Living at the Margins: Experiences of Borderlanders of The Indo-Bangladesh Border

The contested Bengal Borderland (results from Radcliffe’s arbitral award) partitioned the Bengal province of British inhabited by the Bengali ethnic group into West Bengal of Independent India and East Pakistan of Independent Pakistan. The continuing cross-border movements of people and goods render this border very complex. In India, these movements have been highly securitized, culminating in fortified and militarized borders. Borderlanders are the primary witnesses to the evolving nature of this border. The process of border hardening and fortification engenders various challenges for Borderlanders, encompassing socio-political and economic constraints in their daily lives. Through an exploration of Bangladeshi immigration and smuggling dynamics consequent to border hardening, this paper sheds light on the tensions and socio-political and economic constraints faced by borderlanders. The people living in borderland have the unique life experiences in their everyday lives. Life stories are important genres of narrative analysis, which ‘is a way of sharing and making sense of experiences in the recent or remote past and recounting important, emotional or traumatic events and the minutiae of everyday life’. This kind of narrative does not explicitly the ‘truth’ but captures the dynamic interplay between lives, experiences, and stories. Drawing on narratives and experiences of individuals residing in borderlands, this study offers an empirical chronicle from the Bengal borderlands. Leveraging Rumford’s conceptual frameworks of 'seeing like a state' versus 'seeing like a border', the paper analyzes the State’s role in border hardening and its impact on the lives of borderlanders. Employing forty open-ended semi-structured interviews conducted with individuals residing in different areas of border districts of West Bengal along the Indo-Bangladesh border, the paper aims to capture the nuanced life experiences of borderlanders.