To be or not to be a refugee? Reflections on refugeehood and citizenship among Sri Lankan Tamils in India

ABSTRACT

This article looks at citizenship from a position of liminality – that of Sri Lankan Tamils in India. It is based on fieldwork conducted with different groups of Sri Lankan Tamil refugees and repatriates in and around Keezhputhupattu camp (Tamil Nadu), in Ceylon Quarter (Pondicherry) and in Chennai. No matter what their legal status is, they all position themselves on the refugee-citizen spectrum and, by doing so, they find themselves standing in-between its two opposed poles. From there they build their political subjectivities by negotiating, appropriating and sometimes rejecting Indian citizenship and Sri Lankan refugeehood. It is through their relationship to this position of in-betweenness that, we argue, citizenship, but also refugeehood, acquire new meanings.

KEYWORDS:

• Tamil refugees and repatriates
• Sri Lanka
• India
• refugeehood
• citizenship
• legal status

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Annual Report of the Ministry of Home Affairs 2018-2019.

2. Information Handbook produced by the Department of Rehabilitation.

3. ‘We’ refers to the two authors of this essay. Anne-Sophie Bentz conducted fieldwork in Chennai, while Anthony Goreau-Ponceaud conducted fieldwork in Ceylon Quarter (Pondicherry) and Keezhputhupattu camp (Tamil Nadu).

4. This slowly started to change with the introduction of the Aadhaar card in 2009. This is an identity card for all residents of India which can be used, among other things, to open bank accounts.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anne-Sophie Bentz

Anne-Sophie Bentz is Associate Professor in South Asian History at Université de Paris. She received her PhD from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. Her research focuses on nationalism and postcolonial theories, as well as refugee and diaspora politics. She is the author of Nationalism in Exile: Tibetan Refugees in India (in French, Presses Universitaires de France, 2010) and of several essays and book chapters on other refugee communities in India (Afghan, Burmese and Sri Lankan). She is currently at work on a book-length project tracing migratory patterns of South Asian refugees beyond India.

Anthony Goreau-Ponceaud

Anthony Goreau-Ponceaud is Associate Professor in Geography at the University of Bordeaux and from 2018 to 2020 a research fellow at the French Institute of Pondicherry (UMIFRE  21 CNRS MEAE). His PhD research focused on Sri Lankan Tamil migration and diaspora in France. He has since then published widely on the Sri Lankan Tamil issue, Sri Lankan Tamil refugees in India, the diverse forms of Tamil nationalism, Hinduism and ethnic nationalism.