Jungle Passports: Navigating the India-Bangladesh Borderlands

In this edition of Sambandh Scholars Speak, Jahnavi Mukul interviews Malini Sur, Senior Lecturer in Anthropology, Western Sydney University, on her book, Jungle Passports: Fences, Mobility, and Citizenship at the Northeast India-Bangladesh Border, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2021. 

The introduction of the Citizenship Amendment Act and National Register of Citizens in 2019 has brought to the fore questions about unauthorised Bangladeshi migration and created a sense of ‘otherness,’ especially in states like Assam in Northeast India. In Jungle Passports, Sur closely attends to the judicial trials of ‘suspected’ Bangladeshi foreigners and their struggles for legitimacy in Assam’s Foreigners Tribunals (pp.14, pp.145-169).  

Her book carefully follows the construction of India’s new border fence with Bangladesh exploring the lives and livelihoods of border societies. The primary objective of India’s new barrier is to control unauthorized Bangladeshi migration into India and smuggling. Instead of taking India’s new border infrastructure as an end in itself, Sur shows how roads, maps, rice, cattle, garments and identity documents functioned as fences in this region since the 19th century. States labelled the inhabitants of this borderland as “rude savages,” and “frontier land-hungry peasants,” and marked them as spies and traitors (p.13). Jungle Passports shows how people traversed difficult terrains and uncertain climates to sustain their livelihoods and maintain kinship relations.  

In Jungle Passports, Sur explores the mobility and the equilibrium surrounding the lives of the Muslim and Garo Christian communities in these ever-volatile border zones. Six historical and ethnographic chapters provide deep insights into how borders acquire different meanings and how border societies do not fit into the neat divisions of sovereignty, citizenship, and border governance. This book is a must-read to understand border policies and infrastructural developments that affect the everyday lives of people on the margins of Northeast India and Bangladesh. 

 Jahnavi Mukul: Your book showcases how communities along borders have adapted to political limitations and do not necessarily defy state authorities. In terms of a comparative outlook, are there border control systems around the world that have successfully been able to prevent loss of life and livelihood around mobility?

Mobility [across the India-Bangladesh borderlands] is a fundamental attribute of life as people’s claim on land historically precedes present-day national boundaries.

Malini Sur: The similar societies living along the India–Bangladesh border have been separated by colonial and post-colonial boundaries, including the stretches that cut across Northeast India. This borderland comprises societies that are diverse in religious, ethnic, and political composition. For more than two hundred years, societies in this region have resisted the imposition of state rule through armed struggles while simultaneously using the border to make a living. Here, mobility is a fundamental attribute of life as people’s claim on land historically precedes present-day national boundaries. Suspicions inform border lives and livelihoods as people maintain kinship, farm, and trade under the gaze of bureaucrats, politicians, and heavily armed troops. While the violence, deaths, and killings along the US–Mexico, Palestine–Israel, and North Africa–Europe might make more headlines, the India–Bangladesh border also has a long history of militarization.

Border walls and fences are projects of national governance and rule. They aim to keep out undocumented migrants, control border residents and contain political dissidence. But as Peter Andreas reminds us, even robust infrastructures, such as those that divide the U.S.-Mexico border, and border enforcement function as political and symbolic gestures; nation-states struggle to reduce smuggling and unauthorized migration. Not only along the US-Mexico border but globally, border policies spiral dangerous and risky ways of moving people and commodities, and in turn, more militarization. Even as people along the India-Bangladesh border resist and rebel and others refuse to accept state policies surrounding trade and movement, I show how mobility and border-crossings are far more than just a way to circumvent state authorities in people’s lives.

JM: Is there a way for India to reconcile what seems conflicting, such as to protect what it deems sensitive like cows, and simultaneously also grant space to communities on the border to facilitate their daily activities?

MS: Since the 19th century, Hindu nationalists have mobilised cows as a sacred and nationalist symbol while agrarian and pastoral communities rely on cows to make a living. India has one of the highest cattle populations in the world and is among the top five exporters of carabeef globally. The bovine economy is central to low caste Hindu and Muslim cattle workers, butchers, tanners, and others whose lives and livelihoods revolve around the care and killing of these animals. Even after the imposition of a new border with the Partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947, the states of East Pakistan and India and borderland communities had an implicit understanding that cows were a commodity. In times of scarcity and territorial raids, these animals were even more precious as border resources. In Jungle Passports, I have foregrounded the entwining and tension between the sacred and the commodity to show how cattle traffic shapes how people experience prosperity and hunger and determines who will live and who will die. 

Today, electoral politics in India encourage cow vigilantism and violence that impacts the lives and livelihoods of the most powerless people in this commodity value chain. The stakes are high and politically vitiated. But we must also bear in mind that the consumption of beef as both food and ritual is culturally specific and states like Meghalaya, Manipur, Nagaland, and Mizoram do not ban beef. Politicians and communities in Northeast India frequently protest India’s national policies on beef. Given India’s diverse communities, respecting cultural specificities is a good place to start.  

JM: One of the most fascinating aspects of the book is the description of the kinship relations between Garo Christian women and border troops. What is also particularly interesting to read is the way these women are not considered as threats by the Indian Border Security Forces. What role does gender and ethnicity play in creating a perception of certain groups being a danger to territorial integrity?

Gender, ethnicity, and religion determine how Indian and Bangladeshi troops perceive border residents … [for example,] banter between troops and women border-crossers help normalise a heavily militarized border.

