IDENTITY AND EXPERIENCE AT THE INDIA-BANGLADESH BORDER: THE CRISIS OF BELONGING

The effects of the partition of India in 1947 have been more far-reaching and complex than the existing partition narratives of violence and separation reveal. The immediacy of the movement of refugees between India and the newly-formed state of Pakistan overshadowed the actual effect of the drawing of the border between the two states.The book is an empirical study of border narratives across the India-Bangladesh border, specifically the West Bengal part of India’s border with Bangladesh. It tries to move away from the perpetrator state-victim civilian framework usually used in the studies of marginal people, and looks at the kind of agencies that the border people avail themselves of. Instead of looking at the border as the periphery, the book looks at it as the line of convergence and negotiations―the ‘centre of the people’ who survive it every day. It shows that various social, political and economic identities converge at the borderland and is modified in unique ways by the spatial specificity of the border