Abstract
Paula Banerjee’s monograph, Borders, Histories, Existences, Gender and Beyond, adds to her already existing body of work on gender and forced migrations by locating these and other related concerns within the politics of national cartography and its production of fixed borders. Though many of these concerns have long been prevalent in various disciplines, including in that of conventional history writing, Banerjee’s work would perhaps be more comfortably located within the new emerging, and may we add, fast expanding ‘interdisciplinary’ field of ‘Border Studies’ and its analogous field of study, ‘Migration Studies’.
Borders, Histories, Existences, Gender and Beyond is a book about borders and their numerous social, political and economic subversions in contemporary South Asia. Except for Chapter 1, ‘Aliens in the Colonial World’, which functions more as the customary obeisance offered to the spectre of history and less as a serious engagement with extant historical writings on borders, the other chapters address themselves very specifically to themes from the post colonial politics of South Asian nations: Aksai Chin, McMahon lines and Sino-Indian relations, the governance of security along the India–Pakistan Line of Control, the violence embedded in the cross-border migrations of women and in their ‘bordered existences’, ‘border’ diseases such as HIV and AIDS, and the complex and violent world of border laws: the Defence of India Act, The Armed Forces Special Powers Act and The National Security Act. Nevertheless, the opening lines of the book express the author’s frustration with the reluctance of historians in South Asia to ‘write on borders’, a situation that she examines in some detail in her Introduction and then elaborates in the first chapter of the book. Since this portrayal of historians of South Asia as unable to interrogate the ‘normative discourse about borders’, entrenched as they are in Barthes’ doxa of historical opinion (p. xi), is introduced almost as the leitmotif of the work, we will have reason to return to it at a later point in the review.
The other chapters of the Borders, Histories, Existences research various aspects of the making of definitive political borders, focusing on their arbitrariness and inflexibility and the erasure of a certain fluidity and porosity by the exigencies of the post colonial state. The chapter ‘Borders as Unsettled Markers’ revisits the problems of assuming political borders to be the markers of territoriality by the post colonial states of India and China. To support its central argument—’borders are basically human constructs that become problematic at different historical junctures’, the explanation for which has to be sought in the contingencies of contemporary politics—the chapter draws upon a close reading of several primary documents (papers and correspondence of Jawaharlal Nehru, Lok Sabha debates, private paper collections of political figures such as Jayaprakash Narayan, T.T. Krishnamachari, among others) and convincingly demonstrates that, contrary to prevalent arguments, the drawing of political borders through the McMahon line and Aksai Chin determined diplomatic relations between the two nations, and not vice versa. The next chapter extends this line of argument about turbulent political borders in South Asia into the region of Kashmir. Here, unlike the preceding chapter, Banerjee skids on a rather thin political narrative of the conflicts over control over the Line of Control in the post 1947 period until the present, to emphasise the language of violence and control that has marked the political discourse in the region. While summations such as ‘The logic of violence is to designate alien status on certain groups of people’ (p. xvii) or ‘Violent displays of control will only lead to greater violence resulting in overall insecurity that will often spill over and vitiate the entire political system’ (p. 80) no doubt attempt at a realistic representation of the political history of this border region, they contribute little by way of conceptual analysis (historical, philosophical and otherwise) of the forms and persistence, of violence between communities in the border areas of Kashmir or of the post colonial state. There is little on offer in the chapter either, of how the author’s understanding of the existent political situation could then translate into more specific suggestions for ameliorating circumstances.
The fourth chapter, ‘Circles of Insecurity’ is well researched and perhaps the strongest in the book. It investigates the often violent effects of migration on women living, and straddling, border areas of different parts of north-eastern India. The chapter elaborates this theme with a overview of the many histories of migration and movement in north-eastern India, drawing upon available historical work which sees the region as one traversed by routes of trade and migration, mobility and fluidity in socio-economic practices that wove communities living in the hills and in the valleys into various networks of dependence, and posits all of this against the regimes of binaries and fixity that were introduced by the Company state and the later colonial government and the accompanying erasure of a world of connected histories. The section ‘Women’s insecurity in the North East’ in the chapter begins with a fine analysis of the social position of tribal women among some of the hill communities of north-eastern India, unravelling the embedded nature of their social inequality in structures and practices of local political economy and customary laws. It then weaves this argument with feminist perspectives on sexuality to unpack the deeply disturbing practice of trafficking in women from Nepal, Mymanmar and Bangladesh in the border areas of the region. The discussion on the silence in official realms about the prevalence of trafficking and AIDS, in both of which the state and its arms, including the army and the bureaucracy, are often complicit, is then also a strident critique of the ‘masculine power structures’ that overdetermine the discourse of ‘security’ in the region. The concluding sections of this chapter therefore anticipates the subject of the next chapter, ‘Mobile Diseases and the Border’, which explores the vulnerability of women towards what the author terms as ‘border diseases’—AIDS and HIV—and its imbrications in the ideology of the state’s security apparatus. In the last chapter, ‘Border Laws and Conflicts in North-east India’, Banerjee returns to the subject of the politics of territoriality and the reproduction and enforcement by the state of the notion of an absent territoriality among communities of the northeast in order to further its security concerns.
As should be evident from the above, the themes thus laid out in the book are located very definitively within the contours of contemporary post colonial histories of South Asian states. There are meaningful echoes and resonances of these themes in the shared colonial past of these regions, but Banerjee’s engagement with the discipline of academic history through the text remains cursory at best. And this would not have posed any problem of academic rigour at all for a work that addresses problems of contemporary society and politics, except for the fact that the initial forty pages or so of the book are littered with expressions of severe disappointment about the apparent intellectual stubbornness of historians in their inability to appreciate the significance of the historicity of borders in the histories they write. The signs of disillusionment (‘The history books of South Asia suggest that South Asian borders had remained undemarcated for years evoking little interest from the British colonialists and almost none from the Indians themselves’: p. xxxii) are many, but the following paragraph from the Preface is illustrative of the tone of this criticism: ‘In trying to make borders rigid, the state tries to control the border which means controlling the bodies that inhabit borders, which in turn threatens and destabilizes that control and creates uniquely bordered existences. This goes against the traditional and received histories of borders that sanitise and stabilize the borders’ (p. xviii). This is not the place to reflect about the nature of the historians’ enterprise but to exit without a comment would amount to ignoring themes that have dominated historical knowledge. Historians of South Asia have not been silent about borders; on the contrary they have engaged seriously and productively with encounters between colonial and indigenous forms of space, ideas of hybridity, appropriations, transgressions and contestations of not just territorial borders (the concern of a book such as this) but of other ‘borders’: borders of normative difference, of nationalist and imperialist ideologies, of hill-plain tribe-caste binaries, the liminal borders of cultural and historical memories, narratives and counter narratives of different imaginations of spaces. On some of these themes, the works of Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Michael Fisher, David Shulman, Sumit Guha, Thongchai Winichakul, Prasenjit Duara and Benedict Anderson (on Java) stand out, among others. That it will be difficult to neatly slot these works into field of ‘border studies’ is of course another matter.
Borders, Histories, Existences, Gender and Beyond comes across to the reader as a set of essays strung together by the rather tenuous thesis of ‘borders’ without a sustained cogent argument. It is however richly informative in parts and should be of interest to scholars working on issues of migration, displacement, gender and security in north-eastern India.