A Critical Reading of Narayan Sanyal’s Bakultala P L Camp

Abstract

While there has been substantial deliberations on borders and refugees and associated trauma upholding a connection between new frontiers and its outcome in the form of refugees and the never-ending humanitarian crisis. But what remains unnoticed is the settlement of the refugee population through the establishment of makeshift camps or colonies slowly turning into a permanent one literally, figuratively and psychologically. The camp becomes a nation of individuals whose identity is fractured and the walls of the camp change for them into a border creating a border within a border. Narayan Sanyal, an acclaimed writer from West Bengal who served the Government of West Bengal as a settlement officer at various such camps set up for them discussed this issue immediately after the brutal bifurcation of the erstwhile British India’s Bengal province in 1947 through his novel like Bakultala P.L. Camp. Through this work, Sanyal presented his investigation of the victims of forced migration showcasing in detail the poor living conditions existing in those refugee camps lacking basic amenities, economic exploitation of the male refugees and sexploitation of their female counterparts. The methodology employed for documenting the observations for this research will be transdisciplinary and multi-layered including textual analysis, then historical contextualisation and lastly will be founded upon the Freudian-Caruthian model of Trauma theory. A critical reading of this novel churns out the fact that how the victims themselves are reframing their own identity with respect to borders of new India in general and the specific camps in particular.