Jungle Passports

Jungle Passports
Author: Malini Sur
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2021-08-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0812297768

Since the nineteenth century, a succession of states has classified the inhabitants of what are now the borderlands of Northeast India and Bangladesh as Muslim "frontier peasants," "savage mountaineers," and Christian "ethnic minorities," suspecting them to be disloyal subjects, spies, and traitors. In Jungle Passports Malini Sur follows the struggles of these people to secure shifting land, gain access to rice harvests, and smuggle the cattle and garments upon which their livelihoods depend against a background of violence, scarcity, and India's construction of one of the world's longest and most highly militarized border fences. Jungle Passports recasts established notions of citizenship and mobility along violent borders. Sur shows how the division of sovereignties and distinct regimes of mobility and citizenship push undocumented people to undertake perilous journeys across previously unrecognized borders every day. Paying close attention to the forces that shape the life-worlds of deportees, refugees, farmers, smugglers, migrants, bureaucrats, lawyers, clergy, and border troops, she reveals how reciprocity and kinship and the enforcement of state violence, illegality, and border infrastructures shape the margins of life and death. Combining years of ethnographic and archival fieldwork, her thoughtful and evocative book is a poignant testament to the force of life in our era of closed borders, insularity, and "illegal migration."

Bangladeshi Migrants in India

Bangladeshi Migrants in India
Author: Rizwana Shamshad
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 398
Release: 2017-10-03
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0199091595

In January 2011, Felani Khatun was shot dead while attempting to cross the border from India to Bangladesh. Her body remained hung on the fence as a warning to those who illegally crossed an international border. Migration to India from the current geographical and political entity called Bangladesh is more than a century old and had begun long before the nation states were created in South Asia. Often termed as ‘foreigners’ and ‘infiltrators’, Bangladeshi migrants such as Felani find their way into India for the promise of a better future. Post 1971, there has been a steady movement of people from Bangladesh into India, both as refugees and for economic need, making this migration a complex area of inquiry. This book focuses on the contemporary issue of undocumented Bangladeshi migration to the three Indian states of Assam, West Bengal, and Delhi, and how the migrants are perceived in light of the ongoing discourses on the various nationalisms in India. Each state has a unique history and has taken different measures to respond to Bangladeshi migrants present in the state. Based on extensive fieldwork and insightful interviews with influential members from key political parties, civil society organizations, and Hindu and ethnic nationalist bodies in these states, the book explores the place and role of Bangladeshi migrants in relation to the inherent tension of Indian nationalism.

Identity and Experience at the India-Bangladesh Border

Identity and Experience at the India-Bangladesh Border
Author: Debdatta Chowdhury
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2018-06-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1315296799

The effects of the partition of India in 1947 have been more far-reaching and complex than the existing partition narratives of violence and separation reveal. The immediacy of the movement of refugees between India and the newly-formed state of Pakistan overshadowed the actual effect of the drawing of the border between the two states. The book is an empirical study of border narratives across the India-Bangladesh border, specifically the West Bengal part of India’s border with Bangladesh. It tries to move away from the perpetrator state-victim civilian framework usually used in the studies of marginal people, and looks at the kind of agencies that the border people avail themselves of. Instead of looking at the border as the periphery, the book looks at it as the line of convergence and negotiations—the ‘centre of the people’ who survive it every day. It shows that various social, political and economic identities converge at the borderland and is modified in unique ways by the spatial specificity of the border—thus, forming a ‘border identity’ and a ‘border consciousness’. Common sense of the civilians and the state machinery (embodied in the border guards) collide, cooperate and effect each other at the borderlands to form this unique spatial consciousness. It is the everyday survival strategies of the border people which aptly reflects this consciousness rather than any universal border theory or state-centric discourses about the borders. A bottom-up approach is of utmost importance in order to understand how a spatially unique area binds diverse other identities into a larger spatial identity of a ‘border people’. The book’s relevance lies in its attempt to explore such everyday narratives across the Bengal border, while avoiding any major theorising project so as not to choke the potential of such experience-centred insights into the lives of a unique community of people. In that, it contributes towards a study of borders globally, providing potential approaches to understand border people worldwide. Based on detailed field research, this book brings a fresh approach to the study of this border. It will be of interest to researchers in the field of South Asian studies, citizenship, development, governance and border studies.

India's Bangladesh Problem

India's Bangladesh Problem
Author: Navine Murshid
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2023-03-31
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1009259377

In recent years, Bengali Muslims in India have faced harassment and scapegoating as the trope of the illegal Bangladeshi has gained political currency. India's Bangladesh Problem explores the experience of Bengali Muslims on the Indian side of the India–Bangladesh border in the context of neoliberal policies, unequal bilateral relations, labor migration, contested citizenship, and increasingly xenophobic government rhetoric. Drawing on extensive research in the borderlands and hinterlands of both countries, Navine Murshid argues that ever-deepening neoliberal policies across the border have shaped how certain ethnic groups are valued and have reconfigured social hierarchies. She provides new insights into the strategic inclusion, exclusion, and invisibility that characterizes Bengali Muslims' lives, rendering them a group susceptible to manipulation by virtue of their ethnic kinship to the majority of Bangladeshis. In turn, Bengali Muslims simultaneously resist and utilize received neoliberal ideas to sustain their lives and livelihoods at a time when neoliberal development has largely bypassed them.

Choice

Choice
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 620
Release: 2009
Genre: Academic libraries
ISBN:

Borderland Politics in Northern India

Borderland Politics in Northern India
Author: Yu-Wen Chen
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 161
Release: 2016-04-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317605160

The colonial legacy in the construction of the modern Indian state has left a deep imprint on contemporary Indians’ self-identity and self-determination. Borderland Politics in Northern India is a collection of essays, giving detailed accounts of the many different ways that people throughout India understand their homeland, the territory where they live, and the broader region to which they belong. Mona Chettri looks at the Gorkha community in the Darjeeling hills to the northeast, Manjeet Baruah examines Assam, and L. Lam Khan Piang explores the dispersion of the Zo people throughout many northeastern states. In the northwest, Aijaz Ashraf Wani illustrates how Jammu and Kashmir state is severed along complex regional, religious, and ethnic lines. This book is an invaluable source for readers interested in comparative studies of borderlands globally. It also contributes to South Asian studies broadly conceived, to Indian border studies, and to local social, cultural, and political histories of the constituent border regions of Northern India. This book was published as a special issue of Asian Ethnicity.