On 11th May 2021, amidst the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, Gujarati poet Parul Khakkar’s poem, “Shabvahini Ganga” went viral on social media. Within a few days, it was translated into many Indian languages. Parul Khakkar’s poem highlights the enormity of grief and mourning as citizens stood mute witness to the last rites of so many dead, week after week:
“Lord, your crematoriums are too few; fewer the wood for pyres
Lord, our pall-bearers are too few, fewer yet the mourners
Lord, in every home Yama performs the dance macabre
Lord, in your ideal realm the hearse is now the Ganga”[i].
The missing actor appears to be the state which has abandoned its citizens. It is this relationship between the state and citizens that the edited book, Displacement and Citizenship: Histories and Memories of Exclusion, published by Tulika Books in 2019 raised. What happens when the state turns against its citizens and the entire edifice of the state’s moral authority crumbles?
This edited volume with 17 papers takes readers to debates on displacement and citizenship. It explores the three interconnected spheres of citizenship: political, economic and cultural. The editors write that, “while political and economic rights are conferred on individuals and groups by the legal frameworks of nation-states and international agreements, cultural citizenship is a right always in the making” (pp. xi). The lived and imagined lives that constitute memory, concealment and forgetting leaves behind traces merely in the official archives, where the official paper trail gets preserved, silently waiting for the prying eye of a historian-researcher; a source for literary texts, self-narratives or oral histories.
In the Introduction, Ayesha Kidwai takes the readers through the amendments that restricted the applicability of jus soli and the caveats and qualifications that sought to make jus sanguinis citizenship contingent upon the fulfilment of the same. She reminds us that “on 31st August 2019, over 19 lakh people residents in Assam found themselves excluded from the final NRC published by the central government” and believes that “the suffering, social tension, economic and psychological impact of a nationwide NRC cannot even be imagined at this point of its inception” (pp. xv). She welcomes this edited volume since it performs the task of showing “how in a period of just over seventy years, a nation-state is set to return to the debates that lay at its very foundations – whether descent in jus sanguinis is to be determined by religion in the first place – and forget the consequences that were visited upon it: vivisection of territory, economic collapse, mass-scale violence and forced migration of millions of people” (ibid).
Ayesha Kidwai refers to the essays contributed to this edited volume as offering much more than “mere cautionary tales”. These essays indeed perform the much-needed task of taking the reader through the painful recounting and remembering the traumatic lived experiences that accompanied the foundational moment of the emergence of India (1947) and Bangladesh (1971). Going beyond South Asian narratives, essays in volume also presents to us how the community gets constituted by examining the literary texts that revisit large scale displacement, refugee crisis or expulsions and forceful enrolment into the workforce through slavery or indentured labour.
Arshi Jawid’s paper gives readers a glimpse into the forgotten stories from the Jammu massacre. Presenting the self-narratives from the abducted women, she posits a question: “whether the silence about certain aspects of this massacre or any other violent event can help in achieving a sense of reconciliation”. Without mincing words, the paper does raise a question about how the state never went after the abductors and perpetrators of violence, when it states:
“The most glaring lacuna in the programme for the Abducted Women’s (Recovery and Restoration) Act, 1949 was that there was provision only for recovery of the women. There were no legal charges against the abductors as often the women went from one abductor to another. Identifying and establishing any charge against the abductor would have been difficult. Some abductions were carried out by identifiable political groups and targeting the groups would not have been politically feasible. Hence, the omission of all penal provisions was deliberate” (pp. 270).
Similarly, Nazia Akhtar’s essay presents a reading of Huma R Kidwai’s The Hussaini Alam House in a style that lays bare “the carefully fashioned image of a democratic and tolerant Indian nation-state” by presenting “the experiences of Hyderabadi Muslims” (pp. 175). Besides presenting a close reading of the depiction of “partition – which was a ‘long’ event whose constituent events and impact far exceeded the time frame(s) it has been traditionally assigned, i.e., 14-15 August 1947, August 1947, June – August 1947 or the year 1947 – in one literary text,” the essay also “briefly explains how other literary texts depict this cataclysmic event (pp. 178)”.
