Jungle Passports: Fences, Mobility, and Citizenship at the Northeast India-Bangladesh Border

The Ethnography of Political Violence

by Malini Sur

Since the nineteenth century, a succession of states has classified the inhabitants of what are now the borderlands of Northeast India and Bangladesh as Muslim "frontier peasants," "savage mountaineers," and Christian "ethnic minorities," suspecting them to be disloyal subjects, spies, and traitors. In Jungle Passports Malini Sur follows the struggles of these people to secure shifting land, gain access to rice harvests, and smuggle the cattle and garments upon which their livelihoods depend against a background of violence, scarcity, and India's construction of one of the world's longest and most highly militarized border fences.

Jungle Passports recasts established notions of citizenship and mobility along violent borders. Sur shows how the division of sovereignties and distinct regimes of mobility and citizenship push undocumented people to undertake perilous journeys across previously unrecognized borders every day. Paying close attention to the forces that shape the life-worlds of deportees, refugees, farmers, smugglers, migrants, bureaucrats, lawyers, clergy, and border troops, she reveals how reciprocity and kinship and the enforcement of state violence, illegality, and border infrastructures shape the margins of life and death. Combining years of ethnographic and archival fieldwork, her thoughtful and evocative book is a poignant testament to the force of life in our era of closed borders, insularity, and "illegal migration."

Genres: India

248 pages, Paperback

Published August 6, 2021

Reviews

[Emerald · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s interesting about this concept of “jungle passports” and how it’s used differently for Garo women and Garo men.

Also the experience that Sur went through emotionally. Makes you think if you’re going to do ethnographic work then how are you able to continue that work when it’s becoming a mental health? I think continuing the work knowing that many women and men go through this mentality of the India-Bangladesh border. Think of the people you’re doing this for.