Displacement, integration and identity in the post-colonial world (original) (raw)
Related papers
2011
In May 2008, at the High Court of Bangladesh, a ‘community’ that has been ‘stateless’ for over thirty five years were finally granted citizenship. Empirical research with this ‘community’ as it negotiates the lines drawn between legal status and statelessness captures an important historical moment. It represents a critical evaluation of the way ‘political space’ is contested at the local level and what this reveals about the nature and boundaries of citizenship. The thesis argues that in certain transition states the construction and contestation of citizenship is more complicated than often discussed. The ‘crafting’ of citizenship since the colonial period has left an indelible mark, and in the specificity of Bangladesh’s historical imagination, access to, and understandings of, citizenship are socially and spatially produced. While much has changed since Partition, particular discursive registers have lost little of their value. Today, religious discourses of ‘pollution’ and ‘pur...
This World and the "Other": Muslim Identity and Politics on the Indo-Bangladesh Border
Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 2023
This article investigates the "othering" of Muslims in two Northeast Indian states: Assam and Tripura, in a region known for its ethnic, linguistic and cultural diversity, and long history of militancy and civil unrest. Northeast Indian politics thrives on disagreement between "Us" and "Them" and tensions over illegal migration, drawing on overlapping or intersecting frames of "othering." This study asks why and how the political "othering" of Muslims persists, and why the religious frame, or the Hindu-Muslim divide, is more salient in some parts of the region than in others. Drawing on fieldwork on the Indian side of the Indo-Bangladesh border in Tripura and southern Assam, historical records and contemporary print media archives, this study compares the role of Hindu-Muslim contention in the politics of the two neighboring states and finds reproduction of the Hindu-Muslim divide in Assam and resistance to Muslim "othering" in Tripura. The theoretical contribution of this article is to confront the concept of "othering" with colonial and post-colonial frameworks of representation to understand how contemporary non-Western "worlds of difference" capitalize on, reproduce and resist vestiges of colonial representations.
Distinctive Citizenship: Refugees, Subjects and Post-colonial State in India's Partition
Cultural and Social History, 2009
The refugee, in India's Partition history, appears as an enigmatic construct -part pitiful, part heroic, though mostly shorn of agency -representing the surface of the human tragedy of Partition. Yet this archetype masks the undercurrent of social distinctions that produced hierarchies of post-colonial citizenship within the mass of refugees. The core principle of the official resettlement policy was self-rehabilitation, that is, the ability to become a productive citizen of the new nation state without state intervention. Thus, the onus of performing a successful transition -from refugee to citizen -lay on the resourcefulness of the refugees rather than the state. This article traces the differing historical trajectories followed by 'state-dependent' and 'self-reliant' refugees in the making of modern citizenry in post-colonial India.
Re-bordering Camp and City: ‘Race', Space and Citizenship in Dhaka
The SAGE Handbook of the 21st Century City
Re-bordering Camp and City: 'Race', space and citizenship in Dhaka The relationship between 'race', space and citizenship has been a central feature of urban sociology since the studies of African-American urban segregation at the end of the nineteenth century (Du Bois, 1899; Haynes, 1913). It is typically associated with the study of the 'ghetto' or 'ethnic enclave' and with immigrant communities rather than displaced people or refugees. With a few notable exceptions (Sanyal, 2012; 2014) interest in forced migration on the other hand has been more commonly associated with refugee studies and development studies, than urban studies or sociology. As such it has tended to consider citizenship through the lenses of ethnicity and nationalism rather than 'race' and class. In this chapter I bring some of these disparate literatures together to examine how the urban refugee camp, much like the ghetto or ethnic enclave, racializes residents and configures claims to citizenship in the city, but also how the everyday movement and mixing characteristic of urban space reconfigures those claims in complex and unexpected ways. I argue that when we look at the refugee camp through its relationship to the city, particular features of the camp that have been otherwise neglected are brought to the fore. In recent years with growing scholarly interest in transnational phenomena, population movements from South Asia have attracted considerable attention. The emphasis in this field of research however has been on those who migrated to the West, overlooking far greater movements of displaced within the South itself. These 'other' south-south diasporas have been comparatively ignored by western academies. The Partition of the Indian Sub-Continent in 1947 generated what is now regarded as one of the largest involuntary migrations in modern history, much of which took the form of internal movement to
Dilemmas of Diaspora: Partition, Refugees, and the Politics of “Home”
Refuge: Canada's Journal on Refugees, 2006
The following paper explores the idea of "refugee diasporas" by focusing on a case study of the Hindu Bengali exodus from East Pakistan (later Bangladesh) following the 1947 British Partition of India. The author begins by problematizing and historicizing definitions of diasporas in general and refugee diasporas in particular and then uses the case study to illustrate the diversity in experiences that different groups that emerged from the Partition encountered. This focus on the lived experiences of flight, resettlement, integration (or lack thereof), and the rebuilding of lives helps to unravel some of the embedded and obscured meanings that terms such as "refugee diaspora" might otherwise contain.
Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 2021
The paper intends to study the figure of the refugee in post-Partition West Bengal by critically examining the oral history narratives of individuals who migrated from East Pakistan in the wake of the 1947 Partition. It underscores the value and relevance of narrativity in the representation of factual history, the motivation and manifestation of which make history subjective, interpretive and contingent on the refugee's narrative. The narrative act presents the refugees' transition from, what may be called, figurative to socio-material subjects who interrupt and derange the nationalising exercise of the nation-state. The multivalent understanding of refugees makes the nation-state suffer from an anxiety of incompleteness (Appadurai 2006). The paper extends the idea of incompleteness by showing that however much the nation-state attempts to frame a particular brand of nationalism, variants of ethnocultural nationalism do exist, demonstrating the diverse subjectivities embodied by the refugees/narrators. Such ethnocultural nationalism can be read as alternative forms of self-assertion deeply etched in the social memory of the refugees.