On Narasingha Avenue in Dum Dum stands the modest house with a red-and-yellow terrazzo floor of Lakshmi Kanta Kundu, a trader from Khulna. In 1950, he swore an affidavit before a Calcutta magistrate declaring himself a refugee from East Pakistan. He had left behind property worth Rs 30,000 and generations of belonging.
The family’s papers tell the story in an inverted order. First came a squatter shed in a jabardakhal colony beside the ruins of Clive House. Then, in March 1951, a dakhal patra recognised their possession. A title deed followed in August 1953. Only in April 1954 did South Dum Dum municipality sanction a plan for a house that was already standing. Possession came first, and the law followed. That sequence became Bengal’s grammar of land and illustrates the unusual historical legacy that complicates its development today.
Inside the house hang portraits of Swami Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore and Lenin: Hindu faith, Bengali pride and Left ideology, all enlisted in the service of three cottahs and a title deed.
Calcutta was once where India traded with the world. Jute, tea and coal moved through its port. Partition cut the city off from the fields that fed it and sent it a flood of people. The border was drawn late and arbitrarily. Kundu’s Khulna, expected to go to India, was assigned to Pakistan in the final award. By 1951, about a million refugees had reached Calcutta and its neighbouring districts. The state’s then finance minister, Nalini Ranjan Sarkar, offered them “the deepest and most sincere sympathies” — and little else. As Uditi Sen notes, the city absorbed India’s largest concentration of refugees without a plan to house them.
So the refugees housed themselves. Many were not the destitute of the stereotype. Joya Chatterji found them more likely than the local population to be employed, and better qualified. They occupied Second World War barracks, mango orchards and wasteland, establishing 149 colonies in Greater Calcutta, many around Dum Dum and Panihati in the north and Jadavpur and Tollygunge in the south. Denied the state’s help, they asked only for its indifference.
The colony club became their instrument. In Dum Dum, the Colony Institute, founded in 1951 by local doctors, still displays its football trophies. The clubs secured plots, organised Durga Pujas, ran the Motijheel school and cheered East Bengal against Mohun Bagan. In 1950, they federated into the United Central Refugee Council. Congress families turned Left less from doctrine than from the need for a secure plot. Bengal had once led India’s politics from the top. Now it was politicised from the para up.
Their power rewrote statutes. The 1951 eviction law only allowed squatters to be removed if they were rehabilitated elsewhere. The West Bengal Premises Tenancy Act of 1956 entrenched tenants’ rights. ‘Operation Barga’ carried the logic to the countryside, giving sharecroppers tenure on the land they tilled. These may have been appropriate for the moment but systems outlive the occasions that create them and protections built for the dispossessed hardened into obstacles to putting land to productive use.
Land was not the only cause of Bengal’s decline; but the ethos that redistributed land also fostered militant unions and capital flight. By 2023-24, West Bengal’s share of national GDP had fallen to about 5.6% and its per capita income to 83.7% of the national average. Singur and Nandigram exposed the contradiction of a political movement that had championed land rights but struggled to reconcile them with the demands of industrialisation.
The question now is how to preserve the security those families won while building an economy in which they can find work. The unfinished task is alienability: the legal right to use, combine, finance and transfer land without a neighbourhood veto or a generation spent in court. Industry does not need a city without a past but it does need clarity about rights. Others have confronted similar challenges. After reunification, a single East German property might carry claims from Nazi dispossession, communist expropriation and an heir living in the West. Germany accepted restitution in principle but did not let rebuilding wait for every claim to be resolved. Its Investment Priority Act allowed contested land to be put to productive use, and claimants displaced by investment received compensation. It was the Dum Dum sequence put to a new purpose: use first and settle after, but with the law ratifying investment rather than occupation and compensating those it displaced. Vietnam, whose Constitution places land under collective ownership, made land bankable without privatising it. The 1993 Land Law let households and firms hold use rights that could be transferred, leased, inherited and mortgaged, recorded in certificates known as ‘red books’. Rights weren’t absolute, but were defined, recorded and tradeable.
Bengal should begin where the ground is clear. As an imperial entrepôt, Calcutta left large tracts with the docks, the railways and the armed forces. Where such land is no longer needed for its original purpose, release it for work. But the tangled inheritance cannot be wished away. We have to reconcile legitimate historical claims to land with its most productive use. A closed mill or an idle railway yard should not stand empty for decades because ownership remains unsettled. The law must address claims through settlement or compensation without blocking development in the meantime. Land rights should give us a present in which we can build, not hold us hostage to the past.
Underpinning both is a process to digitise land records, fast-track claims and issue bankable titles. Simplify changes of land use for closed mills, derelict factories and disputed properties. Repealing the Urban Land (Ceiling and Regulation) Act is necessary but not sufficient.
None of this will happen by itself. It needs a state government willing to legislate, a land tribunal with the judges and the mandate to clear its backlog, and a Centre willing to release the land its agencies no longer use.
Finally, we must create the conditions for the para’s talent to find commercial expression. This week, Durga Puja will again show what neighbourhood clubs can achieve: raise funds, coordinate with people, hire artists and deliver projects on deadline. That is the foundation of enterprise. With access to capital and markets, they could incubate local businesses, create jobs and keep more value within their neighbourhoods.
Seventy years on, the terrazzo at Narasingha Avenue still gleams. The family laid it while they were still sleeping in a shed, choosing beauty before comfort because they meant to stay. Against huge odds, they built a home. Now we must give them the means to build an economy. Set the ground rules, and Calcutta can again be where India meets the world.
Rudra Chatterjee is Chairman of Obeetee, Managing Director of Luxmi Tea, and writes on finance and economic issues