Kalyani Ramnath is a historian of modern South Asia, interested in researching and teaching legal history, histories of migration and displacement, transnational and global history, and questions of archival method. Her first book, ‘Boats in a Storm: Law, Migration, and Decolonization in South and Southeast Asia 1942 – 1962’ was published with Stanford University Press in August 2023. From July 2024, she will be the Assistant Professor of History at Columbia University.
Sahana Ghosh is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the National University of Singapore. She uses ethnography and feminist approaches to study militarized bordering, the politics of citizenship and neighborliness, the national security state, agrarian change, and the political economy of gendered labor. Her first book, ‘A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security Across the Bangladesh-India Borderlands’ (University of California Press 2023 / Yoda Press 2024) and a range of academic and public writing center on borders and borderlands, gender and migration, and national security regimes in South Asia. She is currently researching work and value of soldiering in India and the transnational governance of labor migration through the prism of Bangladesh.
Kalyani: Sahana, thank you for participating in this conversation and a million congratulations on your new book, A Thousand Tiny Cuts Mobility and Security across the Bangladesh-India Borderlands that has just been published with University of California Press in their Atelier: Ethnographic Inquiry in the Twenty-First Century series. I thoroughly enjoyed reading, as I have enjoyed multiple conversations with you as we were writing our books. This is a wonderful opportunity to reflect on our research and writing process, now that the books are complete.
Sahana: Kalyani, congrats on your book, Boats in a Storm: Law, Migration, and Decolonization in South and Southeast Asia, 1942-1962! Even as I have been familiar with your work over the years, it is so generative to see it come together in such a book that shows how “borders were as much jurisdictional as geopolitical” (p. 5). Your use of the law as an archive to trace the inexact relationship between citizenship regimes and political belonging in a postwar world is marvellous.
Kalyani: What assumptions did you want to undo about the India-Bangladesh borderlands?
Sahana: It was twofold. One is a very specific narrative about the India-Bangladesh borderlands and post-colonial bordering, and the second, is about how such places in the Global South fit into existing narratives, both scholarly and general.
From my previous work experiences, I was interested in the lived experience of surveillance in the borderlands and what residents frequently described as being rendered ‘second-class citizens’ through suspicion and criminalization by both states. As I did fieldwork, I realized that studying human rights violations and torture by state actors in the Bangladesh-India borderlands (as was my original intention) was only the tip of the iceberg, that there are all kinds of ways in which people are not just talking about, but shaping and being shaped by what it means to live next to a border. It was more dynamic and appeared paradoxical, as other scholars have also noted[1]. I wanted to better understand what appears paradoxical, in small and structural terms. So eventually, with the India-Bangladesh borderland story I wanted to write something that, of course, centered people who live in the border areas but not through the prism of violence alone. I begin by asking a very broad question: What does living next to a border mean to you? Many other ethnographic questions followed: Why does it matter that you are in a borderland? How do you know that you are in a borderland? Remarkably, not everyone thought they were living in a borderland or that it had always been that way. And what it means to live in a borderland is itself a very vexed question. Some of the things that we’ve assumed are not even obvious: e.g. not just what are the kinds of violence in a borderland, but is this a borderland? Who is it a borderland for? I want to call into question the fetish of the border itself – as a line, the structure, the fence. And so that was particular to the India-Bangladesh story. Asking these questions, allowed me to tell an account of the region of northern Bengal, its histories, its politics and it becoming a national borderland over decades rather than at once, from a different angle. Also, I think these allowed me to connect with the question of how places like this, i.e. the story of a South Asian borderland, can be spoken of in the contemporary world that do not predetermine a story of violence, security, and militarization. Of course, there is militarization. Of course, there are discourses of migrant illegality and there are consequences for it. And of course, in such postcolonial places it is still about states trying to produce its territory. And none of that is false. But I think they assume far more than they explain the nuances of everyday life at a border seventy years since it was first drawn with Partition in 1947. It also becomes pertinent to frame the struggles around citizenship, belonging, mobility, and transnational relationships in the borderlands in a way that does not exceptionalise this as a South Asian case.
Kalyani: You make that point so powerfully in your introduction. You raise an important question – how does one know they are in the borderland? Typically, the picture that forms in one’s mind is cartographic. But you show how that is not necessarily the only possibility. You do such a beautiful job of sort of unpacking that and making the reader pause at the very beginning and reflect on their assumptions. And then of course, the readers are immediately invested in finding out more about why their assumptions might be obscuring a much richer account.
Sahana: What about you, Kalyani? I think you’ve always been interested in questioning the division of geographical divisions and areas of scholarly inquiry such as South and Southeast Asia. Is that something you knew you wanted to do through the book? What came first – the framework or the approach?
Kalyani: When I started working on this project, I very much wanted to work on South India. What I had not anticipated perhaps is how my working with archival materials at the Madras High Court or the Tamil Nadu State Archives for this postwar period would lead me to see all of these linkages with Southeast Asia. Scholars have already shown us these long-standing connections between what we consider South Asia and Southeast Asia, but these accounts typically end with the Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia in 1942 or shortly thereafter with independence movements in 1947-‘49[2]. I started seeing these connections even after the War – between South India, Ceylon, Malaya /Malaysia and Singapore, and to Burma/Myanmar. These patterns intuitively aligned with what I experienced growing up in South India, where I would hear stories of how people’s worldviews, aspirations, and dreams were often encompassed and oriented towards countries in southeast Asia. So I dug deeper. I wondered what the aftermath of the wartime displacements – we know of the ‘long march’ from Burma for example, when people sought refuge in India – was for peoples’ everyday lives. I begin the book with 1942, and trace the aftermath of wartime displacements through seemingly ordinary legal disputes – recovering debts, filing taxes, changing immigration status and so on. I wanted to see if it was possible to tell a story about people who faced challenges moving between South and Southeast Asia that isn’t necessarily about the end of empire and emergent national identities. Through a close reading of legal archives, that’s ultimately what became the subject of the book.
Sahana: Can I ask a question about partitioning? It’s so striking. You set it up so well in the introduction but I think it gets richer as one moves through the book, more layers get added and it comes to mean different things. As we move through the chapters, we encounter different people and their trials and tribulations. I really want to hear more about how you settled on this and the kind of conceptual work you wanted to offer. I was excited because I saw it as a close kin to the way I describe and write about “bordering”. Do you think they are analogous? Are we trying to get at the same sort of process or are there similarities but also differences?
Kalyani: I think there are definite parallels between partitioning and bordering. The mid-twentieth century moment in South Asia, particularly around questions of citizenship, is shaped by the 1947 Partition. The constitutional provisions around citizenship reference it, and in the same moment, seemingly rule out the possibility of dual citizenship. But the histories that are less well-known are about the relationship between wartime displacements and citizenship. People whose lives are not directly impacted by the horrific violence of the 1947 Partition – such as the people I discuss in this book – were left without a clear sense of where they belonged, and more specifically, how they belonged to new nation-states. I wanted to find a way to capture that. Partitioning is a term used by historian Sujit Sivasundaram in his book, Islanded, about 19th century Ceylon/Sri Lanka and how it is constituted as an island separate as a kind of imperial formation within the British Empire separate from India through various forms of knowledge[3]. To me, legal practice also generates forms of knowledge, and in the legal encounters I was looking at, partitioning described the creation of juridical borders. Through these legal disputes, ultimately South Asia is partitioned off from Southeast Asia as an area of enquiry. But partitioning was also meant to recall the constitutional separation of Burma from India in 1937 and that it was during this time that a number of discussions around political belonging, particularly of migrants from South India in Burma, took place against this background. And finally, of course, that the partitioning that I explored was taking place at the same time as the aftermath of the Partition. Ultimately too, the provisions and schemes for wartime displacements had a very real connection with the Partition – as I show in Chapters 3 and 7, everything from double taxation regimes to refugee rehabilitation plans created for Partition was remodelled for wartime displacements. So ultimately, what we are doing with bordering and partitioning is to signal to how our books provide this alternate narrative about citizenship, belonging and placemaking in South Asia.
Sahana: I really like that and it’s so clear over the course of your book. One of the aspects of the book, as well as your writing that I really enjoyed, is that the chapters seep into one another in a very beautiful and effective way. The exploration of the different layers of partitioning works particularly well because it’s not only an alternative history; it is that, and as you say, all these multiple kinds of partitioning that are also happening simultaneously. The partitioning of property is this kind of common noun – partition – that happens all the time within families. There is a lot of that in the archives that you draw on and in the stories of the people you tell. What I also really like is the connection of all of these kinds of partitioning to the Partition. We are not jettisoning capital P partition, but about relationships between these processes.
Kalyani: That’s right.
Sahana: I think that is very exciting because on the one hand, it prompts us to see multiple or more complicated relationships to 1947. It does not mean that we disavow what we know about 1947 but rather, that we reexamine the different associations to 1947 across the subcontinent. And through that reexamination, we understand it differently. We relate it to the present a little bit differently. And that is a goal both our works really share.
In my case, the Bangladesh-India border may seem like an obvious partition border. One may even think that after there has been at least two generations of very rich scholarship on partition and border making in South Asia, what more is there possibly to say or know about partition other than additive histories? That is, maybe we don’t know what Partition means for this group of people or in this place. So we find that particular story and tell it, but it is still broadly like fitting in a slot in a bookshelf where perhaps one entry is missing but the bookshelf – you know, the structure of the shelf – is already in place. Critically examining that settled historical knowledge was my goal with “bordering” as it unfolds over generations and spaces. I am influenced by and in conversation with Vazira Zamindar’s The Long Partition and Ananya Kabir’s Partition’s Post-Amnesias about the relationship between 1947 and 1971[4]. Zamindar’s argument about partition as a process in conversation with Kabir’s question about what is the relationship between 1947 and 1971, opens up important empirical lines of inquiry in Bengal. Kabir asks fundamentally what is the relationship between 1947 and 1971 and in asserting one kind of relationship, what are the other kinds we are forgetting? That really resonated with what I learned ethnographically in the borderlands: that 1947 and 1971 – understandably –are very important political milestones in the personal and regional histories people recounted.However, in the life stories people tell, across generations, these are not the only political and affective pegs. As I was recording people’s histories of settlement, mobility, changing citizenship, marriage and kinship practices, agrarian cultivation and commerce, all kinds of other political milestones were coming up (e.g. chapters 3, 4, 6). Such milestones – like 1965 for example and the years leading up to it – were not additive. In stressing the importance of 1962 and 1965, people reoriented the historical narratives pointing to the violence of bordering in unexpected sites and forms – these surfaced in the form of reshaped kinship geographies, prohibitions on farming or property ownership, or attachments to places and identities after displacement and settlement. Such accounts of political history recompose the very biography of this border and bordering. It makes us reconsider bordering as temporal relations, the ebbs and flows of networks and mobilities. I found that it was not just that multiple events are absent or erased from a singular, nationalist history, but that taking those seriously actually rearranges the relationship between South Asia’s many partitions. And that opens up all kinds of narratives about why things happened the way they did, why certain kinds of remembering are imperative and how those change belonging, hierarchies of citizenship, and political claims in the present.
So while I build on the thesis of ‘the long partition’, I also suggest that it has never ended. This recalibration or continuously examining and rearranging relationships of all kinds between people and between places continues through militarised bordering. The categories of ‘citizen’, ‘migrant’, ‘refugee’, and relationships across forms of difference are not settled at all. These relationships include but exceed the kind of documentary identification and bureaucratic forms that scholars have attended to[5]. Over generations, this reexamination of relationships of value across multiple, ordinary domains of life are forms of bordering.
Kalyani: From my perspective, what became evident as I researched the book was the sheer impossibility of ignoring the Partition even for those distant from it – who lived in places far away from those directly impacted by the redrawing of geographies in 1947. The proximity to Partition, for those, was achieved through legal provisions. Take for example, the citizenship debates in Ceylon in the 1950s and 1960s. The restrictive requirements of the Ceylon Citizenship Act in 1948 left few options open for those who migrated or were forced to migrate from South India to Ceylon under conditions resembling indenture from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. The legislative solution was the Indian and Pakistani Residents (Citizenship) Act, 1949 (which I talk about in Chapters 4 and 5). Note the title of the Act. One had to identify oneself as an Indian or Pakistani before one could renounce it and become a Ceylonese citizen. It is impossible to say authoritatively from the archival materials whether the applicants under this Act were aware of the Partition, but they had to frame themselves in relation to those juridical identities. Uma Dhupelia-Mestrie writes about the consequences for the Indians in East Africa, the Muslims being thought of as putative Pakistanis[6]. That relationship to 1947 is forced upon the people I write about. On the other hand, I also try to highlight that migration and displacement outside of the Partition is obscured at this mid-twentieth century moment of political belonging. For instance, as I show throughout the book, political belonging in Burma and Ceylon after independence were frequently mediated by the question: where were you in 1942? Did you flee back to India during the War or did you stay behind? By tying the possibility of citizenship status – and vicariously, all the material and symbolic benefits that flow from it – to wartime displacements, regimes capitalised on anti-immigrant sentiments that had been simmering below the surface before the War. Each of my chapters begins with 1942 and circles back to it.
Sahana: Yet, even as citizenship choices were forced upon people through the binary law in 1949, with colossal sociolegal consequences as you show, this legal determination of citizenship status neither closed mobility nor fixed belonging and identity across the Bengal borderlands. As I document in the last chapter of my book, Muslims moving from West Bengal to East Pakistan through the 1950s and 1960s found that they were readily categorised as “muhajir” and endowed with Pakistani citizenship, within a peculiarly South Asian refugee regime, where there was no loss of citizenship[7]. Yet political and social belonging and identities did not emerge or neatly coincide with this legal status. Rather people struggled for generations as “home and dwelling, identity and citizenship never aligned” (p. 184). These struggles and misalignments are a vital aspect of citizenship as lived in relation to mobility and migration histories in South Asia as they continue to be weaponized in exclusionary nationalist regimes. Do you see similar stories?
Kalyani: Yes, and I think of these as a sign of hope. In Chapter 4, I write about how when the census was conducted right before the restrictive citizenship legislation was to come into force in Ceylon, the number of people who identified as ‘Ceylon Tamil’ showed a significant increase. As you note, legal determinations often limit, but do not completely rule out, possibilities for movement across borders. In my book, I write that most people live their lives trying to navigate a spectrum of legal statuses between citizenship and statelessness. But their impact is often felt when trying to access other kinds of citizenship benefits that depend on possessing the right kind of paperwork, such as ownership of a house – Mythri Jegathesan writes about this in the case of the Malaiyaha Tamils – or in terms of securing employment, or indeed trade, as you show in the wonderful chapter on ganja.
I also wanted to come back to the simultaneity of the histories that you talk about in Chapter 1 of your book, “Off and On Rangpur Road”. You have this beautiful account built around rumours about the road from Madhupur to Rangpur – the Rangpur road – and its proposed return or renovation (p.33-34). You write: “to travel on and off Rangpur Road is to home in on signs of an ongoing process of becoming on the landscape – of roads ruined, of connection severed, what the river sutures, and what it washes away.” (p.36) It’s an event that people have a relationship to which exists alongside political chronologies about partition, independence, wars and liberation we are familiar with. It is a challenge to portray simultaneity in that manner, and you do it so beautifully. How did you think about the framing of the chapter and what were some of the challenges you faced in doing so? How did you ultimately decide to go with the road as the central feature of that chapter?
Sahana: This was the hardest chapter to write! I didn’t want to write a context chapter. Yet I needed the chapter to answer questions like – where is this place and what is its regional history? What is its historical present? I needed to find a way to narrate not simply what is the history of the place, but that the historicity of the place is sedimented and is itself a very powerful actor and a mood as this connected region, the former princely state of Coochbehar, becomes national borderlands over half a century. Mobility – of people and goods – was central to north Bengal’s cultural identity and political economy. There was a regional identity and regional pride that marked it off from the rest of the Bengal delta. Elders recollected how it was a princely state, distinct from British-ruled India and how at the time of Partition, they could have gone with Pakistan but chose to stay with India. People seem to remember a time when it was not only India or East Pakistan/Bangladesh, but something else altogether when you were not boxed into that bi-national choice. The more I did ethnographic work on both sides, I would always come away with a feeling, a mood that sat uneasily with the contemporary frame of remoteness and underdevelopment with which borderlands on both sides are portrayed and understood from the viewpoint of capital cities. The elderly folks I talked to had an especially layered historical memory, which was not nostalgia, but a deep sense of loss, a mood that reminisced a time when they were at the centre of myriad networks and connectivities and mourned how they were now totally disconnected. The road as a narrative device offered me a way to reveal the intricacies between the history of commerce and trade and the history of mobility infrastructures such as road, rail, customs – that otherwise lies beneath the surface of remote borderlands.
Kalyani: Do you think that is the vacuum from where you started formulating what it means to be like a resident of the borderland?
Sahana: The story the book tells is as much about the region of north Bengal as it is about the people who become or grow up as borderland residents. I had to show that north Bengal was not always a borderland place and that people deeply remember that and narrate this historical becoming very carefully.
Bordering has led to the ruining of the infrastructure or dismantling of connections or the devaluing of certain kinds of movement in people and goods. States choose to disinvest and ruin this very rich economic life. It’s not a story of neglect or ignorance by the state, but active targeting between India and Pakistan since Partition through the 1950s and 1960s, now picked up in new ways by the neoliberal states of India and Bangladesh[8]. For example, the tale of the twisted testicles in Chapter 1 shows that the customs houses and railway stations in disrepair today were the sites where bureaucracies controlling ‘migrant traffic’ translated ideas of ideal citizens and acceptable migrants in classed, gendered, and religious terms onto bodies in the borderlands. While I draw on bureaucratic stories of bordering in the decade immediately after 1947, we know that such translation of what ‘citizens’ look like or can continues in different sites of policing across our countries.
Kalyani, I enjoyed many bits in your book, but my most favourite is Chapter Five, ‘Women Who Wait’. By the time we get to that chapter, this kind of tracing of cases and fragments that you do, it’s familiar and powerful. I love the title ‘the family in law’ – it could be the title of a course taught in law school. You make the family in law come alive methodologically, not just as that which experiences the effects of law or on which the law acts, but as a site on which the law is constructed, and where the family form itself is made and unmade many times. It’s not just about the women who wait; it’s about the relationships they cannot have. And the law allows you into this kind of archive through which you can see and question that production of the family form. I wanted to ask a little bit about your methodology, and especially as somebody who also uses a similar method of assembling, ethnographically, family histories. What was your methodological practice? I can imagine that the relationships were hard to find, and then narrate, especially as these stories were not all coherent. How do you negotiate the incoherence or fragmented nature of the materials that you encountered?
Kalyani: In the first two chapters before this, I discuss how disputes over recovering wartime debt and the dissolving of business partnerships shored up new juridical borders – particularly around income tax – between India, Burma, and Ceylon. It then moves on to the inquiries around immigration requests that I spoke about a little earlier. The family form is a latent theme throughout. In the chapter “Women Who Wait’, however, I wanted to show how taxation and immigration regimes were not disparate but intertwined as well as how they were gendered in explicit and implicit ways. Here too, as in the earlier chapters, you see this notion of partitioning. As you mentioned, these are families that are together but apart. They include traders between Madras and Colombo, whose wives and families stayed behind in India, and who the traders returned to during the War. In their attempts to naturalise or challenge tax assessments, they were asked if their familial attachments translated into political attachments. I found that to be a very compelling story. But the chapter also ends with a discussion of the family form itself. As you note, there is a certain inability within legal regimes to comprehend political belonging where families participate in migrations across borders, particularly when the wives continue to live in India. Methodologically, I started with documents, inquiry reports, tax cases and so on, and then travelled to Colombo, Kilakkarai, and Kozhikode/Calicut to see what remained of these family relationships and of their dwelling homes. There are, of course, aspects of familial relationships in some interviews that I chose not to include because they did not pertain to the broader arguments I was trying to make about the gendered nature in which these legal regimes were leveraged. So, in effect, narrating the history of these families in law, in this place and time, did not require a genealogy, but using these fragments to question what familial attachment means, and how it was, in this specific moment, translated into political attachments. It was difficult to write because it was not a single family’s account but trying to capture a similar experience of encountering new juridical borders after wartime displacements.
We share this interest in familial attachments as political attachments most vividly in your third chapter , ‘Relative Intimacies’”. My chapter shows the consequences of having legal regimes that cannot comprehend ways to labour and love that involve families being apart, and do not involve men being ‘heads of households’. Other relationships and networks that people record are often quite literally struck out by officials in the archival documents I consulted. Women who wait are not just hanging around, they are living and thriving. Your chapter on intimacies, on the other hand, show how kinship geographies are “countermaps” (p.92). This is such powerful phrasing. How did you go about the process of researching for this chapter?
Sahana: I started by doing old-school kinship maps that I reimagined as transnational feminist praxis. I would start with a family that I was getting to know and ask for both kinds of lateral and generational connections. There were a lot of gaps and silences – either people would not know or would not want to talk about. The political discourse and practice of exclusionary citizenship, separating legal status and social recognition through suspicion and uncertainty of documentary identification, has long been potent in the Bangladesh-India borderlands. Kinship intimacies and the borderland family is a site from which we can see so clearly the poisonous nationalisation of ideas and practices of exclusionary citizenship.
We know from the work of feminist scholars that families and the state are enmeshed, and that the state too works through the family form. But what was so stark ethnographically was how gendered it all was – the way men and women recounted their family histories. So, as I describe in chapter 3, while men would painstakingly narrate linear family histories pegged to nationalist timeline of political events, women in the same families would disavow knowing anything “political” even as genealogical mappings surfaced all kinds of charged silences and presences. So I wanted to show how family histories are rife with unresolved political histories – the elisions, the absences, the relations, mobilities that don’t add up. I think family histories are an incredibly powerful methodological tool because of the ways in which it opens a political and social canvas in non-linear ways. Family histories are of course politically charged in a particular way today with the implementation of the National Register of Citizens in India, where being an individual citizen no longer suffices and one must in fact provide a genealogical account of oneself as a citizen, among other things.
Kalyani: This is an important distinction you make between gaps and silences, Sahana. The idea of verifying whether somebody’s telling the truth or not about their family is a fraught one. I talk about it a little bit in Chapter 4, ‘Application Forms’, where people were called upon to narrate family histories – with attention to births, deaths, and marriages of course, but also about seemingly unimportant details like who they sent migrant remittances to and for what purpose or where they celebrated community festivals and with whom – to support their cases for naturalisation. Officials in charge of these inquiries would then discern from these narrations whether they had the necessary intention for permanent settlement. So, when I wrote the chapter, I was trying to adopt the stance of someone observing this encounter or this conversation as opposed to someone who is invested in verifying whether the applicant in question was telling the truth or not. If I pursued the latter, then in a way, I am also being the state. We know of course, as historians, that the inquiry report is a mediated document and, in most cases, would contain answers translated from perhaps Tamil or Malayalam or Sinhala to English. But it is by building out the culture of fear, sadness and suspicion but also resilience, that we mitigate some of these concerns. And of course, then, it is not going to look linear or systematic. But a linear or systemic family genealogy would not be the story that we are trying to tell. I love your observations about how men and women narrated these histories differently.
I’m always asked another question that makes me hesitate, particularly in the context of migration and mobilities research – the relationship between the legal and the illegal, the licit and illicit. For example, did people ever forge evidence, such as a trading permit or a birth certificate? It is also a theme that runs through your book, that perhaps, these binaries were misleading or unproductive.
Sahana: I think unproductive is a really good word to use. The funny thing is that when I began this project, I thought it would be all about legality – as I had mentioned, I worked in a human rights organisation before. Anthropologists of borderlands in South Asia, and elsewhere, write about the divergence between social norms around what is licit/illicit as well as legal norms around what is codified as legal and illegal[9]. I imagined exploring this divergence as well. Ethnographically, there’s no doubt that issues of smuggling, deception and morality are widespread in borderland life, as I write about with the term ‘du-nombori’ (most explicitly in chapter 2). But du-nombori is also a moving target, because the quality or status of being counterfeit or illegal/illicit is not in a person, an object, or even in a relationship, but is really interpretive. It’s how you relate to a person, intention, relationship, circumstance. Gender, class, and religion play a big role in these interpretations.
Both Indian and Bangladeshi states are highly present in borderland lives and businesses, trying to fix this moving target, but so are residents in relation to each other. So du-nombori becomes a proxy for all manner of social distinctions – as in policing suspected clandestine migrants, among kin relations, assessing the value of crops and cattle and so on. It has little to do with the law per se or stability as a status because it is so dynamic. So beyond a point the licit/legal distinction is unproductive because it is not what people are really invested in.
Kalyani: I am struck by this powerful idea about du-nombori as not residing in a thing or a person, but as something that is a fluid expression or relation. And you mentioned that intention, relationship, and circumstance, all matter in labelling someone or something as du nombori. I have often wished that I could definitively see what was going on in people’s minds – their intention – but there are of course, limits to this kind of exercise, particularly when one’s starting point is with legal records, but in the end, we have to rely on circumstances and relationships to speculate as to what people were thinking in the past. I try to get at this a little in Chapter 6, ‘Red Flags’ in which I talk about how a group of young men, whose parents had immigrated from Madras – were labelled as “communists” before deported from Malaya. Given that it was the late 1940s, when both Madras and Malaya were on the lookout for political dissenters. Labelling someone a “communist” was not a definitive claim about ideological affiliation, but like du nombori, a moving target and from the perspective of the state, intentionally framed as a moving target.
But particularly with border-crossing, I found it challenging to write conclusively about motive and intention, even in a heterogenous sense. It is hard to tell what was really at stake. That’s why in the book, I eventually call these legal encounters as an attempt to retain the rhythms and patterns of migrant life. And everything beyond is imagining or speculating what people could have wanted. I think even what you’re saying about knowing definitively is true or the inability to know definitively is also true for ethnographic research, right?
Sahana: Yes, correct, and you do so beautifully and sensitively through your account of “legal encounters”, retaining those unknowns and shadows. A foundational feminist insight that I take to be at the core of my ethnographic work is to be honest about partial truths. And even if I make clear that I am writing about particular communities and people and what is at stake for them, my ethnography can’t claim comprehensive knowledge because experience – especially when we are writing about histories and political identities, claims, and belonging at different scales – is not a transparent category but always constructed narrative. Which is not to say that partiality means that they cannot be taken seriously but that all claims to truth and history, however representative and universal, are partial. This is especially charged in contemporary South Asia in terms of the contours of who belongs where and as national history becomes a battleground of national security.
So for example to continue to engage in the binaries of legal/licit is to traffic in that epistemology of certitude and stable classification which is empirically just not true. And ultimately, it is to remain locked in statist categories and methodological nationalism, which I work hard to address and overcome in methodological and analytical terms. So the unqualified terms “Indian” or “Bangladeshi” attach themselves to people, crops etc. naturalising the difference of the national. My book tries to illuminate how that difference of the ‘national’ is produced transnationally across the borderlands and becomes meaningful. It becomes the dominant form of difference, fracturing other forms of identity and solidarity, so you don’t get to be agrarian workers, landless sharecroppers, or separated kin.
Kalyani: Your comment reminds me that one of things I was very keen on achieving with this book is to show that this is not a history of migration or of connections that do not get recognized. It is an account of how histories of migration are leveraged.
