This talk would focus on a little-known group of stateless people in South Asia, many of whom have already died over more than 50 years, while the remaining seem doomed to meet the same fate. It would trace the predicament of the indigenous Buddhist stateless Chakma refugees from erstwhile East Pakistan, who have been leading a stateless and rightless existence in the north-eastern Indian State of Arunachal Pradesh bordering China. Entrapped in a state of 'liminality', the current 'betwixt and between' status of the minority ethnic Buddhist Chakma refugees seems to have become a never-ending feature of their lives. The story of the stateless Chakmas can be seen as a textbook example of how an awfully wrongly drawn political boundary could inexorably push a whole community of people into the throes of an unending cycle of painful transition. The Chakmas have had no say whatsoever in any of these episodes of transition, which have progressively worsened their plight. It is this spiral of transition that this talk would try to untangle, with a view to chronicling the chequered lifeworld of the stateless Chakma refugees.
Deepak K Singh is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, Panjab University, Chandigarh and has been Visiting Faculty at Yale University, among others. His research interests include migration and refugee studies, politics and ethnicity in Northeast India and postcolonial politics in South Asia.
Abeer Gupta is currently the director of the Krishnakriti Foundation in Hyderabad and the Achi Association India in New Delhi and Leh. His research is based in the western Himalayas, in Ladakh, Jammu and Kashmir. His introduction and interest in the subject stems from his time documenting the crafts of the Chakmas in Mizoram.
Негізгі бет Фильм және анимация Lost in Transition: Narratives of Non-existence - Deepak K Singh in conversation with Abeer Gupta
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