cross-border activities in everyday life: the bengal borderland
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Cross-border activities in everyday life:the Bengal borderlandSahana Ghosh aa Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University ofOxford , Oxford, UKPublished online: 30 Mar 2011.
To cite this article: Sahana Ghosh (2011) Cross-border activities in everyday life: the Bengalborderland, Contemporary South Asia, 19:1, 49-60, DOI: 10.1080/09584935.2010.544718
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Cross-border activities in everyday life: the Bengal borderland
Sahana Ghosh*
Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
This paper will address the multiple forms and layers of porosity that giveborderlands, such as the Bengal borderland, their distinctive nature as zones ofcontestation. Cross-border interactions continue to be an integral feature ofeveryday life in the Bengal borderland despite increasing militarisation andregulation by the Indian government in the last decade. Criminalization of localcross-border flows has driven them underground – while organized cross-bordercrimes (smuggling and trafficking) enjoy considerable attention, the breadth anddepth of informal cross-border interactions in the quotidian lives of borderlandersremain understudied. What is the significance of such daily cross-bordertransactions? How do they feed into the local perceptions of the state policiesof border control? How do they relate to larger organized flows of smuggling andtrafficking? Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork in the border district of North24 Parganas in West Bengal, India, this paper critically examines the rationalesand practices of such informal ‘illegal’ cross-border interactions and problema-tizes the territorial logic of the postcolonial nation-state as it is contested in therealities of the borderland. Such a focus also enables a construction of the socialhistory of those people in whose worlds an international border appeared in themonsoon of 1947, thus relating the present configurations of porosity to theregional unity that existed in the pre-Partition past.
Keywords: cross-border interactions; border control; identity; border landscape
The political sovereignty of postcolonial South Asian states, as many scholars haveobserved, continues to be reliant upon a proactive territorialism, a territorialism ofwhich visible control over borders is a crucial component (Ludden 2003; VanSchendel 2002; Mishra 2008). Surprisingly, this stance transcends political partisan-ship in India. The word I encounter most often in descriptions of the Bengal borderis porous, and unlike many other cliches this is, arguably, still the most appropriate.This paper will address the multiple forms and layers of porosity that giveborderlands, such as this, their distinctive nature as zones of contestation.1 Cross-border interactions, cultural and commercial alike, continue to be an integral featureof everyday life in the Bengal borderland despite increasing militarization andregulation of this eastern border by the Indian government in the last decade.Criminalization of local cross-border flows has driven them underground – whileorganized cross-border crimes (smuggling and trafficking) enjoy considerableattention, the breadth and depth of informal cross-border interactions in the
*Email: [email protected]
Contemporary South Asia
Vol. 19, No. 1, March 2011, 49–60
ISSN 0958-4935 print/ISSN 1469-364X online
� 2011 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/09584935.2010.544718
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quotidian lives of borderlanders remain understudied. What is the significance ofsuch daily cross-border transactions? How do they feed into the local perceptionsof the state policies of border control? How do they relate to larger organized flowsof smuggling and trafficking? My paper draws upon ethnographic fieldwork in avillage that I call Prantapur2 (literally meaning the ‘border place’), in the borderdistrict of North 24 Parganas in West Bengal, India, from the summer of 2009, toanswer these questions and critically examine the rationales behind said informal,‘illegal’ cross-border interactions.
Ten out of the 18 districts in West Bengal share a border with Bangladesh,amongst which North 24 Parganas shares the second longest border of 280km afterCooch Behar (561km). The district is the state’s most populous and economicallypoor one. No doubt, this particular locale cannot be held to be representative of allborderlands along the Bengal border: indeed I indicate in the paper how, forexample, riverine parts of the border and those with particular border fencingpeculiarities present situations different from those discussed here. However, Imaintain that they relate in their different ways to the central questions of identity,belonging and territorial imaginations that I raise and analyse through the deepethnographic insights of this particular case.
