Obscurity of Camp Life:

Is the Language of Camp ‘Passivity to Write’?

Abstract

The paper would talk about how the existence of refugee camps in post-partition Bengal was very purposive and it was the immediate assistance given to the people whose way of life was disrupted by the sudden event of Partition. In Bengal the experiences of camp has an ontological distinction with regard to the question of caste. This paper will look into the obscurity of camp life with regard to its mode of silence. The understanding of silence is incorporated here from the seminal book by Martin Heidegger Being and Time to analyze the existential ontological foundation of language. The paper will try to interpret how in such spatio-temporal circumstances the being of lower caste refugees expresses themselves or their passivity to write. Maurice Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster gives us a new direction to think of silence. It will be attempted here to explicate whether the silence of the camp creates a possibility to disclose the dominant discourse of the political subject of the refugee.