From Non-places to Places: Transforming Partition Rehabilitation Camps Through the Gendered Quotidian

Introduction

Forced human displacement, a dominant narrative across the globe particularly in the last century, almost always comes with a cost. Very rarely, however, does such displacement involve the transformation of one national space—from which the dislocated body moves—into a separate nation. The 1947 Partition of India represented such a rare event and witnessed a wave of forced dislocation as well as a subsequent mass migration, hitherto unseen in human history. The alteration of a singular national space into two separate nation-states based on religious identities forced the movement of almost twelve million people, in search of a new homeland (Butalia, 2003). This exodus was experienced differently by individuals depending on their socio-economic backgrounds but unfortunately, in ways akin to any violent transition, women formed the most susceptible ground to the rigours of the Partition. Gross and barbarous acts of violence perpetuated against women were derived from a hypermasculinized nationalist ideology: one that perceived women’s bodies as sites where national and religious identities needed to be forcibly inscribed.

It must be recognized here that the violence inflicted on bodies during the Partition, especially those of women, does not and cannot find correspondence with any other situation in the history of the Indian subcontinent. Because freedom from colonial rule was being actualized, ironically, through partisan colonial ideology that saw religion as the basis for creating a truncated India and the new country of Pakistan, the Partition was a ‘scene of unprecedented collective violence’ (Das, 1996, p. 67). While numerous other equally deplorable acts of aggression (on women) have been realized within India and the subcontinent since 1947, very rarely does one event and its repercussions shape the ‘experiences of self, community and nation’ (ibid.) for the inhabitants of three national territories. Recovering the perspectives of ordinary people on the Partition allows us to acknowledge that violent acts, which were mostly carried out by ordinary people, especially on women, were not a mere fallout of civil, legislative or judicial failures. Instead, they symbolize a temporal phase when ‘[E]vil becomes banal….ordinary people participate in it…and justify it, in countless ways. There are no moral conundrums or revulsions. Evil does not even look like evil, it becomes faceless’ (Mannathukkaren, 2014, para 2, http://www.thehindu.com/features/magazine/the-banality-of-evil/article5818580.ece).  Not  surprisingly, histories of the British Partition of India have frequently privileged only the political circumstances predicating the division of the Indian subcontinent and neglected these traumatic human micro-histories, which dominated and continue to impinge on postcolonial subjectivities. Having commemorated seven decades of independence from colonial rule, I believe, provides us with an opportune moment to recover and solidify the importance of these marginalised perspectives.

Mushirul Hasan traces in his seminal essay ‘Partition Narratives’ that the tendency within practitioners from different schools of Partition Studies has been either to disavow grand narratives or dismiss individual (marginalized) histories as oversimplifications of a momentous event. Not surprisingly, there has been limited conversation between the fields of Diaspora Studies, a relatively recent discipline, and Partition studies due to the apparent difference in disciplinary emphasis and scope of analysis. Hasan argues that the solution to such discord lies ‘not in the reversal of existing historical trends or in the tendency to ignore or rubbish other people’s work, but in a judicious mixing of the multiple levels at which partition studies can be best studied analyzed and integrated’ (2002, p. 33). My intervention—grounded in individual subjectivities—performs a historical analysis of an important material aspect of the Partition and the post-Partition phase by examining the experience of traumatized Partition refugee women who were rehabilitated in ‘temporary’ refugee camps. While diasporic studies in recent years have become a locus for ‘examining transnational practices … and political and cultural flows’ (Bose, 2006, p. 57), the focus has rarely been on subaltern subjectivities that do not have steady definitions of a home/homeland. By emphasizing the materiality of gender within the Partition experience and interrogating representative socio-cultural artefacts that emerge from it, this article foregrounds the key relation between ‘refugee diasporas’ (Bose, 2006, p. 58) and the politics of identity formation in South Asia. I address a key issue raised in this special issue of Millennial Asia and indeed in Diasporic studies: how does the involuntary movement of women alter both the subjectivities of the gendered migrant as well as the spaces to which they migrate?

Following the introduction, the first section of the article explicates how the Partition as an event of ‘supermodernity’ (Augé, 2006) created the template for the rise/development of non-places. The second section, through a literary analysis of selected Partition fiction, emphasizes how and why refugee camps became sites for the resubjectification1 of the traumatized female Partition refugee. The third section, using a case-centred approach analyses testimonies from female inhabitants of certain permanent Partition refugee camps in Nadia, West Bengal—Cooper’s Camp, Dhubulia Camp and Chamta Camp—which have been populated for the last 70 years: albeit with a spectral presence within local and national imaginaries. In this last section I underline, how the transformation of these refugee rehabilitation camps—from transitory non-places into referential spatial locations or places—was facilitated through the quotidian performances of the female Partition refugees at these camps. My claims here also extend the recent turn in scholarship that refuses to concur with the Agambenian formulations about refugee camps: as only biopolitical spaces where all forms of agency are divested from subaltern subjectivities (Owens, 2009; Sanyal, 2013). Instead through recovering the importance of everyday spatialities within such camps and their role in articulating a new politics of resistance, I stress that these material and gendered spaces cannot be understood through reductive binary models of power and subjectivity. This article utilizes a multi-pronged, mixed methods approach to the Partition that is essential towards analysing the effects of what Vazira Zamindar’s terms ‘The Long Partition’, which ‘moves us away from the from the “high politics” of 1947 … to look at the experiences of refugees and the response of the state’ (Gould, 2010, para 2). Zamindar does not see the event(s) of 1947 as a concluding chapter (as seen in most prevailing Partition scholarship) of British colonialism or the Indian freedom movement, but rather a beginning point for discussing subcontinental identity politics, issues of forced displacement and the relationship between subaltern subjectivities and the nation-states of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Indeed, multiple camp sites in Nadia, West Bengal, India that have been harbouring refugees for the last 70 years but still refuse to provide Indian citizenship to its residents (Ghosal, 2014) become emblematic of what Zamindar conceptualizes as the ‘Long Partition’ experience.

Dominant historical (often colonial) meta-narratives have suggested that achieving the independent dominions of India and Pakistan became a ‘matter of life and death for all citizens in pre-1947 India’ (Hasan, 2002, p. 24). However, such statements neglect that this fact was much more relevant for the upper echelons of leadership in the Muslim League and the Congress and true to a lesser extent for the common citizens, leading quotidian existences. The Partition, as has been argued by multiple new historical treatises, provided a site for the extension of elite communalism into popular communalism. This meant that there was a concerted effort on part of colonial authorities as well as many native leaders to radically influence ordinary citizens, in favour of the two-nation theory, which allowed the notion of a divided India to be both legitimized and materialized. While it is widely agreed that the experience of the Partition was different in northwest India as compared to the eastern part there is an attempt amongst both historians and cultural critics to essentialize the experience of certain refugee diasporas, as representative of the Partition experience. The prodigious historical and cultural output—that has often been more didactic than empathetic or analytical—from these two regions has surely contributed to this phenomenon. Such artefacts make it easy to forget that even amongst these purportedly binary experiences of the Partition—from the east or the northwest—it is impossible to identify a single thread or unified model that may crystallize the refugee diasporic experience. This article, therefore, begins by acknowledging the problems in defining the term refugee and refugee diasporas, especially in context of the Partition. The 1951 UN Convention2 espouses that

a refugee is a person who owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country. (qtd. in Dey & Roy Choudhury, 2009, p. 3)

However, as cultural geographer Pablo Bose notes, it is not easy or often possible to delineate and stick to specific categorizations when it comes to population movement and human dislocation. Bose argues:

But there are many problems with such a rigid reading [by the 1951 UN Convention] of population movement, even of a forced nature. It is relatively straightforward to identify certain instances of forced migration—being kidnapped and sold into slavery, fleeing homes and livelihoods in the face of a violent and oppressive state or army or mob, for example. But there are many other and more subtle forms of pressure that have compelled population movements throughout history. The threat—rather than the actual experience—of violence has been a powerful motivator for flight … Similarly important for some groups has been a potential loss of social standing and power rather than an overt threat of violence, as in the case of some East Bengali refugees [during the Partition]… Refugee diasporas may indeed be a group of people forced by conflict or persecution to flee lands and homes to which they have long-standing political, economic, and cultural ties—but it is more often homes that are left behind, rather than nations. As a community in exile, ‘refugee diasporas’ are often defined by their nationality—Somalis, Afghans, Iranians—yet are their connections to ‘home’ predicated on the nation? Certainly within the larger diasporic population, the link is not so clear. (2006, pp. 59–60; author’s emphases)

Since ‘refugee diasporas’ (Bose, 2006) that emerged from the 1947 Partition were extremely divided in their specific motivation for moving beyond their lived spaces, this article does not subscribe to the 1951 UN Convention’s definition of refugees. Instead, it operationalizes the term refugee as anyone who was forced to move beyond their lived spaces—due to the physical and psychological rigors of the 1947 Partition—within and between a truncated India, East Pakistan and West Pakistan. Considering that the Partition created multiple refugee diasporas, I also emphasize how it is surprising that refugee rehabilitation camp sites—where these dislocated subjectivities were often forced into—have found scant mention within critical scholarship.

Creating Conditions for Non-places: The Supermodernity of the Partition

The assertions about non-places in this paper focus on Marc Augé’s assertion that ‘place/non-place pairing is an instrument for measuring the degree of sociality and symbolization of a given space’ (Augé, 2008, p. viii). Augé’s statement underscores that any place has the potential to be transformed into a non-place and vice versa, since ‘place and non-place are like opposed polarities: the first is never completely erased, the second never totally completed’ (Augé qtd. in Collins, 1996, p. 11). Augé postulates that non-places arise from the processes of supermodernity that produce an excess of ‘time, space and individualization’ (Augé, 2008, p. 8), a phenomenon which was succinctly illustrated in the events that unfolded during the Partition. Augé argues that an ‘excess of space’ (ibid.) does not merely imply a geographical expansion of space. Rather it underscores a situation where the ideology governing a singular lived space is deconstructed to produce multiple spaces with distinct ideologies, which consequently provide the inhabitants with a simulation of excess space. The truncation of India into two separate states produced for the inhabitants a psychological excess of space as they were unable to reconcile themselves with the new and unfamiliar national ideologies, which were reconfiguring familiar physical spaces: consequently leading to their dislocation from such referential places.

