Published Paper Details:

Abstract: This article examines how Dandakaranya--the central Indian rehabilitation scheme for post-Partition refugees--functions as a recurring memory-landscape in Bengali Dalit writing. Instead of treating Dandakaranya only as an administrative site of resettlement, this study reads it as a portable topography that shapes narrative temporality, ethical judgment, and political claim in the life writings and testimonios of Bengali Dalit authors (notably Manoranjan Byapari and Jatin Bala). By juxtaposing parliamentary debates and policy documents with Dalit autobiographical texts and recent scholarship on refugee governance, conservation, and the Marichjhapi affair, I argue that Dandakaranya becomes in Dalit literature both an index of state failure and a mnemonic technology: a set of routes, queues, papers, and affinities that refugees carry into later settings (urban slums, reserve forests, courts). The article elaborates three interlinked claims: (1) Dalit writing transforms bureaucratic detail into moral evidence; (2) Dandakaranya-memory organizes nostalgia as critical evaluation rather than sentimental longing; and (3) the Dandakaranya -> return -> Marichjhapi sequence reveals continuities between development, conservation, and casteed governance. Close readings of texts, archival references (Rajya Sabha debates), and historiographic synthesis support the argument.