Camp Life and Graded Divisional Politics: Reading Bengali Dalit Refugee Narratives

Abstract

Dalit refugees, known as “Untouchables” in South Asia’s caste system, experience systematic marginalization and persecution in refugee camps which frequently reproduce the deeply ingrained societal norms that discriminate against Dalits. Ravinder Kaur (2008) talks about the divisional politics against untouchable migrants in Punjab during the resettlement between 1947 and 1965 who were “naturally” placed in colonies and camps distinct from those that the upper castes occupied. Partition, being the seminal event, has its extended underlying consequences. Partition of India and Bengali Dalit refugees have a twisted and intertwined connection where the refugees face social exclusion from host communities or other refugees from higher castes. Camp becomes an invaluable addition to the growing existential crisis and for the Bengali Dalit refugees it plays a valuable role in destabilising the concept of homogeneous refugeehood. Jatin Bala’s memoir Reminiscences of Life at Refugee Camps (2017) and Manoranjan Byapari’s Interrogating my Chandal Life: Autobiography of a Dalit (2018) are refugee narratives which portray lived experiences of camp life and the institutionalized machinery of divisional politics issued on the Dalit refugees. These “common minimal narratives” (Kaur 2008) situate themselves in contrast to the metanarrative of partition history showing how Dalit refugees are treated as homo sacer (Agamben 1995) no less than caged animals in prisons in camps and the camps become a space for surveillance and a calculated arrangement such as that of ‘panopticon’ as Michael Foucault (1975) describes. With theoretical postulation and analysis of the above texts along with the socio-political history the present study focuses on the graded divisional politics of camps on Bengali Dalit refugees’ lives.