First, this paper will argue that through a wide and varied spectrum ofinteractions, that are the daily configurations of cross-border porosity, theincreasingly militarized border is normalized. Through the lens of the borderlandworldview, this paper will pay particular attention to the multiple and oftencontesting ways in which the landscape of the Bengal borderland is politically andsocially perceived, represented and negotiated by different interest groups. Theethnographic examples will all draw attention to the fact that the terms of analysiswe have at our disposal, compelling us to classify activities as legal and illegal withthe state as the point of departure, are highly inadequate. Instead I take my cue fromWillem Van Schendel and Itty Abraham’s (2005) more nuanced approach based on adistinction between what states consider to be legitimate, i.e., ‘legal’, and whatpeople involved in transnational cross-border activities consider to be legitimate, i.e.,‘licit’. Borderland studies have shown how important it is to consider state and non-state notions of licitness and legality in conjunction to understand the worldview thatunderlies the maintenance and development of cross-border links despite statepolicies to the contrary (Van Schendel 2005a; Heyman and Smart 1999). This paperdraws from such literature and contributes to that aim by examining the limitationsof ‘seeing like a state’ (Scott 1998). Developing this point further in the secondsection, this paper problematizes the territorial logic of the postcolonial nation-stateas it is manifested in the realities of the borderland through a discussion of the waysin which geography affects cognitive maps of imagined communities and everydayaffiliations. Such a focus also enables a construction of the social history of thosepeople in whose worlds an international border appeared in the monsoon of 1947.Thus, I will also seek to relate the present configurations of porosity to the regionalunity that existed in the pre-Partition past.
Context
The present-day Bengal border owes its existence and shape to a series of decisionsmade in 1947, at the end of the colonial period in the Indian subcontinent.3 Inaddition to causing widespread, often violent, disruptions in the social realm (Butalia
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2000; Bagchi and Dasgupta 2005), there was an accompanying severance in therealm of economic relations when, as Van Schendel (2001) writes, the ‘border turnedneighbours into citizens of different states . . . often these neighbours entertainedwork relations with each other. They had to devise ways to continue these relations,or create new ones’ (398). It is imperative therefore that a study of current cross-border activities be situated in this historical context of Partition and its manifoldconsequences.
The second aspect crucial to this context is the history of Indian border control.After a border skirmish with Bangladesh in 2001, the centre-right coalition in powerat the time tripled its border security budget in 2003; the subsequent centre-leftcoalition that came to power in 2004 continued fencing the India-Bangladesh border,a project that had been initiated by previous governments (Ramachandran 2005).Commitment to the cause of border security was demonstrated by the fact that Rs2404.7 million (£31.6 million) was spent on fencing the eastern border during 2004–05 (Government of India 2005). This enthusiasm for militarisation is noteworthy forbeing a marked change in strategy because India’s border with Bangladesh hashistorically been a friendly and porous one, albeit not as open as the one with Nepaland not as closed as the one with Pakistan.4 The Border Security Forces (BSF), aparamilitary organization under the Ministry of Home Affairs, stationed alongIndia’s land borders is administered by the central government. Founded in 1965, itis responsible for protecting India’s land border during peacetime and for preventingcross-border crimes.
Everyday cross-border interactions
What the map cuts up, the story cuts across. (de Certeau 1984, 129)
In this section I will construct the breadth and depth of what I term ‘cross-borderinteractions in everyday life’ in the borderland, especially those that escapeenumeration and measure. These seemingly innocuous activities manifest themselvesthrough movements of people, circulation of goods and participation in sharedcultural worlds. The rationales behind these pervasive forms of informal cross-border interactions converge around notions of legitimacy and relations of affectthat do not concur with the embodiment of morality in formal law of the state.
Mobility
The first time I met Mejo ma5 in Prantapur was when she, having heard about mypresence in her neighbourhood, had curiously come across the yard that separatedher house from the one where I was staying, despite the exhaustion from a long dayin the fields. ‘I heard you want to know about what relations we have with the otherside’, she said, with the twinkle of amusement lighting up in her eyes. ‘AmiBangladesher meye’ [‘I am a woman from Bangladesh’] she volunteered to say, a tadprovocatively. There was a note of defiance in that self-description that echoed acritical epiphany a character in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines has, realizing,‘her place of birth had come to be so messily at odds with her nationality’ (1995,152). She confessed that since her marriage she had become ‘stuck on this side’ andcould not travel to her natal village across the border in Bangladesh. She recounted
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how three years ago, when her father was grievously ill, she was unable to cross theborder and walk the 20 minutes required to reach his deathbed at her paternal home.‘The BSF didn’t let me go. I had got news that he was dying and wanted to goimmediately – but it was a bad officer on duty . . . The only way I communicate nowis when my mother and brothers and other relations come to the fields on theBangladesh side and I can meet them and talk to them from our fields. Sometimes ifthe BSF on duty is good then he lets me go across for a few hours.’ Mejo ma’s 15-year-old, school-going son cheekily said, ‘I don’t have any such problems. I go andcome across whenever I want to! The BSF don’t say anything to me. Earlier whenthere was no fence and fewer BSF guards I used to play there [no man’s land] withfriends from the other side.’
Visits to relatives across the border in Bangladesh are common and ‘normal’occurrences. Relations with kin form the most enduring basis of continuing cross-border interaction that has resiliently persisted since Partition. The frail, elderly ladywhose son’s house I was staying in was away, visiting her sisters and daughtersmarried and living in Bangladesh, when I first arrived. She did not have a passport,let alone a visa, for travel into Bangladesh, and had ‘illegally’ crossed the border at ariverine point6 in a nearby village. An overwhelming majority of the people I spoketo in this 402-household-strong village (Gobindopur Panchayat records 2009) notonly had relatives across the border but professed to maintain contact with them bylicit but illegal means.
I was repeatedly mistaken for a dhur, the local Bengali colloquialism used for aBangladeshi border-crosser, during my first few days in the neighbourhoods close tothe border. It is common practice for dhurs to stay with families in the villagemasquerading as visitors or guests, waiting for an opportune moment to cross theborder. These border-crossers are either illegal Bangladeshi migrants in Indiatravelling back to their home in Bangladesh or migrants from across the bordermaking their way to places in India in search of work. Sakhina had recently spentthree years working in Bombay, as well as having ‘illegally’ crossed the border to visitkin in Bangladesh multiple times in the past. She reflected on these mixed movementswithin and from the borderland: ‘[l]ooking at them [Bangladeshis moving to India forwork] people from Prantapur are also seeing the benefits in working outside. Besides,as long as we have our ID cards7, we can go wherever we like, however far away thatis . . . Who can get passport to go somewhere so close [in Bangladesh]? That is forpeople in Kolkata. For us here, the ID card is the only thing that matters.’
Thus, border-crossings in either direction consist of mixed flows. There is a localacceptance of such movements, which, although prohibited by the Indian statewithout a valid visa, are perceived as legitimate. Although with the passport the statehas its own mechanism of ‘produc[ing] the ‘‘nationalized’’ migrant’ (Mongia 1999,529) and privileged control over mobility, in borderland reality, the ‘passport’ toovercoming border control is a persuasive claim to cross-border relations of affectthat pre-date nationalized identities in the region. Besides, it is ironic that thepractical task of acquiring a passport entails journeys through bureaucracy in theheartland of the state, the capital city Kolkata that many in Prantapur like Mejo ma,a widowed woman on her own, are unable to undertake. Many academic andanecdotal reams may have been devoted to the pain of separation, the trauma offorced migration, and the anxieties of new nationalities in the Indian subcontinent,but there appears to be a yawning silence regarding the Indian state’s continueddenial of local communication between kith and kin across the border, which
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consequently produces a category of ‘illegal’ activity within which falls the everydaybusiness of cross-border communication.
