Dispossession, Border and Exception in South Asia: An Introduction

ABSTRACT

Dispossession can be examined from various vantage points across disciplines. Dispossession is a condition that overturns self-sufficiency by forcing individuals and communities to be dependent. The dependency remains on a "mode of governance and a legal regime that confers and sustains those rights” (Butler 2013, 4). Being dispossessed indicate that the subjects are disowned and degraded by normalising powers active in the society, where the subjects are differentiated. The differentiation is manifested in varied conceptions of development and under-development, of dislocated and "counter-hegemonic subjects." This epistemic distinctions remains the basis for spaces of border formation. However, dispossession is a layered activity that involves multiple actors. It is imperative to unpack layers of dispossession to unravel complex border formation. Thus taking dispossession as the central category of analysis, the contributors in the special issue have examined the complex and layered relationship between dispossession and (b)ordering processes to demonstrate overlapping dominations and subjugations: at (in)security, psycho-social, cultural, political, and economic realms. It attempts to unravel mechanisms of contentious politics of dispossession and the “narratives of encounters” of collective imaginations within a relational framework. In the process, it tries to unfold historical processes and political dynamics of exclusion that constitutes internal and external border practices in acts of dispossession.

KEYWORDS:

• Dispossession
• border
• refugees
• citizenship
• South Asia

Introduction

Dispossession is a condition that manifests in political emergencies and violence leading to a full or partial loss of material and non-material existence. Humans are inherently dispossessed to a particular degree by the pre-established customs, institutions, and latent structures of existence. “Being” dispossessed is linked to the human condition of perpetual precarity induced by the “quivering humanity of those living, differing, sexing, mattering, touched and touching otherwise, elsewhere” (Butler and Athanasiou 2013, 33). People are not dispossessed rather they are “being made” dispossessed (Butler and Athanasiou 2013) dependent on “mode of governance and a legal regime that confers and sustains those rights” (Butler in Butler and Athanasiou 2013, 4). Dispossession is a condition that implies “imposed injuries … modes of subjugation” by the “normative and normalizing violence” (Butler and Athanasiou 2013). “Becoming” connotes a sense of layered deprivation and displacement. It is about alterity and foreclosures (Morrill and Tuck 2016).

We live in “cultures of dispossession” (Bhandar and Bhandar 2016) that appear in varied forms. The accelerated paces of dispossession are witnessed through the growing attack on minorities, and acts of displacement from residence. It manifests in ideologically driven attacks. As a a result, wars have led to the refugee crisis wherein permission to seek asylum has become politically motivated. With rise in attacks on minorities, racial profiling and ethnic cleansing, people are forced to live a precarious life within a nation-state. The slums are cleared off in metropolis to facilitate the construction of information and technology hubs or smart cities or the beautification of cities to prepare for grand international events. Constructions of affordable housing society in cities are dispossessing people. Dispossession is thus linked with loss of materiality. But that might not be the complete truth: dispossession may lead to loss of dignity and humanity (Chowdhory and Poyil 2022), causing alienation and a acute sense of disempowerment.

The logic of border formation is based on the juridical process of securing identity, such as, citizenship, nationhood. Several juridical processes create various kinds of exclusion and marginalization. Cultural and juridical apparatus generate myriad exclusion and marginalization that create a universal “we.” Political, economic, and cultural imaginations are the bases of exclusionary practices, setting up boundaries among communities within nation states (Brambilla et al. 2015; Finnsson 2019). The excluded population carry an identity of "surplus" or "waste" who are dispossessed on many accounts. They are rendered as “waste” i.e., a source of production of surplus value – who are culturally segregated and bio-politically subjugated by the ruling class to maintain power hierarchy in society. Thus the dispossessed identity seldom changes.