Sahana: Absolutely! As you say so well – who’s leveraging what history of mobility and attachments at what political juncture are vital clues onto a shifting political terrain, one that may change in the future. That makes me think about something that’s often suggested in policy circles, particularly when dealing with questions of formal legal status –resolving with finality ambiguities and contradictory claims around citizenship. How do you deal with the relevance or consequence of your work in relation to such questions?
Kalyani: Yes, absolutely – for example, the suggestion that we can solve the problem of statelessness by issuing more definitive paperwork. And it really does go back to that thing that you were saying, right? The binary framework of citizen and stateless person does not work because most people don’t live their lives like that. Their investment is navigating a spectrum of legal statuses between citizenship and statelessness. No one seemed, at least in researching this book, to want to choose one citizenship conclusively over the other. There is then, at the very least, some danger in suggesting that the solution to inconclusive political identities is to have more conclusive “proof”. There is no juridical truth to be discovered at the end of this road.
Sahana: I think you and I are trying to say that status is not the end game, mobility is the end game. The goal is not to be settled in one status or the other. The goal is to remain mobile.
Kalyani: Absolutely.
But perhaps one difference in our books is the landscapes or seascapes that we are looking at. A lot of the migrations that I am talking about take place over the sea, or are at least, partially undertaken over the sea. Conceptually speaking, can one draw a distinction between mobility over land and mobility over oceans?
Sahana: That’s quite a difficult question, Kalyani. Reading your book made me think of the way in which the ocean shapes distance and the spatiality of jurisdiction. Ideas of jurisdiction are so commonly tied to territoriality and land territoriality that it is shaped distinctly by the oceanic form. I think this is a question for further research and exploration. The qualities of distance, intimacy, separations, and notions of areas are shaped by long-distance networks and mobilities spanning seascapes and within Asia rather than the global north to south versions that are more commonly theorised.
What happens to bordering practices when we think with seascapes rather than landscapes? Are there equivalent forms of dispersed bordering, blurry and overlapping boundaries?
Your question prompts me to note that the landscape of much of the Bengal borderlands is riparian, a riverscape. There’s a very fluid interaction between land and water in this landscape, between the floodplains of the Teesta and the Brahmaputra. This is broadly true of this part of South Asia: Naveeda Khan writes about it brilliantly in her recent book, River Life and the Upspring of Nature, about making life and property in land and kin, in this kind of shifting between land and water (Khan 2023). I look forward to more historical and ethnographic attention to the relations between political ecology, riverscapes, relations with states, and regimes of citizenship and political belonging. Your book offers many openings to study the fluidity of jurisdictional borders and their very material consequences.
Kalyani: I would love to continue thinking about this, because as you rightly said, the jurisdictional divide between land and sea is affected by extending land-based property regimes into water. Debjani Bhattacharya, Tamara Fernando, and Devika Shankar all write about this in their work from different vantage points on the Indian Ocean littoral[10]. I write a little bit about the now-derelict train-and-ferry crossing from Dhanushkodi to Talaimannar, and elsewhere about the steamships that plied between the Madras coast and port cities in Burma and Malaya. But there is yet more to explore in terms of how oceanic voyages – particularly those associated with migrations back and forth – shape notions of distance and time for those who undertake them, and indeed, for those who “wait” and their implications for how their attachments are perceived in their homes and places of work.
Kalyani: This has truly been a fantastic conversation. Thank you, Sahana.
Sahana: Thank you, Kalyani.
Footnotes
[1] (van Schendel 2005a; Schendel 2005b)
[2] (S. Amrith, 2013, Bayly and Harper, 2010)
[3] (S.Sivasundaram, 2013)
[4] (Zamindar 2007; Kabir 2013). See also (Ferdous 2021)
[5] (H. Roy 2016; A. Roy 2008)
[6] (U. Dhupelia-Mestrie, 2014)
[7] (Robinson 2012; Rahman and Van Schendel 2003)
[8] See (Murshid 2023) for an extensive discussion of the neoliberal regimes that shape life prospects of Bengali Muslims in India across the Bangladesh-India border.
[9] (van Schendel 2005; Sur 2012; Heyman 1999)
[10] D.Bhattacharya, 2018; T. Fernando, 2022; D. Shankar, 2023.
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