Udaya Kumar’s article makes us face the ultimate sense of hopelessness, that would have prompted the leadership in the land rights movement to invoke the threat of a “spectacular collective suicide” where the State uses a police action to forcefully evict the occupants from a rubber estate that they have occupied. In this paper, Kumar presents to us the autobiographical narrative of Seleena Prakkanam and makes us reflect on how the recollected memory of death by suicide (the painful recollection of having seen Girija’s and Girish’ mother lying lifeless on the first day of her school, her best friend’s suicide a week before college examinations) continues to haunt her. Reflecting on this new idiom of the protests, Kumar states, “the politics of death adopted in the Chengara land struggle dramatically visibilised the destitute state of landless Dalit communities in Kerala” (pp. 17). However, he further asks, “when do life and death become effective sites and instruments of political struggle?” (ibid). He thinks that “Seleena Prakkanam’s testimonial account of her life and the Chengara struggle shows us a political subject in crisis, endangered from within and without, devoid of anchorage in the institutional ethos of the movement yet trying to persist in resistant life” (pp. 19).[ii]
Historians of social movements in the South needs to reflect on why anti-displacement struggles range from Mulshi Peta Satyagraha led by Senapati Bapat to the more recent Narmada Bachao Andolan invoked the Suicide (embracing Death by Drowning) as the only means of resistance? What are the weapons of everyday resistance that are adopted by the destitute, displaced[iii] and indebted persons[iv] in the hope of making the State listen? Adivasi struggles against displacement in Jharkhand and other East Indian states have shown us the emergence of new idioms, by imagining new slogans such as, “Jaan bhi nahi denge, Zameen bhi nahi denge”.
This is followed by Papori Bora’s essay, which takes readers to the ‘Mongolian Other’ of India. Papori Bora reminds us that “colonial discourse represented India and the North East (or colonial Assam) as binary opposites” (pp. 25). Her analysis also finds continuity between colonial historiography and nationalist discourses, when it comes to the crucial question of defining the contours of normative ‘Indian citizen’. She shows how the “Indian state’s military response to the various armed movements, in the form of counter-insurgency military operations, builds on the cultural-nationalist argument of people of the North East as incomplete national citizens” (pp. 26). In her essay, Bora asks, “At this time, when the conflicts in the region are waning and there is an uneasy peace, can there be a different coming together in the North East beyond identitarian modes of belonging? (pp. 27)”
The next two papers in the first section take readers to think of an exiled citizen and refugeehood. Leila Essa analyses two fictional texts presenting the protagonists recounting the grave suffering and violence in the context of partition – of East/West Germany and India/Pakistan. Similarly, Lipi Biswas Sen talks about the creative writings by two authors, Manuel Scorza from Peru and Easterine Kire from Nagaland and presents to us how these authors recollect memory to keep alive a sense of what had truly happened and witnessed. In this sense, Lipi Biswas Sen’s essay and Nazia Akhtar’s essay, ‘Opaque Fragment, Clear Narrative: Silence and Testimony in Huma R Kidwai’s The Hussaini Alam House’ performs a similar task of retrieving memories and producing testimonies.
Chitra Harshvardhan’s essay engages with the genre of ‘Dalit Self-Narratives in English Translation’ and presents a close reading of Omprakash Valmiki’s Joothan as a Dalit Literary Text giving us a glimpse to the literature of resistance and everyday struggles of communities living on the margins. This essay also traces the role of translation in the Dalit Discourse and underlines certain disagreements and criticisms that were voiced on the translation published by Columbia University Press. In conclusion, Harshvardhan argues that “the preferred strategy in translating Dalit texts should be one that preserves and sustains difference while opening up spaces for a differentially based unity in resistance, for achieving a non-discriminatory and just world” (pp. 67).
