A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Experiences of Borderland Realities

Yoda Press has published and launched the South Asia edition of Sahana Ghosh’s groundbreaking book A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security across the Bangladesh-India Borderlands in Kolkata and Delhi, India recently.

Focusing on mobility, security and migration, the book talks about the existence and militarization of the friendly border between India and Bangladesh, revolving around the lived experiences of the people who have always dwelled, existed as well as survived between and across these borders.

A social anthropologist, Dr. Sahana Ghosh is broadly interested in forms and experiences of inequality produced through the intersection of mobility, policing, and gender in the contemporary world. She uses ethnography and feminist approaches to study a range of concerns, such as: borders and borderlands, the mobility of people and goods, citizenship, refuge and neighborliness, the national security state, agrarian change, spatial history, transnational kinship, and the political economy of gendered labor.

 Dr Ghosh’s first book, book A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security across the Bangladesh-India Borderlands, chronicles the slow transformation of a connected region into national borderlands and shows the foundational place of gender and sexuality in the meaning and management of threat and security in relation to mobility.

Talking about her book, Dr Ghosh said: “Stories like that of Shefali’s archive the life of the India-Bangladesh border – not as political events or decisions in distant place, but very real openings and closures in time and space witnessed in the borderlands. In writing this book, I have been committed to centering such lived experiences, histories, and analyses of what bordering had been and could be, from the point of view of borderland residents on both Indian and Bangladeshi sides. Writing the book has been humbling and rewarding: I show that gender relations are central to border security and migration regimes in South Asia not only because of the effect they have on differently gendered bodies, but also in the way in which they shape masculinities and femininities in communities and nations.”

Drawing on a decade of fieldwork in the borderlands of northern Bangladesh and eastern India, A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security Across the Bangladesh-India Borderlands (U California Press, 2023) chronicles the slow transformation of a connected region into national borderlands and shows the foundational place of gender and sexuality in the meaning and management of threat in relation to mobility. It recasts a singular focus on border fences and border crossings to show, instead, that bordering is an expansive and accumulative reordering of relations of value. Devaluations–of agrarian land and crops, borderland youth undesirable as brides and grooms in their respective national hinterlands, disconnection of regional infrastructures, and social and physical geographies disordered by surveillance–proliferate as the costs of militarization across this ostensibly “friendly” border. Through a textured ethnography of the gendered political economy of mobility across a postcolonial borderlands in South Asia, this ambitious book challenges anthropological understanding of the violence of bordering, migration and citizenship, and transnational inequalities that are based on Euro-American borders and security regimes.

“The everyday experiences of bordering as a thousand tiny cuts – and as they have changed over the 70 years since the origin of the border with Partition – tell a story of the violence of bordering between India and Bangladesh which is very different from the mainstream political discourses in both countries. If we are to understand the growing polarization within India and Bangladesh as well as the tensions between India and Bangladesh, this book about the borderlands realities of intimate relations, gender relations, agrarian economies, and citizenship is vital,” concluded Dr Ghosh.

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Excerpt

IN BETWEEN COMINGS AND GOINGS/JAWA ASHAR MAJHE




You see, in our family we don’t know whether we’re coming

or going—it’s all my grandmother’s fault. But, of course, the

fault wasn’t hers at all: it lay in language. Every language

assumes a centrality, a fixed and settled point to go away

from and come back to, and what my grandmother was

looking for was a word for a journey which was not a coming

or a going at all; a journey that was a search for precisely that

fixed point which permits the proper use of verbs of

movement.

—Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines




If Kader’s words portray the experience of the border as a curse, growing up, Shefali Barman experienced the same border as a promise. But promises, like the language of direction (as Amitav Ghosh’s narrator discovers), are treacherous paths. As a Hindu woman marrying into an Indian border village close to her natal family in Bangladesh, her cross-border marriage was forged with the promise of mobility but failed to live up to that promise. Close in age, we spoke frankly about family and feeling left out. One hot afternoon we lay on her bed, fanning ourselves and chatting about my upcoming travel to Bangladesh. Shefali wrung a promise out of me to visit her brothers’ families so that I could hear directly from them, her boudis and nieces and nephews, how beloved she was to them. She sat up very straight, beads of sweat around her mouth as she spoke. “Hay re, Sahana, tor ki moja. Pakhir moto ghure berash. [What fun you have, Sahana! You wander about like a bird.] I married into India out of greed for the melas [fairs] and now I’m stuck . . . no jawa-asha [coming and going] for me.”




In contrast to what appeared to be my unhindered travels, Shefali drew attention to her own loss of mobility. Married at twenty, widowed at twenty-three with an infant, Shefali continued to live with her in-laws in Putimari, a border village neighboring Kathalbari. In 2014, she was particularly upset that she couldn’t cross the border to attend a nephew’s riceeating ceremony in the nearby Bangladeshi border village of Boraibari. The circuitous path that Shefali usually took between Putimari and Boraibari, across an unfenced portion of the border, was closed at that time due to a newly stationed BSF patrol there. All her natal family would be gathered in her brother’s house on this occasion, and the pain of being unable to attend was evident on Shefali’s face. Shefali desired not simply to be on one side or the other—she wanted a transnational life of continued jawa-asha. She found, instead, that she had to navigate belonging to unequal places, unequally.




