Reflections on Malini Sur's Jungle Passports (2021)
Madhumita Mazumdar
Borderlines continues its second book forum, titled “Jungle Passports,” with a discussion on borderlands, mobility, and citizenship by different scholars. This essay is the second part of the book forum which engages with the ideas within Malini Sur’s book, Jungle Passports: Fences, Mobility, and Citizenship at the North-East India-Bangladesh Border.
Indian Garo women laborers mining sand for India’s border fence construction. Photo courtesy: Malini Sur
For those unfamiliar with the complex and fluid markers that constitute the international border between India and Bangladesh in the Northeast India, looking closely at maps is usually the first recourse. Yet, as Malini Sur argues in her riveting anthropological study of the borderlands of Northeast India, the limits of the cartographic gaze and the academic blind spots it engenders is what prompts her study of this region. What then is the remit of this study, its specific intervention in the terrain of ‘borderland scholarship’? The evocative title of Sur’s book, Jungle Passports is perhaps the first indication of the positioning of her expansive and nuanced reading of ‘borders’ and ‘borderlands’. Jungle Passports draws upon the larger reserve of a “borderi lexicon” that is built around the grammar of illicit mobilities and surreptitious crossings that sustains the lives of some of the most dispossessed and precarious communities that live on either side of this international border. Sur’s engagement with the “borderi lexicon” offers her a singular point of entry into the history and anthropology of this unique border zone located within a protean riverine ecology and a tense political frontier.
Although one is tempted to read Sur’s book as a history of the border ‘from below,’ with its protagonists living on the margins of starvation, legality and settled polities, there is much in the book that offers a rich understanding of border infrastructures and reasons of state. Sur introduces readers to her engagement with the border through a measured survey of borderland studies that speak to her specific concerns. These are studies that have generated new insights into the complex entanglements of borderland materialities, ecologies, economies, bureaucracies, kinships, language and life-worlds. Sur is particularly attentive to both borderland discourse as it takes shape in the textual worlds of the officialdom of both colony and post-colony and the embodied ‘borderi lexicon’ that dodges, confounds, and mocks this discourse with its playful subversions.
She brings to bear the rich scholarly insights from the reserves of borderland scholarship into her longitudinal ethnographic study of the India-Bangladesh border, a study that began in 2007 and stretched to 2015. It marked what she describes as a fascinating “in-between time” when India started building a new multi-layered border fence to replace the older tentative markers worn and damaged by ravages of wind, rain and the ever-shifting terrain of a riverine marsh. In her own words, the book originated in fieldwork conducted in the Bangladesh-India-North East Border with an attempt to “follow the lives of undocumented Bangladeshi migrants”. It acquired a distinct life of its own when the construction of the new fence set in motion a series of transformations that reconfigured life, livelihoods and relations along the border in completely unanticipated ways. Unlike the old border that could be easily dodged or cut across, the new militarized border-zone and fence instituted a new infrastructure and a new regime of fear and endemic uncertainty.
Sur contextualizes the shifting contours of the border from its tentative and dispersed presence to its more solid, identifiable and purposive presence by drawing readers into a historical timeline that begins in 1822 with Regulation No.10 to the passing of India’s Citizenship Act in 2019. It is important to be attentive to this timeline as it frames the story of the shifting contours of the India- Bangladesh border in the North-East within the larger longue duree history of the British annexation of the Kingdom of Assam in 1826 and its complex trail of consequences. The most enduring of these consequences was the simultaneous agricultural colonization of the region with its contentious claims upon territory along on the shifting chars of the Brahmaputra and the early labelling of mobile peasant communities of the region as “illegal migrants”. The category of ‘illegal migrants” began to acquire new life under successive Partitions of Bengal in 1905 and the Partition of Indian subcontinent in 1947. The political, ethnic, linguistic and religious boundary making practices that both preceded and followed from these acts of Partition gave rise to a related class of categories like ‘foreigners’ ‘immigrants’ and ‘infiltrators’. The ceaseless mutations of these categories in the wake of multiple projects of nation-building in the North-East of India is what makes the shifting lines of the international border in this region so contentious.
Yet if Sur’s historical framework confirms the segregating, contentious and violent attributes of political borders in general, her anthropological engagement with the mobile lives in these borderlands as well as around the fences and outposts that marked them tells a story of borders as ‘unfinished projects’ of the state even as they are positioned as heightened zones of state surveillance and violence. Borders in her account are also spaces marked by reciprocity, exchange and conviviality.
Sur explores these dualities from her ethnographic work on both sides of the border during 2005-2017 when much of her time was spent along the border construction site in lower Assam and the Garo hills of Meghalaya and the adjoining Kurigram, Sherpur, Jamalpur, Mymensingh and Netrokona districts of Bangladesh.
At the heart of her ethnographic study is Rowmari, a border town in Bangladesh, where people’s memories surrounding an old trade route that led to Tura in Meghalaya are both contentious and nostalgic. Rowmari and Tura now lie on either side of the India-Bangladesh border and yet they belong to a borderland space sustained by difficult historical relationships and the contingencies of proximity. It’s a space that local memories strangely signify as one of both conflict and healing. Sur offers an intimate biography of the road as she travelled its length in the company of bull smugglers and transporters and scurried along Garo Christian women with their ‘jungle passports’ from Bangladesh to the haats of borderland Meghalaya where they sold their wares of export-reject garments to local villagers.
It is these encounters on the road that become the sites of her participant observational methods as she follows Shefali, Jonaki and Alibaba through their perilous journeys. She observes them from moments before they prepared for the journey, to their tense crossings and finally to the aftermaths of their return to their families in states of either relief or trauma. The story of the Rowmari-Tura road however is told through a longer historical lens too as Sur scours maps, archival trails and material traces of the heliotropes of British surveyors as they battled the treacherous terrain to mark and segregate spaces and people into invidious categories of plains living people as ‘civilized’ and those living on the hills as ‘savage’. She journeyed through the road through historical and contemporary times to mark its shifting contours and practices of mobility and weave a compelling account of the peculiar contingencies that shaped lives, livelihoods and relationships between state and citizens. Her dwellings on the Rowmari-Tura road compelled her to explore both the ‘life-giving’ and ‘life-staking’ properties of border infrastructures.
It must be noted here that Sur’s study of this segment of the border between Bangladesh and India is really a story of the dramatic changes instituted in its infrastructure. What Sur had first witnessed in 2005 was a diversely barricaded landscape comprising old fences, plastic bags in rows, mud paths between rice fields, a tarmac road cutting across a rice field all indicating the awkward imperatives of boundary-making between two neighbouring nations. By 2015 this awkward border was replaced by a more assertive and menacing one. The new border had to be a fortified one on the assumption of potential conflict over contested claims on territory. The new militarized border had to thus be in a state of permanent armed preparedness. While Sur worked in the area, the border resembled a huge ‘construction site’ with an army of civilian engineers at work to build not only a multi-layered fence but an enormous surveillance and residential complex for border troops to be stationed there. The residential complexes were equipped with modern amenities, provided regular supplies of food and water and large sports and recreational facilities. Unlike the old border outposts the new border complex was completely cut off from the earlier network of local relationships that sustained it. It was self-contained, omniscient and omnipotent.
Sur’s ‘thick description’ of the new border with all its menacing visual and tactile materiality made it acquire an almost surreal presence amid the quiet rural landscape. In a beautifully evocative paragraph that described the border zone before the large fortified complex came up, Sur describes how the mere presence of a border infrastructure could disrupt the gentle patterns of rural life. An ordinary evening in the villages as these plunged into darkness after dusk, she writes, would throw strange shadows from the flickering lights of the border outposts on both sides. The eerie silence that followed once darkness descended would be broken by sounds of quivering church bells, loud devotional songs from Indian outposts, distant prayer calls from a mosque and the sudden and always terrifying bellowing of elephants from the deeper forests. With the replacement of the old outposts with the new border infrastructure in 2015 came the regime of blinding floodlights and a new ‘lightscape’ of fear. Villagers and border-crossers, when they dared, would have to hone their senses to understand the ominous signs of darkness and light, silence and noise.
Sur draws us into the terrifying world of the new border but tempers and humanises her clinical description of the physical infrastructure of fence and tower with a range of ethnographic vignettes that tell a story of transborder kinships, conviviality and unforeseen friendships.
As the book transitions from the world of cattle-smugglers and the darker terrains of the fan-fung economy amid the silt -laden river beds or chars of the Brahmaputra and moves into the higher regions of Tura hills, Sur draws us into a completely different world around the border with its story of two elderly Garo women, Shefali and Jonaki living in the adjoining villages of Mymensingh and Netrokona districts of Bangladesh. Shefali and Jonaki arrived every morning in the haats of Meghalaya to sell export-reject clothes from the sprawling garment manufacturing units of Bangladesh. Sur makes the point that it was the labour of primary Bengali Muslim women who worked in these garment factories that enabled the elderly Garo Christian women to arduously cross the heavily militarized border and sell their wares as cheap essentials to the border villages of India. It was Shefali writes Sur, who asserted she travelled by a “jungle passport” an euphemism used by Garo border villagers for the forest camouflage used by them to cross the borders. The term was part of a more benign ‘borderi lexicon’ known to border forces on both sides and part of an intimate space of kinship and conviviality facilitated by Christian religiosity and transborder Garo matrilineal networks. The crossings of Shefali and Jonaki were less perilous because their journeys did not end with territorial claims or the wilful offence of religious sensibilities. Sur marks the conviviality between border -troops, both Hindu and Muslim and the Garo Christian women to engage with Marshall Sahlin’s expanded definition of kinship as a “mutuality of being” that connected people and structured relationships between people not necessarily connected by blood and descent. This adds value to what she describes as the exercise of exploring convivial relations on the nation’s margins no matter how uneven these may be.
Toward the end of the book Sur brings us back to the realities of the border as it positions itself as the defining marker of citizenship on both sides. Her insightful ethnographic study of judicial proceedings in the Foreigners Tribunal X1 and X2 brings her study of the border within the larger ambit of state-citizen relationships that play out in bureaucratic framings of legitimate and illegitimate claimants of citizenship rights and identities. It is a final comment on the tortuous points of navigation that people on the border encounter as they move in and out of the material, textual and narrative spaces of the state embodied in maps, border outposts, metal fences, barbed wires, gun patrols, tribunals and most notoriously in the seemingly benign paper economies that protect their claims to citizenship by identifying and placing them on a National Register.
Jungle Passports is at once an inspiration and a provocation to revisit some of the early writings of anthropologist Vishvajit Pandya with whom I now collaborate on several research projects. One of these is on the after-lives of borders in the ‘settler colonial polity’ of the Andaman Islands, where ‘tribal reserves’ and ‘settler villages’ are separated by boundary posts and police patrols deployed to ‘protect’ one community from the other.
We study such borders as yet another example of a space where relationships between settlers, indigenes and the state play out in the complex rhythms of both legal and illegal crossings of boundaries that divide two incommensurable though shared worlds of the ‘civilized’ and the ‘savage’. It was Pandya who first drew our attention to the complex articulations of the ‘borderland’ that divided the Jarawa Tribal Reserve in the Middle Andaman region with the settler villages that lay in close proximity. Pandya’s early studies of this ‘border’ focused on both historical and contemporary studies of ‘contact’ between the Indian state and the Jarawas as carefully choreographed events that invested the two ‘border-zones’ on the eastern and western sides of the Reserve, with multiple and often contradictory meanings. ‘Contact events’ that were designed to transcend potentially ‘hostile’ borders were most often staged, hesitant and fleeting visitations that left both sides i.e the Jarawas and the state mutually mistrustful. Such events were most often conducted from the western coast of the Reserve from boats anchored close to the beaches where the Jarawas were meant to meet the ‘state’ and accept gifts signifying friendship. Yet, the slightest provocation could destroy the moment of truce and result in a potential situation of conflict. Jarawa hostility however was more pronounced on the eastern borders of the Reserve where an arterial road cut through a long stretch of the forest Reserve that disrupted the community’s resource base and paths of mobility. Here however conflict ensued not after events of staged contact with the state, but rather with settlers who tried to enter the forest reserve to poach for resources. (For a fuller explication of Pandya’s long-term study of the history of ‘contact’ see In the Forest: Visual and Material Worlds of Andamanese History (1858–2006) )
Yet as Pandya’s later studies and our more recent collaborative research show, ‘illegal’ border-crossings of both settlers and Jarawas into each others’ territories have become more routine and acceptable to both. Tribal Welfare staff on the ground and police at various check-posts are rarely able to control these surreptitious visitations. The border posts that mark the boundaries between the Jarawa Reserve and the settlement mean little to those crossing it. The forest and the road that separates the settlements are deemed an unfettered ‘commons’ to both Jarawas and settlers and mutual visitations treated with degrees of both indulgence and suspicion. There are resources to be acquired by both. Pigs, crabs and other forest resources for settlers and rice, bananas, biscuits and clothing for the Jarawas. There are silent intrusions into each others’ habitations as well as collusive transgressions of buffer-zone rules.
What is evident is that the border between the tribal reserve and the settlement confounds both the Jarawas and settlers in equal measure. For both, the road, the check posts and the fences are there only to be crossed at will. The state and the tribal welfare administration insist on the sanctity of the border, but encroachers are seldom prosecuted or convicted under the terms of the Protection of Aboriginal Tribes of 1956.
The deeply asymmetrical though now almost routine relations of exchange between Jarawas and settlers question popular notions of ‘isolation’ and ‘hostility’ attributed to the Jarawas and subverts the racialized cartography that demarcates the space of the ‘savage’ from that of the ‘civilized’. Yet settlers remain citizens and Jarawas, perennial subjects. The relations between the two maybe marked by ‘conviviality’ and exchange, but the indigene is never coeval with the settler. The border-zone between the Jarawa Tribal Reserve and the Settlement remains a fluid ‘cultural construct’ that sustains nothing beyond the reasons of state.
As a final thought Jungle Passports reminds us that the seemingly fragile or even at times fraught relations on the many borders we encounter, offer a rare opportunity to study borders as a productive zones that create possibilities for different imaginations of kinship, identities and moral economies that sustain lives of people living in precarious conditions and thereby make possible new political imaginations of citizenship and belonging on the margins of the nation-state. The book's lingering appeal lies in its gentle meditation on borders as spaces where human disquiet and affirmation, hope and despair meet and where they ceaselessly shape and are shaped by their inescapable interdependence. This is what makes it an outstanding scholarly accomplishment.
Madhumita Mazumdar is a Professor of History and a faculty member in the Humanities and Social Sciences department at Dhirubai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology, Gujarat, India. She has co-authored a book with Visvajit Pandya and Clare Anderson, titled New Histories of the Andaman Islands: Landscape, Place, and Identity in the Bay of Bengal (1858-2004). Apart from her projects on colonial and post-colonial histories of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, her work also concerns the social and cultural histories of science in Bengal. Her current work falls at the intersection of the history of science and design and examines the intellectual history of design methods in India
Commissioned by: Antara Chakrabarti and Purbasha Das, Editorial Assistance: Tara Giangrande