Critically along with the excess of spatiality the Partition also underscored an excess of time, especially in case of the gendered victims of violence, for whom the traumatic memories underscored a radical alteration in the qualitative aspect (kairos)3 of their temporal existence. For these individuals even though the phase of Partition violence was defined by a finite measure of quantitative time (chronos), the resultant trauma extended far beyond the Partition to envelop all aspects of their qualitative existence (kairos). Female victims who faced unmentionable cruelties on their physical and psychological selves (and had been in most cases dislodged from their erstwhile familiar spaces) were largely unable to reclaim their pre-Partition identities due to the excess of the violent Partition time, which spilled over and encompassed the remainder of their existence.4 Augé argues that the third parameter of supermodernity, an ‘excess of individualization’ which is ‘linked to the first two concepts’ (excess of time and space) creates a reaction that ‘produces a feeling of discomfort, of crisis, which is linked to the consciousness that each one of us can see everything and do nothing’ (Augé, 2008, p. 9). The Partition epitomized a situation where the individual consciousness was rendered helpless: an impotent observer as the violence and debauchery of the Partition raged on. In the following sub-section I emphasize that although the conditions for the creation of non-places had been established by the events of the Partition, the specific manifestation of non-places was materialized in the form of rehabilitation camps and was a concerted measure undertaken by both India and Pakistan to consolidate their sovereign status as independent nation-states.

Asserting Sovereignty: Non-places and the Creation of Nation-states

The circumstances immediately following the Partition necessitated that both the newly created states of India and Pakistan forge an independent national identity, which implied the creation and maintenance of territorial integrity. It is rather important to note that complications regarding the sovereignty of both states arose from many colonial failures. Primary amongst these was the inability of the Boundary Commission (under the supervision of Sir Cyril Radcliffe) to demarcate clear cogent boundaries before the deadline, when the two countries would come into existence (Chester, 2002, sec 1). Surprisingly, even though the sovereign nation of Pakistan was formed on 14 August 1947 while India was constituted a day later on 15 August, the actual delineation of the Radcliffe Line (the border between India and Pakistan) came into force only on 17 August 1947. The mass migration which had begun much before 15 August gained considerable momentum following the enforcement of national boundaries and carried with it the serious potential of disrupting the purported ideal of religious homogeneity that had led to the creation of the separate states of India and Pakistan (Menon & Bhasin, 1998, p. 33). Paradoxically, the fallacy implicit in the Hindustan–Pakistan plan of 19475—promoting nationhood based on religious orientation—was that in both countries, there were hardly any area that could be specifically categorized as either Hindu or Muslim majority. Menon and Bhasin note that

religious minorities were scattered all over the country, there were towns and villages even in Muslim-majority provinces that had a very large number of Hindus and Sikhs … So although people had begun moving out of villages as early as 1947, much before the announcement of the plan, the Partition Council nevertheless passed a resolution on August 2, 1947 to arrest further exodus and encourage the return of people to their homes. (Menon & Bhasin, 1998, p. 34)

However, by the time such a resolution had been passed, the frenzied violence unleashed by each community against the other had reached uncontrollable levels and ‘the migrations took on an urgent and treacherous character: convoys were ambushed, families separated, children orphaned, women kidnapped and whole trainloads massacred’ (Menon & Bhasin, 1998, p. 35). Rehabilitation camps therefore arose in both countries as necessary interim structures that would provide shelter and support to migrants and refugees who had either been forcibly evicted from their dwelling spaces or had voluntarily chosen to do so.

Contextually, Davidson notes that since ‘the very practical notion of management is intrinsic to the existence of the nation state’ (2003, p. 4), the rehabilitation camps established in both countries were sought to be increasingly regulated by national authorities. Treaties such as the Recovery and Restorations Act of 19496 were decreed amongst India and Pakistan, which clearly postulated that displaced women and children belonging only to specific territories and of certain religious affiliation would be recovered in the rehabilitation camps of India while the others would be recovered in Pakistani rehabilitation camps.7 This method of interdiction8 meant that the countries involved, embarked on the process of recovery based not on the need of the migrants but either on religious identifications or pre-partition spatial positionalities.9 This venture, however, was problematized by the large-scale presence of individuals, mostly women, who had been abducted from their home territory, abused, raped and, in a large number of cases, forcibly converted to the religion of their abductor.

During the post-Partition phase when religious identity was being considered synonymous with national identity, these forcibly converted women were considered as having ambiguous nationalities by the respective state authorities, which impeded attempts at recovery and rehabilitation. Such a stance undertaken by the national authorities in both countries also implied that the children who had been born to these women (mostly out of forced alliances) were not allowed to accompany their mother, as they belonged to a different nationality.10 Consequently, since neither country could actually enforce strict rules regarding the recovery process, rehabilitation camps were increasingly structured as territorially excised areas so as ‘to create migration zones where the rights of asylum seekers are lessened or eliminated’ (Davidson, 2003, p. 5). Internal excision of domestic spaces through the mode of rehabilitation camps meant that in both India and Pakistan, ‘particular parts of its sovereign territory’ would become ‘ostensibly international’ while in reality ‘these measures (were) taken in an attempt to create a nebulous legal zone in which the state in question can avoid the responsibilities … the moment a refugee claimant enters (its) national space’ (Davidson, 2003, p. 6; my emphases). Davidson posits that this very process of creating spaces where the state remains ‘non-relational’ translates into ‘the nonrelational aspect of the equation having its ultimate expression in the non-place’ (ibid.; my emphases).

