13 – Partition refugee camps: New debates and perspectives
Ever since its inception in the 1990s, the field of Partition Studies has continuously expanded to explore the history of this foundational and traumatic event. Leaving aside high politics, historians have explored the lived experiences of violence and displacement, paving the way for alternative methodologies (oral histories), new fields (material history), and new material (fiction and memoirs). The “Partition Turn” underlined the absence of national memorialisation policies and the consequent absence of actual sites of memory which were repeatedly called for. Whereas certain aspects of Partition (communal or gender violence) were examined in depth, others remained surprisingly underexplored. Despite their strong effects on the urban (Kingsway in Delhi, Walton in Lahore) and rural (Kurukshetra in Punjab) landscapes, refugee camps remained historical grey zones that embodied the persistent effects of the “Long Partition”. How to understand the invisibilisation of Partition refugee camps? What new methodologies are required to document this glaring amnesia in the history of the new nations?
This panel proposes to inaugurate a “Camp Turn” to fill in a research gap in Partition Studies. It invites original contributions from various disciplines, dealing with the “Long Partition”, with the following objectives: to identify existing and potential sources for the study of camps; to document the political, institutional, social and intimate lives of the camps and its inhabitants — if possible with a caste and/or gender lens; to critically examine rehabilitation policies, their implementation by the States, and the social work of (communal) NGOs; to understand the lingering presence of the camp on a city’s fabric; to develop comparisons between camps in
India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, between large and small cities, and within cities, between official and informal camps; and to understand the politics of their invisibilisation and memorialisation.
