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This article focuses on the Muslim refugees who went to East Pakistan due to the Partition of British India in 1947. It studies the magnitude of their migration, their motives for and strategies of migration, their origins, occupations, and political orientations, and their linguistic identities and experiences with rehabilitation. As refugees in East Pakistan, they faced many social, political, and economic hardships, and they had to negotiate with the government in different ways, but little is known about their experiences of migration and rehabilitation. This article addresses that gap and in so doing challenges the popular notion that Bengal only witnessed a one-way migration of Hindus from East Pakistan to West Bengal. Moreover, by highlighting how the linguistic identities shaped the experiences of the Muslim refugees in East Pakistan, the article highlights how the province's language movement affected the unfolding of Partition in a particular part of post-colonial South Asia.
Nisharuddin Khan (Sun,) studied this question.