It is imperative to underscore here that a sense of non-place arises for an individual only when they have a referential space—or a place—to compare with this non-relational space. This implies that an entity who is bereft of a referent point (a house/home) would fail to perceive a non-place as a transitory space, but rather locate it as a stable spatial location from where they could create a new sense of self and identity. Therefore many of the rehabilitation camps that emerged from the Partition, as temporary and transitory non-places for recuperating female refugees and aiding their assimilation into mainstream life, were often transformed into long-term settlements and effectively changed the character of such spaces. Circumstances which problematized the process of integrating traumatized women into mainstream life, is poignantly narrated in this interview of a female Partition refugee by Urvashi Butalia:

I have got nobody. There was perhaps more truth in this phrase than many women realized: for several of those who did allow themselves to be rescued or who were forcibly recovered, there was another trauma to face. Their families, who had earlier filed reports and urged the government to recover their women, were no longer willing to take them back. (Butalia, 2003, p. 126)

While the vocabulary of modernity is anti-home, since it celebrates mobility, movement, migration and boundary crossing what is often elided from such a discourse is that the celebration of ‘anti-home’ can take place only when the ‘home’ can be located as a stable referent. The supermodernity of the Partition which destabilized all such steady notions of home for the refugee diasporas meant that regaining subjectivity—especially for the female refugee figure—could only be accomplished through a reconstruction of their new temporary residential spaces into referential ‘home-like’ places. The lack of residential options for the female refugee meant that the transitory space of the refugee rehabilitation camp would perforce become this stable referent and a site for resubjectification. The analysis of representative Partition fiction in the following section —that emerged from and are steeped in real life circumstances—highlights the diverse manifestations of the plight of female refugees, which led them to this crisis.

Heading Home: Locating the Female Refugee and Rehabilitation Camps in Partition Fiction

Using narrative analysis of Partition fiction as a mode of making assertions about the choices and the embodied subjectivity of Partition refugee women may appear counter-intuitive. Such scepticism, if any, has some very precise rejoinders. Firstly, Partition fiction is based on and within the ambit of real-life violence, and trauma during the division of the subcontinent. Therefore the causal factor or its veracity, which forced traumatized Partition refugee women to consider refugee camps as a space for resubjectification, is neither in doubt nor in question. Secondly, even though artistic creations are often understood to be exaggerations/over-dramatized versions of events due to their being within the domain of artistic licence, the Partition represents an event where ‘the normality of language had been destroyed’ (Das, 1996, p. 76). In such cases, ‘[s]ome realities need to be fictionalized before they can be apprehended’ (Das, 1996, p. 69) and creative fiction therefore becomes a bona fide source of securing valid information and perspectives. Indeed, the Partition produced a situation where the articulation of trauma was impossible to put into language for the gendered survivor. Therefore, the attempted consolidation of such inarticulable trauma and the recovery of such narratives involve paying heed to political, social, economic as well as literary narratives—all of which represent different facets of an event and are beyond the scholarly or artistic scope of one specific discipline. Drawing on an understanding of Partition fiction, as socio-cultural artefacts that lend both political and epistemological valence to complex, multifaceted and often ambiguous events (Ewick & Silbey, 1995), I will focus here on two fictional artefacts: Krishna Sobti’s Where is my Mother? and Qudratullah Shahab’s Ya Khuda (O God). While I am fully cognizant that any selection of Partition fiction runs the possibility of reducing the Partition experience, the narrative analysis offered here actively contests such simplifications. Instead, by locating these two stories as parts of an assemblage that distil ‘[t]he pervasiveness of the Partition’s afterlife and continuing manifestations of historical trauma in the present’ (Saint qtd. in Gairola, Iyer, & Singh, 2016, p. 75), I continue the critical engagement espoused in Zamindar’s paradigm of the ‘the Long Partition’. Although refugee camps feature prominently or spectrally in almost all of Partition fiction, these two narratives have been chosen for their distinctive handling of the relationship between the female Partition refugee and the spaces of transitory rehabilitation camps.

Amongst these two stories Krishna Sobti’s Where is my Mother? has, arguably, been the more opined upon. In this story a soldier from the Baluch Regiment, Yunus Khan, while travelling to Lahore chances upon a small girl child ‘lying unconscious, covered by a blood soaked scarf’ on the road (Sobti, 1995, p. 336). In this narrative, Yunus Khan represents the worst face of communal violence: he has deliberately participated in the carnage of Partition violence by mindlessly looting plundering and killing men, women, and children, which he saw as necessary ‘[f]or Pakistan [and] for the brotherhood of Islam’ (ibid.). However, ‘the sight of the unconscious and helpless young girl leads to a sudden (and inexplicable) change of heart. The Baluchi soldier decides to ‘save this child’ even though he had ‘massacred hundreds of them’ (ibid.) and takes her to the Mayo Medical Institute, a military institution. This is again a carefully thought-out choice since admitting her to Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, a Hindu hospital, would ‘be like restoring her back to her own people’ (Sobti, 1995, p. 337). As the girl gains consciousness the sight of the ‘huge Baluchi’ incites even more fear and anxiety in her and she starts shouting ‘[…] run run, for your life’ (ibid.). Even though Yunus Khan implores with the doctor to ‘do something to cure the child’ it is of little use as the doctor opines, ‘[t]here’s not much you can do. She is scared of you because she is a kafir.’11 Yunus, however, refuses to lose hope and tends to the young girl with utmost care and diligence. After a few days when she is almost fully recovered, Yunus Khan tries to ‘coax her’ again by telling her, ‘You are now all right. We shall go home now’, while the girl views him with ‘big black eyes [that have] terror and suspicion in them’ (Sobti, 1995, p. 338). In response, the girl becomes violent again and screams ‘[…] I have no home. I won’t go with you—you’ll kill me…I don’t want to go home…Take me to refugee camp. I want to go the camp’ (Sobti, 1995, p. 338). Even as Yunus tries all forms and modes of persuasion to convince her that he is not a threat (anymore), the girl keeps repeating ‘Take me to the refugee camp. I only want to go to the refugee camp’ and the narrative reaches an abrupt conclusion with the girl’s question ‘Where is my mother?’ (ibid.).

