Borders: A view from ‘nowhere’ 1

Introduction

Borders are performed and ritualized in various ways in order to mark out the territory of a state and to separate citizens and foreigners, deepening the demarcations between ‘us’ and ‘them’ (Aas, 2007). They choreograph, hinder and regulate the movement of goods and bodies. They (re)direct the flow of populations. The presence of borders impacts everyone who lives on, across, within and outside of them. Through such processes of ‘bordering’, identities of ‘citizen’ and ‘non-citizen’ are produced vis-à-vis territorial boundaries and the logic of state sovereignty. As McCulloch and Pickering (2012: 1) have convincingly argued, the border has ‘become a pre-eminent site for criminalization and crime control on a global scale’. Any violation of national borders, such as that of irregular crossing, is seen as a threat to state sovereignty and is punishable by law.

While mainstream criminology has historically focused on matters of exclusion, integration and identity, discussion of its relation to borders has only recently emerged as a focus of study. In particular, borders have come to the forefront in the context of transnational policing scholarship as being central to a broad range of criminal activities and subsequent practices of enforcement (McCulloch and Pickering, 2012; Pickering et al., 2014; Weber, 2013). Further, the growing literature on the ‘criminology of mobility’ (see, for example, Aas, 2007; Aas and Bosworth, 2013; Bosworth, 2012) is attending to the range of experiences of people caught in the legal trap of sovereignty anxious states (see, for example, Aas, 2007; Pickering and Weber, 2006; Wacquant, 1999). As Pickering et al. (2014: 391) contend, the ‘criminology of mobility reveals that the empirical focus of enquiry must shift to include those sites, historical and contemporary, where penal power intersects with other forms of state governance’. However, discussions on the intersections between gender and the criminology of mobility are still on the margins (although see Bosworth, 2012; Pickering and Cochrane, 2012; Sudbury, 2005).

In the scholarship examining the choreography of the state, borders and institutions, and the related processes of criminalizing certain groups of people, what seems to have been left out of these discussions is how ‘transgressors’ of state borders understand and make meaning of these borders, negotiate them and fulfil their aspirations despite the wealth of law and policy geared towards the criminalization of their acts. Moreover, most discussions of borders, and the maps upon which processes of bordering are made possible, echo masculine voices and perspectives. Only recently has the silence of female voices (see Gilligan, 1982) been highlighted, along with the difficulty in hearing what these voices say when they speak. Further, as opposed to the androcentric understanding of borders, Yuval-Davis (2011: 7) rightly points out that a feminist political project of belonging, based on an ethics of care, ‘relates more to the ways people should relate and belong to each other rather than to what should be the boundaries of belonging’. This article proceeds from this basis, aiming to ground the analysis of border crossing and its criminalization in a feminist framework that privileges the voices and understandings of women moving across borders.

Borders separating two states, and the related regimes of citizenship, are reflective of, and produce, gendered inequality. As Banerjee and Basu Ray Chaudhury (2011: xvii) observe, the border is a ‘site where this contest over inclusion and exclusion is played out every day’ and in turn ‘becomes a zone of endemic violence where masculinity is privileged’. The modern state is a gendered state with power and security as its cornerstones (Mohsin, 2004). Gender inequality is inherent in the militarist security ideology of bordering processes and practices of state governance as well. The female citizen subject has a fractured or inundated citizenship. Rajan (2003: 28) argues that:

Women are interpellated as citizens of the nation state in a variety of ways […]. Citizenship becomes gendered in the state’s acknowledgement of the social discrimination that women suffer (a necessary preliminary to reducing it); via its regulation of sexed (reproductive) subjects; as a consequence of its construction of (gendered) identities toward specific ends; and in its governance of a ‘female population’.

Scholars like Ramaswany (2001) contend that maps of states are represented as feminine spaces, which need to be protected by the patriotic sons. Women are seen as the markers of social boundaries and essential for upholding the honour of the family, community and therefore the state, but ironically they are excluded from the nationalist imagination and tend to be underrepresented in scholarly examinations of border crossings as well (but see Pickering, 2011; Pickering and Cochrane, 2012; Yuval-Davis and Stoetzler, 2002).