“Did you really marry for the melas?” I asked.

My question seemed to bring Shefali’s usual good cheer back right away

and she nodded with a chuckle.

In my childhood, our father or older brothers would take my sisters and me to the Rash Mela in Cooch Behar and smaller melas during Durga Puja and Rathjatra in Dinhata.10 You see, it was no fun being Hindu in Bangladesh— but each time we would come here [West Bengal, India], we would see that so many women, so many families, Hindu and Muslim, who would come to these melas, traveling to them from different places and enjoying them till late at night. . . . The border was open in those years [through the 1990s], and the distance between Boraibari and Dinhata was not very much. Jawaasha was very easy, and when it was necessary we occasionally stayed a night or two at relatives’ homes. Then we would return to Bangladesh with toys, new dresses, and sweets.




With two paternal aunts married in the same area of Cooch Behar district, Shefali had also grown up as a witness to the ease of their jawa-ashaacross this international border. One of her older sisters had also married into an Indian border village. Having traveled these cross-border routes herself, she was agreeable to the proposal of marriage she received, with the reassurance that it was close enough within the borderland for her to visit frequently. She recalled that the excitement of the wedding for everyone included feasts on both sides and journeys accomplished clandestinely. “Truly an international affair,” she laughed, underlining the local importance of that event. Shefali’s deep disappointment with her immobility is thus made sharper in contrast to the memories of these crossborder journeys of her childhood and her expectations based on those experiences.




Shefali experienced the border as open through the 1990s. India’s construction of the border fence was underway along some parts, but not in this region. At the time of her marriage there was a fence, though it was not as formidable as the current version and border security practices were not so rigid. The variability of the border’s closure at any given time became even more clear as Shefali bemoaned that her sister would likely be able to attend the rice-eating ceremony by crossing as she usually did: her husband’s family had land in the area between the border fence and the border, so she typically deposited her identity document at a gate on the border fence and went through. On this pretext of going to her land, she would make a quick trip across the border to their brother’s house, which was located right by the border, and return before the gates closed for the day.




Shefali sat up again, struck by a new idea. She wondered if she should try to join her sister. She had, of course, visited her sister numerous times, but never attempted to cross the border at the fence there. I accompanied her the next day on this journey to meet her sister at the BSF checkpoint by the fence gate. At the checkpoint, the BSF soldiers on duty inspected Shefali’s and her sister’s voter identity cards and informed them that holders with addresses not in that village required special permission to be allowed through. “She’s my sister, she’s come to visit me, we will go together and come back together,” pleaded Shefali’s sister. The soldiers refused, simply shaking their heads in silence. Shefali was trembling visibly, crestfallen and fearful of an argument with the guards. Hopes dashed, the two sisters consulted in whispers, and decided that Shefali’s sister would go through and bring the gathered family right up to the fence at a point between the BSF patrols, and Shefali would see them and talk with them through the fence for as long as possible. Shefali swallowed back her tears as we marched down the border road (fig. 10). It felt like a defiant act because the BSF strictly control civilian use of this road, which is monopolized for guarding the fence and movement of security force personnel and their vehicles, even though it was built by the Public Works Department. After what felt like a long time, I could see an elderly woman in a white sari running toward the fence through the bare harvested fields. We stopped walking and waited, facing Bangladesh, breathing on the concertina wire that filled the space between the two rows of metal frames strung with barbed wire.

10. 10. Shefali marches down the border road, prohibited for civilian use without permission from the BSF—a defiant act in itself.

I turned away, keeping a watchful eye out for BSF soldiers who might come along patrolling the road on their bicycles. Soon, the larger group of sisters-in-law, nieces, and nephews joined up with Shefali’s mother, and a frantic and tearful exchange of news took place. “Please go for another round for five minutes,” I requested the young BSF constable who had cycled up, clearly understanding what was going on. “You people hurry up, if my superior comes around by chance and sees this, I will be in trouble,” he said nervously. I was surprised at how obliging he was. The voices, briefly paused, resumed as he cycled away slowly. I looked on from the side, as this group of women and children spoke excitedly. Shefali complimented the children on their nice outfits, new ones on the occasion of the rice-eating ceremony. Even through her tears she managed to squeeze out a wry joke: “Amar sharee ta paona roilo [a sari is still owed to me].”




The exchange was difficult to follow—bits of the lunch menu, news of Shefali’s school friends, messages from guests at the family celebration pushed through the barbed wire, like pieces of a puzzle through a sieve. “Look after our girl,” said one of Shefali’s sisters-in-law to me. “We know there are a lot of rights and laws for women in India, but we don’t want any of that. We just want her to be happy, to feel she has her rightful place. And she should be able to come to visit.” Another barb, marking out the difference of jurisdictions, underlining the hierarchy of neighbors.

 

11. 11. Shefali meets her Bangladeshi natal family across the border fence, while I (Sahana Ghosh) am keeping a watch out for the patrolling BSF soldier.

The constable was spotted cycling back again, waving agitatedly. And so, the intense meeting ended abruptly. Both groups turned away from the barbed wire to walk back into India and Bangladesh.
Images: Sahana Ghosh, Yoda Press (Book Cover)