The collection of papers in the Special Issue (SI) provides a number of perplexed and varied experiences of dispossessions. We delve into the question of interlinkage of complexities of dispossessions, layered border formation, and intersectionality of materiality of class, caste, religion, and subjectivity of belonging and citizenship in the South Asian region. While addressing the interlinkages and intersectionality, the papers draw onto empirical understanding from South Asian countries. The papers in the SI critically engage with empirical studies from different fields ranging from political science to history, law, and anthropology. These are not merely case studies; rather a response to the near-universal questions of dispossession and bordering processes. Both the internal and external border function in tandem and mediate, communicate, and regulate the routine life of dispossessed groups. The contributors highlight how the border organizes them, systematizes their activities, and transforms their experience frames. The border as a constructed and contested space becomes the Nietzschean “will to power”: the majority dominates over the “other” to control the other's life world and the other resists within the dispossession processes.

The South Asian context

The common historical legacies within states in South Asia have an interwoven and complex narrative. The historical and political processes that engendered the region tend to have a shared history, culture, and heritage. The British administrative practice of demarcating boundaries and enumeration signaled a shift of sovereign territorial consolidation, resulting in a specific understanding of the region. The uniqueness of state formation in the South Asian region dictated a particular trajectory of citizenry rights which excluded non-citizens and cultivated a politics of belonging based on nationality (Chowdhory 2018, 43–71). Citizenship emerges as the indispensable factor in rooting a notion of belonging within the contours of the prescribed membership norms in South Asia. The proximity of one's natural and social attributes with the conjured imaginary homogeneity of the nation is fallaciously understood as the primary basis on which belonging is founded. But, interestingly, the state-centric understanding of “belonging” is tied to the idea of membership: citizens who belong to a specific territory are recognized and accepted as members of that state, both politically and legally (Chowdhory 2018). A bifurcation exists between citizens’ “rights and entitlement” [1]. Despite the accommodative tendencies, the issue of membership was defined based on nationality first and, in some rare occasions, through the process of registration (Chowdhory 2007).

The experiences of nation-building of states in South Asia are different than other post-colonial state(s) in Africa and Latin American countries. However, an introspection that is different from the vantage point of the state would reveal that the inculcation of a sense of belonging does not exclusively depend on the state-determined rubric of membership (Chowdhory and Poyil 2021). Due to the process of contestation, fissures were created during the colonial times. The nature of state building in South Asia contributed a typical trajectory of power domination. The causative analysis of forced migration in South Asia (among other factors such as natural disasters, climate change, and development) significantly showcases the negative impacts of post-colonial state-building that attempts to carve homogenous populations by relegating different cultural/ethnic/religious minorities to the margins of the state, forcing them to migrate (Chowdhory 2018). The state-centric views in South Asian countries have constructed boundaries of belonging. The trajectories of state formation were governed by the colonial pronouncement of incompatibility of religious coexistence at the partition time that reverberated and informed every aspect of institution building among states in South Asia.

The functioning capacity of the state had the power to penetrate society, regulate social relations and extract resources (Migdal 1988; Chowdhory 2007 and 2018). As the recent developments show, religious divide overshadows the caste and class conflict. It does not mean that the caste conflict has ended; rather the state deploys human resources to exacerbate religious mobilization. The elites have evoked competing specular political practices to rule by invoking narrative/s of nationalism, border security threats, and risks for the majority population. Borders are part of a colonial product that impacts the postcolonial politics of everyday lives of citizens. van Schendel (2014) asserts that the states in northern South Asia are unique as a result of uncertain sovereignty and “apprehensive territoriality” across borders.¹ The border, the “colonial production of space,” exacerbates the tension between different nations that informs state politics and policies. The state–society relationship is formed by the anxiety of maintaining the border that plays out in the socio-political conflicts and concomitant violence between religious communities. The contemporary South Asian border and internal politics reflect such anxieties (Cons and Sanyal 2013).

The border represents state apparatus, manifested through the idea of nationalism and nationalistic practices. The national space of the border and political economy that includes culture and education showcase such discourses. The narrative of the border has become uni-directional and ossified along a specific perspective that converges on national identity and security risks. The security risk has a historical antecedent in the wider contour of religious identity, which was manifested in colonial India and persists till now. Religious identities play an important role in the post-colonial society, used as a political instrument in perpetuating dominance of the majority group. Religion is a causal factor of dispossession that remains an important aspect within South Asia.

The dispossessed are the product of the sovereign states’ internal politics, and consequent statelessness is part of the dynamics of border politics arising out of socio-political cleavages. Dispossession of citizenship rights unravels the institutional, functional, and symbolic aspect of the border–society–state dialectics. The border as a “discursive landscape” – a “multitude of practices, discourses, narratives, and human relations” – and a “space of tension” is an interconnected political and economic decision produced by “constraints and opportunities, by popular stories and by history, by memories and myths” (Neto, 2016, 2). It is critical in mediating relations between various communities in South Asia. It regulates the geopolitics of the market, bio-politics of labor and displaced people. The border is a liminal space, which manifests, enacts and negotiates power relations between different countries and marginalized communities. It is a place wherein the visible is made invisible i.e. an interstitial space where the power relations between the citizens and the sovereign are conjoined.

The South Asian perspective diverges from the statist and universality approach to inquire into the “othering” processes of border formation, especially the internal border that primarily reflects the social production of differences. The perspective tries to understand histories of the “other” – the local – “deprived of their claim to universality.” The nation states manifested deprivation of “epistemic privilege” flowing from the imbrication of coloniality within modernity. The post-coloniality challenges the universality of border and articulate symbolic, psychological, cultural, and urban boundaries (Mignolo 2012). It unravels unpredictable ways of overlapping, connections, and disconnections which shape forms of domination, exploitation, subjugation, and subordination. As the contributors in the SI assert, border formation is “deeply implicated in the operation of old and new devices of dispossession and exploitation” (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013, viii).

A perspective from below is the starting point for unraveling the shifting focus in understanding the nature of the border and state–society power relationship in the SI. This perspective from below links the border “to the other spaces and processes at the margins of normative and juridical framings of community” (Cons and Sanyal 2013, 6). It compels us to acknowledge historical moments that fostered changes, disruption, discontinuities, and disjuncture. It considers the agents of change that transformed the processes of dispossession by decoding the deep and affiliative structures in operation.

Developing a South Asian perspective is thus a challenging but a pedagogic necessity. The challenge lies in establishing the dialectics of dispossession and more expansive sites of marginality through the “logic of governability” (Chatterjee 2004, 68), where the border formation in the South Asian region is contrived. The border continuously evolved, shaped, and re/shaped the social reality. Capturing the complex processes in the dynamic terrains of different South Asian countries is a daunting task that requires the engagement of an ensemble of academics and institutions. The articles in the SI capture the complex relationship between dispossession and the b/(ordering) processes. Taking dispossession as the central category of analysis, the contributors have examined the layered relationship that demonstrates multiple overlapping subjugations and dispossessions: in security, psycho-social, cultural, political, and economic realms. They have examined the existence, formation, and continuity of external and internal border-engendering conditions of dispossession, deprivation, discrimination, dehumanization, and de-recognition.

Decrypting dispossession

The classical Marxist literature on the capital–labor contradiction is the harbinger of the exposition of labor class dispossession: from means of production, their product, and the self. Dispossession becomes the condition for the collective struggle to counter it. The conditions of dispossession expand beyond the market system into the daily life of people living in urban areas and the production processes in the countryside, especially with the expansion of the market'. The cities are manifesting new forms of dispossessed classes. David Harvey (2014) encapsulates these phenomena in his conceptualization of the “politics of accumulation by dispossession.” The “politics of austerity,” as Harvey argues, engulfs education, social welfare schemes, health, pension benefits, and subsidies to people dispossessed of their means of livelihood, dignity, and rights. The dispossessory factors are entangled within the other capitalist contradictions of race, religion, gender, region, and nation. As he mentions, “labor and housing-market segmentation and segregation along racial, ethnic or other lines, for example, are notoriously pervasive features of all capitalist social formations” (Harvey 2014, 68).

Butler and Athanasiou (2013) re-examine the earlier category of dispossesed to include refugees,, stateless, undocumented migrants, and differing sexual orientations. Scholars have maintained a broad political economy approach to formulate a relational and an interpellative framework to understand dispossession. Both are not causative; instead, they are complementary. This framework helps to understand two aspects of dispossessions: first, the relationality, which deals with psychic subjugation and social attachment to the other by getting dispossessed from the self; the second, “normative and normalizing violence that determines the terms of subjectivity, survival, and livability” aspects of dispossession (Athanasiou, in Butler and Athanasiou 2013, 2). When the former aspect stresses psychic dependence on “the other,” the latter is about imposed “modes of subjugation” by “the other.” While the former is about the loss of self, the latter is about the loss of land, belongingness, citizenship, identity, and livelihood sources. Adopting this framework, the papers in SI unravels deepened relation between borders and dispossession.

The logic of dispossession includes loss of humanity as well as loss of materiality. Dispossession appears to be the irreducible “indivisible remainder” in a refugee's everyday life, for instance. The capitalist order conditions a narrow interpretation of dispossession. There are innumerable means through which procedures and systems of accumulation that are otherwise normalized tend to deprive humans of not just their property but status, rights, and even visibility. Dispossession, to a large extent, incorporates refugeeness, migrancy and subjectivity within a state of exception. The study of migration, refugeehood, and displacement is about polymorphous dispossession and disruption that spiral across time and space. Being dispossessed means that the subjects are disowned and degraded by various normalizing powers active in society. The subjects are differentiated regarding development and under-development of “dislocation and counter-hegemonic subjects” (See Chowdhory and Poyil in the SI). Dispossession in this context means regulated “distribution of vulnerability” imposed through epistemic as well as physical violence, which determines the terms of survival and security among subjects. Dispossession, thus, becomes a dynamic process of effecting disruption into the routine life of subjects of various kinds. It is a “move to the other by the other” (Butler and Athanasiou 2013).

The discussion on the State of Exception is important and it invites an intellectual engagement. The work of Giorgio Agamben (1998) can be applied across a range of disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, especially in relation to the space of exception. The current intellectual vocabulary owes much to Agamben’s intervention through concepts and frameworks such as bare life, the camp and states of exception. The works of Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin (especially in ideas from his Theses on History) express similar concerns. If we look at the work of other scholars such as the anthropologist Michael Taussig, there seem to be significant points of confluence, whether intended or not, between states of exception and states of emergency especially in the context of normal everyday life. These frameworks have become starting points for a range of research and critical exploration of historical, social and political phenomenon (See Chowdhory 2016). The juridical process involves normalization and notions of "exceptions." The state of exception begins with the bare life of vulnerable minorities by forfeiting right as human beings. In the given situation, there are points of confluence, whether intended or not, between states of exception and states of emergency, especially in everyday life. Exceptions can be witnessed at the border crossing, at camps sheltering refugees (Chowdhory and Mohanty 2020), displaced people living in resettlement colonies (Mohanty 2016) and enclaved people residing at the border (Chowdhory and Poyil 2022). The role of the exception is to dispossess the people of their commons: loss of common property (Sanyal 2007) or prevailing informality in the urban economy without providing the basic wage for survival (Chatterjee 2004) or making of the "logistical world" (Neilson, Rossiter, and Samadar 2018) or dispossessing people of their belonging to their nation. The legal rights are suspended and exception becomes an instrument for land acquisition to carry out development for the poor, violence on migrants at the border areas and taking away the autonomy of self-determination resulting in the fluidity of citizenship rights and sense of belongingness. This relational aspect of dispossession, marginality and border appears to be the basic premise for understanding the South Asian perspective. Taking Agambanian framework of exception, many scholars have examined state of exception at the border(lands). For example, Vaughan–Williams (2009) argues that exceptionality is a technique of establishing sovereignty at the border. (Vaughan-Williams 2009). In South Asian case, Verkaaik, Khan, and Rehman (2012) have explored the tribal areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan border as places of exception. The illegibility and invisibility not only manifest at borders, but also in other spaces of exception thus defining the subject-sovereign relations.

Scholars have argued that “borders symbolize the sovereignty of states” (see Khosravi 2010, 2) Borders constitute nation-states, and attempts to re-configure the lives who are residing within. The tales of dispossession reiterate that “nations are fixed in space and marked by their borders (Malkki 1992, 26). However, they also illuminate that the border constitutes a liminal space where power relations are manifested, enacted, and negotiated. It is a place where the visible is clearly discerned; simultaneously the visible is interpellated by the invisible: porosity, migration, illegal trade and sufferings of people residing within the interstitial spaces on both the sides. The marginality is manifested through the “vanishing point” wherein techniques, identities, practices, and power relations are used to regulate and confine activities of those living around the borderlands and beyond. .

In South Asia, South East Asia, and African states, the country of first asylum is very critical for refugees. In South Asia, the country of origin for refugees is culturally or ethnically contiguous to countries they seek asylum to. For instances Rohingya refugees fleeing to Bangladesh to escape the persecution by Burmese government; Sri Lankan Tamils fleeing to Tamil Nadu, India or Afghan refugees Pakistan, an affinity to the host state based on kinship or culture constitites a common idenity due to postcolonial historiography (Chowdhory, Poyil, and Meghna Kajla 2019). While looking for refuge, refugees tend to fall back on this commonality which perpetuates a protracted refugee crisis in the Global South.

In the SI, this aspect of dispossession is examined in Nasreen Chowdhory and Shamna Poyil's article Displacement and Dispossession: Notes from South Asia. The article argues that dispossession appears to be the irreducible “indivisible remainder” in a refugee's everyday life. The deprivation that causes them to undertake forced migration is the tangible outcome of material dispossession of rights as a citizen of the state. The biased global protection framework for refugees inadvertently perpetuates the predicament by providing protection while dispossessing refugees' of their dignity. Chowdhory and Poyil investigate substantively the material dispossession of rights of refugees and address the dispossession of dignity in a normative and metaphysical sense.

The debate on right is crucial for citizens’ existence that constitutes the state's essence. Citizenship gives rights, status, and entitlement to its citizens. It provides outsiders certain rights and benefits; however, South Asia does not have a framework for refugees, stateless, illegal immigrants, etc.

In this context, Meghna Kajla and Nargis Jahan's article, Splinters in the Citizenship of India, Legality, and Social Trauma: National Register of Citizens engages is an ethnographic study to examine the impact of policy dimension on state politics and bureaucratic processes of documentation as a strategy to exclude people of their legal claim. Against this backdrop the authors iillustrate the “experiences of exclusions, dreading loss of citizenship and resultant effects of laws on citizens.”. The work engages in deep ethnographic work on citizenship, documentation, and historical and political conditions of the Assam region. The discourse of dispossession is used to understand experiences of loss of citizenship status due to changing citizenship laws in India.

The global understanding of dispossession cannot be ignored. It impacts the local political economy and sustains external and internal borders by creating geographies of development and underdevelopment areas. Araghi (2009, 14), using the concept of “accumulation by displacement,” brings out the double aspect of “great global enclosure”; which led to the massive dispossession of world peasantries and accumulation of “surplus nature.” The crisis of capitalism is manifested in the crisis of global value relations expressed as "the end of cheap food for people." However, to provide food security, many lands have been colonized and dams have been built for perennial source of water flow for intensive land cultivation. Interrogating development projects and their concomitant consequence would lead us to understand the creation of various kinds of borders: between developed and underdeveloped regions, urban and industrial versus agrarian and underdeveloped areas.

The South Asian region provides an interesting range of sites for exploring the experiences of forced migration caused by development projects, producing internally displaced persons (IDPs). Development projects, such as dams, mining, highway construction, and urban expansion undertaken by private and public enterprises, necessarily lead to displacement and citizens’ subsequent dispossession of materiality and human dignity, mainly of the underprivileged sections. Poverty, loss of land and displacement all become part of the loss of subjectivity. It signifies the submission of the subject to surreptitious expropriations. The dislocated subjects are “put aside” rather than put beside the development. Biswajit Mohanty in his article Border, development and dispossessed agency points out that border studies have focused on the securitisation through surveillance systems, construction, and reconstruction of borders through symbolic tropes. The passivity of agency remains the sub-text in border studies. His research emphasises on a different set of actors – the dispossessed people – produced by the construction of development projects trying to uplift the impoverished, underdeveloped regions and persons that unintentionally became part of the internal border formation. The dominant value of development dispossessed people of their values, freedom, identity and life-sustaining system within the bordered areas of habitation. The article illustrates how the internally dispossessed persons’ contestation of dominant and hegemonic project retained the capacity to reclaim rights to livelihood and thereby transform institutional behavior.

The internal border creates a space of indistinction for refugees. In the piece Geneva Camp, Dhaka: Bihari Refugees, State of Exception and Camouflage, Rajarshri Dasgupta engages with this issue and argues for the necessity to amend this perspective in the light of the existential reality of subaltern refugees in South Asia. Building upon a multi-sited ethnography of low-caste Hindu refugees in India and Urdu-speaking Bihari-Muslim refugees in Bangladesh, the article examines the complexities and lingering impact on the current state of refugees in this region. Taking the case study, the author traces the arcs of migration, prosperity and dispossession in the life histories of an extended family with two households’ characteristic of a particular refugee camp. The author engages with Agamben's conception of “exception” and subsequently charts out the struggle of those families in the urban space by “camouflaging” and “shuffling” their identities thereby destabilizing their selfhood.

Both borders and dispossession must account for rupture and contingencies in the flow of life. Evictions and alienation caused by the expansion of the cantonment area due to the state-centric idea of external and internal security concerns illustrate a rupture in the life of the villagers, mainly belonging to the minority population in Bangladesh. It deterritorialized them and created legal codes that operated against the villagers. Éva Rozália Hölzle in her paper Experiencing Land Loss: Land Dispossession in the Name of National Security in Sylhet District, Bangladesh vividly highlights this aspect in examining the condition of the inhabitants of Ratargul, living next to the Sylhet Cantonment of the Bangladesh Army. Villagers confronting gradual alienation from their land due to the cantonment construction adjoining the settlement are grieved and aggrieved. In their accounts, dukkho (grief) overshadows their anxiety and anger, suggesting that dukkho is not simply an expression of grief over the material loss but pain over the disappearance of life forms. The article suggests that their minority status has led to the non-materialization of their aspiration. They are in a dilemma to fix responsibility on the government or the army of their condition.

Rupture, invisibility, and multiple borders are aptly portrayed in the cinematic and literary fields.In the South Asian context, the literary and cinematic genre produce binaries and visciousness of the other. Cinema as a Discourse on Critical Geopolitics: The Imagery of India–Pakistan Borders in the Narratives of Bollywood Movies by Sanjeev. H. M. and Vaishali Raghuvanshi examines representation of “psychology of cartographic fundamentalism” in Bollywood movies. The paper examines how the film narratives to construct the psychology of border in the “demotic consciousness” of the spectators encourages the psychology of cartographic divide. Such constructions in Hindi films, as the authors argue, is to ingrain the ideological binary of righteous self and the vicious other. This representation has wider ramifications for constructing narratives against refugees and forced migrants by altering the “dialectics of cognitive mapping.”

Samata Biswas’, Fences, goods and “police”: Figurations of the border in Manjira Saha's Chhotoder Border closely reads Manjira Saha's ouvre (Children's Border), which is a collection of children's line drawing and short narratives, collected by Saha from the students of her school situated at the India-Bangladesh borderlands. Samata analyses the linguistic and visual texts collected by Saha in framing of the materiality of the Indo-Bangladesh border. By this artistic representation Saha, the author, contributes to the discourse on the “cultural aspect of borders”. By investigating the “figurations” or tropes/themes present in these border narratives, this article furthers the understanding of discursive construction and circulation of borders in society.

• [1] Nasreen Chowdhory. 2007. “Belonging in Exile and 'home': The Politics of Repatriation in South Asia.” PhD dissertation, McGill University, Montreal, Canada.

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Notes

1 For more discussion see Uddin et al. 2019, 222.