Abstract
Jungle Passports by Malini Sur starts with a fresh approach to the northeast India-Bangladesh border by portraying it not primarily as a disruptor but as an “assembly of life forces” (p. 8)—a border that does not stop, but instead animates daily activities. Through a reading of ecologies, infrastructures, exchanges, and mobility, Sur zooms into the heart of borderland communities in Bangladesh and India for whom the border hardly throws up complicated questions of nation and sovereignty but simply remains a line that needs to be negotiated for different purposes. However, Sur eventually traces the evolution of the same border into an irrefutable physical and ontological barrier that freezes once closely-knit cross-border ties and serves as the site upon which the Indian province of Assam's (and in turn, the state of India's) daily (re)production of “migrants,” “illegals,” “citizens,” and “refugees” are staged. In so doing, with a mastery of ethnographic narratives combined with rich archival work, Sur offers a vivid picture of daily lives marked with visible forces (e.g., border guards), invisible fears (e.g., the fear of being killed and apprehended) and the natural ability of borderlanders to “sense” the border—an instinct that only those who live long enough along that border develop.
The strength of Jungle Passports lies in the face-off between the imaginary line called the border and the expressions that bring that imagination into being. The author sharply contrasts her ethnographic experience with archival works to demonstrate that although it was often easy to lose sight of where the “border” was on the ground, it remained obvious in the daily operations of the state far away from the border itself (e.g., in the courtrooms of Assam and the wide-ranging discourses produced by the state). Sur demonstrates that while the border itself continues to be the lifeline for local borderland communities, techniques, and technologies that bring the border into existence (e.g., barbed wire fences, checkpoints, panopticons, night vision cameras, drones, and surveillance) brutally divide nations and societies.
Jungle Passports starts by tracing the making of India's northeast borders with Bangladesh from the colonial era when the British ruler employed western mapping and survey techniques to territorialize the terrain. Drawing primarily on archival works, in the first chapter, Sur sets the context of the “field” where the ethnography has been conducted. At the same time, focusing on the role of infrastructure, especially roads (the Rowmari-Tura Road in this context), she teases out the colonial racialized history connected to state-making and infrastructures with great detail. The second chapter focuses on the role of rice in drawing the border and building nations. Joining James Scott (2017), the author demonstrates the role of grains in making state spaces legible. During the early post-colonial phase of India's nation-building, Sur argues, rice became militarized, controlled, and policed, which facilitated territory-making and at the same time synonymized religious categories with othering, for example, “Muslims” with “smugglers.” As demonstrated in chapter six, such equating was perhaps the beginning of an orchestrated process of othering that became formalized in 2019 in the notorious Citizenship Amendment Act of Assam, which questioned the citizenship status of a large number of Bengali Muslims in Assam overnight.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the remote chars (riverine islands) of Kurigram, Mymensingh, Netrokona (in Bangladesh), Assam, and Meghalaya (in India), subsequent chapters bring out nuances of livelihoods and survival strategies of borderland communities. They tell us the stories of cow smugglers, whose lives often remain tied with the animals that they trade in. It sheds light on the arrangements between border troops and borderland communities that keep the border porous no matter how high and sharp the barbed wire fences are. Moreover, it delves into the cross-border kinship and networks, local power struggles, and the ambivalence of fear and respect warranted by the border. Above all, these chapters narrate the story of the people who invoke their jungle passports—a moral claim to a shared landscape. The final chapter breaks free from the “jungle” and takes us to the courtrooms of Assam, where the author offers an ethnography of structural violence fashioned by bureaucratic usage of complicated files and documents. Corroborating previous works (Gupta 2012; Hull 2012), Sur demonstrates that the discrimination continues especially against those who lack resources to negotiate state mechanisms and, therefore, are more likely to be(come) victims of sovereign violence, which, in extreme cases, can entail the loss of their citizenship.
A shortcoming of Jungle Passports, if at all, is the absence of a dedicated in-depth engagement with the idea of jungle passport itself—how people living and moving across the border invoke their rights to mobilty, rights to the landscape, rights to exchange and above all, the right to survive with innovative ways to cross the border and dodge the system. The author occasionally hints at how she conceives the idea but leaves the task to theoretically connect it with subsequent discussions to the reader. Thus, while those familiar with the topic and/or the region would not have difficulties comprehending the bigger picture of “jungle passports,” those who are not may feel lost in the detailed ethnographies without an overt theoretical point of reference. Perhaps the conclusion missed an opportunity to do so. Overall, however, with its detailed ethnography, rich archival works and attention to minute details, Jungle Passports is a highly valuable addition to the small yet powerful scholarship on the post-colonial northeast India-Bangladesh border (Baruah 2020; Cons 2016; McDuie-Ra 2016), which stands as a testimony that “the dust from old maps and new fences will never settle at borders” (p. 12).