Circulation and communication
The mass media is the basis of another kind of cross-border interaction, premised onthe fact that the borderlands on either side share the same language, Bengali. Herethe public spheres of commerce and media intersect to become the site where thesocially licit conspicuously overrules the formally illegal. Reza and Samir, teenagesiblings whose houses were adjacent to the BSF camp in the Prantapur, were devotedaudiences to both Bangladeshi radio as well as television channels that they couldtune in to. Gleefully, they made me listen to a musical programme being broadcastedon the radio which played the latest hits from Bangladeshi films. They said, ‘[l]ivinghere we get the best of both sides – our favourites are Bangladeshi programmesbecause they are funnier and more dramatic. But we can also listen to Bengaliprogrammes of this state [the state of West Bengal] if we want to.’ For them thesepractices provided them with the cultural points of reference that they shared withtheir cousins in Bangladesh. Developments in Bangladesh, whether in politics or insports, were keenly followed through the transmission of news on the radio; thesesubsequently formed the topic of lively discussions in the evening bazaars in theborder villages.
The bazaars in border villages like Prantapur are places where manycommodities with particular local, socio-cultural significances may be found: printedmosquito nets from Satkhira, starched lungis (a type of wrap-around skirt worn bymen) from Jessore and so on. DVDs of Bangladeshi films are currently one of themost popular items in the bazaars of these border villages. There would be crowdsgathered at the shops stocking videos for weekly rental with many people placingorders for copies of films to be brought from Bangladesh the next week. Anenterprising young man, also a private tutor for school children, who ran a successfulvideo rental shop in Prantapur at the time of my research told me that the pressuresof ‘keeping up to date with the latest films and music videos’ are high. He admittedwith pride that it was a lot of hard work to keep the supply of pirated DVDs fromBangladesh flowing with a regularity that met the demand of the consumers in hishome village. He had been running his shop for over five years and there had been noraid from either the police or the BSF; in fact the BSF jawans (constables) wereamongst his loyal customers. Well-known commodities of large-scale illegal tradesuch as manure and Dhakai saris (Van Schendel 2006) are no longer openly soldbecause of BSF vigilance and surprise inspections of suspected shops. However, Iargue that in this – the BSF’s quiet tolerance of small-scale illegal trade ofcommodities with a local demand – there is an institutional discernment in scale aswell as between the realms of local exchange and transactions and that of purelycommercial networks of trade.
Movements of people and goods in either direction across the border are heavilydependent on telephonic communication. Virtually every family in the village has aBangladeshi SIM card and mobile phone connection in addition to a local Indianone to aid contact with friends, family and business associates in Bangladesh, asotherwise expensive international telephone rates would apply across the border.There may not be electricity in most parts of this borderland village but it is well-connected along the margins and to the centres by the strength of expansive private
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telecommunications networks. The pivotal importance of telecommunications isrecognized by the Border Security Force as well. The senior officer in the battalionthat was posted in this part of the border at the time of my research mused, ‘[i]f onlywe could shut down mobile phone networks in this border area – you would see thatthere would be absolutely no illegal cross-border activity for that period.’
