Caught between the nation and the state: Voices of Rohingya refugee women in Bangladesh

Abstract

There is abounding literature on nationalism and the state that deals with the tensions between the primordial and the civic. The bordered state or the legal ‘power container’ more often than not is the container of a people/s who refuse to be contained within the geographical and cultural borders imposed by the state. The legality of the legal indeed remains a big question. The geographical boundaries of the post-colonial states often do not match the cultural boundaries of the newly created states. South Asia carried this colonial legacy of boundary mismatch through its state crafting process. Borders and boundaries are often looked upon as this side and that side; rather than a sanctified territory. Borders also become conduits of passage to safety when a group of people living within a bordered land called a nation-state find themselves borderless within those borders, since the state’s ethno-cultural borders or frontiers refuse to accommodate the frontiers of the former. This article is an examination of the hopes, aspirations and moving ahead of the Rohingya people through the voices of the Rohingya refugee women in Bangladesh as they carve out their spaces as a people both cognitive and physical in a land which is not theirs; for a land which they claim to be their own.