A signficant number of refugees and migrants left East Bengal following the partition of Bengal province in the lead up to independence of India and Pakistan in 1947. Bengal was partitioned into the Indian state of West Bengal and the Pakistani province of East Bengal (later renamed East Pakistan, which subsequently broke away from Pakistan to form the independent country of Bangladesh in 1947. Most of Sylhet district in Assam also joined Pakistan. The majority of East Bengali refugees settled in the new state of West Bengal, but a signficant number also moved to the Barak Valley of Assam
The vast majority of East Bengali refugees and migrants were Hindus, though a significant number of Bengali Muslims opted to make their permanent base in West Bengal after partition despite having origins in what fell in the new Pakistan. Their reasons included ideology, as well as professional and family ties.
While the exact number of refugees has never been officially collected and estimates vary considerably. In the immediate aftermath of partition, commonly attributed figures suggest around 3 million East Bengalis migrating to India and 864,000 migrants from India to East Pakistan. Migration continued, primarily from East Pakistan to India, right up to the liberation of Bangladesh in 1971, both on an on-going basis and with spikes during periods of particular communal unrest such as during the 1965 India-Pakistan War.
The outflow of Hindus from East Bengal had a particularly negative effect on the Hindu community, as a significant portion of the region's educated middle class left. The heights reached by many of the East Bengali migrants and their descendents, including Amartya Sen's Nobel Prize and Meghnad Saha's pioneering work in Astrophysics are considerable.
Jogendra Nath Mondal (politics, First Law Minister, Pakistan (1947-1950) Jyoti Basu (politics, Chief Minister, West Bengal 1977-2000) Bimal Roy (cinema) Meghnad Saha (science) Muzaffar Ahmed (politics, founder of Communist Party of India) Ritwik Ghatak (cinema) Sunil Ganguly (literature) Mrinal Sen (cinema)
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