Gurugram, India: Hachette India, 2017. xii, 387 pp. US$20.00, cloth. ISBN 978-93-5195-023-3.
Borders have always remained in India’s public psyche. While the long shadow of partition has made borders a constant presence, wars that India fought with two of its biggest neighbours after independence also played an important role. Borders are also spaces of performance and this is especially true for the borders India shares with Pakistan. However, in recent times, there has been an increased interest in borders beyond such ceremonial aspects and Pradeep Damodaran’s book Borderlands: Travels Across India’s Boundaries is part of that interest. Borderlands, for the author, are spaces of ambiguity where people’s identities are “trapped between two distinct national identities” (vii). His intention was to write a travel book exploring the “unfamiliar and unheard-of border towns in search of an Indian identity” (ix). While this was not an academic project, through this book the author records the personal histories and narratives associated with these borderlands along with his own experience of travelling to these areas.
The book is divided into ten chapters along with a brief introduction. In each chapter, Damodaran recounts his travels to a borderland town or a village, except in chapter 9, where he follows the Indo-Bangladesh border in two places: Taki and Cooch Behar. While the author does not give a chronological account of his travels, his first chapter discusses his visit to Dhanushkodi, the small fishing village in the southern-most corner of India, sharing a sea border with Sri Lanka. Interesting to note here is that the Wikipedia page on Dhanushkodi identifies it as an abandoned town. The author also includes islands, writing two chapters about Minicoy Island (chapter 2) in the Arabian Sea and Campbell Bay (chapter 10) in the Indian Ocean. Both these islands fall under the jurisdiction of two Union Territories of India, Lakshadweep and Andaman and Nicobar Islands respectively. Chapter 3 narrates his travels to Hussainiwala town and frontier villages, located on the border with Pakistan, where he also experienced the beating retreat ceremony on the Hussainiwala border. Chapter 4 describes his journey to Raxaul, the town on the border between India and Nepal in the state of Bihar. Chapter 5 is focused on Gangtok, the capital city of the state of Sikkim that borders China. Since he could not go up to the border, he visited a village whose economy runs on the products legally imported from China. Chapter 6 narrates his travels to Jaigaon, the town located on the Indo-Bhutan border. The peaceful atmosphere he witnessed there was unlike any of the other border towns he had visited. This speaks volumes about India’s relationship with Bhutan and how Jaigaon’s development into a bustling town on the border is intrinsically related with the hydropower dams constructed by India in that country. Chapter 7 describes his stay in Tawang, one of the most important border towns in Arunachal Pradesh and a contested territory between India and China. Apart from his description of Buddhism and its presence in the high-altitude town, the chapter also narrates the horrific experience of people during the India-China War of 1962. Chapter 8 describes his journey to Moreh, the border town between India and Myanmar, in the state of Manipur, and it is one of the most engrossing chapters of the book. This chapter is an illuminating narrative of life on borders, which are not only physical but also social and cultural. The town is inhabited by Tamils, Sikhs, and Nepalis along with local communities such as Meiteis, Kukis, and Manipuri Muslims. How each of these communities came to live in this space where no one used to live tells an interesting story of migration across Southeast Asian borders. This story of moving across borders also resonates with the accounts of people and animals moving across the Indo-Bangla border.
In his book, Pradeep Damodaran accomplishes the mammoth task of compiling personal narratives from such diverse borders. The author does a fine job of narrating personal stories that he heard from people in different borderlands. However, the book lacks a conclusion, which would have made it more interesting, especially for students or researchers interested in borderlands. Despite this, his narratives are helpful in drawing some parallels among these diverse spaces. One such parallel is how these borderlands are spaces of not just physical borders but also sites for the creation of social distinction. The spectacle of the “beating retreat border ceremony” in Hussainiwala is one such example where the performance of soldiers is cheered with loud sloganeering and aggression (99). In Moreh, the emphasis placed by the author’s friends on the comunity elder, who restates that his community settled this borderland town before any other people, is another example of this (287). While the book covers the borderlands from the south, west, east, and northeast of the country, it is interesting to note that there is no story from the northern borderlands of Jammu and Kashmir.
While this book stands out as a unique collection of experiences from borderland spaces, recounting anecdotes of everyday life, the history, and current social-political milieu, I was struck by how the author reiterates certain stereotypes associated with gender throughout this book. The author’s sadness about a burqa-clad woman floating in the water in Minicoy (62), or his descriptions of women’s physical features or behaviour—“Dr. Bhutia with her sculpted features” (173), “a little on the plump side, she had large, attractive eyes” (194), “K.T. seemed a little too solicitous, almost flirtatious” (212), “a petite young woman with a bright smile and a cute dimple on her chin” (242), “pretty Kuki woman” (283), “plump Burmese woman” (294)—reiterate stereotypes that are levelled against woman from a certain religious community or region. His comment of “why I had to pay money for a woman—that too a fully-clothed one—to dance on stage” (217), is very problematic and stands in contradiction with his empathy for the man from Tawang who is harassed for his appearance in a South Indian city (232–233) or with his surprise for being tagged as different with the term “Mayang” (261) in Manipur. While the author sets out with the aim of exploring unfamiliar places in his book, his reiteration of stereotypes, especially against women, leaves a bad taste for the reader.
Parag Jyoti Saikia
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA