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Woman on the move Gender, Conflict
and
Migration This book recounts the sufferings of women as a
result of conflict and provides an insight into the survival strategies
adopted by them. Third in the series, Woman and Migration in Asia,
it is a judicious selection of 11 papers that emerged from an
international conference held in Delhi. This volume goes on to
effectively convey the deep understanding of the concepts—gender,
conflict and violence. Concentrating on the existing literature,
Navnita Chadha Behera provides a unique and instinctive understanding of
women’s migration due to conflict and also focuses on the conceptual
methodology, logical and policy- related issues identified by the
contributors in the book. Nayanika Mookherjee uses MuktirGaan (Songs of
Freedom), a documentary film as a lens to bring to light the experiences
and heterogeneity of refugee identification among the middle class
refugees in the 1971 Bangladesh War. Based on oral testimonies of 50
women, Furrukh A. Khan adds a new dimension to studies on violence
during the Partition. Saba Gul Khattak, studying Afghan refugees in and
around Peshawar camps, focuses on their multiple meanings of home, which
is disrupted often as a result of war. Writing on the ‘largest human
migration known to history’, Urvashi Butalia demonstrates the forced
migrations where such decisions were made for the women. She brings to
light the "recovery" of abducted women and question the
categories of these women as being ‘migrants"
"refugees" or "dislocated women". The three
protagonists of Anasua Basu Raychaudhary’s paper offer the reader a
long journey, from the patriarchal ‘andarmahal’ to the ‘barmahal’
during the partition of the East. Examining Tamil and Muslim women,
Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake highlights how the "new war" in
Sri Lanka has affected women who share the same social and cultural
backgrounds, but profess different faiths. She explores the new role
women have taken and cites the examples of young widows, who wear the
red pottu, challenging age-old conventions. Rita Manchanda
enlightens the readers and states it is the "dyad of women and
children" who are dominant among the refugee and internationally
displaced. Providing answers to the question why women flee, Manchanda
explains the phenomenon of "internally stuck". Mary O’Kane
studies women exiled from Burma who are politically active along the
Burma- Thailand border. Kane explain the "take off" of the
women’s organisation in the borderlands, where self-education is the
priority. The organisations address the issues of security, women’s
political participation at all levels and social welfare. Writing from
a legal perspective, Oishik Sircar discusses "persecution" and
"gender-based persecution" in the International Refugee Law
and explains that there in no concrete definition of the concepts.
Sircar highlights the difficulties faced by women seeking asylum and
calls upon the South Asian states to provide "real" protection
to the women. In the concluding chapter, Anthony Goods analyses the
cases of South Asian asylum applicants in the UK and states that
"the refugee identities of both men and women may be
different". He uses various illustrations to examine the cases of
asylum-seekers from Sri Lanka, Pakistan and India in the British
courts. The contributors have used various research methods such as
oral history, ethnographic research, in-depth interviews, etc. This book
is highly informative and can be of great help to scholars of social
sciences.
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Migration, a concept as
old as time, is seen as a movement dominated by the males. However,
these days the number of female migrants is on the rise. Earlier
literature dealing with migration did not take gender into account. An
effort was needed to provide a gender perspective on the existing
migration theories.