Cross-border activities in everyday life: the Bengal borderland

Abstract

This paper will address the multiple forms and layers of porosity that give borderlands, such as the Bengal borderland, their distinctive nature as zones of contestation. Cross-border interactions continue to be an integral feature of everyday life in the Bengal borderland despite increasing militarisation and regulation by the Indian government in the last decade. Criminalization of local cross-border flows has driven them underground - while organized cross-border crimes (smuggling and trafficking) enjoy considerable attention, the breadth and depth of informal cross-border interactions in the quotidian lives of borderlanders remain understudied. What is the significance of such daily cross-border transactions? How do they feed into the local perceptions of the state policies of border control? How do they relate to larger organized flows of smuggling and trafficking? Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork in the border district of North 24 Parganas in West Bengal, India, this paper critically examines the rationales and practices of such informal ‘illegal’ cross-border interactions and problematizes the territorial logic of the postcolonial nation-state as it is contested in the realities of the borderland. Such a focus also enables a construction of the social history of those people in whose worlds an international border appeared in the monsoon of 1947, thus relating the present configurations of porosity to the regional unity that existed in the pre-Partition past.

Keywords:

• cross-border interactions
• border control
• identity
• border landscape

Acknowledgements

I thank the editor of this Special Issue of CSA and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful 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 their guidance. All the shortcomings that remain are my own.

Notes

 1. For discussions of the Bengal borderland see Van Schendel and Abraham (2005); for similar arguments on other borderlands see Rösler and Wendl (1999), and Wilson and Donnan (1998).

 2. Prantapur literally means ‘border-place' in Bengali. As with names of people, I have changed the real name of the village in order to protect the identity of the residents.

 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 been polarized in Hindu nationalist rhetoric. For a discourse analysis of the media on this topic, 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 own activities.

 7. Referring either to the identity cards issued by the BSF certifying that they are residents of this border village and thus permitted to access agricultural land in no-man's land if required, or their voter identity cards issued by the Government of India as proof of Indian citizenship. English words used in Bengali speech have been italicized.

 8. Involvements in organized cross-border flows, such as smuggling and trafficking of people or goods, tend to stem from and build upon these existing local attitudes and practices, 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 accord of 1974 with Bangladesh to leave a distance of at least 150 metres between the border line and any fence to be erected could only thus erect it beyond the village. This has led to a situation where there are entire villages ‘outside’ the border fence that is guarded and defended by the BSF, which fall within Indian territory, and yet need special permission and abide by the restricted timings to ‘enter’ the rest of India through the gates on the fence. Another variation on this absurdity was the case of villages where the border fence and accompanying defence road cut through the village. These were instances in the string of villages immediately south of the one where I was doing my fieldwork and hence it was a predicament that was very alive in the local imagination and regularly referred to in 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 were gates at varying intervals. These gates were opened according to non-negotiable times - an hour each in the early morning, early afternoon and early evening.