Penning the pain of partition: Refugee camp narratives in Indian comics

Abstract

Within the melange of comics studies, migration studies and autobiography studies, this article investigates the process in which the collective trauma as well as the personal trauma of refugee women has been portrayed through the visual medium in Malini Gupta and Dyuti Mittal’s ‘The Taboo’, Syeda Farhana’s ‘Little Women’ and Maria M. Litwa’s ‘Welcome to Geneva Camp’. These stories focus on the issues faced by women who migrated to Bangladesh from parts of Bengal and Bihar and thereby experienced a crucial, grief stricken life in refugee camps during the Indo–Bangladesh–Pakistan partition. Life in these refugee camps meant not only meagre resources but also a loss of nationality. In the absence of such validation, these migrants faced an extreme sense of identity or existential crisis. The group photographs, family photographs, complex roadmaps and the map of the subcontinent in the aforementioned graphic narratives are merged to serve as the ‘narreme’, the base of narratives. They are organized on the basis of experiences of women from various classes, castes and provinces, contesting with the interminable psychological violence of partition and post-partitioned reality.