The second section of this book presents four papers on ‘Displacement and Refugeehood’ bringing to us narratives from citizens in exile (whether a self-imposed one by a creative personality or resulting from a mass scale humanitarian crisis). Shambhavi Prakash reviews contemporary German documentary films on the relationship between the refugee and host, observing that “the films discussed do not draw away from the experiences and self-narrations of the refugees by excessively focusing on humanitarian helpers, although they do portray refugees as innocent victims and as subjects devoid of histories” (pp. 123).
Ekata Bakshi in the essay ‘The Marginal Women’, presents the long-term struggles of families who were compelled to cross borders during Partition (1947) and depicts the lives of marginal women in rehabilitation colonies such as Asansol. Similarly, Anindita Ghoshal’s essay traces the narratives around Migration, Memory and Identity in Post-Partition East Bengal (1947-71) by paying close attention to both the Bengali and non-Bengali Muslim refugees. This essay also has a short section that presents the relationship between Bangladesh and Buddhist tribals of the Chittagong Hill Tracts, who became “victims of Bengali Nationalism”.
Certain violent episodes in the lives of refugees that the editors could have engaged with are the 1978 eviction of Bangla speaking refugees from Morichhapi in Sunderbans and the latter eviction of the Jailya Kaibarta community from Jambudwip in 2003-2004.[v] In some sense, by evicting the transient fisherfolks from accessing a small stretch of Jambudwip island to dry their fish catch, the Supreme Court of India not only failed the refugees’ right to livelihood but by not relying on an anthropologist’s narratives about their sustainable stake net fishing, the apex court also failed the academic community of anthropologists.[vi]
[i] These are the lies from the English translation of the poem Shabvahini Ganga by Rita Kothari and Abhijit Kothari. To read the full poem in translation, see https://thewire.in/the-arts/parul-khakkar-gujarati-poem-ganga-bodies-covid
[ii] In an interview with J Devika, Seleena Prakkanam recounts her own movement alongside practicing a mobilizational politics along with marginalized communities in Kerala after she leaves Chengara land struggle, See, Devika, J (2014) ‘Becoming Society: An interview with Seleena Prakkanam’, Economic and Political Weekly, XLIX(17): 40-44.
[iii] We have oral history accounts of participants in Anti-displacement struggles such as Narmada Bachao Andolan, which may provide insights into everyday strategies and struggles, taking us beyond such singular frames as ‘Jal Samarpan’. For details of one such oral history project led by Nandini Oza, see https://oralhistorynarmada.in/ For another such effort to bring in published form self-narratives of Andolan activists, see Ojas, S. V.; Kumar, Madhuresh; Vijayan, M. J. and Athialy, Joe (2010) Plural Narratives from Narmada Valley, Delhi Solidarity Group, Delhi.
[iv] For an example of such an engagement with the everyday weapons of resistance that an indebted farmer who survived an attempted suicide resorts to, see Hardikar, Jaideep (2021) Ramrao: The Story of India’s Farm Crisis.
[v] For an account of how Jaliya Kaibarta community interpreted their forced eviction for Jambudwip island as “second betrayal”, see Jaladas, Niranjan (2013) Fishermen, the ‘Forest Acts’ and narratives of eviction from Jambudwip island; Nehru Memorial Museum and Library Occasional Papers, No 6 (New Series: Perspectives in Indian Development).
http://125.22.40.134:8082/jspui/bitstream/123456789/910/1/06_niranjan_jaladas_op_6.pdf
[vi] See, Raychaudhury, Bikash (1980, reprint 2003) The Moon and the Net: Study of a Transient Community of Fishermen at Jambudwip, Anthropological Survey of India, Kolkata.
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Dr Himanshu Upadhyaya is an Assistant Professor at the School of Development, Azim Premji University, Bengaluru.