Through the narratives of everyday experiences, I have sought to examine the transformation of gender identity, relations, and roles of Rohingya women in the refugee camps in Bangladesh – of how they see themselves and how they make a life despite their difficult circumstances. Focusing on the voices of Rohingya women helps to highlight the impacts of forced migration on how the ‘gendered self is transformed’ and the ways in which these women learn to negotiate and navigate new environments, thereby reshaping ‘strategies of selfhood’ (Bhabha 1994; Abusharaf 2009; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2014). While the prevailing scholarly literature on refugees details many of the complexities of displacement, much of the attention is put on the challenges and suffering faced by refugees during and after forced migration. One strand of research that remains underrepresented is a grounded understanding of refugee experiences more broadly – and that of refugee women specifically – that focuses on their ability to reconstruct their lives after displacement. This book is an attempt to look beyond these broad assumptions by providing a lens into the everyday, the mundane, the quotidian parts of Rohingya women's lives in the Kutupalong–Balukhali mega-camp, after experiencing violence and forced migration. Through the narratives, stories, and emotions conveyed in the preceding chapters, I have sought to uncover how the experiences of Rohingya women during and after forced migration, as well as their strategic deployment of varying forms and degrees of economic, social, and cultural capital, help them to recreate a sense of community and ‘life’ in the camps. This book thus showcases the creative capacity of refugee women to apply their own frames of meaning within the camps – frames that are distinct from the commonly promoted or taken-for-granted assumptions of NGOs and humanitarian aid agencies.

Through feminist ethnographic research, this book has shown that the camps have neither destroyed pre-existing conceptions of masculinity and femininity, nor have they left them unchanged – instead, these notions have come to occupy an ‘in-between’ space, opening up the possibilities of empowerment while also reifying gendered expectations. Gendered positions do not remain static – rather, Rohingya women negotiate and navigate patriarchal structures and power asymmetries, highlighting their agentic capacity.

During the early twentieth century, Rabindranath Tagore sought to spread his intellectual ideas in a fight against a scientific racist ideology which presented non-White or non-European individuals as downtrodden and in need of European colonialism to civilize them. Tagore was born in 1861 into a prominent Bengali Brahmin family as the youngest of thirteen children. His family was extremely wealthy, mainly due to the success of his grandfather Dwarkanath who had amassed a fortune through his firm, Carr, Tagore and Co. Dwarkanath had earned a great deal of respect from the British for his business accomplishments. From an early age, Tagore was an avid reader. Heavily influenced by the Upanishads, he was inspired to become a writer himself. In his works, Tagore set out to find unity and “a stability of belief and moral principal to give meaning and order to everything he did.”1 He looked for harmony in all things while paying attention to the deep religious beliefs of ancient India. Tagore believed the “unity of God and his creation was the unity of a creative personality.”2 He expressed his creative passions by writing poetry that had strong spiritual messages. His writings referred heavily to the landscape of eastern India where he described the flowers, forests, birds, and the sacred Ganges River. Many of Tagore's poems created a sense of nostalgia. In one of his poems, titled Shah Jahan, named after the Mughal emperor who built the Taj Mahal, Tagore lamented the end of the Mughal Empire, writing, “You are gone now emperor – Your empire has dissolved like a dream, Your throne is shattered, Your armies, whose marching shook the earth, Today have no more weight than the windblown dust on the Delhi road.”3 Tagore believed that the British Raj neglected the histories of the great Indian empires within their schools for Indian pupils. He wanted Indians to be proud of their ancestry, and sought to reassert their cultural brilliance both at home and abroad.

The Muhajir Qaumi Movement (MQM) is a militant ethno-nationalist movement that achieved mass-democratic power in Pakistan during the 1980s. Propelled by ethnic riots and led by university students with lower-middle-class backgrounds, the MQM used a vigilant style of militancy to transform the cities of the southern Pakistani province of Sindh into an ethnic majoritarian stronghold – this, at the unlikely height of Pakistan's third military dictatorship (1978–1988). From the outset, leaders from the movement voiced long-standing concerns that Muhajirs – partition-era migrants from what is today India – had been systematically pushed out of public sector institutions by native Pakistanis (often referred to by activists in English as “sons of the soil”). The more novel aspect of the MQM's platform, however, was its demand for the recognition of Muhajirs as a separate, “oppressed nationality” (mazlum qaum) within Pakistan. This demand for an ethnic nationality and the displacement it enacts on both official and minority conceptions of the nation is the subject of this book.

Some sense of what is at stake in the displacements of Muhajir nationalism can be found in the story of its original leader, Altaf Hussain. Soon before the MQM achieved mass-political power, Hussain was arrested for burning the Pakistani flag on the steps of the mausoleum of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the Muslim nation-state's “great founder and leader” (Quaid-e-Azam). A senior MQM activist's voice swelled with feeling as he recalled the ghostly encounter between the two leaders, which took place shortly after the military coup of 1978. The question of what Hussain was trying to convey that day on the steps of the mausoleum hung between us as we sat there, just slightly removed from the evening bustle of the party office. Sensing my apprehension, he turned in closer to break the silence: “After all, what else can a lover of Pakistan do when they don't receive rights?” (Akhir, jab haq nahi milta to mohib-e-vatan ko kiya karna chahiye?).

Further insight into the MQM's distinctive critique of the Pakistani nation-state can be found in Safar-e-Zindagi (My Life's Journey, 1988), Hussain's hastily written political biography published on the eve of Pakistan's return to civilian democratic rule in which he writes, “[T]he Mohajir [sic] nation had its beginnings (shuruat) in the Two-Nation Theory of Pakistani nationhood” (A. Hussain 2011 [1988]: 132), thereby framing the latter simultaneously as a point origin and departure.

This chapter focuses on the role of nationality laws in relation to marriage migration to South Korea (‘the Republic of Korea’ or ‘Korea’) and Taiwan (‘the Republic of China’) in manufacturing gendered nationality and statelessness. It illustrates how gender-based statelessness serves the interests of the ‘nation-state’ by excluding some female marriage migrants from membership of the nation. This is because nationality laws confer a status on those marriage migrants who advance the project of nation building by reversing falling birth rates. It argues that discriminatory nationality laws in Korea and Taiwan reflect traditional East Asian framings of nationality based on cultural and ethnic patriarchal lineage. The chapter demonstrates how laws and policies on nationality, in both Korea and Taiwan, both include and exclude the marriage migrant on the basis of gender, nationality, race, class, culture and ethnicity; it thereby exposes the causes of statelessness in the context of marriage migration. The chapter applies a construction of gender as based on power relations involving the state, social structures and individuals in the context of nationality laws in Korea and Taiwan.

The two worlds of Bengal and Malaya were connected through language, religion, maritime trade and colonial administration. In addition to being a trade route, the Bay of Bengal carried flows of migrants, information, ideas, cultural practices, pilgrims and soldiers over the centuries. However, this tie between the two worlds became more direct and extensive as British bureaucratic control spread over the Malay Peninsula from Calcutta, creating opportunities in various capacities for the Bengalis. By exploring the cultural contexts of migration, and the routes and nodal points of bonding with the Malay world, this chapter examines the administrative web that cemented existing flows of people, commodities and cultural practices from Bengal.

Linguistic and Cultural Links

The linguistic connection between Bengal and Malaya dates back to the early Christian era. In the Malay Archipelago and mainland Southeast Asia, Austroasiatic languages are widely spoken, which are also used throughout some parts of India, Bangladesh, Nepal and the southern borders of China. Hindu and Buddhist preachers from the Indian subcontinent, including Bengal, spread their beliefs in Southeast Asia in Sanskrit and Pali, leading to Indian linguistic influences in the region. The influence of Bangla, in particular, can be seen through the use of a pre-Nāgarī script. Srivijaya, a Buddhist thalassocratic empire based on the island of Sumatra, also had religious, cultural and trade links with the Buddhist Pala dynasty of Bengal.

The Malay language has borrowed many Sanskrit words. The Bangla script and the Sanskrit language are found in the Sejarah Melayu (Figure 1.1). Lanman suggests that Sanskrit influenced not only the Malay vocabulary but also ideas. About 45 per cent of the total Bangla lexicon is composed of naturally modified Sanskrit words and corrupted forms of Sanskrit. Similarly, there are many Sanskrit loanwords in the Bahasa Melayu. Although Bangla belongs to the Indo-European languages family, while Malay belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian/Austronesian family, many common Sanskrit loanwords can be found in classic Malay and Bangla. Both languages have borrowed a good number of standard Arabic and Persian words (Tables 1.1 and 1.2).

One of the earliest references to Bengal in Malay texts is in Raja Culan's Misa Melayu (The Mass of Malay), dating back to the second half of the eighteenth century. It mentions that a British captain had come from Bengal.

While Rabindranath Tagore and Taraknath Das did not travel to the US to learn about American racism, Lala Lajpat Rai specifically journeyed there to understand the Black experience. Rai was born in 1865 to a Jain family in the Punjab Province. His father was a teacher of the Urdu language at the Government Higher Secondary School where Rai also studied as a child. In 1880, Rai attended the Government College at Lahore to study law, graduating four years later. During his time at there, Rai began to grow disillusioned with British rule. In 1886, he moved to the village of Hisar in Haryana to practice law and founded the Hisar district branch of the Indian National Congress and the Arya Samaj, a Hindu reform movement. Like the Brahmo Samaj, the Arya Samaj campaigned against caste discrimination, and they supported widow remarriage and women's education. The organization also had an internationalist outlook and established chapters in British colonies with Indian populations, such as South Africa, Fiji, Mauritius, Suriname, Guyana, and Trinidad and Tobago. Rai was an active participant and campaigner during the early years of the organization's existence. Like the Arya Samaj, Rai had an internationalist philosophy toward advocating for Indian independence as well as social reform. In 1914, he quit practicing law to dedicate himself to the Indian independence movement fully. That same year, Rai planned a six-month trip to the US to collect material for a book on the plight of Black Americans. However, while he was in the US, the British categorized him as a political exile for criticizing British rule and he was not allowed to return to India until the end of 1919.

During his five-year stay in the US, Rai had a considerable impact on Americans. He formed alliances and garnered support for Indian self-rule from Irish nationalists, American civil rights activists, and other American anti-colonialists. In addition to seeking out support for Indian self-determination, the strife of Black Americans was a central part of Rai's advocacy. Rai wanted to understand how the Black American struggle related to the plight of Indians under the British Raj, and he also sought to compare American racism to the Indian caste system.

Chapter 5 examines how early nineteenth-century accounts of walking in the city traced the nuisances and delights of urban living, helping to articulate a sense of collective experience that in turn shaped a sense of what it meant to be a Londoner. Many of these accounts of London emphasized the modernity of their moment by reimagining earlier eighteenth-century works, presenting them as inadequate to the task of describing the contemporary experience of the city. Trivia’s “art of walking the streets of London” was reworked to propose forms of selfish behaviour in the streets, and Pierce Egan’s Life in London broadly followed the template of spy guides while also showing his characters delighting in, rather than simply observing, all aspects of urban pleasure. Together, these works suggested new ways of thinking about moving through the streets of a city as crowded and busy as London.

To understand the context in which “new” trans women align themselves with middle-class cisgender womanhood as they distance themselves from hijras, we need to return to the NGO office where I spoke with Deepa, Priya, and their friends. Indu, a soft-spoken trans woman in her fifties wearing a coral-colored sari, looked serious as she said, “I don't want to tell others that I’m a hijra.” Though Indu was part of a hijra group for many years, now she does not want to be associated with hijras at all. Indu considered herself lucky as her facial features do not mark her as visibly GNC; in her words, she appears “feminine, very feminine.” She remarked that most people initially recognize her as a cisgender woman.

Nodding toward Indu, Deepa observed, “If she says to the [other] passengers [she encounters] on the bus, ‘I’m a hijra,’ nobody will want to sit beside her on the bus. But looking how she looks, very feminine, the other passengers will sit beside her on the bus.” Shaking her head, Deepa continued, “If she's looking like a hijra….” and she trailed off, looking uneasy. For trans women like Indu and Deepa, the costs of being perceived as a hijra include being excluded and ostracized.

Indu nodded seriously, remarking, “So what's the use in telling people that I’m a hijra? … It's better you present yourself as a woman and just be on your own. Then you’ll be—” and at that point, Deepa jumped in, saying, “—For respect. For self-respect. See, we want to give respect to ourselves also.” For Deepa and Indu, aligning themselves with cisgender womanhood1 offers the potential of being regarded with dignity by the people around them—and a form of self-respect they do not think is available to hijras.

This interaction also indicates the deeper meanings around hijra-ness and womanhood in economically liberalized India. Indu points to a connection between hijras as a collective and “new” women as individuals “just … on [their] own.” Someone who once identified herself as a hijra and now identifies as a woman is therefore autonomous and not limited by her association with a particular group.

This chapter considers the experience of visitors to Flavius’ tomb after his death, particularly as they drank alongside Flavius while he was portrayed doing the same.

Bengali migrants became distinctly visible in the Malay public space in the late nineteenth century. Their professional world has been discussed in Chapters 4 and 5, showing that they gradually created a diasporic space with other migrant communities, such as the Chinese and Tamils. When it comes to social spaces, the Bengalis carved them out in several ways: by maintaining intergenerational communication, fostering multiculturalism, continuing interaction with other diasporic communities and forming transnational families in Malaya. These multidimensional aspects of space-making made the Bengali diaspora an integral part of the Malay cosmopolitan world, a role only enhanced by the contributions to Malaya's decolonisation process after WWII. This chapter explores how the Bengalis carved out a place for themselves through interactions with other communities, political practices and involvement in making institutions of social and political importance.

Intergenerational communication

When Ramnath Biswas was travelling in Malacca, an elderly ‘Sundarban Bengkalis’ invited him to have dinner with his family. The Sundarban Bengkalis served eastern Bengal food and spoke in an unusual accent, prompting Biswas to learn more about the so-called Sundarban Bengkalis. He later had another opportunity to learn about them from a Bengali named Deepak, who spoke in the Barisal dialect and lived in a Portuguese mahalla (a residential area or unit). According to Deepak, when Buddhism declined in Bengal, many Bengali Buddhists from the Sundarbans migrated to Pulau Bengkalis. This dispersion continued during the Portuguese and Maghs plunder at the Bay of Bengal and Sundarban areas. This diffuse community was mostly composed of fishermen in Bengal. They upheld the same profession at Pulau Bengkalis. After fishing in the Straits, they brought the fish to sell in the Malacca market. Later, some settled in Malacca and converted to Christianity. Deepak said that the Bengalis who migrated from Pulau Bengkalis to Malacca were known as Sundarban Bengkalis. A few primary and secondary sources corroborate Deepak's narrative. For instance, Lloyd and Moore suggested that the Indians settled in the tiny fishing village and married local girls before the Muslim arrival. The Suma Oriental and the Report of Balthasar Bort, Dutch–Malacca Governor (1665–1677), both explain that the Bengali fishermen settled and engaged in the fishing profession in Malacca.

I grew up and went to school in the multi-culture of Kalimpong—the town that is the focus and main protagonist of this book. My father, a trader-adventurer, landed up in Kalimpong from Rangpo, a town across the border in the Kingdom of Sikkim, which was then a British protectorate. His father in turn had been working in Singtam (also in Sikkim) for a firm with connections to Kalimpong. This was on the heels of Colonel Francis Younghusband's ‘opening up’ of the route to Tibet in 1904. My father never really made it economically, nor did he sojourn in Lhasa as many businessmen were then wont to do. Coming of age, not without kvetching, in the Tenth Mile area of the town, I noted there was just a residue of the Indo-Tibetan trade, with descendants of merchants using the conduit via Kathmandu while still hoping that the Jelep-La border would one day reopen. The Chinese families still living in the town mainly ran restaurants or shoe shops. Tibetan refugees, lamas and aristocrats had a considerable presence in the town environs. The mule trains were but a distant memory for old timers as army trucks trundled up and down the roads carrying supplies and military hardware.

I remained quite clueless about the potholes in the ground of history on which I daily trod. It was only when I relocated to the United Kingdom (UK) for my doctoral work, on a different topic, that I kept encountering material on Kalimpong in the British Library, London. It was then that the urge to someday write a book on the town took hold of me. This was not a bad beginning for a scholar specialising in postcolonial studies. It was only much later that this work began to take some sort of shape, its contours cut and circumscribed by the continuities and discontinuities of the colonial experience in Asia. Although the Tibetan side of the story at the border had been written about, it seemed to me that what was lacking was the presence of China in Kalimpong, with all that this implied for the larger story of China–India relations before and after 1947.