transnational migration is experienced as a double loss — of origin and of reality; a ‘hyperreality’, as it were. The representation of identity is, therefore, an ongoing process because immigrant identities are continually being transformed by the journey, their subjectivities being recomposed in ‘different practices and sites of experience’. Thus ‘home’ itself may be experienced in movement and has come to be conceptualized in fluid terms. The immigrants’ experience of the present is coloured with a persistent desire for return, a sense of deep nostalgia for their homeland.[1] Therefore, when thirty thousand migrants from Dandakaranya reached the small island of Marichjhapi to the south of Kumirmari of Sundarbans in April 1978, their primary desire was to settle down to conceptualize carefully what could be called ‘home’ in an altered reality. The otherwise self-sufficient community life that took birth without the cooperation of the midwife named State could not, however, survive the rage of the establishment post 1979. It was then that Marichjhapi was successfully annihilated; silenced beyond a murmur. This piece of semi-academic work shall try its best to document that voice of Marichjhapi before the silence. Marichjhapi, unfortunately has not been as well documented as Nandigram or if we look beyond national boundary, the Nazi Holocaust. However in recent times, owing to the persistent efforts of a fraction of the academia and intelligentsia like Ross Mallick, Annu Jalais, Tushar Bhattacharjee, Mahasweta Devi, Sunil Gangopadhyay and Jagadish Chandra Mandal, Marichjhapi has received a voice. Needless to say I have heavily relied on the available materials and documents to ponder why Marichjhapi Massacre happened and why Marichjhapi is still shrouded in silence.
বা ঙা ল না মা 
