Partition's Legacies offers a selection of Joya Chatterji's finest and most influential essays. "Partition, nation-making, frontiers, refugees, minority formation, and categories of citizenship have been my preoccupations," she writes in the preface, and these are also the major themes of this book. Chatterji's first book, Bengal Divided, shifted the focus from Muslim fanaticism as the driving force of Partition towards "secular" nationalism and Hindu aggression. Her Spoils of Partition rejected the idea of Partition as a breaking apart, showing it to be a process in the remaking of society and state. Her third book, Bengal Diaspora, cowritten with Claire Alexander and Annu Jalais, challenged the idea of migration and resettlement as exceptional situations. Partition's Legacies can be seen as continuous with Chatterji's earlier work as well as a distillation and expansion of it. Chatterji is known for the elegance of her prose as much as for the sharpness of her insights into Indian history, and Partition's Legacies will enthrall everyone interested in modern India's apocalyptic past. "What emerges from the essays," David Washbrook writes in the introduction, "is often quite startling. The demarcation of Partition followed no master plan or even coherent strategy but was made up of myriad ad hoc decisions taken on the ground, often by obscure actors. Refugee policy, immigrant rights, and even definitions of national citizenship ... were produced by no deus ex machina but out of day-to-day struggles on the streets and in the courts."

This edited volume examines global power-rivalry in and around South Asia through Bangladeshi lenses using imperfect and overlapping interest concentric-circles as a template. Dynamics from three transitions —the United States exiting the Cold War, China emerging as a global-level power, and India’s eastern interests squaring off with China’s Belt Road Initiative, BRI—help place China, India, and the United States (in alphabetical order) in Bangladesh’s “inner-most” circle, China, India, and the United States in a “mid-stream” circle, and the United States and Latin America, among other countries, in the “outer-most” circle, depending on the issue. In an atmosphere of short-term gains over-riding long-term considerations, the desperate, widespread search for infrastructural funding inside South Asia enhances China’s value, raises local heat, releases new challenges, with costly default consequences looming, issue-specific analysis overtaking formal bilateral relations and a stubborn uncertainty riddling the Bangladeshi air as its policy preferences stubbornly show more certainty.

Little is know about the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh (CHT), an area of approximately 5,089 square miles in southeastern Bangladesh. It is inhabited by indigenous peoples, including the Bawm, Sak, Chakma, Khumi Khyang, Marma, Mru, Lushai, Uchay (also called Mrung, Brong, Hill Tripura), Pankho, Tanchangya and Tripura (Tipra), numbering over half a million. Originally inhabited exclusively by indigenous peoples, the Hill Tracts has been impacted by national projects and programs with dire consequences. This book describes the struggle of the indigenous peoples of the Chittagong Hill Tracts region to regain control over their ancestral land and resource rights. From sovereign nations to the limited autonomy of today, the report details the legal basis of the land rights of the indigenous peoples and the different tools employed by successive administrations to exploit their resources and divest them of their ancestral lands and territories. The book argues that development programs need to be implemented in a culturally appropriate manner to be truly sustainable, and with the consent and participation of the peoples concerned. Otherwise, they only serve to push an already vulnerable people into greater impoverishment and hardship. The devastation wrought by large-scale dams and forestry policies cloaked as development programs is succinctly described in this report, as is the population transfer and militarization. The interaction of all these factors in the process of assimilation and integration is the background for this book, analyzed within the perspective of indigenous and national law, and complemented by international legal approaches. The book concludes with an updateon the developments since the signing of the Peace Accord between the Government of Bangladesh and the Jana Sanghati Samiti (JSS) on December 2, 1997.