“People of the city can’t live even a single day if we stop serving you, but we couldn’t be a part of you still now,” said Shahara Khatun, a 66 years old woman of Dhaka’s Bihari camp. For the last 36 years, 22,000 people, packed in an area of 60,000 square metres, have lived, breathed, reproduced and survived, without the protection, benefits and recognition of a state, in a small section of the Dhaka city’s Mohammadpur area known as ‘Geneva Camp’, in the ‘state’ of Bangladesh.
The community has been forced to live as 'refugee' as a retribution of supporting Pakistan, during independence of Bangladesh. A community that possess many useful and sublime skills in labour, one that has its own literature and language, its own norms and customs, many culinary and cultural treats, have been buried under the title ‘refugee’. Today, in the twenty-first century the Biharis still exist without a state.