These factors make the relationship between women and nation a paradoxical one (Yuval-Davis and Anthias, 1989: 6). It is this paradox that ‘affects women’s situated imaginings of (state) borders and (national) boundaries as well as some practical-political conclusions that at least some women draw from their specific relation to the nation’ (Yuval-Davis and Stoetzler, 2002: 335). This relationship is an important theoretical consideration and useful for understanding how the research participants in this study imagined or perceived geographical borders and boundaries. Yuval-Davis and Stoetzler (2002: 342) further point out that women ‘embody borders and boundaries but also the possibility of crossing and transcending them’. Through their ‘transgressions’ of borders and boundaries – both social and physical – women challenge the patriarchal social system that is dominated by male machismo and violence and seek to imagine a better life outside the given framework of the gendered docile behaviour expected of them. Importantly, as Pickering (2011: 110) reminds us, the border is in constant performance and the continuous process of construction and reconstruction lends it multiple and shifting meaning; therefore, ‘women’s experiences of crossing them extra legally are also going to vary and be imbued with a range of meanings that are both context-specific and globally informed’. Consequently, in the context of heightened mobility under conditions of globalization, and the associated criminalization of much of this movement, it is important to hear and understand women’s voices with respect to borders and border crossings, because their experiences are (potentially) different from those of men and based on the specificities of their marginalized positions.

This article foregrounds the relationship between criminology and borders with a feminist lens by drawing attention to the ways in which women who are criminalized for crossing borders deal with masculinized and militarized normative understandings of borders. ² It provides a close reading of the narratives of young Bangladeshi women, detained in Kolkata, India, under the Foreigners Act (1946), to highlight the alternative range of meanings they assign to borders and use them to negotiate their everyday life in prison in which they are labelled as ‘criminals’.

A Note on Methodology

This article is based on interactions ³ with 40 young Bangladeshi women prisoners lodged in two correctional homes in Kolkata, the capital city of the Indian state of West Bengal, located near the border between Indian and Bangladesh. The majority of participants were between 18 to 22 years of age. The fieldwork was conducted for nine months between December 2010 and December 2011 with the purpose of exploring how the experiences of these women were shaped in the context of ‘honour’ and violence in the process of ‘illegal’ migration and their interactions with the criminal justice system in India. ⁴ An interview guide with broad themes, including migration decision, understanding and process of crossing borders, experiences of arrest, imprisonment and legal proceedings, change in gender roles and responsibilities and deportation, was used to steer conversations with the research participants who began from the topic they felt most comfortable. The article also draws on everyday field notes and observations made during this period.

The research participants came to India for varied reasons, most of which revolve around the aspiration for a better life. Some came with the hope of making a living or to escape violent and abusive marriages; others came to meet relatives on the other side of the border, which, as will be shown, they viewed as an extension of Bangladesh and not necessarily a separate country. ⁵ These women were either arrested from railway or bus stations upon their arrival in India, in the course of their attempt to go back to Bangladesh, or from a brothel. Very few of the research participants had managed to go to school to receive formal education. On average, they attended school for five years. Some of them went to madrasas ⁶ (schools) to receive religious education. However, the majority could not read or write. They spent their childhoods as domestic workers earning a meal or two in return, took care of their younger siblings or ran their own households. Belonging to extremely impoverished backgrounds, they resided in temporary settlements, mostly in rural areas. A number of participants had previously worked in garment factories in Dhaka or other small Bangladeshi towns. Of the women who were married, only one came to India with her husband and child. The others came alone, with the help of dalals ⁷ (agents) or acquaintances from the village from whence they hailed.

This article is based on research that draws on a feminist methodological premise that systems of knowledge are designed in such a way that they silence and devalue the voices of women, either through acts of omission, implying that women’s voices and experiences were left out from the process of knowledge production by mistake, or acts of commission through which women’s voices and experiences were intentionally left out of the process of knowledge production (Langton, 2000: 130–134). Moitra (2002: 105) argues that the exclusion of women’s experiences is ‘due to an androcentric bias which treats “human” as a neutered concept and on every occasion tries to replace woman by human’. She also observes that due to the creation of these neutered ‘human’ qualities, women’s experiences that do not converge with ideas about ‘human’ experiences are left out of theory construction on the pretext that these do not match the desired or aspired human qualities. By rendering them as unworthy of theory construction, women’s experiences are left out of the process of knowledge construction and gradually silenced and marginalized (Moitra, 2002: 31–32). Feminist scholars have pointed out that a rational, logical and often teleological presentation of experience is considered appropriate for the purpose of knowledge creation within a positivist framework. Women’s experiences tend to be marginalized on the pretext that they are based on emotions and therefore are irrational, inappropriate and undesirable for theory (see Foss and Foss, 1994).

