Life in the Bihari Camps
A young girl writes a poem where she asks a simple question. One which no one can answer. She asks, "Who am I?"
Her forefathers were born in India. During partition, they moved to East Pakistan, now called Bangladesh. She was born in independent Bangladesh.
India has given up on them a long time ago, and Pakistan will not take them either.
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Although Bangladesh's High Court granted citizenship to these refugees in 2008, the young girl's crisis is far from over.
She says that she has many names - 'Bihari', 'Muhajir', 'Non-Bengali', 'Marwari', 'Urdu-speaker', 'Refugee', and 'Stranded Pakistani.' But she only wants to be identified as a human.
This remains the reality for several lakhs of Urdu-speaking people living in dozens of camps across the country. Life, however, goes on.
I began my documentary work on the Bihari community in 2017. I started with Mirpur camp and then started visiting the Geneva camp in Mohammadpur from 2018 on a regular basis. About 50,000 Urdu-speaking people live there.
It is an extremely difficult task to work in the squalid camps for a long time, now imagine the woes of the residents. I cannot fathom their hardship of living in the camps.
My dream is to organise a photo exhibition in the camps, and to publish a book with the photos I took there.
