Abstract
“The 20th century even more than any age before is the age of the refugee” and simultaneously works on migration seem incomplete without looking into the migrant experiences. In fact for an in depth study of migration, analyzing migrant narratives are important owing to its contribution in understanding the subjectivity of trauma and forced migrant survival. The paper attempts to engage with life stories of migrants escaping Burma from Japanese attacks (1942), including my family, whose written narrative has inspired me to carry forward this project. The author, Gayatri Gupta (born Gayatri Bose), who happened to be my father’s aunt, was only eight years old during the migration. However, it was only in around the early 2000s did she pen down her memories of the migration. The paper attempts to deal with the lived experiences of the Bose family from a critical and analytical point of view and understand the historicity of trauma, coping and memory politics from the perspective of migrants. Although the paper deals with the experience of my family in particular in the context of trauma and recollection, the larger focus of the project is an in depth analysis featuring ten culturally diverse journals (Bengali, Anglo-Indian, Australian and British) in the context of favored mobility and embodied experience of trauma.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Forced Migration, Trauma, Second World War, South Asia, Memory Politics
