Chandal Jibon: An Excerpt

Chandal Jibon (2009) is the story of Jibon, a boy born into the hitherto ‘untouchable’ Chandal (or Namasudra) community in East Bengal, whose parents flee from East Pakistan and arrive as refugees in India. The story of the boy’s journey to adulthood – is also the story of the experience of the subaltern Bengali refugee community and of caste oppression, humiliation and violence, providing a trenchant bottom-up view of post-1947 Bengal and of Calcutta in the turbulent Naxalite era. It is a tale of the indomitable human will to survive.

In this excerpt from Manoranjan Byapari’s novel, Chandal Jibon, the author writes about the abysmal and inhuman living conditions and treatment of low-caste refugees from East Pakistan in the early 1950s in the Shiromanipur camp in West Bengal. V. Ramaswamy translates.

Research and Orientation Workshop in Migration and Forced Migration Studies

Applications are invited for a Research and Orientation Workshop to be held in Kolkata from 25 November to 30 November 2018. The workshop will be held by Calcutta Research Group (CRG) in collaboration with the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung. It will address the following themes:(a) Global compact on migration and refugees; promises and paradoxes;(b) Racialisation of migration: race, religion, gender, and other fault lines in the global protection system, (c) Power and responsibility in the protection system ( global, regional, and national) in the context of mixed and massive population flows; the need to redefine the “responsibility to protect”;  (d) Migrant and refugee labour and immigrant economies, camps, and urban refugees; privatisation of care and protection(e) Statelessness, international conventions, and the need for new initiatives; (f) Refugee crisis in Asia, in particular South Asia: common features with the European scenario; and (g) Perspectives on the need for New Global, Regional, and National Responses (with special reference to Asia).

The Inhuman Face of Climate Change: Climate Refugees, Their Status and Protection

 

Anshika Srivastava gives an overview of contemporary research on climate refugees, locates international laws as well as makes suggestions for improving the Indian context.

Images from a Rohingya Camp: Camp Ohn Taw Chay, Sittwe, Myanmar

 

 

 

Photo Credit: Marko Szilveszter Macskovich, Researcher on Forced Migration and Identity Management

Photographs taken on December 20, 2017

 

‘No Such Thing As Rohingya’

Read this New York Times article to find out how Myanmar is systematically erasing the history of the Rohingyas in the country while also murdering them en masse.

Opportunities for Refugees with Academic/ Scientific background in German Development Institute

Flyer_Refugees_02.12.2016

The German Development Institute, located in the UN City of Bonn, Germany is offering those refugees in the Bonn area with academic reference to DIE’s topics the possibility to get involved with the Institute’s activities. The German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE) is one of the leading think tanks for global development and international cooperation worldwide. You can download the flyer from the link posted above.

“Urban refugees in Delhi” A report.

“Urban refugees in Delhi: Identity, entitlements and well-being” is a detailed report on the study of two connected, contemporaneous realities in India – urban refugees in India (in this case, specifically, refugees in India’s capital city of Delhi), and India’s lack of a legal framework, domestic or international, that guarantee their protection. Seeking to understand the aspirations and desires of Sikh and Christian Afghan refugees and Rohingya refugees leading incredibly precarious lives in Delhi, the study engages in an exploration of the various factors that contributed to their state of insecurity, and proposes its own take on Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach to formulate long-term, sustainable development and security goals for urban refugees based on the notion of ‘self-reliance’. The report can be accessed here.

The Speaking Mirror of Bharati Das

The second phase of refugee influx into West Bengal, especially by the once powerful caste group, namashudras, continues to be ill documented in social science literature of the day. Through the narrative of a young caregiver, Bharati Das, Parimal Bhattacharya makes an important intervention in documenting these lives, as well as, through the trope of a video recording, makes marginalised voices heard.  

Uemon and Hariprabha Takeda: Travelling into Lives (Part – II)

Hariprabha visited Japan thrice in her lifetime. Uemon accompanied her each time. Their third visit together had coincided with the Second World War and Hariprabha jotted down her experiences of a war-torn Japan in the form of diary entries. Madhurima Mukhopadhyay, in the second part of her essay, focuses on Hariprabha’s war memories. The first part can be read here.