Govinda wrote powerfully about what it meant to be forced out. He wrote movingly about the last time he saw his Amai, and about the torture and death of a dear friend and classmate, Khadka Bahadur Magar, whose family was tricked into signing forms that made it seem as though he was already sick (pp. 102-103). He describes the slow impoverishment of his family in Lodrai, with no income and no ability to plow the fields. When his family left, he describes how the family plot was taken from him, and he was made landless and homeless. In one of the most emotive moments of the book, Govinda describes managing to cross back into Bhutan during the AMCC marches. I quote at length here, because Govinda’s words demonstrate the tension and hope that so many young Bhutanese must have felt about exile and the potential promise of return. Read full
ABSTRACT The Bhutanese Refugee Cultural Complex (BRCC), housed in Jhapa in eastern Nepal, is a centre devoted to the memory and study of Bhutanese refugees. As the BRCC develops into a fully functioning centre, it is worth asking about its purpose(s). Building on research conducted on other memorialisation initiatives, in this article I suggest five possible purposes for what I called commemorative structures: documenting history; preventing future problem events; reconciliation; individual healing; and tourism. I analyse the potential for the BRCC to fulfill these roles, and suggest the questions that might need to be answered to make this a reality. Keywords: Bhutanese refugees, history, memory, memorialization, persecution, reconciliation, culture Read Complete Article