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| Kathmandu, Thursday August 14, 2003 Shrawan 29, 2060. |
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Refugees, nations and pain
By ABHI SUBEDI
Sadness pervaded a small nation in diaspora, the
shanty towns of the Bhutanese Nepalis in Jhapa and Morang, when media reported in a few
words that the process of the refugee repatriation was stalled due to internal engagements
of the government leaders in Thimpu. It is a double in miniature of what has happened in
South Asia in the 20th century. Nations have risen and fallen under the spell of words at
various times. Words have become swords in the post-colonial South Asia. There is a direct
link between discourses and nations. But the nation formation process has taken a
trajectory in history—from displacement and pain to settlement. The Bhutanese Nepalis
have a unique position. Sandwiched between discourses, they languish on the corridors of
the nations. They wait in the twilight zone of history and look at the indifferent,
inefficient and mistaken politicians of Bhutan and Nepal for solution. But the leaders of
Bhutan right now enjoy the greatest luxury in the world to keep this nation in diaspora
waiting, to use a line from poet T S Eliot’s The Waste Land, like ‘an engine
throbbing’. The luxury of keeping over a hundred thousand refugees in a limbo, in
their perennial pain, is a bizarre manifestation of sadism.
But the Bhutanese refugees are going back to
their old homes they have been forced to leave years ago. New journeys of the refugees are
never straight. By that token, they will be compelled to move into the new texture of a
nation. New lines will have been drawn inside their territories when they reach home.
Cartographers must be busy now redrawing the map for that purpose. Refugees are often
compelled to follow the painfully ambiguous contours inside the nation’s territory. A
surrogate nation, a ghetto, is created even for people who rightfully return to their home
spaces.
Territory, terrains and terror are the three
homonyms that reflect the fate of the South Asian history. Nations have risen and fallen
and the cartographers have changed the contours on the maps of the nations in South Asia
so many times after the departure of the British colonial power in the forties. People,
who hold power, imperial or civil, create new frontiers. Words and sentences create the
borders of the nations in this region. Textual power became the greatest strength of the
Western colonial rulers especially in the 19th century. The war of independence was the
battle of texts. Mahatma Gandhi tried to create an alternate discourse of coloniality. He
reduced the code; spoke minimum words that people could understand. But he was not a
minimalist. He understood the power of the colonial texts. I think Gandhi’s sparse
clothing, wispy loin wear and what Churchill called in the British Parliament his
"half-naked fakir" modus vivendi, were all the powerful simplification of the
complex and verbose colonial texts.
But Gandhi’s simplification of the colonial
text did not solve all the problems. Imitation of the Western texts in power structure
became the style of politics in South Asia. Western search for more complex knowledge in
our own part of the world in the 19th century showed our own indifference to our own
traditions of texts, and their awareness of what we had with us changed the mode of the
power structure. The massive archival collection and shipment of documents, monuments and
icons to museums was part of the great textual movement during the later days of the
colonial rules.
Though we were not under the colonial rule,
Nepal remained an important waterhole for the collectors. The trend continues even today.
To read anything about Nepali art and archival constructs we have to read books that
compile, illustrate and analyse the items now under the custody of the Western individuals
and museums. It is a debatable subject whether such holdings or cataloguing have helped
preserve the old archival items or not, but my concern here is the discussion about the
textuality that is related to the rise and fall of the nations in this region.
The greatest bone of contention, to use the
little antiquated expression, was not only the text but the indexing and illustration of
the texts. The British India was a big text that continued to dominate thinking even after
it was split into two nations. Politicians and religious leaders became the new
cartographers who unscrupulously drew lines between the same people.
But such illustrations and textual analyses have
caused the deaths of the millions in this region. People have made grand movements across
the length and breadth of the subcontinent changing their locations, and cultural and
emotional terrains. Bloody trains ran between India and Pakistan. Cartographers had
misread the text. Misreading a text could be costly, the irony of which do the
postmodernists or deconstructionists explain. We can misread texts in luxury too sitting
behind the windowsill looking outside into the rain. But when you misread the texts of the
nation it costs very dearly.
The text readers were merciless power mongers
and megalomaniacs. They even made women’s bodies the new maps and made textual
interventions. They branded millions of Hindu and Muslim women’s bodies, which was an
act of sinister cartography.
Most alarming of all is that such misreadings
continue to influence the actions of the rulers in South Asia even today. Three million
people of Bangladesh paid with their lives for an independent nation, the second phase of
territory formation and reading of the historical text.
The Bhutanese people of Nepali origin were
thrown out of their homeland because the Bhutanese power holders misread the historical
text. The cultural texts and geographical texts are not always the same, but the Bhutanese
regimes justified their misreadings of the text which involved language, ethnic
discriminations and a wrong definition of the textual power called a nation. These
refugees are the consequences of the misreading of the Bhutanese grand narration. Only
such and such people, and such and such language groups and such and such cultures can
survive. Others must go.
But where would the Bhutanese people of Nepali
origin go? Where would the Muslims, or the Buddhists or the Hindus or the Christians of
anywhere go, for that matter? This destination question is a point of confusion and pain.
New nations created a bewildered and displaced diaspora in South Asia that is condemned to
live in difficulties.
Bhutan is making the latest experiment in
drawing cartographer’s lines across its own people’s terrains. Hence, it is the
bizarre and vulgar misreading of the colonial text. A nation when it draws imaginary lines
within its own territories, creates terrible casualties for itself. Dictators often create
horrors and force people to leave the land. But we can not say the same thing about the
Bhutanese government. It perhaps respects human rights, and runs a parliamentary system of
government. It is bizarre to create a situation of attrition among its own people and draw
a line that is bound to fail. The Nepali hill nationalists’ attempt to draw a line
between themselves and the Madhesis is similarly a bizarre dream and is bound to fail.
The most sensible thing for the South Asian
nations to do is to stop misreading the text of nationalism. They should stop drawing new
territories with people’s blood. Their cartographers’ quills should rest in
their inkwells and the Bhutanese refugees should go back home.
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