When India was partitioned in 1947, the province of Bengal was split along religious lines. West Bengal became part of India; East Pakistan -- later Bangladesh -- went to Pakistan. Millions of Hindus fled east to west, Muslims west to east, in one of the largest mass migrations in human history. The educated upper classes found footing in Calcutta. The poor -- overwhelmingly from lower castes, many of them Dalits -- were shipped to resettlement camps far from Bengal, in the arid forests of Odisha and Chhattisgarh, a region broadly known as Dandakaranya. The camps were bleak. Refugees described barbed-wire perimeters, identical rows of tarpaulin shelters, and constant surveillance. Officials called them Permanent Liability Camps -- a name that captured both the bureaucratic contempt and the despair of the people warehoused inside them.

The CPI(M), then Bengal's main opposition party, made the refugees' cause a political rallying point. Party leaders argued that Bengali-speaking refugees could and should be rehabilitated within West Bengal. At demonstrations in the Dandakaranya camps, CPI(M) leaders personally invited the refugees to return. The response was overwhelming. When the Left Front won the 1977 elections, the refugees organized through a committee called the Udbastu Unnyansil Samity and sent representatives to Bengal to scout a settlement site. They chose Marichjhanpi, an island in the Sundarbans mangroves -- particularly appealing to refugees who had originally come from the nearby Khulna district in Bangladesh and still had relatives living in forest clearings. But the party that had issued the invitation now held power, and power brought different calculations. The island fell within the Sundarbans Tiger Reserve, and the government grew apprehensive about the political and ecological complications of sanctioning a large settlement there.

Despite official discouragement, roughly 40,000 refugees reached Hasnabad, and around 500 families established themselves on Marichjhanpi by early 1979. They cleared mangrove, built shelters, dug wells, and began fishing. For a brief period, the settlement functioned -- a community of displaced people building lives on a six-meter-elevation island in the tidal swamps. Then the state moved to evict them. Police and paramilitary forces imposed a blockade around the island, cutting off food and fresh water. Boats attempting to bring supplies were turned away. Residents who tried to leave by water were intercepted. The details of what followed remain disputed and deliberately obscured -- the state government restricted press access, and official records have never been fully opened. What researchers have pieced together includes violent clashes between armed residents and police, alleged extrajudicial killings, and deaths from starvation and disease during the blockade.

The death toll at Marichjhanpi remains unknown. Estimates range from hundreds to as many as 10,000, depending on whether one counts only direct violence or includes starvation, disease, and the scattered deaths of refugees who were forcibly deported back to Dandakaranya. The state government under Chief Minister Jyoti Basu denied that any massacre occurred. No official inquiry was ever conducted. For decades, the incident received almost no coverage in Indian media, and it has been largely absent from mainstream historical accounts of the Left Front's 34-year rule in West Bengal. Researchers like Annu Jalais, Ross Mallick, and Deep Halder have worked to reconstruct the events from survivor testimonies and scattered records. Marichjhanpi today is once again uninhabited mangrove forest, six meters above sea level, reclaimed by the Sundarbans. The island keeps no visible record of the people who briefly tried to make it home.