Continued and continuous cross-border interactions thus normalize the borderby making the habit or practice of denying absolute severance ordinary (VanSchendel 2006; Samaddar 1998). Participation in these socially licit activities iswidespread and the visibility and everyday character of these activities lends an air ofnormalcy to them. The border is overcome at several levels – as a physical and literalbarrier and as a mental marker of separation that seems artificial in the localworldview – illustrating the multidimensionality of the ‘border as a categorical divideand the border as an interactive process’ (Van Schendel and Abraham 2005, 24). Theinterplay between the ‘illegal’ and the ‘licit’ amounts to instances of the socially licitsuperseding the formally illegal. As Heyman and Smart observe, ‘[l]egitimation is anoutcome of struggles in both discursive and practical arenas, and criminalisingactions is often a central move in such struggles’ (1999, 7). There are at least threekinds of responses from the state to different kinds of cross-border interactions.These range from those that the state regards as permissible, to those to which itturns a blind eye, and others that the state is particularly keen to combat. Yet noneof them are ever entirely bereft of state presence, eliciting at least one of the threeresponses. For instance, the very constables who are customers at the illegal DVDshop may, under duress in times of heightened public anxiety, raid all illegal shopsand businesses forcing them to close down. However, deep-rooted and pervasivelegitimation in the borderland worldview of the forms of activities described hereelicits the first two of the three possible state responses. This lenience in turnvindicates the moral standpoint of borderlanders.8 The avowal of cultural allegianceat the most local geographical level rationalizes and translates into activities thatunwilfully carry the connotation of anti-national behaviour by virtue of notprivileging or affirming national identity and interests above local ones.
Re-scaling the landscape
In the partitioned geography of a borderland, cognitive maps will never overlapcompletely . . .. (Van Schendel 2005b, 56)
In this section I argue that geography affects the way in which people imaginethemselves in relation to a larger community. This means that there will be spatialvariations in perceptions of (national) identity and that the ‘imagined community’ towhich people align themselves will be perceived rather differently according togeographical location. The conspicuous lack of a nationalized cultural identity in theborderland, in contradistinction to the patriotic rhetoric espoused by the men ofthe Border Security Force stationed there, may be linked to the living memory of thelocal landscape unfenced and unguarded. Symbolism at the frontiers of a state ismeant to reiterate the presence of a state (Donnan and Wilson 1999), evokepowerful territorial identification – yet these spatial rituals of the state are oftenignored by borderlanders who continue to scale their world in a way that theirmental maps do not coincide with state borders (Van Schendel 2005b). InPrantapur, the prevalence of communal and personal memories that pre-date
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symbols and practices of state border control and chart their emergence over theyears undermine their absolute authority. This case emphatically reiterates that‘[b]orders are zones of cultural production, spaces of meaning-making and meaning-breaking’, to recall Donnan and Wilson’s general point about the tussle overidentities in borderlands (1999, 63).
Oral histories that seamlessly traced the rise and growth of border defencesabound and while they tend to vary in terms of precision of dates/times as arefactually known, the richness of the details in recountings of the lived localexperience generally corroborate each other. A trot through the brief history of thepresence of the BSF in this area through such oral accounts is insightful for anunderstanding of attitudes of the local population towards the Force and the way inwhich the landscape is imagined and represented by the local mind’s eye.
Earlier there were never so many BSF men. When first those bideshis, foreigners, camehere no one here could understand their speech. They are not Bengali. Now people havelearnt to follow some Hindi. They praised our green, fertile fields.9 You know that theyare all Hindu don’t you? . . . Why, I have seen the border happen with my own eyes –when I was a child there was no border; then we knew there was a border but it was veryopen and though there were some markings we used to go wherever we wanted; then aftertheMukti Juddho [War of Independence, 1971] the BSF started setting up their camps inthis region. Even then there were fewer camps along the border – now every village has itsown camp and there is constant patrolling. (Asif Miah, mid-sixties, August 2009)
The border was drawn 62 years ago, with its set of unresolved disputes, and thebuilding of a border fence on the Indian side has breathed fresh life into all theexisting absurdities, bringing them into sharp relief by creating new ones.10 India firststarted fencing the border with Bangladesh in the late 1980s in a disorganizedmanner. Locals in their forties have inherited innumerable pre-Partition storiesabout the geo-political unity of the borderland and themselves remember theconstruction of the fence very clearly, locating it in a trajectory of increasinginterventions at the border by the central Indian government. As Asif Miah and histwin brother narrated their story of the border for me, his son who had come into thecourtyard for his lunch-break from the fields joined the conversation animatedly,eager to insert his own part in these lived memories.
