The Fear of Camp Life: Understand the Spatial Reality and Formation of Discourse

Abstract

The paper makes an existentialist analysis of refugee Camps in West Bengal that came into being after the Indian Partition in 1947 when the state received a large number of asylum seekers from the-then East Pakistan. The objective of the paper is to discuss the construction of Camp life in terms of the affect of fear. Camps have been largely interpreted as the active agents of rehabilitation, space of political movements or supplier of informal labourers. The principal enquiry here however would be to interrogate if the camp is home for the refugees or it has a separate existential reality in the face of fear which goes beyond the questions of rehabilitation. Borrowed from Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) the concept of fear in this paper does not indicate any specific character or definite future. Rather, fear unfolds as an ‘affect’. In West Bengal, construction of the Camp by the government was presupposed for rehabilitation of the refugees from East Pakistan (Bangladesh). Hence, in-itself a Refugee Camp functioned to control the population by its norms, rules, and regulations. On the other hand, it was constructed as temporary shelter for the refugees. Therefore, the temporal character signifies how Camp constitutes the refugees through ‘care’ and how they encounter reality in that situational condition. The paper will not focus on fear as only as detrimental to the life of the refugees. Rather, it tries to show how the affect of fear may also unfold the possibility of that space by engaging with the elements of speech, silence or listening that constitutes the discourse of Camp. The paper would explore how as a temporary shelter of the refugees, Camp life has been constructed as a discourse in terms of spatial boundary and limits. Coopers Camp in Ranaghat, West Bengal here is taken as a case study to explicate the discourse of camp life in the light of fear and ontologically address the refugee question in post-Partition subcontinent.