REFUGEES AND REPATRIATES IN TAMIL NADU: A SRI LANKAN PERSPECTIVE

Anthony Goreau-Ponceaud (1)

1 ADES - Aménagement, Développement, Environnement, Santé et Sociétés

This paper deals with a comparison between two groups of Sri Lankan Tamils who have experienced forced migration : the Sri Lankan Tamils refugees and the repatriates in Tamil Nadu. On the one hand, the Sri Lankan refugees have arrived in Tamil Nadu since the outbreak of the Sri Lankan civil conflict in 1983. Separated from northern Sri Lanka by the narrow Palk Straits, the southern Indian State of Tamil Nadu has been an important destination for refugees fleeing the long civil conflict between the Government of Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Ebbs and flows in numbers have reflected escalations and lulls in hostilities. Their experiences of refugee are traumatic illustrations of social change. They are uprooted from one social setting and thrown into another. Many spends years in refugee camps; where births, marriages, and death take place within the confines of this unnatural setting. On the other hand, the repatriates are the descendants of bonded laborers brought from southern India in the nineteenth century by the British colonial authorities to work on hill-country plantations. Repatriation was the outcome of the decisions of policymaker. The repatriates were sent in India because it was their land of belonging. But the sad irony is that in India, they mostly faced rejection and in all probability were treated as mere migrants and foreigners. This is the feeling of the repatriates who are settled in Ceylon Quarter in the Union Territory of Pondichery who define themselves as “native refugees” even having Indian citizenship. Based on primary data collected through different field, this paper explore the issue of marginalization, limitation and exclusion processes that affected these two groups and try to explore their exile experience. By using interviews in order to reveal their life story, this paper shows that the practices of these groups produce in-between spaces such as Keezhputhupattu camp or Ceylon Quarter. These spaces are a means of inscribing meaning on certain bodies and they form the corporeal materiality, the embodied framework of being a refugee/a “native refugee”. These bodies and the spaces that have been introduced to control them tell the corporeal stories of what the prerequisites of citizenship are.

Mots clés: Repatriates; Native refugees; Refugees in camps; India; Tamil Nadu

Domaines: Géographie

Anthony Goreau-Ponceaud. REFUGEES AND REPATRIATES IN TAMIL NADU: A SRI LANKAN PERSPECTIVE. Forced migration in South Asia, CEIAS, Dec 2014, Paris, France. ⟨halshs-01097374⟩