Although, Sobti’s polarizing story has been extensively critiqued for playing ‘upon the popular Hindu fear of the Pathan … as a mindless killer’ (Bhalla, 1994, p. xvii) I would like draw attention to the subjectivity of the traumatized female survivor in Sobti’s story, which has rarely found mention within canonical scholarship. The young girl’s implorations to be returned to the refugee camp in fear of being violated (again) by a religiose male oppressor is a telling reminder of a period when violence had become so normalized that even the most basic act of helping a wounded child is considered an anomaly. In a societal situation where the body of a woman/a girl was merely the site for reinforcing masculine nationalist and religious ideologies, Yunus Khan’s act of altruism cannot be perceived as such, especially by the traumatized survivor. Through the dialogue between Yunus and the traumatized girl, it is clearly established that the spatio-temporal location of the survivor does not allow her to trust any man, let alone a man from another religion. While seeking refuge with Yunus would be a rational choice for anyone else (a trend noted later in this article), as opposed to going back to a temporary refugee camp, the young girl begs to be returned to that transitory space. In understanding her motivation it is worth reflecting upon Veena Das’ assertion that Partition violence not only caused physical harm but resulted in a psychic division for the survivor between the ‘self and the world … that made the self radically fugitive and the world radically fragmented’ (Das, 1991, p. 65; my emphasis). The violence of the Partition effected a form of double appropriation by claiming ‘a territory as nation and appropriating the body of women as territory’ (Das, 1996, p. 83) and there was little choice for the female survivor other than to seek a refuge in a space that the nation-states (and masculine nationalism) had refused to take any responsibility for: namely the refugee camp. It is crucial to note here that the process of resubjectification for the female Partition refugee survivor would require a site that was bereft of institutionalized politics. Refugee camps and their inhabitants by virtue of having been disavowed by authorities became the opposite of ‘relational, historic and concerned with identity’ and were the only sites where machinations of institutionalized masculine nationalism could be avoided.

Qudratullah Shahab’s Ya Khuda (Oh God!) is a more nuanced presentation of this situation where the protagonist Dilshad, is an Indian Muslim girl who is abducted and raped repeatedly by the Sikh men in her village. When she becomes pregnant and gives birth to a girl child, her abductors refrain from taking her responsibility and put her up to be ‘recovered’. She is consequently transferred to a Pakistani rehabilitation camp where Indian Muslims are being sheltered. Even though the physical space of the camp provides the refugees with neither material nor mental comfort, the refugees slowly but surely start rebuilding their lives within the precincts of the camp. Since the situation beyond the camp appears and is indeed more gruesome, Dilshad starts likening the camp to Ka’aba; the holiest site for Islamic worship and refuge. The camp is regularly visited by ‘male benefactors’, who try to lure away many of the female inhabitants with promises of a better life beyond the camp. Dilshad falls prey to one such wealthy benefactor, Mustafa Khan Simabi, who had ‘bestowed many favours on Dilshad… [including] a red sweater for her daughter’ (Shahab, 1995, p. 291) and accepts his proposal to leave the camp and move to his mansion. However, once she reaches the mansion, she realizes that this is indeed a Faustian bargain as Khan Sahib, a devout Muslim, is no different than the Sikh violators from her village. Qudratullah Shahab notes that after a few days, ‘[when] Khan Simabi had gone through the various stages of his pilgrimage [exploiting Dilshad], Dilshad came back to camp’ (ibid., p. 292).

The story ends abruptly with the entire space of the camp being transformed into a sort of pseudo-carnival where ‘a fair seems to be in progress every day’. Dilshad is a food vendor here along with other refugees who sell:

Cooked food, stitched clothes, second-hand shoes, fresh fruit…a strange assortment of goods and objects, keeps these homeless people propped up. A curious sense of satisfaction pervades the air, and life here has a certain perpetuity and endlessness about it. (Cowasjee & Duggal 2005, p. 303)

Shahab’s narrative highlights that even though these unfortunate refugees were not provided with any form of agency in the rehabilitation camp, they started transforming the character of the camp from a passive temporary non-place to an active space that provided them with employment and livelihood. The refugee women in these camps, who were neither accepted by their families nor wanted to go back to their abductor’s houses, were now positioned as social outcasts. Paradoxically this also meant that they were now free from many of the traditional societal constraints, which had limited women’s movement in the pre-Partition period. The desire of these women to eke out an independent existence forced the newly created nations to alter the attributes of these camps. From merely temporary settlements these camps became permanent rehabilitation programmes, which sought to establish the victims into mainstream life through economic and social independence. Menon and Bhasin note that

In September 1947 the government appointed a small advisory committee of women social workers attached to the Ministry of Rehabilitation to direct the programme—this was the Women’s section … The functions of the state women’s sections were: to formulate schemes for the rehabilitation of women and children; establish homes for them … give financial or other aid to women … assist in finding employment … In a sense, the Women’s Section of 1947 can be seen as a forerunner of the many government agencies that now exist for the welfare of women and children. (1998, pp. 151–152)

The implementation of developmental schemes such as Women’s Section project implied that the female refugees acquired a sense of economic and social security and increasingly came to recognize rehabilitation camps as developmental spaces, which could provide them with a stable future. Since ‘our sense of space arises in the intersection of … specifically developmental movement and social place’ (Morris, 2004, p. ix) such recognition altered the non-place nature of these camps from spaces ‘where human beings don’t recognize themselves … or cease to recognize themselves…or have yet not recognized themselves’ (Augé, 2006, p. 11) to locations that provided them with a sense of belonging, ‘where relationships are self-evident … where each person knows where they and others belong’ (ibid.). While the fictional pieces analysed here are creative representations of a social reality—the determination of women refugees to recreate their identities through their intimate everyday acts within camp spaces—the following section looks at real situations from camps in Nadia, West Bengal where such gendered negotiations have been continually happening for the last seven decades.

Finding Home: Reclaiming Subjectivity in Refugee Camps

In the run-up to the 2014 general elections in India—as Indian citizen voters aligned themselves with either the pro-refugee or anti-refugee rhetoric being spewed by the major national political parties—the residents of Cooper’s camp notified area in Nadia, West Bengal raised a few simple questions: ‘Who is an infiltrator and who is a refugee?’ and ‘What difference does this in nomenclature make to “refugees” who have been inhabiting a “temporary” transit camp for the last 70 years?’ (Ghosal, 2014). The story of Cooper’s camp in Nadia, West Bengal along with other camps like Dhubulia and Chamta epitomize the imprint of the 1947 Partition on the Indian subcontinent, even after 70 years of the Partition. Following the official division of the Indian dominion into the truncated nation of India and Pakistan (East and West) a large number of ‘transit’ camps were set up across the nation, with the maximum number sprouting up in the border areas of Bengal and Punjab where the refugee situation was of utmost crisis. While the inflow and outflow of refugees in the northwestern sections of India were a more immediate reaction to the 1947 communal frenzy, the movement of refugees between East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and West Bengal had been a continual process since the Noakhali and Tippera riots during October–November 1946 (Dey & Roy Chaudhary, 2009). In this geographical region, the upper caste Hindu population or bhodroloks, with significantly higher social and economic capital, made their exit first from East Pakistan and were in most cases able to find housing in and around Calcutta. This section of the East Pakistan refugee populace, which moved before 15 October 195712 was significantly better off than the next group of refugees who moved after the massacres in Khulna and Rajshahi in East Pakistan (Bangladesh) in December 1949. For a significant section of this refugee population who were forced to dislocate in the post-1949 phase and who understandably had very little resources at hand, refugee transit camps were the only available refuge option.

Following the Partition three distinct types of camps were established by the Government of India: women’s camps, worksite camps and Permanent Liability (PL) camps. However, there were overlaps as,

The inmates of the women’s camps were also P.L. members comprising mostly women and children who had no male member of their family to look after them. Even, no male person was allowed to enter into the camp premises without the permission of the camp authority. (Dey & Roy Chaudhary, 2009, p. 4)

Even though beside the PL camps both the other form of camps were meant to be temporary rehabilitation sites, they turned out in multiple cases (as in the case of Cooper’s camp) to be permanent settlements. As Dey and Roy Chaudhary highlight:

[…] as time passed by, many of the inmates of these women’s camps have been permanently rehabilitated along with their family members in and around the area and thereby it has now become an area for permanent resettlement. (ibid.)

What is worth emphasizing is the motivation of the individuals who were forced to seek refuge in these ‘temporary’ rehabilitation camps. It has been globally documented that given the choice between finding refuge in a transitory camp and the possibility of self-settlement through full or partial support, an overwhelming number of refugees choose the self-settlement option (Bose, 2006). This world-wide phenomenon makes it amply clear that the Partition refugees (especially women) had clearly no other option—due to a combination of financial and circumstantial inadequacies—than to become inhabitants of these refugee camps. However, paradoxically their continued inhabitancy in these camps and the change in the very character of these camps from being temporary spaces (non-places) to being permanent settlements (places) definitely warrants investigation. Female refugees assimilated in rehabilitation camps found themselves dislocated from both the psychological and physical spaces that had been their homeland and were now unable to reclaim either a physical or national sense of identity. Augé postulates that ‘a person entering the space of non-place is relieved of his usual determinants’ (Augé, 2006, p. 34) which finds resonance in the condition of female Partition refugees entering rehabilitation camps. Therefore, the non-place character of rehabilitation was concretized not only by the sovereign interests of India and Pakistan (as noted earlier in the article), but also by the individuals who inhabited these camps. Augé highlights that ‘non-places begin with unrootedness’ (Augé, 2006, p. 9) and these camps inhabited by migrants and refugees who had no relational or historical connection with these spaces, further reified the non-place status of these camps.

While the physical violence inflicted on Partition refugees might now be restricted to historical annals, sites like Cooper’s camp, Dhubulia camp and Chamta camp13 reflect how the legacy of political and epistemic violence continues till date. Here the residents are still officially ‘refugees’ even though many of the residents have never stepped outside the boundaries of their camp since their birth, let alone the state or the nation. There is no dearth of literature and critical scholarship about how Partition refugees have had to face tremendous hardships to migrate between national spaces and reach the refugee rehabilitation camps. However, there is a surprising silence regarding what happened within these purportedly transitory sites. Economic restructuring, housing policies and ideological constructs that led to the construction of these camps have been researched on, while the role of traumatized female subjectivities through ‘which spatial form and social process interact to produce maps of territoriality and identification’ (Weber, 1995, p. 197) have been neglected or cursorily referenced. This is not surprising considering the fact that female refugee victims were seen under the lens of ‘double victimhood’—firstly as refugees and then as women. This form of essentialization precludes the possibility of exploring the everyday lives of gendered bodies within these camps and the expression of agency/reclamation of subjectivity by these subaltern bodies.

This article recognizes the impossibility of speaking for or distilling the traumatized female refugees’ experiences within these or any refugee camps/spaces of rehabilitation. Instead by adopting a case-centred approach I foreground the importance of intimate and everyday relationships—between these traumatized gendered bodies and the refugee camps—which change (d) the character of these refugee spatialities. In doing so, I question the (often state-sanctioned) political and social narratives, which have historically refused to provide refugees with any form of agency. The problem has been particularly severe with frameworks that divest all possibilities of articulating resistive politics from refugee subjectivities, especially from within camps/rehabilitation spaces. Contextually, Giorgio Agamben notes that refugee camps are the ‘quintessential zone of indistinction, where refugees can be reduced to “bare life” and be subjected to various forms of violence without legal consequences’ (qtd. in Sanyal, 2013, p. 560). However, what needs to be noted is that these forms of violence are not only physical or legal but epistemic as well. Agamben’s contention that refugees represent ‘bare life’ (zoe) where one is stripped of political life (bios), rendering ‘humans as animals’ (Owens qtd. in Sanyal, 2013, p. 559) is problematic since there is ‘no possibility for the re-articulation of [resistant] politics’ (Sanyal, 2013, p. 560). The epistemic standpoint from which such Agambenian narratives emerge, see only result or goal-oriented movement/action as having the possibility of articulating a politics of change. Such an understanding naturally interprets actions of all bodies—especially traumatized female bodies—within the spaces of refugee camps as ‘useless’ and unable to effect any form of change. This paradigm is predicated on rigid binaries of purposeful and non-purposeful action. On the contrary, philosopher Alfonso Lingis’ argues, the natural world is replete with examples, where non-purposeful action can create major changes or alterations to bodies and their surroundings:

Most movements-things that fall, that roll, that collapse, that shift, that settle, that collide with other things, that set other things in motion-are not goal-oriented …. Even most of the movements to which we assign goals start by just being an urge to move, to get the day going, to get out of the house … The campesina in Guatemala occupies her hands with the rhythms and periodicity of her knitting as she sits on the stoop gossiping with her friends; the now old Palestinian who will never leave this refugee camp fingers his prayer beads … These movements [are important but] not productive, they extend neither toward a result nor a development … Every purposive movement, when it catches on, loses sight of its teleology and continues as a periodicity […]. (Lingis, 2000, p. 197)

The forgotten refugees of permanent camps, emerging from the Partition, epitomize that any scholarship drawing on the experience of refugee subjectivities must acknowledge that refugee camps are sites of contestation: where both the character of these spaces and the bodies inhabiting them are negotiated on a daily basis (Dey & Roy Chaudhary, 2009). The preceding section, through an analysis of selected Partition fiction, exhibited the reasons behind how and why refugee camps became, perforce, a site of renewal and resubjectification for the traumatized female Partition refugee. As an organic continuation, this section using a case-centred approach analyses the experiences and testimonies from female Partition refugees: to decipher the specific everyday tactics through which the transitory non-place character of refugee camps were altered into referential places, where the process of resubjectification could be initiated.

Juxtaposing the theoretical framework of ‘the everyday’ with Partition refugee subjectivities, must be preceded with a discussion about why this critical paradigm is so rarely used. The everyday has been at the margins of critical theory, sociological and anthropological inquiries precisely because of its ‘essential, taken for granted continuum of mundane activities’ (Felski, 1999, p. 15), which does not lead to any significant spatio-temporal disturbances or at least ones that should be discoursed upon. Much like the female subject, who has often been defined by her absence from mainstream discourses, the everyday has been seen as what is leftover once the heroic, the exceptional and the extraordinary have concluded. Rita Felski argues that ‘women like the everyday have been defined by negation’ (ibid., p. 15), which becomes particularly pertinent for the permanent female residents of Cooper’s, Dhubulia or Chamta camps. Refugee women arrived at these transit sites carrying the trauma of communal riots and a pogrom. Many amongst these women ‘faced abduction, molestation, or rape…[and] on a few occasions these displaced women were forced to marry Muslim men and convert to Islam…However, most of these women prefer to remain silent and [they represent] the epitome of marginalization’ (Dey & Roy Chaudhary, 2009, p. 35).

The recognition of the trauma faced by these dislocated female refugees, a crucial project in Partition and Diasporic studies, has been undertaken by multiple scholars. Unfortunately, such scholarship has repeatedly cast the figure of the migrant female refugee as a ‘victim’, thereby making the gendered subject undergo a form of triple marginalization: first as a refugee, secondly as a woman and thirdly as a victim. More importantly, the recovery of women’s agency has often meant gathering the voices of strong, powerful and outspoken women who have made their disruptions within masculinist epistemologies, quite explicit. However, understanding the ‘agential capacity’ of women (Butalia, 1993, p. 12) also needs to take into account that all forms of agency are not manifested through extraordinary acts. Indeed, there are forms of agency that are expressed through a ‘mundane material embeddedness’ in the quotidian (Felski, 1999, p. 14) where ‘home, habit and repetition’ (ibid., p. 15) become empowering, as is seen through an analysis of female refugees experiences at these ‘permanent’ refugee camp sites.

