Homeless in the Promised homeland: An exploration of the concept of the diasporic

consciousness through the South Asian case study of the Biharis of Bangladesh.
Isha Dubey
Abstract
The ever increasing transborder movements of people across the globe have created categories
such as the refugee and the stateless. They occupy the uncomfortable space that lies beyond the
confines of the nation state as the others of the citizen, and are primarily driven by the need to
belong. However, even as migration has become one of the most studied themes within the
academia in humanities in recent years, the focus has mostly been on Europe. The identity of Postcolonial South Asia, dominated by India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, has been profoundly shaped by
the partition of the sub-continent in 1947 and the Liberation War of 1971 both of which involved
massive cross-border movements of people as well as large scale internal displacement. The Urduspeaking Biharis in Bangladesh migrated from the Muslim minority regions of India during and
after Partition to claim the promised homeland of Pakistan. And yet they found themselves
stateless after the War of 1971 on account of accusations of being collaborators of the WestPakistani army. The community presents an important yet largely ignored case study for
understanding the meanings attached to the ideas of home, homeland and the nation as well as for
exploring, nuancing and perhaps broadening the horizons of who can inhabit the diasporic space
and what constitutes a diasporic consciousness. This paper shall attempt to initiate such a discussion
by attempting to piece together Bihari narratives of life in East-Pakistan as allegedly privileged
Pakistani citizens and later as a stateless ethnic minority in Bangladesh.
Key Words : Biharis, migration, homeland, home, nation, diasporic consciousness, partition,
statelessness, Bangladesh, East-Pakistan.
*****
You ask me who I am, Sir from the faraway land
All I can tell you is that I am Bihari . . .
How many generals have come and gone
But I have been waiting for a never ending time
To go to Pakistan or to kabristan( grave)
My cataract affected eyes can no longer see well
But in my minds eye memories keep flashing by
I remember Patna where we possessed land and farms
There is something about the torrential rains of Bengal that I identify deeply with
It is akin to my crying self
At night I dream of the mountains in Pakistan
But why is it that in this big wide world that God has created
I have no home to call my own in any nation

Mr. Journalist, dear sister from the NGO, Sir form the faraway land
Can you go and ask Mr. Jinnah
Where is my home? Where is my nation
And if he asks you who I am
Please tell him that I am Bihari . . .1

In 2007 noted Bangladeshi filmmaker made a documentary called Swapnabhoomi The

Promised Land on the Urdu-speaking community in Bangladesh. The film starts with the poignant
poem quoted above in Bengali. And although it has been penned by the filmmaker himself its
impactful words quite accurately capture the crisis of suspension of identity and blurred belonging
that has become a part and parcel of the existence of the Urdu-speakers in Bangladesh over the
years. And even though the Bangladesh Supreme Court, in a landmark judgment in 2008 ruled for
the community to be unanimously granted Bangladeshi citizenship and issued National Identity
Cards, officially restoring the communitys belonging, I shall attempt to argue in this paper that
citizenship from above in fact does not necessarily mean integration from below and the end of the
condition of being a migrant does not end the condition of displacement. It is in this context that we
can study the Bihari Urdu-speaking community within the conceptual framework of diasporic
consciousness though it might not strictly fall within the scholarly definitions of the term. I shall
begin by an exploration of the traditional meaning attached to the term diaspora and then the
concept of diasporic consciousness. Subsequently, with the help of some Bihari narratives of
displacement and of life in East Pakistan and then Bangladesh, it would be attempted to analyze if it
is a useful conceptual framework for understanding and studying this complex communitys
experience of migration, alienation, loss of home and homeland, statelessness and attainment of
citizenship of a country where they continue to reside in camps alongside the mainstream Bengali
population as an invisible minority.
Scholarship on diaspora has been dominated by two strands that differ in their approach to
understanding what a diaspora is and which populations it may be constituted of. The first approach
is that of diaspora as typology 2 wherein the attempt is to . . . first define diasporas and
therefore distinguish them from other categories of persons on the move. . . Then with their
definition in hand, they proceed to analyze a range of issues that take place in the concrete historical

Bengali poem Briddha Bihari Mahila written by TanveerMukammal.Iam grateful to my friend Sharmita Ray for
translating it in English. The poem is available at http://www.swapnabhumi.com/poem.html
2
Willian Safran, Robin Cohen Khachig Tllyan amng others are the mot prominent scholars witin this strand.