In a positivist mode of knowledge production – reflective of much mainstream criminological thought – there is no space for vagueness at any stage of research. Ambiguity or fuzziness is considered to be a threat to the well-defined structure of a scientific study and taken as a fault at the epistemic level. It is assumed that it is the inability of the knower to understand fully the ‘fact’ of the matter and hence vagueness creeps into a proposed research project. However, an alternative way to look at vagueness is that it is omnipresent in all our lived experiences. Feminist theorizations reflect scepticism of the ‘neatness’ that science proposes, questioning the ways in which knowledge is organized. As Moitra (2011: n.p.) elucidates, ‘[i]n the name of neatness and efficiency the existence of fuzzy categories are either denied, or mutated, or marginalized and silenced’. I borrow her argument that vagueness lies not only at the epistemic level but it is a virtue of the ‘reality’ that we seek to study. The continuous allegation of vagueness at the epistemic level is in itself a scientific trope. In this context, as a researcher I have paid attention to the power differentials acting in the epistemological processes and self-reflexively transformed the methodology at every step. Efforts were made to loosen out epistemic fixities in order to fracture the homogeneity and hegemony that often accompany a research process. In the process of this research, the voices of the research participants have been acknowledged in a manner that provided space for vagueness of their everyday lived experiences in the context of cross-border mobility.

The Indo-Bangladesh Border and the Criminalization of Mobility

The Indo-Bangladesh border and the map of India have a colonial legacy. It was important for the British to mark a single entity, politically and territorially, as their imperial space (Ramaswamy, 2001). As chairman of the Border Commissions, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, architect of the Radcliffe Line, a boundary demarcation line between India and Pakistan upon the Partition of India, was charged with equitably dividing 450,000 square kilometres of a territory comprised of 88 million people. It is said that Radcliffe had never visited India before this appointment. He was responsible for marking out the border in a span of six weeks. The result was an arbitrary border which ran through some thickly populated regions and often divided parts of a house in a way that some rooms were in one country and others in the second country (Sanjog, 2011: 8). The modern territorial Indian state has constantly tried, albeit without much success, to discipline the flows of goods and people existing prior to the partition. Impermeable borders become difficult to achieve in the context of borders that separate countries like India and Bangladesh with such close socio-cultural and historical ties. Additionally, the physical geography of the area, consisting as it does of plains, riverine land, hills and jungles with hardly any natural obstacles, has made the Indo-Bangladesh border extremely porous and in practice ambiguous. Neither of the two countries, with their burgeoning populations, have any strict citizenship identification tools; moreover, in terms of ‘race’ and ethnicity, the people are similar, sharing languages, food, religion and culture. ⁸ These factors make it especially difficult to prove the nationality of persons alleged to be ‘illegal’ migrants from the other country (Bhattacharya and Sen, 2005: 11).

East Pakistan, the eastern part of erstwhile Bengal province under the colonial rule, was a consequence of the partition of India in 1947 when the country was divided based on Muslim and non-Muslim majority areas, resulting in East Pakistan becoming part of the Republic of Pakistan. In 1971, after a prolonged freedom struggle, East Pakistan became independent of the Republic of Pakistan and was born as Bangladesh. India’s land border with Bangladesh – 4096.7 kilometres in length – is the longest that India has with any of its neighbours. Of this, approximately 2000 kilometres are shared between the Indian state of West Bengal and Bangladesh. Bangladeshi divisions of Dhaka, Khulna, Rajshahi, Rangpur, Sylhet and Chittagong, along with Indian states of West Bengal, Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram, are situated along the border. The states of West Bengal, Assam and Tripura are said to deal with the maximum number of Bangladeshi migrants coming into India (Afsar, 2008: 4). Regions on either sides of the West Bengal and Bangladesh border are commercially underdeveloped, but are fertile grounds for smuggling in both commodities and persons. The area is heavily populated, and cultivation is carried out on every last inch of the border in many stretches.

