6. Bamboo Baskets and Barricades Gendered Landscapes at the India-Bangladesh border

Sur, Malini

doi:10.1515/9789048515875-009

Cited by 10 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…Diverse fiscal practices and the diffusion of political authorities in border zones structure sustenance and confer meaning to life and social legitimacies (Flynn 1997; Walker 1999; Chalfin 2001; Das and Poole 2004; Roitman 2004, 2005; van Schendel 2005; van Schendel and Abraham 2005; Ghosh 2011; Sur 2012). Villagers on both sides of the India‐Bangladesh border felt that cattle smuggling generated employment and prosperity; in fact, everyone I spoke with believed that the business of cattle smuggling had reduced rustling and theft.…”

Section: Cattle Rustling and Border‐makingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Time at Its Margins: Cattle Smuggling across the India-Bangladesh Border

Sur

2020

Cult. Anthropol.

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This article resituates the study of time in anthropology, moving it from the comparative exploration of internally coherent religions and national territories to the very margins of religions, nations, and capital. Borders recalibrate time by imbuing mundane economic activities with political salience. Dangerous border crossings make temporal registers contingent and erratic, and generative of violence and torture. I show how India’s prohibitions on live cattle exports and Bangladesh’s demand for beef compel acts that effectively legalize animal smuggling, which, nonetheless, remains a risky business. Across the riverine islands of the India-Bangladesh borderlands, small-scale traders and transporters operate according to the distinct logics of militarized infrastructures and legal regimes that generate moments of “signal clear,” marking the temporary opening of border passages and opportunities for sustenance, as well as “armed” times, more sustained periods of heightened national security, and imminent violence. By subjecting the border’s productive and coercive temporal energies to close ethnographic scrutiny, I suggest that cattle’s sacrality reinforces the material world of capital and strife, ruptures kinship ties, and subjects Muslim cattle workers and their families to prolonged periods of scarcity and hunger. This article shows how people’s experiences of the borderland as a space are vitally shaped by fractured, shifting, and contingent rhythms of time.

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Section: Cattle Rustling and Border‐makingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Time at Its Margins: Cattle Smuggling across the India-Bangladesh Border

Sur

2020

Cult. Anthropol.

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“…Outposts function as informal immigration checkpoints and travel is prevented during high-security alerts. 35 As a Christian villager, schoolteacher, and tailor, Mary has had contact with the nearest outpost since its construction in the early 1990s. Like other villagers, she willingly lent her possessions to the outpost.…”

Section: Cycles Of Convivialitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Danger and Difference: Teatime at the northeast India-Bangladesh border

Sur

2019

Mod. Asian Stud.

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This article asks what can be learned about affinity and alterity by considering how villagers and state troops collectively live in remote and often dangerous borders. Situating this question along South Asia's longest international boundary—the India-Bangladesh border—I query the political possibilities of conviviality that bear upon altering notions of reciprocity, exchange, and trust, and which have not attracted the attention of either urban or border scholars. I argue that reciprocal webs of exchange brought Garo matrilineal kinship and Christian religiosity into relations with seemingly impersonal worlds of state control and border rule. The exchange of valued domestic objects, and the broader set of political and gendered affinities that surrounded these, are evidence of the border's changing role and temporality in mitigating difference and danger. Although these relations are embedded in the history of border-making in the Garo Hills, recent national security measures and border infrastructures have disrupted prior exchanges. These have disembedded the troops from their immediate rural environment in attempts to contain trans-border relationships.

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“…A partially fenced militarized border allows for continuous population flows across the Indo-Bangladesh border. Borders and fences, as Sur (2012: 148) observes, ‘counterintuitively induce transnational spatial practices and propel regions and people to be more interconnected’. The research participants ‘transgressed’ various borders either ‘unknowingly’ or without ‘full’ knowledge of what it entailed.…”

Section: The Indo-bangladesh Border and The Criminalization Of Mobilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Borders: A view from ‘nowhere’¹

Mehta

2016

Criminology & Criminal Justice

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Borders separating two states are the markers of inequality in terms of gender as well as in terms of other intersecting social locations of marginalization and discrimination. Mobile populations generate cartographic anxieties for the keepers of these borders who, in turn, respond by increasingly criminalizing unwanted border crossing. While mainstream criminology has historically focused on matters of exclusion, integration and identity, discussion of its relation to borders and more specifically, 'gendered borders' has been oblique. This article presents the narratives of young Bangladeshi women, detained in Kolkata, India under the Foreigners Act (1946), on borders and border crossings, bringing into the discussion women's understandings of their 'transgressions' in relation to normative and androcentric paradigms of state sovereignty and border control. It connects the newly emerging body of work on the criminalization of mobility with feminist theorizations and methodologies for an empirical understanding of the lived experiences of those subject to practices of border control. By focusing on the narratives of Bangladeshi women imprisoned in India for infractions against the sanctity of the Indo-Bangladeshi border, the article provides an insight into how everyday border crossings can be framed and understood differently, in juxtaposition to dominant rationales underpinning criminalization discourses.

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6. Bamboo Baskets and Barricades Gendered Landscapes at the India-Bangladesh border

Cited by 10 publications

References 0 publications

Time at Its Margins: Cattle Smuggling across the India-Bangladesh Border

Time at Its Margins: Cattle Smuggling across the India-Bangladesh Border

Danger and Difference: Teatime at the northeast India-Bangladesh border

Borders: A view from ‘nowhere’¹

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6. Bamboo Baskets and Barricades Gendered Landscapes at the India-Bangladesh border

Cited by 10 publications

References 0 publications

Time at Its Margins: Cattle Smuggling across the India-Bangladesh Border

Time at Its Margins: Cattle Smuggling across the India-Bangladesh Border

Danger and Difference: Teatime at the northeast India-Bangladesh border

Borders: A view from ‘nowhere’1

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Borders: A view from ‘nowhere’¹