Why, I remember very clearly that we only had those pillars [milestones that still exist,marking out the actual border on the map] earlier – I used to play there . . . there wereBSF camps near Bongaon, not here. Here the camp was just a tent earlier, slowly theyhave expanded, built the defence road that runs along the border and then built thisfence. They built the fence to try and stop black [illegal trade]; when they couldn’t dothat, they started sending BSF men to guard the fence. Did that stop black? No – so nowthere are BSF camps in every single village and every inch of the border is guardedconstantly. But still black continues – together with the BSF. (Mohsin, August 2009)
Similar accounts emphasized the intrusive dimension of border control by way ofphysical barriers as well as the presence of the BSF men, foreign to theborderlanders. The relation to these ‘non-Bengalis’ was narrated as ambivalent,with the potential for hostility as well as the kind of tolerant amusement that isreserved for what is foreign and unfamiliar. Further, the direct implication of theBSF’s involvement in cross-border smuggling, although common, was certainly notso easily and outwardly available or articulated. The first and unhesitating responsethat I always received from everyone to my question ‘what is it like, to live by the
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fenced border?’ was that it was unnatural and inconvenient. A litany of complaintswould follow, invariably to do with the physical obstructions caused by the fenceand all the other barriers and inconveniences caused by the operations andbehaviour of the BSF because of their prioritisation of border security. ‘Rememberto take your ID when you are going near the border; you may be stopped andchecked any time’, I was repeatedly warned. A representative example is aconversation with Rashid chacha who, like many others, was at first convincedthat I was a journalist and insisted on telling me all that was wrong for ‘us, ordinaryfarmers, in this border area’ demanding that I write a front-page article about it, aswe walked along a path from his fields to his house.
If you are unlucky, like me, to have fields on the other side of the barbed wire, then youare in trouble. I cannot go to my fields as and when I want – there are restrictedtimings11 and restrictions on what we can grow in our fields on the other side. Do youknow that we have to sign a register every time we go in or out? . . . Earlier they used tocome and harass us in our houses – take away our cows alleging that they were forsmuggling across, bother us for information, beat us up without any reason if they didnot get what they wanted. . . . You have to take permission to travel on the defence roadafter dark – so if someone fell sick at night and needed to be taken to the hospital by theroad, you couldn’t. You’d be stopped and searched – I mean can you imagine that? Wehave become suspects in your own land!
There was a great willingness to talk at length about these inconveniences and howthey contributed to the community’s disadvantaged socio-economic conditions.
Limits of state control
While there was a legitimate and conspicuous set of grievances that the localpopulation had against the stipulations, interferences and whimsies of the BSF, Isoon noticed that people used stock phrases, stock arguments and stock examples tomake their point and thus became alerted to a vigorous rhetoric of suppression bythe BSF that was a part of the community’s self-presentation to the world outside theborderland. Not only was there a keen awareness of discourse generation (Rashidchacha’s urgings to report, for example), there were active attempts to relate realityto the discourses about them and vice versa. The non-identification with and lack ofsympathy for the patriotic cause of national security of a larger geo-political entity isthrown into sharp relief when contrasted with the widespread sense of indignation atbeing alienated in their homeland.
Underneath the dominant rhetoric of complaint about the BSF lay the spectre ofcomplicity with the BSF. Local people’s collusion with the BSF in smuggling goodsand people across the border is a common occurrence, commonly known. Thus, asDas and Poole say, ‘local worlds and the state do not stand as binary opposites.Even though they are locked in unequal relations, they are enmeshed in oneanother.’ (2004, 22) Certainly not unique to this borderland, this phenomenon ofnegotiating and subverting the law at the margins of the state but from within theapparatus of the state occurs, for instance, along Ghana’s eastern frontier where thelong-established Border Guards are co-opted into local smuggling networks (Nugent1999), or in the economic strategies by marginalised youth that stretch theregulatory practices of the state at the border in Chad (Roitman 2004). Thiscomplex overlap is one of the aspects that characterize the interactions between thelocal people and the BSF – collaboration with the BSF and the knowledge of it
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polarised the community into those who did not wish to be associated with illegalactivities, and by extension the BSF, and those who through association with theBSF boasted of one-upmanship on legal restrictions on local informal trade. Thisattitude towards subverting state control in illegal commercial activities works intandem with the more widely prevalent jubilation in overcoming state control ofboth people’s movements and the landscape in communal social events.
