Nidhi Jain, PhD, Sanjay lodha, PhD
Displacement as a Violation of Human Rights
This paper argues that the displacement of populations due to poverty, misery, or inadequate employment opportunities is a violation of different categories of human rights. The evolution of human rights is closely integrated with the development of human society. In the past few centuries, consciousness and awareness about human rights have increased manifold pressurizing nations and international bodies to provide statutory status to basic rights which are essential for the development of human personality. The rise and expansion of socialism and democracy have given a new salience and character to human rights.
Apart from their global spread, the nature and scope of human rights have also expanded. In contemporary times, more emphasis is given on rights related to social security, welfare, and the well-being of human beings. In this scenario, the right to work, right to health, right to education, right to food security, and right to dignity have assumed great significance. Their denial causes poverty, misery, and deprivation ultimately forcing populations to leave their native places in search of subsistence livelihood opportunities. Uprooted from their soils, the displaced diaspora, whether internally or externally, live a life of abject penury, seclusion, and alienation. Their ghettoisation deprives them of dignity, honor, and sustainable livelihood opportunities. The answer to this predicament is to provide them with necessary skills and opportunities at their doorsteps so that they can lead a decent life without being uprooted from their native places. The Sakhi project located at a small township in the southern part of the state of Rajasthan in India is such an effort. Keeping the acute problems of the local indigenous population, especially the womenfolk, Sakhi has trained more than 5000 women in the last seven years and made them self-reliant. These women have become the major breadwinners of their families facilitating education for their children and increasing their social capital.
However, Sakhi depends upon the generosity and the sense of social responsibility of philanthropic individuals and organizations. It is in search of a perennial and uninterrupted source of financial support so as to become the backbone of thousands of women in remote, tribal, and underprivileged areas.
Shazia Hafiz Ramji, MFA
The “Also-Colonized Other” in Desertion by Abdulrazak Gurnah and The Book of Secrets by M.G. Vassanji
In Desertion by Abdulrazak Gurnah, the narrator says that he finds it impossible to imagine the interracial relationship of his predecessors in colonial East Africa: one between a white man and a mixed-race Black and brown woman. He admits this failure of imagination when piecing together his brother’s lost notebooks as a scholar in London. In The Book of Secrets by M.G. Vassanji, a white settler in colonial East Africa loses his journals that mention the name of an Indian Muslim woman. Her husband kept the journals and recognizes her name in them after his son (whose paternity he questions) teaches him to read and write.
Both Gurnah’s and Vassanji’s narrators attempt to recuperate the period between 1899 and 1915, a turning point in East African history whose repercussions have yet to be addressed. Writing in “The Complicating Sea: The Indian Ocean as Method,” Isabel Hofmeyr insists on the importance of the Indian Ocean “in complicating our views of slavery, which are theorized on the basis of the Atlantic experience” and on the need to consider “the also-colonized other” (587). Through diaspora studies and critical race theory, Ramji hopes to build on Hofmeyr’s methods to interrogate the logic of recuperation. Additionally, Gurnah’s and Vassanji’s engagements are situated within a broader conversation about how the Indian Ocean diaspora can help us reconfigure the colonized-colonizer binary that undergirds diasporic relations.
What is the positionality of the “also-colonized other” in Canada? How do such ambivalent positions create new relationalities between diaspora and Indigeneity? Ramji aims to show how Gurnah’s and Vassanji’s own metafictional recuperations through the lost notebooks think with and against the grain of diaspora studies as they sketch legacies that deepen Afro-Asian and settler relationships beyond the binary of solidarity and tension, which can offer new ways to rethink diaspora more broadly.
Nidhi Jain, PhD
Nidhi Jain is a social researcher and activist. A gold medalist during her Master’s and M Phil degrees from Mohan Lal Sukhadia University, Udaipur, Nidhi completed her Ph.D. in 2009 working on the theme Evaluation of the Role and Position of Gram Sabha in Panchayat Raj: A behavioral study with special reference to Banswara District. She is a recipient of a Postdoctoral fellowship from the ICSSR, New Delhi. She has been involved in several research studies relating to elections, impact assessment of welfare programs, rural local self-government. Dr. Nidhi Jain has also taught Political Science to undergraduate and postgraduate students. As a social researcher, she has been involved with several premier research organizations in India and abroad viz. CSDS-Delhi, TISS-Mumbai, IDS- Sussex, Jaina-USA. As a social activist, Nidhi has worked for organizations like Astha, Sewa Mandir, Rajiv Gandhi Foundation, and others. In pursuance of her academic activities, Dr. Jain has visited the United Kingdom, Ethiopia, South Africa, Mauritius, and a few other countries. At present, Nidhi is coordinating the activities of the Sakhi Foundation at Kushalgarh working for the economic betterment of deprived and backward women. ACADEMIC QUALIFICATION
Shazia Hafiz Ramji is a Ph.D. student in English at the University of Calgary. She is the author of Port of Being and was a finalist for the 2022 Montreal International Poetry Prize and the Malahat Review’s 2022 Open Season Award for Fiction. She lives in Vancouver, Calgary, and London, England, where she is at work on a novel and sound art.
Sanjay Lodha, PhD
Sanjay Lodha is a Professor at the Department of Political Science, Mohan Lal Sukhadia University, Udaipur. He was educated at the Mohan Lal Sukhadia University Udaipur and Jawaharlal University, New Delhi. Research Interest Dr. Lodha’s research interests include foreign policy and international relations, political processes and development issues in India, and the dynamics on state politics in Rajasthan. Published articles include “Fighting Corruption: A Comparative Study of Civil Society Initiatives for Securing Freedom of Information in Nigeria and India,” in Madhya Pradesh Journal of Social Sciences, and "A Status Report on the Evolution of Panchayati Raj in MP" in the Journal of Social Sciences. Additionally, Lodha has worked around the world, including visiting Nigeria for three months during Oct-Dec 2004 on a South-South Exchange Programme between CSDS, New Delhi, and Centre for Democracy and Development, Lagos funded by Ford Foundation and also worked on the Freedom of Information campaign in Nigeria. Lodha also visited the USA on the Fullbright Programme at the Department of Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2005.
