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This chapter focuses on the migration history of the chars and shows that people arrived on chars from different areas at different times. Both groups of migrants—Biharis and Bangladeshis—who live on the Damodar chars have a tradition of outmigration from their own lands. At present, the majority of char dwellers belong to the Bangladeshi Hindu community and these refugees were granted patta to settle on chars by the district government of Burdwan after the Partition. The char dwellers live in a hostile environment, coping with floods, using skills and resources they have learned over years of experience with this phenomenon either in Bangladesh or in India. Chars could be only one area where the lower castes settled on the Indian side of the border. Geography and history come together in exploring twentieth-century legacies of colonial rule and in viewing divisions such as the Partition as political solutions.

This chapter focuses on the livelihoods of char dwellers by developing a sense of community that allows people to help each other in the struggle for survival. They have honed a fine appreciation of the nature of the river in order to use every bit of opportunity available to them and create a hybrid livelihood. The char location provides a unique setting, providing a geographical context in understanding the livelihood strategies of women-headed households. Choruas build a sense of community in securing livelihoods for themselves and their families. Chars are not deterritorialized in the process in which culture and power is enmeshed, even though in the chars, neither locality nor community is rooted in natural identities. Thus, char communities create new forms of economic citizenship that are beyond the state through their complex and hybrid livelihood strategies.

This chapter outlines the mental maps of char dwellers, and shows the coping and adjustment strategies that they adopt to live in an environment of vulnerability and isolation. People live in a risky and uncertain environment not only because they have incomplete knowledge or because their rationality is bounded by compelling factors, but also because they take a calculated risk. They opt for a chance like that in a lottery or a gamble, a risk which is informed by the intimate knowledge developed over many years of living in a fluid and dynamic environment. Ill health, especially of income-earning members of the community, brings vulnerability to char dwellers because of their extreme poverty, affecting both the expenditures and income of households. Thus, char dwellers have honed their adaptive capacity as an important strategy for coping with the fragile environment in which they live.