MS: Gender, ethnicity, and religion determine how Indian and Bangladeshi troops perceive border residents. It is not only relationships of trust and reciprocity but also banter between troops and women border-crossers that help normalise a heavily militarized border. For far too long, nationalist politics has assumed that all undocumented border-crossings are aimed at taking over India’s territory. The Northeast India–Bangladesh borderland, where indigenous societies make moral claims to shared resources and mobility but not to land as political territory, challenges the taken for granted assumptions about unauthorised migration.

I was especially interested in the life-worlds of borderland Garo matrilineal societies where women have taken a lead in social and economic life, often out of compulsion in contexts of conflicts and scarcity. I have shown how East Pakistan and later Bangladesh’s state national projects of recovery and protection did not extend to include indigenous Garo women who were geographically and socially remote. These women have mobilized border resources and taken risks to circumvent national policies and the control of borders. They continue to challenge gendered norms and hierarchies within the Garo community in Bangladesh and mobilize kinship through their participation in trans-border trade. It is not that border troops do not allow male mobility at all, but politics and media in India and Bangladesh demonise the border-crossings of Muslim and Garo men as “infiltrators” and bootleggers respectively, and this impacts all, including the actions of border troops.

JM: Does the ethnic composition of border communities affect the way their issues are discussed at the governmental level on the Indian and Bangladeshi sides, and what do these communities feel about the effectiveness of these governments’ efforts to control their cross-border mobility? 

MS: Yes, the issues that communities face, including obtaining permission to attend to their farms located across the border, visit families, attend feasts, travel for pilgrimage and religious occasions, partake in small-scale trading, and even to seek hospitalization depend upon their social location and the goodwill and whims of the border troops. Border enforcement policies are experienced via the military outposts where the troops reside.  

In the border zone that I studied, Bengali Muslim householders who live close to the border in Bangladesh’s chars (river islands) belong to Bangladesh’s dominant ethnicity (Bengali) and religion (Islam). In these chars, smuggled cattle are ‘legalized’ and Bangladeshi troops work in close cooperation with villagers. Just across the border from them, in a very similar landscape in Assam, rural societies comprising Muslims of Bengali origin who depend upon the border for a living are treated with suspicion by the Indian state as they are an untrusted religious minority. In Assam, their presence is controversial on account of ethnicity and language; they are suspected to be unauthorized Bangladeshi migrants and older settlers who grabbed land when Bengal and Assam were provinces in British India. Since 2015, the National Register for Citizens—implemented in the state of Assam aimed to detect unauthorized Bangladeshi migrants—with the intention of addressing questions of land loss, language, and ethnic conflicts but has further compounded problems and human misery.

Despite national mandates that demand a clear division between military and civilian spaces, and restricted contact, dependencies straddle demarcated sites [along the borderland between the state of Meghalaya and Bangladesh].

Along the borderland that is divided between the state of Meghalaya in Northeast India and Mymensingh and Netrokona districts in Bangladesh are Garo families who are today Indian and Bangladeshi citizens respectively. Suspected to be communists and persecuted for being non-Muslims, Garo families who came to be displaced from East Pakistan and later Bangladesh crossed the border and relocated to present-day Meghalaya. In Meghalaya, Indian troops have had long-standing relationships of trust and reciprocity with the mostly Christian Garos, also recruiting them for trans-border espionage. Despite national mandates that demanded a clear division between military and civilian spaces and restricted contact, dependencies straddle demarcated sites. Rather than being fleeting, or superficially transactional, such reciprocities were essential to social and moral life in a remote borderland. However, Garo villagers also came to be displaced by India’s border fence construction and were paid little compensation, measured only in terms of the land parcels they lost. In Bangladesh, Christian priests and village elders have relationships of trust with border commanders, especially for the release of undocumented travellers. On account of armed dissident groups seeking refuge in this zone and the increase in abductions, there is far more scrutiny and surveillance; old relationships of trust are gradually eroding on the Indian side.

JM: In Jungle Passports, you locate four elements (ecology, infrastructure, exchanges, and mobility) to foreground life and loss in the borderland. Can you elaborate on this further for us?

Borders shape people’s experience of risk and time as they recalibrate the violence perpetrated by nation-states, and in turn, people reshape the border as vibrant centres of relationality and exchange.

MS: When I first started my fieldwork in the region, I was seeking to explore questions surrounding undocumented labour migration. But soon the complexity and diverse worldviews of this borderland challenged my assumptions about national citizenship and transnational belonging. As an anthropologist seeking to understand societies on their own terms, I refrained from imposing easy categories and instead worked from the ground up. The four elements—infrastructure (fences, roads, border posts, and associated construction but also rice and cows); ecology (forests, hills, rivers, animal-human relationships); exchanges (trade, banter and smuggling); and above all mobility (movement between and across of goods, people, and animals)— form an enmeshed ‘force of life’ which Jungle Passports illustrates. Set against violence and militarization, I bring questions of vitality and the political salience of borders to bear upon scholarly understandings on mobility. Borders shape people’s experience of risk and time as they recalibrate the violence perpetrated by nation-states, and in turn, people reshape the border as vibrant centres of relationality and exchange.

About the author:

Dr. Malini Sur is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and Sociology at Western Sydney University. She is an environmental and socio-cultural anthropologist with research interests in India, Bangladesh and Australia. She studies agrarian borderlands, cities and the environment. A first line of inquiry is concerned with infrastructures, transnational flows, and identities. The second explores the relationship that degraded air and mobility has to urban space. She also investigates the afterlives of natural disasters, shifting ecologies, air pollution, and climate change in Asia and more recently in Australia. She studies these themes historically and in productive dialogue with human rights discourses, along with keen attention to visual representation.