or contemporary communities that fit their definition 3 . However, over the years the term has
assumed wider meanings and . . . suggests a dislocation from the nation-state or geographical
location of origin and a relocation in one or more nation-states, territories, or countries.4 As the
world witnesses and experiences increasingly more transnational flows of people (whether forced or
voluntary) the identities of increasingly more and more number of people are being shaped and
defined by the experience of migration and finds articulation in the Diasporic consciousness. It is
with this approach that the other strand of diaspora studies has emerged. The tendency here is to . .
. use the term in a looser, more metaphoric sense5 so as to . . . discover diasporic features
among a wider range of migrating groups.6
Robin Cohen, one of the most important of scholars of diaspora in the diaspora as typology
strand has outlined nine features through which this consciousness is manifested. They are: (1)
dispersal from an original homeland, often traumatically; (2) alternatively, expansion from the
homeland in search of work, in pursuit of trade or to further colonial ambitions; (3) a collective
memory and myth about the homeland; (4) an idealization of the supposed ancestral home; (5) a
return movement; (6) a strong ethnic group consciousness sustained over a long time; (7) a troubled
relationship with host societies; (8) a sense of solidarity with co-ethnic members in other countries;
and (9) the possibility of a distinctive creative, enriching life in tolerant host countries.7
It would be a useful exercise to use these nine features that characterise diaspora in studying the
Bihari experiences of migration, displacement and loss of homeland. While they do not
completely fit into the category of the diaspora, it can be said that they do inhabit a diasporic space
that has increasingly expanded in its scope. It can be further suggested that approaching the issue of
Muslim migration to East Pakistan, the alienation of these Urdu-speaking migrants and the eventual
statelessness of the Biharis in post-1971 Bangladesh with the objective of exploring the possibility
of them possessing a diasporic consciousness can further open up the horizons studies of forced
migration and diaspora. What would be attempted in the following sections is to take up Cohens
typology as the basic framework for studying the case study of the Bihari Urdu speakers and then

Andre levy and Alex Weingrod ed. Homelands and Diasporas: Holy Lands and o=Other Places(California: Stanford
University Press, 2005). 7.
4
Jana Evans and Anita Mannur, Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 1.
5
Op cit p.7
6
Ibid.
7
Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An introduction,(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), 180.

stretch and complicate the boundaries of these points to the extent where they begin to overlap with
the diaspora as metaphor strand.
Original home and the origins of migration: Analyzing forced migration and the degree of
choice
Cohens first two points for a people to qualify as a diaspora are directly concerned with the
physical act of migration and displacement from a place of origin whether a traumatic dispersal or
a voluntary one for various socio-economic motivations. In this context the Bihari Urdu speakers
are victims of a double displacement one at the time of partition when they crossed the borders
into East Pakistan and then after the liberation War of 1971 when fear of persecution at the hands of
the victorious Mukti Bahini dove them to move to the make shift camps created by the Red Cross
across Bangladesh that have since become permanent structures where the majority of the
population still continues to reside. The double displacement also becomes a prominent feature of
their narratives and to a large extent makes them a part of two types of diaspora, The first is what
may be called partitions diaspora and includes all those who migrated as a result of the redrawing
of the map of the sub-continent. And Secondly as a more specifically Bihari diaspora that had
roots primarily (but by no means only) in the province of Bihar but with trails of migration
spanning across the East Pakistan (later Bangladesh) , West Pakistan (later just Pakistan) and Inida
but also beyond the sub-continent.8 The time line for this migration spans across the years before
1971 when there was constant movement of the Urdu-speakers across the borders into India or to
West Pakistan on account of long standing migration networks and still existing relations on the
other side :
The first couple of decades after the creation of Pakistan the borders did not pose a very big
problem. I remember visiting relatives in Bihar and Kolkata quite often. In fact my sisters
were married in Bihar itself. In fact it was very common those who had migrated to East
Pakistan to still search for marriage proposals in the original place. It was the War of 1965
that made things difficult. But still at least my family maintained relations with our relatives
in Bihar for a long time.9

The migrations then resumed after the Liberation War of 1971. This time the motivations were
mostly to escape the onslaught of the Mukti Bahini which viewed the community as a symbol of
West Pakistani domination over the Bengalis. While the major component of this displacement was
8
9

Papiya Ghosh, Partition and the South Asian Diaspora: Extending the Subcontinent, (New Delhi: Routledge, 2007)
th
Tawheed Khan. Interviewed 18 July 2014.

the experience of being uprooted from the mainstream of East Pakistan to the camps, migrations
also took the form of repatriation of a limited number to West Pakistan, flight of others across the
border to India10 and for the relatively well off relocation outside the subcontinent ( primarily the
U.K.). What I intend to emphasize here is the fact that while Cohens definition of a diaspora
highlights that the act of migration would mostly entail a single point of origin and one or multiple
destinations, the case of the Biharis in fact shows that diasporic movements might not always be so
simple to map and may present a crisscrossing network of mobility with several points of origin and
destination spread across time and space.
The other important dimension in Cohens exposition about diasporic migration concerns the
level of agency employed in the decision to migrate. Cohen elaborates that the driving factor behind
migration could be both a traumatic expulsion (forced migration) or of a more voluntary nature for
the opportunities for personal advancement such a migration could offer. The incorporation and
acceptance of both forms of migration forced and voluntary is indeed an attempt , on Cohens
part to broaden the scope of what a diaspora can be by shifting focus from earlier categorizations
which focused more on bringing out the traumatic expulsion aspect of migration. In this sense it
certainly becomes easier to identify the possibility of the Urdu-speaking migrants of being studies
as a diaspora. However, the case study shows that a lot of the times the binary between voluntary
and forced migrations is clearly not distinguishable and it almost never an either/or situation. This is
never more evident as it is in the migration of Muslims from the Muslim minority provinces.
The 1940s in India witnessed the strengthening of the movement for Pakistan focused around the
rhetoric that it would be the homeland for all the Muslims of the subcontinent. In fact the support
for the movement was most robust in regions where the Muslims were in a minority primarily the
provinces of Bihar and the United Provinces. However, the Muslim League, in its propaganda
deliberately kept the meaning of Pakistan and what and who it would represent as a reality vague
and abstract. And even though it was quite clear that these provinces could never fall within the
actual perceived boundaries of Pakistan, it was the Leagues agenda to sell the idea to the Muslim
inhabitants of these regions that Pakistan could mean anything they wanted it to mean new
homeland, a long coveted Islamic nation, or simply a land of new opportunities where one could
10

I wished to interview some of those who had returned to Bihar. However, it is extremely difficult to get the details
of such families. Dr. Syed M. Kareem, Director of Higher Education Govt. of Bihar, in his interview with me said that he
personally knows several such families who came back and on the basis of existing property, family relations and
contacts were able to start life anew. However, he said that such families will not come forth with details of this return
migration as it is matter of existence for them.

begin anew. Even when it was somewhat emphasized that the conceived physical limits of Pakistan
could not possibly include the Muslim minority provinces, support was still rallied by raising the
slogan of sacrifice.
In fact, for a large number of Muslims in the Muslim minority regions, this call for sacrifice and
their acceptance of it, became a means for claiming Pakistan as their own.11 The idea of sacrifice
gained more credence when the province of Bihar was rocked by gruesome communal riots directed
against the Muslims in October 1946 as a reaction to the Calcutta killings earlier that year when the
Hindus had been killed in large numbers. It is true that the Muslims of the province suffered heavy
loss of life and property during the riots and in this hour of total breakdown of law and order, the
idea of the possibility of life in another land one, as the leaders of the Muslim League claimed,
was being created for the Muslims of the subcontinent came to seem like a viable, even justified
option for many. Imran, who currently owns a travel agency for Haj pilgrims in Patna, Bihar,
remembers how members of his family ( the brother of his grandfather and his family) decided to
migrate after 1946 :
One thing you need to understand is that people migrated mainly because of the riots . . .
riots create a situation where all you want is security. Property, the ancestral home,
connections and ties all cease to matter. They become important later ...when you are in an
alien land surrounded by strangers. Those who migrated from my family were well off, they
had not even been affected by the riots but migrating seemed like a good idea to them at
the time because they felt Bihar was no longer safe for Muslims. 12

At the same time, it is important to understand that the narrative of forced migration from the
original homeland to the new one is perhaps too simplistic to explain the complicated networks that
existed between Bihar and undivided Bengal and which also affected the decision of movement of
the Muslims of the province during and after partition. In fact the binaries of forced and voluntary
are most effectively complicated in studying the case of these Muslim migrants who eagerly
accepted the tag of Mujahir. The term has strong religious underpinnings and literally means a
religious migrant who has made a journey for the sake of his faith like the flight of Prophet
Mohammed from Mecca to Medina to escape persecution and strengthen Islam as a religion.
11

