Aligned and shifting identities in distant diasporas: a multigenerational examination
Introduction
From about 1990 to the mid-2000s, more than 100,000 refugees from Bhutan resided in refugee camps in eastern Nepal. As with many populations who have endured persecution, these refugees carried with them the narratives of their people including the well-known story of the martyr Masur Chhetri, who, in the early 1950s, challenged ruling authorities for the unfair treatment of his brethren and was subsequently drowned in a leather bag by those authorities. In refugee camps in Nepal, young and old refugees gathered every year to hear the story of Masur Chhetri, a way of tying young generations to the persecutory experiences of their parents and their grandparents. In their intent, these stories are no different from the performances that children watch and act in any primary or secondary school: the performances review key moments in a nation’s history as a way to secure identity and transmit it to the next generation. This represents an expression and transmission of identity – a ‘collective endeavour [to] grapple with the preservation of cultural heritage’ (Ullah Citation2024, 5).
But what happens when the ability to preserve these histories is significantly reduced? In the context of refugee camps, refugee lives and identities are constrained by the spatial and temporal structures of camp lives; the older generation and the younger generation live side by side. But when the vast majority of those refugees resettle to the distant diaspora, far away from the home country and dispersed across countries of the Global North, what happens to those stories, and more importantly, what happens to the identities that are tied to those stories? To put a fine point on it, without the annual Masur Chhetri performance that ignites memories of a persecuted past, do younger generation former refugees retain the same types of identities as their parents and grandparents?
This article examines the ways that the identities of former Bhutanese refugees have been sustained and shifted in the context of mass resettlement of the population. It begins by reviewing the literature on migration and identity, focusing specifically on forced displacement and intergenerational identity formation. After a section describing our methods and our definition of ‘younger’ and ‘older’ generations relevant to this article, the paper reviews the history of the Bhutanese refugee population. It then examines the question of multigenerational identity by comparing the views of younger and older generation members of the distant diaspora in Australia, as they have been recorded through 11 interviews on Radio Pahichan, a Nepali-language radio created by Bhutanese Nepali refugees and broadcast out of South Australia.Footnote1 We examine diaspora members who have participated in these public expressions of identity through the overlapping thematic lenses of stories, language, culture, success, and memory. Through an analysis of this material, we show how some aspects of identity serve as a bridge between generations, while others show shifts in previously similar identities.