Speaking the language of the ‘other’: negotiating cultural boundaries through language in chitmahals in Indo-Bangladesh borders

ABSTRACT

Borders are not merely assertions of sovereign territorial demarcations, but indicative of cultural boundaries. This article discusses how the India-Bangladesh Land Boundary Agreement (2015) led to reorganisation of territorial boundaries, whereby the inhabitants had the choice of citizenship between India and Bangladesh that reaffirmed their identity. The subjective differentiation between ‘us’ and ‘them’ was negotiated by various cultural elements such as Bangla language; an everyday language symbolizing membership in the constituting communities, kinship and citizenship in the nation. Language was an important attribute that identified them as ‘Bengali’/‘Bangladeshi’ while navigating the trans-territorial national identity. While arguing that the new citizens’ construction of ‘acts of citizenship’ was based on a linguistic identity and everyday languages made claims to citizenship possible, the paper also explores: how does language help negotiate the cultural boundaries of ‘us’ or ‘them’ in post Land Border Agreement? How has language (re)shaped identity towards attainment of citizenship?

KEYWORDS:

• Chitmahal/ enclave
• borders
• language
• citizenship
• belonging

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. We have used the terms chitmahal and enclave interchangeably.

2. We use the abbreviations LBA (land boundary agreement) and LBAT (land boundary agreement treaty) interchangeably in the article.

3. Article 15 in Indian constitution and Article 28 of the constitution of Bangladesh guarantees right to equality without discrimination on the basis of religion, caste, race, gender, and place of birth.

4. All the names of enclave dwellers used in this paper are changed to protect their privacy.

5. Scholars like Doevenspeck (2011) and Megoran (2006) propose for an ethnographic perspective to map the ways in which unique territoriality of borderlands shapes the communities living along the borders and in turn how the everyday lives of these populations shape and reshape the discourse on borders.

6. Yuval-Davis (2006, 199) deconstructs the notion of belonging along three interconnected levels of analysis- first being social locations, second being individual identifications and emotional attachments and third being ethical and political value systems.

7. Bilgrami acknowledges the perspective that gender and race are socially constructed, but points out that- by the same logic scholars like Foucault had opined that even subjective identities are shaped by ‘conceptual and institutional formulations’.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nasreen Chowdhory

Dr. Nasreen Chowdhory is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, University of Delhi. She obtained her PhD in Political Science from McGill University, Canada, she taught at Concordia University and later joined University of Delhi. Some of her significant publications are “Displacement: A ‘state of exception’” in the International Journal of Migration and Border Studies, 2016. Refugee Watch;Refugees, Citizenship and Belonging: A Contested Terrains (Springer 2018) and edited volume on Deterritorialised Identities and Transborder Movement in South Asia with Nasir Uddin with Springer 2019. Citizenship, Nationalism and Refugeehood of Rohingyas in Southern Asia with co-edited with Biswajit Mohanty, Springer 2020, and Gender, Identity and Migration in India (Palgrave 2021) with Paula Banerjee.

Shamna Thacham Poyil

Shamna Thacham Poyil is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Delhi. Her research focuses on the narrative of statelessness of the Rohingyas and the politics of exclusion. Her recent publications include ‘National Identity and Conceptualization of Nationalism among Rohingya’ in Citizenship, Nationalism and Refugeehood of Rohingyas in Southern Asia (2020), ed. Nasreen Chowdhory & Biswajit Mohanty; ‘The Global Compact of Refugees: A viewpoint of Global South’, Refugee Watch (2020) with Dr. Nasreen Chowdhory; ‘The Idea of Protection: Norms and Practice of Refugee management in India’, Refugee watch (2019) with Dr. Nasreen Chowdhory and Meghna Kajla, ‘Transitional justice, reconciliation and reconstruction process: the case of the former LTTE female combatants in post-war Sri Lanka’ with Dr. Nasreen Chowdhory in Transitional Justice and Forced Migration ed. Nergis Canefe, Cambridge University Press 2019.