The Decolonization Process in the Indian Ocean World: Border Making and the 1947 Partition of India

Drawing from a range of archival and ethnographic data, the paper will broadly investigate the theme of “geographic visibility and invisibility” in shaping the decolonisation process with respect to border making process in Bengal, India, especially the Sundarbans-World’s Only Mangrove Tiger Land. A part of the world that is thought to have been cut off from the other Indian Ocean World once the 1947 Partition happened in the subcontinent. It is the aim of my project to argue that, the riverine networks of the Bengal delta which connects the hinterland to the Indian Ocean has always been a pathway for commerce and transfer of humans along the mangrove coastline running from South Asia to South East Asia. The riparian network of the Bengal delta has always been active and in visible human consciousness, even as the British Empire aimed at converting wastelands to cultivable spaces, so as to enable tax collection. Still, during the 1947 Partition these rivers and their wetlands were ignored and consequently the post-colonial border was drawn through them dissecting the fluvial delta which now performs as fluid, mobile borders adding layers of legal and psychological complexities in people’s lives. Though there had been unending debates about divisions on religious lines, as to which areas should fall on which side during the 1947 Partition—India or Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan), there was no stir about ecological considerations of the littoral Bengal delta in birthing one such border and it had been completely “invisibilised.”