Bengal–Bangladesh Borderland: Chronicles from Nadia, Murshidabad and Malda*

Introduction

Borderland studies, particularly in the context of South Asia, are a fairly recent phenomenon. I can think of three works that have made borderlands, particularly the Bengal–Bangladesh borderland as the focal area of their study in the last one decade. Ranabir Samaddar's The Marginal Nation: Transborder Migration from Bangladesh to West Bengal started a trend that was continued by Willem Van Schendel in his The Bengal Borderland: Beyond State and Nation in South Asia. Both these books argue that the border is part of a larger zone or the borderland that at once constructs and subverts the nation. Samaddar goes beyond the security and immutable border discourses and problematizes the borderland by speaking of flows across the border. He argues that such flows are prompted by historical and social affinities, geographical contiguities and economic imperatives. [Page 4]People move when their survival is threatened and rigid borders mean little to the desperate. They question the nation form that challenges their existence. If need be they find illegal ways to tackle any obstacle that stands in their path of moving, particularly when that makes the difference between life and death. Thereby, Samaddar questions ideas of the nation state and national security in present day South Asia when and if it privileges land over the people, who inhabit that land. Van Schendel also takes the argument along similar lines by stating that without understanding the borderland it is impossible to understand the nation form that develops in South Asia, the economy that emerges or the ways in which national identities are internalized. Van Schendel challenges the glib assumption that globalization has done away with borders and also questions the penchant of analysing soci eties, identities and nations as fixed.

Joya Chatterji in Bengal Divided (Chatterji, 2002) argues that to understand the boundary formed by partition one needs to dig beyond received histories. She is of the opinion that one needs to look at Hindu communalism for the act of partition rather than at Muslim communalism. The Radcliffe Line, she says, was not surgically crafted but evolved through other forms of practices. Accepting Joya's arguments about essentials of historical analysis, I have tried to push Samaddar's and Van Schendel's arguments further in my book on Borders, Histories, Existences: Gender and Beyond where I have suggested that borderlands are often sites of exclusion/inclusion in the context of South Asia. This is because there the national will to exclude and include is played out. I analyse how state constructs borders and tries to make them static. This stasis is disturbed by bordered existences, of which women, migrant workers, trafficked bodies and victims of HIV/AIDS are all parts whose survival is carried out within a milieu of endemic violence. The tussle in the borderlands is often on the question of who controls. In this chapter I want to address an issue that I have not addressed previously. I want to look at this notion of flows and how that impacts notions of security. With every election and every census, borders become an issue. I will address the notion of how borders have a penchant of becoming a marker of security. The moment borders become securitized, the question of flows across it acquires particular importance. In the colonial period it is marked by dacoits, thugs and hooligans who cross the district border at will. In the post-colonial period concern remains over undocumented migrants [Page 5]and whether their arrival threatens the nation form. In this chapter I will address the notion of flows and increasing violence in the borders, fencing as the most recent marker of such violence and how women and the evolution of their relationship to the border is shaped through the discourses of violence. I hope to portray that from the beginning violence makes the borders exceptional, albeit this violence may be a continuation from the colonial times, but the processes of state formation have changed the nature of this violence. One of the impacts of this recent form of violence is to reduce the entire question of gender to women's trafficking and obliterating all other forms of violence in the process. I return then to the study of the Bengal–Bangladesh borderlands in the three districts of Nadia, Murshidabad and Malda and look at the nature of the population movement, violence and its effects on women. Instead of meta-narratives, I come back to the question of micro-politics and see whether present-day flows and concomitant violence have any relation to past histories or not and how it impacts the present histories of women.

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