The Islands have been the theatre of both colonial and post-colonial policies of ‘colonisation’ and social engineering. In the aftermath of India’s eastern Partition (1947), ‘residual’ Bengali migrant population languishing in the refugee camps of mainland India were recruited for transportation to Neil Island (now Shaheed Dweep) under the postcolonial state’s ‘rehabilitation’ scheme (1967-69). They consisted almost exclusively of lower-caste Namasudra population proficient in agriculture, fishing and allied activities. Rehabilitation revolved around the male head of the heteronormative family unit, who was the eligible recipient of land and other facilities to ‘settle’ themselves in the Island. The women who reached the Islands as part of the settler household units, however, were viewed merely as persons ‘attached’ to the male head. The ‘settler women’s’ lifeworlds have not been adequately represented in existing discourse. Drawing from archival sources and juxtaposing these ‘traces’ with oral narratives of the ‘settler women’, the thesis aims to address this oversight. The ‘settler women’s’ narratives of negotiating with the rehabilitation machinery; transportation and adaptation to the island ecology, establishment of settlements, and everyday struggle with scarcity; their claim-making as ‘Islanders’ and ‘settlers’; and finally, the close rooting of their identity with place, given the context of their Partition-consequent displacement(s) and altered ways of remembering, offer a rich framework for studying gendered accounts of migration, dislocation and formation of identities in post-Independence India.