Testimonies of Everyday Resistance

To truly appreciate the story of Bimala Das—who like many of her female compatriots has been a resident of Dhubulia camp for the last 75 years—one requires venturing into the lives of these women before they arrived at these Partition refugee camps. In the pre-Partition period, the clear demarcation between the andarmahal (inside space) and the bahirmahal (outside space) within Bengali (both East and West) household meant that the public–private binary was well and truly maintained. However, following the upheaval of the Partition, these gendered refugees were suddenly thrown into spaces where the private–public divide was non-existent. More importantly, the previous public–private household divide had also found a natural extension in the professional domain where men were understood to be the wage earners, while the women tended to the domestic chores. In the post-Partition phase as men and women landed up in cramped camps and constricted barracks, with ‘neither the property nor the finances to build a separate andarmahal’ (Weber, 1995, p. 204) the public–private binary was radically altered.

Not only were men and women now forced to live within the same quarters, public employment/wage earning was now no longer a masculine prerogative. This was significantly influenced by the fact that the post-Partition economic uncertainty ensured that the employment opportunities had substantially dried up. Such a situation warranted that both men and women were now involved in looking for job opportunities, a situation that was quite unheard of in pre-Partition times. The circumstances were even direr for the inhabitants of these temporary rehabilitation camps: as their refugee status precluded them from most employment options, which were for citizens alone. Faced with such extreme circumstances the female inhabitants of these camps were forced to assume a more dominant role in the economic context. However, as Felski notes in the epilogue to this subsection any ‘foray into other worlds’ requires the stable referent of a home. This implied that the women at these camps were forced to renegotiate their relationship with the ‘temporary’ spaces of these camps, before they could engage in employment opportunities. Women like Bimala Das and Maya Saha who were forced to ‘adjust to the [new situation]’ (ibid.) adopted innovative everyday practices, to achieve their objectives.

Patriarchal constraints meant that initially women were not allowed to go beyond the camp sites to secure employment. This implied that multiple refugee women started monetizing habits like sewing and paper-making into economically productive ventures. If agency is understood to be ‘the capacity to process social experience and to devise ways of coping with life even under the most extreme form of coercion’ (Butalia, 1993, p. 14), the acts of these refugee women can be indeed considered as definitive methods of gaining agency. The social consequences of refugee women taking up daily employment were also considerable as patriarchal constraints—both within camps and societally—about women working, slowly withered away. Consequently, the 1950s saw ‘droves of women join the labor force … who [had] never worked outside the home before…as the refugee women rapidly … joined the service sectors, the working bhadromohila (respectable working woman) was a new phenomenon’ (Dey & Roy Chaudhary, 2009, p. 42). Crucially, as refugee women started challenging the economic uncertainties in their lives, there was a simultaneous movement from their end, to change the deplorable living conditions within these camps. Bereft of political or social clout, refugee women took up non-violent everyday protest machinations like hunger strikes to protest against state and governmental injustices. Refugee women also took up prominent leadership roles within these refugee movements:

The refugee movement in Cooper’s Camp … began as a protest against bad quality of food grains that used to be served … Alorani Dutta (a woman protester) died due to lack of medical help) … police firing was a frequent feature in Cooper’s Camp. On 16 July 1956, police organized a combing operation in Cooper’s and arrested 44 protesters of which 7 were women. (Dey & Roy Chaudhary, 2009, p. 45; my emphasis)

The effect of such everyday battles, while not immediate did lead to long-term results. The Government of India constituted in 1967, the ‘Committee of Review of rehabilitation work in West Bengal’ that changed the discourse from ‘refugee care’ to ‘economic rehabilitation’—effectively cementing the permanent status of these ‘transitory’ camps (ibid., p. 48). While space constraints make it impossible to document here all the everyday performances from refugee women, which still continue to change the social and political milieu of rehabilitations camps, it may be safe to infer that such acts challenge preconceived notions: about the both the ‘victim’ status of women Partition refugees as well as the regressive nostalgic associations between women, everyday life and the primitive (Felski, 1999).

Conclusion

Currently, as refugee crises dominate multiple parts of the globe, it becomes increasingly important to turn to the past as a method of seeking solutions in the present. Indeed the situation is such that it is no longer enough to mourn the systemic violence that has and is being inflicted on migrant subaltern subjectivities—especially women—but to respond to such acts of violence through material and theoretical interventions. Turning to the everyday lives of such women and understanding its importance within refugee lives seems one of the only few legitimate as well as ethical paradigms, for understanding the enormity of these circumstances. The purpose of these interventions (including this article) is not to merely expose or make visible the trauma of female Partition refugees. On the contrary, it is to recover the quotidian performances of subaltern gendered bodies, which often slip into oblivion as metanarratives of violence and geopolitical situations become articulated.

The obviousness of everyday acts often makes it impossible to understand that tactical micro-resistances against physical and epistemic violence may be formulated through repetitive acts mired within habitual acts and based in what are understood to be domestic spaces. Recognizing the realm of the everyday—and very often of the women who inhabit it—as concrete rather than abstract is also an important intervention in Diasporic studies, a discipline that is intimately connected with complex issues of external and internal displacement. This is precisely because sometimes, in the disciplinary rush to neatly classify mass patterns of extraordinary migration and displacement, quotidian realities are discounted as inauthentic or non-pragmatic epistemic points. Therefore, to understand and recognize the relation between gendered subjectivities and the spaces to which they migrate requires not only empathy, but an empathy with the everyday.