Carnivalesque
There are some times of the year when Indian control of the border seemsparticularly defeated. A bais khela, boat race, on Eid-ul-Fitr or the following day istraditionally held on a river which now marks the international border between Indiaand Bangladesh further south of Prantapur. It is a well-known and well-attendedevent in the region and despite the BSF’s interventions they have been unsuccessfulin stopping it altogether yet. Eid itself occasions an increased rate of border-crossings in the days leading up to it: Bangladeshis in various parts of India maketheir way back across the border, and families in Prantapur and similar villages inthe borderland with especially strong familial ties in neighbouring villages inBangladesh travel across to break the fast with their closest kin. This is, as it were, anopen secret.
‘This is the time when mayhem is in the air. What can you say to these people?How can we control all parts of the border? We can’t just shoot at them [border-crossers], not at this religious time.’ On the eve of Eid-ul-Fitr, these words of theCompany Commander stationed at Prantapur rang of desperation. The boat raceitself marked a carnivalesque reprieve from border control. Despite the visiblepresence of uniformed and armed members of the BSF, both banks of the river, andthe river itself, were crowded with spectators who had gathered from far and wide.With drums beating, music and announcements blaring on loudspeakers, and men,women and children bedecked in their festive best, it was a celebration in which aeuphoria of transgression culminated. As we stood in the crowd, a group of youngpeople from Prantapur who I had accompanied said, ‘Didi [sister], today there is nofear. No ID card checks, no nothing – you can do whatever you like. Come and goacross, take whatever you like, bring whatever you like. Who will stop whom? Justlook at the crowds.’ Their words captured the mood of the moment – there was nodoubt about the thrilling element of one-upmanship in the open defiance of stateborder control that underlined the celebrations.
Conclusion
From these instances of everyday cross-border interactions and attitudes towards thegeography of the borderland, two points regarding identity politics based onterritorial nationalism are noteworthy. Borderlanders’ interaction with the BSF isthe site on which several dualities and tensions are mapped and played out. One suchis the political duality between interests and measures of the central government andthe interests and necessities of grassroots electoral politics. In the self-presentation ofborderlanders, there was an instrumental use being made of this political split ininterest between the levels of governance to serve their own ends. For instance,panchayat (village-level elected administration) politicians’ support for locals againstthe BSF is an essential part of their agenda to win popularity. As members of the
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state government this immediately placed panchayat leaders in a position of non-cooperation or opposition with the BSF who represented the central government’smediation in the borderland. This contributed to the double-edged relation that bothsupports and threatens everyday cross-border interactions.
Second, the politics of identity is the realm wherein the most fascinating tug ofloyalties lies. In the anthropological literature on migration, there have been richexplorations of the ideas of home, belonging, identity formation and expression inrelation to changing locations in time and space. Much has been written aboutimagined homelands (e.g., Ahmed et al. 2003), home abroad: the recreation of desh inbidesh (e.g., Ballard 1994; Shaw 1994) and even the permeation of bidesh in desh(Gardner 1995; Ballard 2003). However, in Prantapur there are instances of anexperience that offers yet another insight into these varying dynamics between homeand abroad, natives and foreigners, identity and alienation. Local populations oneither side of the border are tied together by the strength of a religious and linguisticunity and historically shared cultural roots. The Bengali identity is the overarchingreceptacle that subsumes all other differences and sleights of nation-making. AtPrantapur, the tall and well-built BSF men from northern and western Indian statesare the non-Bengali bideshis (literally meaning, from another land or foreigners).They speak Hindi, a language not known in Prantapur, come from unknown lands,which may nominally be part of the same nation, but are notionally foreign in thelocal imagination. While this may sound like a common reflection on the greatdiversity within the Indian nation, as I have suggested through the examples, it hasvery real repercussions for socio-economic life at the borderland.
Finally, to use the words of Van Schendel, ‘in borderlands, the spatiality of socialrelations is forever taking on new shapes’ (2005a, 6–9). A vibrant borderland societywith dynamic socio-cultural practices straddling the border is at odds with the state’sagenda of using the border as a tool of statecraft for realising its territorialsovereignty. As I have argued, in the case of Prantapur, the margin of the state is anactive centre of complex negotiations of conflicting interests and contradictoryimaginaries. Through the daily configurations of cross-border porosity, the border isnormalised; through the tensions and interactions with the state, the border issimultaneously affirmed and overcome. Thus, competing forms of social construc-tions of space exist simultaneously in diverging, often contesting social practice(Paasi 1999). Borderlands are sites of anxiety for the modern state: the state’sastigmatic view of borderland activities, the gaps between peoples’ perceptions oftheir activities and the state’s, inconsistencies in legalities all make the borderland aspace where state authority is contested, interrupted and qualified in everyday life.
Acknowledgements
I thank the editor of this Special Issue of CSA and the two anonymous reviewers for theirhelpful comments. My deepest gratitude to the people of Prantapur for their patience,kindness and hospitality, and to the social workers of Simanta Bangla and Sanlaap for theirguidance. All the shortcomings that remain are my own.
Notes
1. For discussions of the Bengal borderland see Van Schendel and Abraham (2005); forsimilar arguments on other borderlands see Rosler and Wendl (1999), and Wilson andDonnan (1998).
2. Prantapur literally means ‘border-place’ in Bengali. As with names of people, I havechanged the real name of the village in order to protect the identity of the residents.
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3. For an excellent analytical overview of the drawing of the border, see Joya Chatterji(1999).
4. The representations of the security issue in both media and policy debates have beenpolarized in Hindu nationalist rhetoric. For a discourse analysis of the media on thistopic, see Van Schendel (2005a, especially chapters 5, 9 and 12) and Samaddar (1999).
5. All names have been changed.6. People in Prantapur spoke of cross-border activities across riverine parts of the border as
exceptional in both nature and scale as distinguished from the ordinariness of their ownactivities.
7. Referring either to the identity cards issued by the BSF certifying that they are residentsof this border village and thus permitted to access agricultural land in no-man’s land ifrequired, or their voter identity cards issued by the Government of India as proof ofIndian citizenship. English words used in Bengali speech have been italicized.
8. Involvements in organized cross-border flows, such as smuggling and trafficking ofpeople or goods, tend to stem from and build upon these existing local attitudes andpractices, and the dynamics between locals and the BSF.
9. A number of the men in the BSF I encountered were from arid regions in Rajasthan.10. Indian fencing along the arbitrarily drawn Radcliffe line has given birth to some
absurdities. Of special note is the case of settlements that existed very close to the river,when it became an international border, on its banks. India having to abide by the accordof 1974 with Bangladesh to leave a distance of at least 150 metres between the border lineand any fence to be erected could only thus erect it beyond the village. This has led to asituation where there are entire villages ‘outside’ the border fence that is guarded anddefended by the BSF, which fall within Indian territory, and yet need special permissionand abide by the restricted timings to ‘enter’ the rest of India through the gates on thefence. Another variation on this absurdity was the case of villages where the border fenceand accompanying defence road cut through the village. These were instances in thestring of villages immediately south of the one where I was doing my fieldwork and henceit was a predicament that was very alive in the local imagination and regularly referred toin the litany of complaints that the local people had against the central state.
11. All along the border when the fence was close to or passed through a village, there weregates at varying intervals. These gates were opened according to non-negotiable times –an hour each in the early morning, early afternoon and early evening.
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