Chapter 18 - Journeys and Myths: Transcending Boundaries in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island

Summary

A traveler, unlike the tourist, goes beyond the confines of boundaries. These boundaries can be actual or metaphorical, or more or less man-made constructs— some geopolitical, some social, and some psychological. Hence, the very act of traveling or crossing borders and traversing boundaries is often related to meaningmaking. It becomes a site where multiple semantic possibilities are produced, giving access to various ways of thinking and interpretation. The idea of crossing boundaries and borders, for that matter, can have several inferences—from visiting, learning to relocating to challenging its stifling and limiting sociopolitical agendas and agencies. As Culbert (2019: 346) puts it, travel reflects “both powerful vested interests and myriad alternative possibilities of resistance and contestation.” Social scientists and geographers (cultural and political) are of the view that borders since they also create differences, are more like processes because they help us to understand how the differences, thus created, are established and renegotiated. In his essay, “Boundaries, Inequalities, and Legitimacies: A Conceptual Framework for Border Studies Collaboration,” Bernd Bucher (2018: 12) sees, “borders and boundaries as a process, rather than as any kind of static entities, they are never ontologically implicated, that is, they do not begin by merely ‘existing’ as entities, rather, they are continuously drawn and redrawn: in a constant state of becoming over time, they in fact precede nation states.” Andrew Abbott (2001: 263) further elaborates this idea by pertinently commenting, “These points us towards boundaries and borders as processes (rather than stable and natural things) that constitute and relate ‘things’ as functions of their performance: ‘Social entities […] come into existence when social actors tie social boundaries together in certain ways. Boundaries come first, then entities’.” It will be useful, at this juncture, to first understand the difference between the two terms,

The border is a political concept, which identifies the territorial limits of the state and beyond where movement is limited to those with the necessary permits and documents. The boundary is a looser term, which signifies the territorial margins of the state, ref lecting other social and ethnic characteristics of the population on either side.