Pregnant Bodies in Transit: Maternity, Migration, and the 1962 Sino-Indian War in Rita Chowdhury’s Chinatown Days

Abstract

Signed as a response to the Sino-Indian war in 1962, the Defence of India Act facilitated the mass incarceration of Indians having Chinese ethnicity, not even sparing children and pregnant women. Rita Chowdhury’s historical fiction Chinatown Days (2018), translated from the Assamese novel Makam (2010), rescues this systematic elimination of the Assamese-Chinese narrative that is otherwise absent in the dominant paradigms of this war history. Chowdhury conducts a rare historiography tracing the origin of the community in colonial India, their internment at the Deoli camp following the war of 1962, and ultimately their deportation to China. Chowdhury’s novel illustrates that the worst victims of this forced migration were the women who had to bear the burden of their reproductive bodies. By borrowing specific contexts from Chowdhury’s fiction that illuminates the challenges faced by pregnant Assamese-Chinese women, this paper conducts a gendered investigation into the events of this state-sanctioned forced displacement and deportation. It interrogates the idea of constructive nation-building through state-sanctioned banishment of the unborn racially undesirable Assamese-Chinese children. It examines how the displaced pregnant female bodies are doubly marginalized in internment camps, having no access to proper sanitation or nutrition, and how they are treated as mere tools to stage political dissent.