In 1986, a border fencing project started with Bangladesh and was led by the federal government of India (Van Schendel, 2005: 212). Border fences have since been erected after due consideration of terrain constraints in the area (e.g. availability of the land, presence of nullah (river), villages, etc.) and the concerns of the local population. A partially fenced militarized border allows for continuous population flows across the Indo-Bangladesh border. Borders and fences, as Sur (2012: 148) observes, ‘counterintuitively induce transnational spatial practices and propel regions and people to be more interconnected’. The research participants ‘transgressed’ various borders either ‘unknowingly’ or without ‘full’ knowledge of what it entailed. India is increasingly focused on enacting militarized and violent border control practices along the country’s eastern border with Bangladesh. Large expenditures are being made towards expanding the number of troops, fencing the border and establishing technologies of control and surveillance (India PT, 2013; Service IAN, 2014).

In addition, several criminal offences were introduced, mostly post-independence, with the effect of protecting state sovereignty and some for punishing people crossing the Indian border without valid documents. The Foreigners Act (1946), which is still in effect, was passed even before Independence and much before the Citizenship Act (1955), implying that it was first important to establish who is not a citizen (and thus a foreigner), and then to establish the rules of citizenship. In the name of security of Indian citizens, ‘foreigners’ without valid documents were, early on, constituted as threats to the citizens and to the sovereignty of India. These two Acts were followed by several others: the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (1956), which got its final shape in 1972 and was imposed on the so-called disturbed areas (i.e. primarily the border areas in the north-east of India); the Defence and Internal Security Act (1971); the Disturbed Area Act (1976); the National Security Act (1980); the Public Safety Act (1978); and the Terrorist Affected Area Ordinance (1984). All of these Acts directly or indirectly focused on the maintenance of sovereignty of the Indian state. Although, today, a number of Bangladeshis in India are also arrested under the Passports Act (1967), this article focuses on the Foreigners Act (1946) as it was under this legislation that the research participants held in two prisons in Kolkata were arrested.

According to the Foreigners Act, a ‘foreigner’ is a person who is not a citizen of India. The category of citizen defines the framework for exclusion of a person who is ‘not citizen’. Further, the provisions of section 14 of the Foreigners Act indicate that a person arrested in contravention of this Act could be sentenced to imprisonment for up to five years and is also liable to pay a fine. On average, the research participants were sentenced for up to two years. It is often difficult for poverty stricken migrants to pay even a small fine and in lieu of it they serve another two or three months in prison as a penalty. It was common for the research participants to languish in prisons long after their terms of imprisonment ended due to bureaucratic delays and political unwillingness between the states of India and Bangladesh. Thereafter, they are ‘pushed back’ ⁹ in large groups. During the period between the ‘push back’ and the end of their sentences, the Bangladeshi women are known as Jaan Khalash or released prisoners. For instance, Prothom Alo, a leading daily Bangla newspaper, published on 27 October 2010 a report stating that over 2509 Bangladeshi prisoners – including children – were incarcerated in prisons across West Bengal, including some 567 so-called Jaan Khalash prisoners who had already served out their sentences (Daily Star, 2010).

The research participants were living in a small female ward in one corner of an extremely large, male dominated prison. ¹⁰ They were housed in the same prison as those charged with theft, kidnapping, murder and domestic violence. This created heightened levels of insecurity and anxieties as the research participants could not fathom why they had to share the same space as such people. They wondered if the state equated their ‘benign’ act of crossing the border with the likes of a cold-blooded murder or torture. Moreover, they saw the Indian inmates go out of the prison on bail or parole while they continued to be in prison for an act which they claimed did not cause grievance or harm to another individual. As will be shown, the Indian state’s endeavour to equate illegal border crossing with other criminal activities was often a source of discontent among the Bangladeshi prisoners who did not understand the politico-legal implications of the border.

Borders: Bangladeshi Women Prisoners’ Perspectives

Many of the 40 Bangladeshi women I spoke to and interacted with claimed to be unaware of the nature of borders and the illegality involved in moving from one side of the border to the other, let alone a knowledge of the Foreigners Act. For most participants, the border was not conceptualized as a concrete territorial demarcation. Some of the women’s narratives suggest that they viewed the two countries as flowing into each other and not necessarily separated by rigid cartographic borders. Twenty-one year-old Hasina’s ¹¹ interaction with the Indian state began at a time when she was unaware of the nature of borders and the illegality involved in the process of border crossings. Even after spending nearly two years in the Correctional Home, she found it difficult to understand what exactly a border was and what a state entailed. At one point she said, ‘I thought maybe India is within Bangladesh … when I came here I realized that no they are separate.’ During another conversation, she stated that although she knew they were two different countries, she did not understand the illegality involved in going from one country to another. She did not necessarily separate the two countries by a border. Hasina’s understanding of borders seemed to be separate from her understanding of what divides two countries. That borders separate two countries was not a given ‘fact’ for her. Over the course of several conversations, Hasina made numerous attempts to explain to me what a country or border meant to her; each time, she presented a different perspective.

