Decolonizing the Discourse: Voices of Hindu Refugees from Western India


Mohita Bhatia, Saint Mary's University

The refugee discourse has remarkably widened its scholarly contours to include varied voices and theoretical possibilities, thus questioning the victim-centric and monolithic descriptions of refugees. Despite this expanded theoretical richness and an attempt to understand refugee experiences from a bottom-up perspective, this scholarship is still somehow embedded in a West-centric conceptual framework. The diverse voices of refugees are still emerging from a ‘Western gaze’ that continues to use ‘victim-survivor’, ‘citizen-non/citizen’, ‘legal-illegal’, and ‘insider-outsider’ dichotomies, often in subtle if not in overt ways. The intricate nature of refugees lives and their politics often defies these neat political categorizations and binaries. In an attempt to decolonize and ‘unlearn’ the hegemonic refugee discourse, my paper will focus on Hindu refugees in Western India and bring to light the liminality of their everyday practices. It will point to refugee experiences that transcend and problematize some of the dominant vocabularies and dichotomies. This paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork in Barmer in Rajasthan - in Western India. Barmer represents the Western Indian border with Pakistan, and is ‘home’ to many Hindu refugees migrating from Pakistan. Using a decolonial lens, this paper argues that colonial history and partition of the Indian subcontinent (into two separate nations - India and Pakistan) cannot be overlooked when understanding the refugee experiences in South Asia. Colonial constructions and the partition memories continue to shape refugees’ claims and performances; and rupture the ‘victim-survivor’, ‘insider-outsider’, ‘citizen-non-citizen’ and ‘legal-illegal’ binaries. Hindu refugees use the historical context of partition to contest borders and claim a fluid, non-permanent idea of ‘home’ - that could be in ‘India’ or ‘Pakistan’ contingent on their various factors, including their memories, contemporary mobilities and political expressions. Through their claims and assertions, the refugees challenge the bordered legalities and shape a more ambiguous insider-outsider and citizen-non-citizen national discourse. This paper will foreground the voices and performances of the Hindu refugees that enable us to imagine ‘refugees’ and their socio-political practices from a decolonial and intersectional perspective. This paper will use an intersectional frame to question the idea of ‘refugees’ as a unified and cohesive category. It will analyze Hindu ‘refugees’ not as a monolith but as a heterogeneous group of people who are united by their common interests and religious or cultural identities; yet are differentiated in caste, class and gender contexts. This paper will argue that caste and religion are often important but overlooked identities in the global scholarship on refugees and migration. It will bring to light the centrality of these identity categories and examine how they differently shape refugees’ politics and claims

This paper will be presented at the following session: