Ethnography of Political Violence. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. x, 215 pp. (Maps, B&W photos.) US$30.00, ebook. ISBN 9780812297768.
Historically, the Great Divide of 1947 gave birth to India and Pakistan, and also initiated one of the largest processes of human displacements in the twentieth century. Around 2 million people became homeless or refugees during the partition of 1947. The partition of the Indian subcontinent created one of the deadliest, most violent, sensitive, and chaotic borders in the world.
Jungle Passports by Malini Sur makes a significant contribution to the literature on borderlands of Bangladesh and India. These two countries share a common border of more than 4,000 kilometres. India has completed almost 3,120 kilometres of fencing to prevent illegal migration from Bangladesh.
Sur explains some of the issues of life and death along the construction of one of the world’s longest and most highly militarized border walls. She conducted ethnographic fieldwork in the border areas of the northeast Indian states of Assam and Meghalaya and the five bordering districts of Kurigram, Sherpur, Jamalpur, Mymensingh, and Netrokona in Bangladesh from 2007 to 2015. Sur used a great deal of research material from archival and historical sources and relied on both primary and secondary sources of data. She argues that border walls and fences are perennially unfinished projects of national governance and political rule. Borderlands are areas of relationality, sustenance, profit, fear, scarcity, uncertainty, cooperation, conflict, violence, resources, legality, illegality, exchange, and dependency. The functioning of borders is portrayed as an “assembly of life force” (8).
The existing discourse on the subject doesn’t adequately capture the complexity of moving, settling, making a living, dying, and grieving that divided the lives of border people. The strength and intrigue of Sur’s book are in its focus on the arbitrariness of border formation, citizenship issues, and especially its careful nuance and discussion of peripheral peoples. The book aims to explain four key elements—ecologies, infrastructures, exchanges, and mobilities—which, she observes, “shape the force of life and loss at the Northeast India-Bangladesh border” (6). India always maintains a militarized gaze in the conflict-ridden and insurgency-prone seven states—Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Meghalaya, Manipur, Mizoram, Nagaland, and Tripura—of its northeastern landlocked region for its greater security and geo-strategic concerns.
The book is organized into six chapters, the first of which elucidates the ongoing infrastructural activities along the Roumari-Tura Road, a broken asphalt-and-mud road connecting Roumari, Bangladesh with Tura, a town in the state of Meghalaya, northeast India. Kurigram is one of the poorest and most affected by floods border districts in Bangladesh. Riverbank erosion and poverty still remain the biggest factors for human dislocation and resettlement in the region. A large majority of the people are dependent on rivers for their economic sustenance and livelihood opportunities.
Chapter 2 demonstrates that even before the construction of physical barriers like fences and walls, some material objects such as rice, garments, cows, and identity papers were used as fences and boundaries. Border peasants were sometimes subject to police control and rice was heavily “militarized, controlled and policed in the interests of early postcolonial territory making” (53). A mutual partnership of convenience between the border peasants and the police was observed to gain control over the border.
In subsequent chapters, Sur provides a thorough and rich account of the lucrative business of cow smuggling, a mostly a male-dominated enterprise with a good level of understandings among politicians, traders, and brokers. It is a major bone of contention between the borders of Bangladesh and India. Previous studies demonstrate that around 1,236 Bangladeshi citizens were killed by India’s border security force (BSF) in the decade between 2000 and 2020 and most of the victims were Bangladeshi cow traders.
At the northeast India-Bangladesh border, fear and reverence, along with the inclusion of troops as an integral part of border societies, had historically ensured that the risk of death was lessened. Issues of kinship, ethnicity, and identity at the border are equally important in determining the nature of cross-border ties and socio-cultural relationships. Chapter 6 shows that in Assam, Muslims are often suspected as illegal Bangladeshi immigrants, smugglers, noncitizens, and outsiders. This is due mainly to the political ascendency of India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi who is an ardent advocate of Hindu nationalism and communal politics. Since 2015, the National Registers of Citizens (NRC) has been aimed to detect unauthorized Bangladeshi migrants. The NRC has accordingly excluded 1.9 million people from Indian citizenship in Assam. The NRC is, no doubt, a heavily bureaucratic and politically motivated programme that is antithetical to basic human rights and democratic principles. The question of unauthorized migration is, at the same time, related to land loss and conflicts over ethnolinguistic identities. Illegal migration has thus been securitized and blended with growing xenophobic discourse in Indian politics.
Notwithstanding, the book has a number of drawbacks. The first lies in the book’s organization and structure. It is difficult for a common reader to locate and understand the main arguments. Second, there is a paucity of a compelling discussion on the theoretical-conceptual dimensions of a border and border studies. The meanings and applications of the concept of border, borderlands, frontiers, border regions, and boundaries are interchangeably used but these terms are, in most cases, ambiguous in the literature. Sur could make a systematic attempt to explore the definitional and conceptual difficulties of borderlands, as it is not obvious as to how the book contributes to border studies theory. Sur could have spelled out her theoretical contribution along with a clear-cut direction of future research agenda on the topic. Given the theoretical state of borderland studies, however, I would argue that some kind of methodological pluralism might abridge the existing gaps in analytical frameworks, concepts, and models by employing both qualitative and quantitative evidence. Finally, Sur missed the opportunity to generate insight in regard to border adjacent people’s perceptions on the shoot-to-kill policy employed by India’s BSF at the Bangladesh-India border.
Despites the above quibbles, the book will certainly appeal to a number of scholars, particularly political scientists, geographers, sociologists, economists, anthropologists, historians, environmentalists, journalists, and international relations experts who study borders, as well as students, particularly graduate students, as it is a fantastic scholarship on the Northeast India-Bangladesh border.
Saleh Shahriar
North South University, Dhaka