Tahir Naqvi, Migration, Sacrifice and the Crisis of Muslim Nationaliasm Journal of Refugee Studies 23/5, 2012:
474-490
12

Imran ,Interviewed 30th May 2014

However, according to Urdu-poet, scholar and intellectual Ahmed Ilyas, who is the director of the
NGO Al Falah that works for the rights of the Urdu-speaking community in Bangladesh :
The category of the Muhajir was something that the Pakistani state carefully created and
cultivated in the initial years of the new Nation state coming being. The term, with its
religious undertones, gave the appearance that the incoming migrants were people of god
and it was the duty of the local Ansars to look after their security and well being. It was the
implicit assumption that since the Muhajir is not recall a refugee, he is not entitled to any aid
or help. However, I feel , that it was this very label and its acceptance by the Urdu-speaking
migrants that marked the beginning of their isolation and alienation from the mainstream of
Bengali life. The Muhajir, by virtue of being a voluntary migrant, it was felt, should be
entitled to a certain respect and admiration and the cuture that he brought from his native
place should be considered superior to the culture of the Bengalis. Many Urdu-speaking
migrants, even if they had not actually come to East Pakistan with the idea of the promised
land became victims of this rhetoric and this was the most unfortunate thing that could have
happened. In fact, the migrations which brought them here were far more complex than
what the image of the Muhajir would have us believe.13

Of Homelands and Homelessness

While the nation state tries to impose on the non-citizens an identity that would primarily and
conveniently distinguish them from the true citizens, those who lie at the margins of the nation
the migrants, the refugees and the stateless have their own narratives of their engagement with the
former. The elusiveness of formal political membership to the collectivity that is the nation
produces forms of aspirational belonging that may or may not coincide with its actual physical
boundaries. It is at this juncture that the discourse of the nation-state intersects with that of the
homeland.

13

Excerpts from a longer interview with Ahmed Ilyas conducted on 22/07/2014 a his residence in Dhaka. In the
interview he further went on to explain the complexity of the migration as such:
As far as my knowledge goes there were three types of migrants. The first were the social migrants who migrated out of
social needs like education. In fact when I contemplate why I migrated, I can say that it was not because I felt that India
could no longer be my homeland or that my religion was threatened there. My coming to East Pakistan was not one
colossal migration but a series of journeys for ends like education or job opportunities. Then there were those who came
as optees. Chief among these optees who chose to come to Eat Pakistan were the employees of the Eastern Railways.
Maximum Muslim employees of Eastern Railways were from Bihar. In fact the work force for the railway workshop in
Syedpur , constructed way back in 1870 had mostly been recruited from Bihar. In those days jobs in the railway could
be passed on within the family after the death or retirement of the person in service. In this way, several of the Urduspeakers from Bihar were already in East Pakistan long before 1947 and hence when the option was given to them at the
time of Partition to choose between the two nations, they chose Pakistan as this was where their livelihoods lay.
Thirdly, there were the politically motivated migrants who had had been fed the propaganda that Pakistan was the
homeland of the Muslims. The riots of 1946 and the losses suffered therein reaffirmed this belief for several of them. In
my opinion these Muslims were just exploited by the League.

Both the emergence of nations and homelands takes place when space is transformed into
territory through the process of territoriality. While the material dimension of territoriality manifests
itself in the limitation and demarcation of space through physical borders its emotional dimension is
more complex and difficult to precisely define. In this context it has been argue by Ansi Passi that
boundaries may be simultaneously historical, natural, cultural, political, economic or symbolic
phenomena and each of these dimension may be exploited in diverging ways in the construction of
territoriality.14 Building on this argument it has been further asserted by Jan Penrose that, This
enormous complexity of borders and of the flexible functions that they can be called upon to
perform means that boundaries are not nearly as fixed, unstable or uncontested as is commonly
assumed.15 It is in the possibility that borders and boundaries can sometimes be ambiguous and
that people can identify with certain spaces as the place to which they belong even while they might
not be within its actual physical borders that the emotional dimension of territoriality comes into
play. The most important way in which this emotional dimension of territoriality creates notions of
belonging and rootedness is by reinforcing the connections between a people and a specific space
through history, memory and myth. It is in this cultural landscape that the concept of the homeland
takes shape. It would be useful to explore how territoriality came into play both in the partition of
1947 and then at the time of the Liberation War of 1971 and how it shaped the identities of those
who have had to contend with these monumental events over the years. The principal basis for the
creation of Pakistan was religion. It was hailed as the homeland that would be open to all the
Muslims of the subcontinent. However, the case of the Biharis who migrated to East Pakistan to
be a part of this homeland, demonstrates the precariousness of such grand , all-encompassing claims
about national belonging. And though their nationality has finally been restored after the 2008
judjement their identity remains fractured by them being variously referred to as Biharis (which
separates them from the Bengalees and draws linkages with their native place),Urdu-Speakers
(which singles out language as the main criteria for their difference), and Stranded-Pakistani (which
highlights the hanging, uncertain nature of their nationality) 16 . If territoriality primarily means
claiming belongingness to a territory by establishing a connection with it in terms of a shared past,

14

Quoted in Jan Penrose, Nations, States and Homelands: Territory and Territoriality in Nationalist Thought. Nations
and Nationalism 8/3 (2003): 280.
15
Ibid.
16
The term is now being increasingly sparingly used as most camp dwellers have given up the expectation of
repatriation to Pakistan and are either resigned to the isolation of the camps or wish for assimilation with the
mainstream. However, there does remain a section of the population and

common lived experiences, ties of memory and creation of a mythology that links a people to that
territory, then where exactly would the homeland of the Biharis lie?
Apart from the actual act of migration, the other necessary criteria for a community of people to
find place under the category of a diaspora is the idea of the homeland and its idealization either
through memory or the construction myths around it and yearnig for a future aspirational return to
this homeland. However as migrations become more complex and their aftermath increasingly
protracted, the emphasis on the discourse of the original homeland has over the years come to be
debated by scholars of diaspora. This has eveoved into what Cohen calls a social constructivist
critique of diaspora which, Influenced by post-modernits readings . . . sought to decompose two of
the major building blocks previously delimiting and demarcating the diasporic idea, namely
homeland and ethnic/religious community.. In the post-modern world, it was further argued,
identities have become deterritorialised and affirmed in fliexible and situational way; accordingly,
concepts of diaspora had to be radically reordered in response to this complexity.17Cohen , while
conceding that a certain . . . degree of decoupling of diaspora from homeland18 might be the need
of the times we live in, he is however not confortable with the radical way in which the socialconstructivists would like to do so. Hence, for Cohen, one way to account for some of the valid
interventions made by the social constructivist position without completely dismissing the centrality
of attachement to place in diaspora studies could his deineation of three . . . main versions of
home/homeland . . . solid (the unquestioned need for a homeland), ductile ( an intermediate, more
complex, idea of homeland) and liquid (a post-modernist rendition of virtual home).19
While Cohen uses different examples from across the world to establish what he means by each
version of homeland, I would like to argue that in the case of the Bihari Urdu- speakers and their
narrratives spread across generations, cliams for all the three may be found. Moreover there might
even be percieved a shift from the solid to liquid articulations and formulation of home and
homeland the farther one moves from the actual experience of migration both temporally and
generationally. As has been discissed in the previous section, the migration of the Urdu-speaking
Muslims has a complicated and enmeshed timeline. However , according to me, what is common to
almost all the narratives that have actual experience of migration either to East Paksitan or of
17

Robin Cohen, Solid, Ductile and liquid: the changing role of homeland and home in diaspora studies in Eliezor
Ben-Rafael & Yitzhak Sternberg (eds.) Transnationalism: diaspora and the advent of new (dis)order, ( Leiden: Brill)
2009, 118.
18
Ibid. 121.
19
Ibid.

displacement afetr 1971, is a strong attachement to place, but, there is no uniformity in what this
place could be. For some it was West Pakistan (or what they thought it could be for them) , for
others it was the place that they had left behind and then there are those for whom the meaning of
home or homeland shifted as the acquired new experiences of being in the land they had migrated to
and especialy after 1971. Amena Khatun, a widow who was a resident of the Geneva Camp for 36
years shows no desire to go to Pakistan as she feels she has somehow accepted bangladesh as her
cuntry however she does recall how ardently her husnand had wanted to go to Pakistan in his
lifetime:He was desperate to go to Pakistan. He would say please let me go . . . I have lived here
long enough. Let me go so that I can see my children there. He was finally able to go but
died within five years of being there.20

In fact almost all the families in the Geneva camp in Mohammedpur, where I condcted
interviewes for this paper have narratives of being divided either at the time of partition or through
the feeble repariation efforts made by the Pakistani state one in 1973 and then in 1983. Hence even
thogh most of these camp dwellers have not really left Bangladesh since it became a country, a
sense of being displaced figures prominently in their accounts. Tawheed Khan, a cook by
profession, whose family was murdered by soldiers of the Mukti Bahini in after the war managed to
escape to India with the help of some Bengali friends. He has since become an Indian citizen and
lives in Kolkata but travels to Dhaka every Eid to meet his friends - both Bihari and Bengali. And
despite having lost everything in the war still considers the house that he was forced to leave as his
real home :
I have lived in Bihar before coming to East Pakistan where my father was working in 1950, I
have lived in the camps after 1971 and I have been living in Kolkata for a long time now. I
have friends in all these places, I have been lucky to have been able to make a life for myself
afetr the msifortune that befell us in 1971. And yet I do not feel at rest. I still sometimes pass
by the house that we used to live in before the War and a sadness engulfs me everytime.
The house is still there and there are people living in it, But for me that will always be my
home. 21

The younger generation of Urdu soeakers who have primarily grown up in Bangladesh and have
neither experinced the migration of 1947 or the displacement of 1971 but who still continue to
20

Excerpt from the documentary Swapnabhoomi: The Promised Land made by Bangladeshi Filmmaker Tanvir
Mokammel in 2007.
21
In a strange accident of fate, I met Tawheed in the queue to obtain a Bangladeshi visa. He wanted one so that he
could visit hes friends in Dhaka for Eid. The coversation started with him saying to me I can never get used to this
procedure to get a visa everytime i have to go that side - I used to live there once.

reside in the camps are the ones who have the biggest stake in challenging the identity that has
become a part of their existance and interactions with the mainstream. It has been their conscious
effort to protray themselves as being different from their parents or grand parents who still talk of
Urdu culture and have bitter memories of how they were betrayed by the promised homeland of
Paksitan and treated by their co-reigionist Bengalees. Khaid hussain , an advocate who grew up in
the Geneva camp believes that the need of the hour for the community is to get rehabilitated in
Bangladesh. He says:
I started understanding the enormity of the question of nationality only when I was giving
my HSC exams in 1999. Everyday some of us would mull over the issue of what our identity
was In school the Bengalis treated us as Pakistanis, even the Bengali kids called us war
criminals, and at home we heard our parents talk about how they wished to go to Pakistan. It
was then that we felt that it was us from the community who forst needed to determine who
we were if we are Pakistanis then we should indeed go to Pakistan and if we are
Bangladeshis then we have as much right to stay here as the Bengalis. 22

What may be observed is a gradual shift in the diasporic consciousnes of the community. The ties
with the originnal homeland have now receded to a distant almost unreachable past

23

; the

idealization of Pakistan as the once promised land has now been replaced by a bitter sense of
beytayal and disillusionment captured in Muraads comment:
There was a time when we would have done anything to go to Pakistan . . . any many did go
. . . but they are even more miserable than we are. The Bengalis all hate us..there was an
incident only few days back when several Biharis were killed in Mirpur and the government
did not intervene at all . . . but somehow I have accepted that ths country is our reality.24

The desire for asssimilation is almost uniformly present in all narratives of all the younger
generation of the camp dwelling Urdu-speakers. They take great pains to distance themselves from
the Stranded-Pakistan or Bihari nomenclature ,and emphasise in very certain terms that they are
indeed Bangladeshi citizens. However what I observed was that this desire for assimilation also
expresses a form of diasporic consciousness. What comes across is that although they are very
aware and conscious of their bangladeshi citizenship, the awareness of what this citizenship does or
does not mean for them is also as strong. And no matter how anomalous a label they find Bihari to
be, they know it is what makes them differnt from the Bengalis, even if they look the same or speak
22

Khalid Hussain, founding president of Association of Young Generation of Urdu Speaking Community of Bangladesh
established in 1999. Interviewed on 21/07/2014 at his office in Moohammedpur, Dhaka.
23
Although almost all the respondants in the camp - even the ones who had never been to any pa knew the eact
name of the village and the district it was in in Bihar.
24
Muraad, Geneva Camp resident, interviewed on 24/07/2014.

the language or possess the same political rights. This difference them itself becomes a tool for
seeking assimilation as a minority.
What I have attempted to argue here is that the awareness as well a conscious projection of being
in a state of displacement and estarnged from the society that one inhabits is , to a large extent, an
expression of a diasporic conscioisness. However,a cross generational analysis indicates that the
the ways in hich the community expresses this sense of displacement has shifted from nostalgia for
real or imaginary homelands to aspiration for assimilation and integration in the one they now
inhabit.
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