Bipasha, who was 18 when she was arrested, had never been to school and along with her sisters was the first one to migrate to India. She had a similar understanding of what constituted a desh ¹² and very coyly admitted, ‘I did not know … I knew that it’s all one desh [giggles softly] … that is how I came here … I did not know that this was a separate desh.’ For many like Bipasha, their inability to describe what a country or border meant was a source of embarrassment. They had learnt a number of terms after coming to the Correctional Home. The legal proceedings resulting in their confinement had also made them more perceptive of the meaning of borders and associated practices like passports and visas, but had still failed to replace completely their experiential understandings with the ‘official’ definitions. These women’s narratives must be read in light of the fact that they performed them from behind the prison bars after spending a few months in prison.

The ambiguity lay not only between understanding India and Bangladesh as separate, but also extended to the ways the research participants perceived the world. Their mental mappings of the world were different from and often opposed to the interests of the sovereign state. Through their criminal convictions and subsequent punishment, the women were encouraged to internalize the values of the sovereign state. However, all attempts at ‘correction’ through the criminal justice system were unsuccessful at making their perceptions of the world more ‘logical’ in terms of normative framings and values.

Although countries and borders may be considered as broad categories for understanding the way the world is geographically organized, the further divisions in terms of states, cities and towns also eluded these women conceptually. ‘Aren’t Kolkata and India the same? Delhi is separate right?’ asked Hasina. Like most of the young Bangladeshi women I interacted with, Hasina also did not understand that Kolkata, Delhi and Mumbai were cities in India which was a country, with each located in a different state. For some participants, Kolkata and India were synonymous and Mumbai, Delhi and other cities were within this Kolkata/India. Some thought that these were all separate, each country in themselves.

At first glance, these comments may appear as surreptitiously naïve. Yet, a close engagement with the narratives of the research participants enables us to understand the nuances of their experiences and their ‘fragmented’ understandings of what constitutes a state, a city and borders. For instance, Salma, an 18 year-old who had abandoned her husband and his violent family, had never heard of what she pronounced as ‘Indiya’:

Before coming here I did not know that some place by the name of Indiya [she makes an awkward face while saying this as she was not sure if she pronounced it correctly] existed … I had heard Bharat, Kolkata and Hindustan … I knew that only Hindus stayed in Bharat and there were no Muslims … That is all I knew.

Salma’s narrative is indicative of the confusion she faced with regard to her understanding of what constituted India. India was now the place where she was imprisoned for being a foreigner without valid documents. Although she learnt the name of the geographical space she had previously known as Bharat or Hindustan, she had not been able to attune herself to the characteristics or nature of this desh called ‘Indiya’.

Some of the women admitted that the porous nature of the Indo-Bangladesh border often added to their already existing confusion or ambiguity around the nature of the border. Aalia, a 30-year-old married woman who had worked in a Bangalore hospital for about a year, remarked how there was nothing clandestine about the way they crossed the ‘border’. Due to the unassuming nature of the entire process, she failed to see the consequences of her transgression. The absence of a spectacle of the border did not make her conscious of its presence. She claimed to have crossed the border by a road running through a field. It did not seem very different from the spaces she moved through in her day-to-day life. The implications of crossing a particular road running through a certain field located in a specific geographical area were unknown to her.

Bipasha had a similar experience. She was not only unaware of what a border was but was also unmindful of the fact that she was going to another country. She said very casually,

I did not know anything … that this is a border and this is India … we thought that this was just like any other place we were going to visit like we usually did in Bangladesh. When someone crosses the border they have a certain fear … I mean the people who steal their way across the border … but we had no such fear because we just walked across what is apparently called the border.

The act of crossing the border in front of Border Security Force (BSF) personnel made her feel that she was not doing something extraordinary or worth worrying about. Although she may have been aware of the intimidation and danger, this did not immediately translate into a fear of the law. This fear was similar to a fear of personal security in the face of an unknown danger. Bipasha was likely waiting for the rituals of the border to appear before her in order to be intimidated by the spectacle, or even to start thinking about what her act of crossing the border entailed. She blamed the absence of any such ritual and symbolic expressions that would signify to her that she was ‘illegally’ crossing a ‘border’ for her lack of awareness.

