Moving beyond the conventional binary logic of state and society, this book reveals how borderlands emerge as both contested and negotiated terrains shaped by historical legacies and contemporary practices co-produced by the state and people.
Migration across borders has become a more contentious political question in contemporary South Asia than ever, especially in the context of recent populist assertions and migration politics. Going beyond the predominant political narrative, the essays in this book not only engage with everyday life as it unfolds in marriage and kinship relations and ethnic and cultural practices at borderlands but also address critical issues that shape everyday life under socio-political, economic, and legal conditions, such as policing, conflicts and violence, illegality, and other forms of precarity for migrant subjects. This book shows that borderlands are not passive edges of the nation-state but lived, socially vivacious zones where people routinely transgress, reinterpret, and negotiate the meaning of borders.
An important addition to the political anthropology/sociology of migration and borderlands in South Asia, this book will be an invaluable resource to researchers of social and political anthropology, sociology, and South Asian societies. The chapters were originally published as a special issue of Asian Ethnicity and are accompanied by a new discussion essay.
Table of Contents:
Endorsements Acknowledgements Introduction: Migration and borderlands: ethnographic explorations from India 1. Moving Borders in South Asia 2. Infrastructures of (im)mobility: maps, mines, militarization, and the making of remote borderland in Kargil 3. The ongoing partition: narratives of belonging and separation in the borderland of Kargil, Ladakh 4. In-between borders: mapping belonging and citizenship in the Bengal borderland 5. Identity, migration and embedded cosmopolitanism: interrogating multiple Muslim identities in Assam 6. Citizenship revocation and ruptures in lifeworlds: analysing the aftermath of the national register of citizens in Assam 7. The poiesis of new migrant subjectivities: resistance and re-signification in Miya poetry 8. Practising border: contextualising criminality of mobility at the West Bengal-Bangladesh border 9. Migrant aspirations, migrating dreams: belonging, materiality, and migration in urban Darjeeling 10. Detection, detention and deportability in India - A discussion 11. Afterword: Testing the limits of statism: concluding reflections on migrations and borderlands
About the Author :
Salah Punathil is a sociologist and teaches at the Centre for Regional Studies, University of Hyderabad, India. His research interests include ethnic violence, migration and borderlands, citizenship and the intersection of archives and ethnography. He is the author of the book Interrogating Communalism: Violence, Citizenship and Minorities in South India published by Routledge in 2019.
Review :
This important collection of ethnographic essays is a sophisticated intervention in the study of the South Asian geobody. It offers a critical rethinking of borders and borderlands that takes us beyond the confinements of geographical location and narrowly defined citizenship. The essays deal with a great number of empirical cases, ranging from the troubles in Jammu and Kashmir to the conflicts in Assam, highlighting the long-term effects of Partition on mobility, family, and marriage.
It is a must-read for those interested in the politics of migration in South Asia.
Peter van der Veer, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen
This book showcases a truly outstanding collection of conceptually subtle and fine-grained ethnographic studies at the intersection of migration and refugee studies, postcolonial history, the geopolitics of borders and border zones, and the contemporary politics of citizenship in India. Excavating the fiercely contested struggles over citizenship, the vagaries of national identity, and the lived textures and complexities of belonging in several South Asian borderlands, the contributions to this volume illuminate vital concerns and debates of global scope and significance.
Nicholas De Genova, Professor in the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Houston
This is a rich collection of historical, literary, and ethnographic texts about ordinary life as it unfolds in borderlands of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal. Focusing on pivotal moments when borders are reconfigured through political conflict, the arrival of new infrastructure or the implementation of new governance technologies, the essays illustrate how state action frames the spectrum of possible mobilities and demonstrate how frequently these conditions change. The rich case studies are a powerful reminder that borders are not merely spatial markings; rather, they are spatio-temporal regimes that evolve dynamically in line with historical ruptures as well as the flows and disruptions that play out in everyday life.
Ursula Rao, Director of the Department 'Anthropology of Politics and Governance', Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle
This is a timely and outstanding contribution to the field of migration and borderlands in south Asia. The essays by young scholars bring fresh insights drawing on in-depth ethnographic research from diverse field sites in the region. Together, they animate borderland lives and experiences of migration, focusing on the everyday, the situated and the contingent. The collection offers a fresh new perspective on both borderland lives and migration experiences that mark a shift from state and legal discourses to more embodied and fluid negotiations around borderland lives that emerge through narratives on kinship and marriage, citizenship and bureaucracy, militarization and conflict.
Farhana Ibrahim, Professor Sociology & Social Anthropology, Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi
