This book joins a growing body of regionally focused studies of the years around and following the momentous partition of 1947. As a study of the division of Bengal and its aftermath in West Bengal, The Spoils of Partition in particular provides a basis for comparing the experience of divided Bengal with that of divided Punjab, and of expanding our understanding of the transformations wrought by partition on the Subcontinent as a whole.

In her earlier book, Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition 1932–1947 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), Joya Chatterji argues for the important role that the Hindu elite of Bengal, the bhadralok, played in the demand for the partition of Bengal, carving out a Hindu-majority homeland in this large Muslim-majority province of British India. The Spoils of Partition follows that argument. The first part examines the involvement of the Hindu bhadralok in drafting the borderline, and the subsequent shift in the political status of the province with respect to postindependence national politics as its borders shrunk dramatically to form the state of West Bengal. Those who felt unease with Chatterji's earlier characterization of Hindu communalism may continue to feel that unease here.

In the second part of the book, she examines the impact of the ensuing massive displacements of people in West Bengal, which, she argues, were largely unanticipated by the very people who wanted the division of Bengal. Here, she valuably examines the experiences of both Hindu refugees who were displaced from the east into West Bengal, as well as the diverse but substantial number of Muslims who chose to remain as a minority in West Bengal. In particular, her account reveals the very different character of displacements in Bengal compared to that of the Punjab, the waves in which people were displaced in the years and decades following 1947, right up to 1971. In the Punjab, on the other hand, there was not only an exceptional interstate agreement on the transfer of populations along religious lines in 1947, but also state controls on the movement of people were put into place along the western Indo-Pak border by 1948, shaping the nature of those displacements.

While Chatterji does not link the history of displacements across divided Bengal to the very different character and history of the eastern Indo-Pak border (this is partly examined in Willem van Schendel's Bengal Borderland: Beyond State and Nation in South Asia [London: Anthem Press, 2005]), she richly documents the failures of the Indian government response to the displacements and the planned rehabilitation schemes, such as the Dandakaranya project. In doing so, Chatterji is rather critical of the Indian government's attempts to avoid a transfer of populations in Bengal, of the kind agreed to in Punjab, arguing that it resulted in the lack of adequate rehabilitation for the very real refugees on the ground.

In this regard, the position of East Bengal's Hindus could be compared to that of Sind's Hindus, where the Sind Congress had to campaign hard to get a reluctant Indian government to extend official refugee status to those leaving Sind. However, in many respects, both the Indian and Pakistani governments treated Bengal as exceptionally as the Punjab, in attempting to reassure religious minorities on both sides, by keeping the border relatively open, by administering evacuee property differentially from the rest of the Subcontinent, and so on.

It is here that the absence of the “other side,” the parallel history of what was happening in East Bengal, is most acutely felt. Why did more Hindus leave East Bengal than Muslims from West Bengal, as Chatterji argues? Was this simply a matter of demographics, or was the nature of violence and discrimination on the two sides of divided Bengal substantially different? What was the nature of the break between West and East Bengal, given mobility in the region, and what kinds of connections endured and influenced the political divide, given that 1971 was to later produce yet another set of refugees?

In the third part of the book, Chatterji tracks the dwindling support for Congress and the eventual electoral success of the Left Front in West Bengal in the years up to 1967, tying party politics to the economic dislocations and demographic changes caused by partition. The book emphasizes the agency and resilience of East Bengali refugees in rebuilding their lives in the face of governmental failures, and attributes part of the success of left parties to their strategic support for Hindu refugee interest groups, such as the squatter's movement, and Muslim refugee dilemmas. In making these connections, this book is an important starting point for interrogating in some specificity the ways in which partition transformed both a social and political landscape, within India as much as South Asia as whole.