Complicity of the BSF ¹³ in their journeys across the border often reaffirmed participants’ faith that they were not doing anything wrong; in fact, it made them more confident. Bipasha’s narrative highlights that all the members of the state are not well conversant with or have not internalized what the state means, and that there are fictitious accounts in the grand narrative of the state as well. Despite this, it is the narrative of the state which has the support and validation of international powers, military and security, while the narratives of the research participants have only individual validation. Power relations between different states, international migration policies, transnational policing challenges and national crime policies determine the fate of those who cross borders illegally (see Weber, 2013).

While Salma, Bipasha and Aalia were oblivious of the normative definition of borders and what constitutes India, 20-year-old Rumpa, who had attended school for about nine years, had a unique contribution to make. She tried to call attention to the arbitrariness of the Indo-Bangladesh border by pointing out that the Superintendent of the prison in which they were kept was a Bangladeshi in ‘origin’. She assumed that he came to India at the time of independence of Bangladesh and hence became a citizen of this country by acquiring the relevant documents. She insisted that despite acquiring Indian citizenship, ¹⁴ the Superintendent remained the progeny of a Bangladeshi couple. For her, it was rather ironic that the Superintendent who kept her in custody for being Bangladeshi without valid documents was himself a Bangladeshi in origin. She attempted to show how the identity of being Indian and Bangladeshi was just a matter of time in history and people from the two countries had several shared identities.

Like Rumpa, Saleha, a 24-year-old widow, was also aware of parts of the shared history of India and Bangladesh. ‘My father was a freedom fighter’, she said,

and he used to tell me that India had really helped Bangladesh at the time it was trying to gain freedom and become independent. I think it was Indira Gandhi who really helped us. If India supported us so much that time then why can’t it think about us now?

Both Rumpa and Saleha viewed the historical connections between India and Bangladesh as reason enough for the Indian state to alleviate their present condition, and to encourage their movements across the border rather than put them behind bars. They also failed to understand the reasons why India and Bangladesh must be uncooperative with each other, especially after their collaboration at the time when East Pakistan was fighting for its independence. The politics of alliance among nations at certain times and not at others eluded them. Rumpa and Saleha’s understandings of borders were in terms of a shared history. For them, the border between India and Bangladesh appeared to have a continuity since time immemorial and this gave them a hope or an expectation of being ‘accepted’ within the Indian state.

Rumpa went on to highlight the mutually beneficial relationship between India and Bangladesh:

This country [India] is taking the help of Bangladesh and Bangladesh takes the help of this country … there seems to be nothing wrong with that. In Bangladesh we eat Indian rice … Indians eat vegetables that are grown in Bangladesh … we take oil from India … we share water and we keep exchanging something or the other … there seems to be an equal amount of give and take between the two countries … there seems to be nothing wrong with all this exchange of goods then why is there an objection to women like us who come to India to work, to look for a means of livelihood … we plan to go back to Bangladesh … we do not want to stay in your county forever.

She expressed her anger at the inequality, which permitted the flow of goods across borders but imposed significant constraints on human beings. Her narrative resonates with the works of some academic scholars (see, for instance, Weiner, 1993) working on cross-border issues who question the forces which restrict the movement of people but facilitate the movement of capital and goods.

Rumpa referred to the trade relations between the two spaces which she had failed to identify as separate states, each with a distinct identity. She had often heard that these two territorial spaces exchanged goods but she did not think that they could be so distinct from each other that her movement from one space to another would correspond to a criminal act. Rumpa viewed the exchange of goods and monetary transactions between India and Bangladesh as reasons for the borders to appear as flowing into one another. She saw the exchange of goods as an amicable activity. It was assumed that countries which shared material resources would not have a problem in sharing human resources. According to her, they are doing what is ‘human’ to do and hence provides a new narrative of economic distribution and its relation with borders.

Hasina expressed a very different rationale with respect to the problems they were facing as ‘foreigners’ imprisoned in India. She said,

Humans have made the prison and humans only stay in the prison. Everything on this earth has been created by human beings. Similarly borders are also created by human beings. Humans create problems for themselves only. If we didn’t have borders we would not be in prison and if there were no prisons then they would not have any place to keep us in.

It took her several months to put together the fragments of her experiences to understand what borders meant. Although she was unsure of the nature of the border and what its existence encompassed, she did arrive at an understanding of the transient nature of the state and its institutions as human constructs.

According to Yuval-Davis and Stoetzler (2002: 331), ‘collectively boundaries are constructed by the imagination in specific ways that are affected and – to differing degrees – determined by the situated positioning – both socially and politically – of those who do the imagining’. Likewise, Sonali and Rumpa identified with borders and countries based on their social locations and life experiences with who is a foreigner and what is a foreign country. The research participants viewed borders from multiple axes based on their social locations of gender, national identity, age, education, class and religious backgrounds. They often adopted an axis which one sees in academia, for instance, that of the political economy of migration (see Massey, 2009). But the way participants used such axes to comprehend different states, borders and their incarceration gives us an understanding of the ways in which power is inherent in these constructs. Participants’ imagining of borders in terms of a ‘spectacle’ or a ‘historical continuity’, and their use of this framing to imagine and choreograph their mobility, is what makes their task a daunting one. The narratives of all of these women give us insight into the various ways in which a border may be visualized. It lays the groundwork for multiple meanings and interpretations that do not necessarily rely on androcentric notions of security and power thereby giving us insight into the fractures that exist within the apparatuses of state security.

Conclusion

Bangladeshi women prisoners diverged from the dominant (legal) view of states as distinct entities, a normative perspective in which borders demarcate nation states. Their narratives of how they understood borders and visualized two different ‘countries’ were drawn from, or based on, a variety of factors: the stories they had heard in Bangladesh; the frequency of travel they had witnessed between the two places; or knowledge they gained through the mass media. While the research participants recognized the difference between India and Bangladesh, for them, this variance was not neatly marked or divided by a border, but more in terms of culture, religion and economics. But this difference did not necessarily translate to an understanding of the two countries as distinctly separate from each other or as having political borders. Their reference point for understanding the difference between two countries was not a printed map. It was based on conversations and lived experiences and hence not necessarily cognitive but lay in a grey area blending cognition and emotions. These women were not exposed to the jargon of the state but were trying to create their own vocabulary, which varied from individual to individual.

The research participants’ narratives provide alternatives to the androcentric perception of a militarized border based on masculine prowess and mutual exclusiveness. The ways in which the Bangladeshi women understood and experienced the various components of state sovereignty provide other possibilities to masculinized notions of security and crime. Their narratives also illuminate ways of moving beyond the boundaries of care and protection which are primarily aimed at restricting their mobility and controlling their sexuality. These boundaries are bestowed on them by virtue of a perceived embodiment of the nation state, which is marked as a feminine space. Further, participants questioned the criminalization of border crossing by foregrounding the idea of borders in terms of relationality, inclusivity and mutual dependence. Their negotiations with their incarceration and ‘criminal’ status encourage more nuanced understandings of exclusion, integration and identity issues, which have often been borrowed by mainstream criminology from feminist and postcolonial literatures. The experiences of the research participants illustrate how the androcentric, abstract construction of borders has serious implications in disempowering them and therefore deepening their marginalization. It also brings forth the fissures within this construction and highlights the complex ways in which the agents of the state become implicit in its creation.

The variety of participants’ notions concerning borders, states, flows and crime highlights the impossibility of elaborating universal claims regarding these women and instead points to the need to see their experiences as partial, as situated knowledges ¹⁵ shaped by their social locations. It highlights the possibilities of these women to exercise power and therefore to challenge the conditions of their oppression, even from the subjugated positions that they inhabit. The perspectives of these women offer an advantageous window from which one can see the arbitrariness, paradoxes and contradictions involved in the criminalization of border crossing and within the construction of the border itself.

The narratives of the research participants provide, to scholars of the newly emerging field of the criminology of mobility (see Pickering et al., 2014), important directions and useful insights into alternative ways of understanding state sovereignty and governance. Further, these women’s narratives offer an understanding of the complex ways in which norms of gender, state and society intersect to create situations of vulnerability for women and in turn influence their everyday experience of incarceration as ‘criminal’. Their struggles and negotiations give us insight into the everyday life of power and the systems of oppression that it creates and maintains. Scholars and activists of the criminology of mobility can use these to bring about a change in the existing structures.