Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-q99xh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T10:54:58.593Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2019

MALINI SUR
MALINI SUR*
Affiliation:
Western Sydney University Email: m.sur@westernsydney.edu.au
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 53 , Special Issue 3: Marginal Hubs: Conviviality Beyond the Urban Centre in Asia , May 2019 , pp. 846 - 873
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

Acknowledgements: I thank the participants and organizers of the Social Science Research Council's Fifth Inter-Asian Conference, the ‘Shifting Significations of Borders in Contemporary South Asia and the Americas’ seminar co-organized by the Department of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University and the Anthropology Colloquium, Macquarie University. I especially thank Madeleine Reeves, Magnus Mardsen, Itty Abraham, Yasmin Cho, and Kavita Punjabi. I am grateful to Eli Elinoff, George Jose, Rakesh Kumar, and the Modern Asian Studies reviewers for their valuable suggestions.

References

1 Federally recruited troops known as the Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) and the Indian Border Security Forces (BSF) patrol the India-Bangladesh border.

2 See Gregory, Christopher, ‘Exchange and Reciprocity’, in the Companion Encyclopaedia of Anthropology: Humanity, Culture and Social Life, (ed.) Ingold, Tim (Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2013)Google Scholar.

3 Baud, Michiel and van Schendel, Willem, ‘Towards a Comparative History of Borderlands’, Journal of World History 8, no. 2 (1997), pp. 211–242CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cons, Jason, ‘Narrating Boundaries: Framing and Contesting Suffering, Community, and Belonging along the India-Bangladesh Border’, Political Geography 35 (2013), pp. 37–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Sur, Malini, ‘Divided Bodies: Crossing the India-Bangladesh Border’, Economic and Political Weekly 46, no. 13 (2014), pp. 31–35Google Scholar; Jones, Reece, Border Walls: Security and the War on Terror in the United States, India, and Israel (London: Zed Books, 2012)Google Scholar; ‘“Trigger Happy”: Excessive Use of Force by Indian Troops’, Human Rights Watch, New York, December 2010, https://www.hrw.org/report/2010/12/09/trigger-happy/excessive-use-force-indian-troops-bangladesh-border, [accessed 21 November 2018].

5 Sahlins, Marshall, ‘What Kinship is (Part One)’, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17, no. 1 (March 2011), p. 14CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Cartsen, Janet, ‘What Kinship Does—and How’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3, no. 2 (2013), pp. 245–251Google Scholar.

7 Chatterji, Joya, ‘The Fashioning of a Frontier: The Radcliffe Line and Bengal's Border Landscape, 1947–52’, Modern Asian Studies 33, no. 1 (1999), pp. 221–224CrossRefGoogle Scholar; van Schendel, Willem, The Bengal Borderland: Beyond State and Nation in South Asia (London: Anthem Press, 2005), pp. 46–47Google Scholar; Das, Veena, Life and Worlds: Violence and Descent into the Ordinary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), pp. 7–8Google Scholar.

8 Das, Veena, Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 63–64Google Scholar, 67.

9 van Schendel, The Bengal Borderland, pp. 96–97.

10 Nowicka, Magdalena and Vertovec, Steven, ‘Comparing Convivialities: Dreams and Realities of Living-with-difference’, European Journal of Cultural Studies 17, no. 4 (2014), pp. 342CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 352.

11 Overing, Joanna and Passes, Alan, ‘Introduction: Conviviality and the Opening up of Amazonian Anthropology’, in The Anthropology of Love and Anger: The Aesthetics of Conviviality in Native Amazonia, (eds) Overing, Joanna and Passes, Alan (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 1–30Google Scholar.

12 Amin, Ash, Land of Strangers (London: Polity Press, 2012)Google Scholar.

13 Gilroy, Paul, ‘Multiculture in Times of War’, Critical Quarterly 48, no. 4 (2006), pp. 27–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Bunnell, Tim and Kathiravelu, Laavanya, ‘Extending Urban Liveability: Friendship and Sociality in the Lives of Low-Wage Migrants’, International Development Planning Review 38, no. 2 (2016), pp. 212–213CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ye, Junjia, ‘Spatialising the Politics of Coexistence: Gui Ju (规矩) in Singapore’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 41, no. 1 (January 2016), p. 92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Illich, Ivan, Tools for Conviviality (London: Boyers, 1973), pp. 17–18Google Scholar, 32.

16 Mauss, Marcel, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies (New York: Norton, 1990)Google Scholar.

17 Nyamnjoh, Francis B. and Brudvig, Ingrid, ‘Conviviality and the Boundaries of Citizenship in Urban Africa’, in The Routledge Handbook on Cities of the Global South, (eds) Parnell, Susan and Oldfield, Sophie (New York and London: Routledge, 2014), pp. 341Google Scholar, 343, 348.

18 Vigneswaran, Darshan, ‘Protection and Conviviality: Community Policing in Johannesburg’, European Journal of Cultural Studies 17, no. 4 (2014), p. 484CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Beverly, Eric Lewis, ‘Frontier as Resource: Law, Crime, and Sovereignty on the Margins of Empire’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 55, no. 2 (2013), pp. 242–243Google Scholar.

20 Jones, Reece, ‘Spaces of Refusal: Rethinking Sovereign Power and Resistance at the Border’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 102, no. 3 (2011), pp. 685–699CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Cons, Jason, Sensitive Space: Fragmented Territory at the India-Bangladesh Border (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2016), pp. 20–22Google Scholar.

22 On the Indian side of the border there are currently 1,200 outposts with plans for an additional 508. See http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/India-Bangladesh-to-set-up-more-border-outposts/article14512271.ece, [accessed 27 November 2018].

23 Mauss, The Gift.

24 See Sahlins, Marshall, Stone Age Economics (Chicago: Adline Anterton, 1972), pp. 165–168Google Scholar.

25 Yan, Yunxiang, The Flow of Gifts: Reciprocity and Social Networks in a Chinese Village (California: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 223–224Google Scholar, 226.

26 Baruah, Sanjib, India Against Itself: Assam and the Politics of Nationality (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

27 John Kelly, ‘Co-Existence: Nehru's Anthropology, Bandung, and the Fate of Highland Asia’, Paper read at the Department of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University, 10 September 2013.

28 Karlsson, Bengt G., Unruly Hills: Nature and Nation in India's Northeast (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2011), pp. 158–159Google Scholar. For a detailed discussion on landholdings in the Garo Hills, see Kar, Parimal Chandra, Glimpses of the Garos (Tura: Garo Hills Book Emporium, 1982), pp. 47–83Google Scholar.

29 On the impact of partition and 1964 in northern Mymensingh, see Bal, Ellen, They Ask if We Eat Frogs: Garo Ethnicity in Bangladesh (Singapore: ISEAS, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 Sur, Malini, ‘Battles for the Golden Grain: Paddy Soldiers and the Making of the Northeast India-East Pakistan Border (1930–1970)’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 58, no. 3 (2016), pp. 804–832CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 Ibid., p. 828.

32 Interviews with D. S. Marak and T. Marak, former members of the Kader Bahini, who relocated to Meghalaya in 1977 and are still living there as Indian citizens, by Malini Sur, Tura, Meghalaya, India, 20–21 October 2007.

33 Interviews with N. Marak and F. Marak, Haluaghat, Mymensingh, Bangladesh, 30 December 2007 and 2 January 2008. Interviews conducted by the author.

34 Walker, Andrew, The Legend of the Golden Boat: Regulation Trade and Traders in the Borderlands of Laos, Thailand, China and Burma (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1999), pp. 111Google Scholar, 162.

35 Sur, Malini, ‘Bamboo Baskets and Barricades: Gendered Landscapes at the India-Bangladesh Borderlands’, in Transnational Flows and Permissive Polities: Ethnographies of Human Mobility in Asia, (eds) Kalir, B. and Sur, M. (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2012), pp. 138–141Google Scholar.

36 Menon, Ritu and Bhasin, Kamla, ‘Recovery, Rupture, Resistance: Indian State and Abduction of Women during Partition’, Economic and Political Weekly 28, no. 17 (April 1993), pp. WS2–WS11Google Scholar, 6, 10–11.

37 Zamindar, Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (New Delhi: Viking, 2008), p. 238Google Scholar.

38 Reeves, Madeleine, ‘Roads of Hope and Dislocation: Infrastructure and the Remaking of Territory at a Central Asian Border’, Ab Imperio 15, no. 3 (2014), pp. 248–249Google Scholar.