Most of us realize that the clearly demarcated and color-coded “political maps” of school atlases bear little approximation to messy ground realities. Borders are poorly demarcated, leaky, frequently contested, and often sites of violence. Yet, nothing quite prepares one for the sheer complexity of the border between India and Bangladesh. Besides the usual problems about demarcations and disputes, by one count there are approximately 106 “enclaves” of India completely surrounded by Bangladesh and about 92 enclaves of Bangladeshi territory fully ensconced within India. Further, some of these enclaves enclose sub-enclaves—so-called second-order enclaves. And there appears to be at least one instance of a third-order enclave, that is, “an Indian enclave inside a Bangladeshi enclave inside an Indian enclave” (p. 161). This Escher-like mindbender is, like most things in the subcontinent, a legacy of colonialism (with its divisions between direct and indirect rule and complex layers of sovereignty based on the right to extract land revenue) and the partition of August 1947.

Jason Cons's deceptively slim volume is an ethnography of this border, focused on Dahagram, a Bangladeshi enclave within India linked to its parent nation through the Teen Bigha Corridor, and, over the decades, a frequent focal point of tensions between India and East Pakistan (till 1971) and Bangladesh thereafter. Cons deploys the concept of “sensitive space”(which suggested itself to him because so many of his interlocutors—clerks at the Archives, state bureaucrats, border security officers—repeatedly invoked that term to justify their decisions on his access to maps, surveys, information, interviewees, or field research sites) to capture life on the Indo-Bangladesh border.

While Cons has multiple riffs on “sensitive space,” these two capture it quite well: it “is a lens through which to examine the anxieties, uncertainties, and ambiguities that undergird territorial rule” (p. 7) and “serves as a framework for understanding the confusions of land, community and belonging at the fragmented edges of national imagination” (p. 154). Ironically, while in colonial times the uncertainty over territorial boundaries—between a princely state and the Bengal presidency, for example—created, at most, administrative confusion, the intensity of the postcolonial nations’ desire for clearly demarcated boundaries has fomented deep anxieties, intractable negotiations, political gamesmanship, and both physical and epistemic violence within and outside the enclaves.

For the vast majority of the residents of these enclaves, being essentially stateless has meant exclusion from developmental programs (such as they are), constantly navigating a treacherous terrain in which one never quite knows when one might be arrested for trespassing into enemy territory, questions over property rights, and lack of access to the institutions of and opportunities in one's own nation-state. The enclaves, and Dahagram (the largest of them) especially, rapidly became embedded in the moral geopolitics of nation, religion, identity, ethnicity, and region. What might have seemed an easy solution—simply dissolving all enclaves on either side of the border into the nation-states that surrounded them (in terms of overall area neither country would gain or lose much)—defied implementation as there were always actors on either side ready to charge the government with losing national territory, appeasing minorities, courting vote banks, etc. Just such an exchange was mooted as far back as 1974 in the Land Boundary Agreement signed between Indira Gandhi and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman but could not be realized due to political one-upmanship.

Through it all, as Cons demonstrates with verve and insight, people within the enclaves and along the borders have built lives, negotiated the political winds, and lost and profited from various interdictions, but have been anything but mute pawns. Cons's use of critical geopolitics and interpretive theory is sparing yet subtle. He allows his rich ethnographic material to reveal the complexities of postcolonial sovereignty, insecurity, and precarity. The result is a highly readable, theoretically acute, and sharply insightful work.

It took an Indian government that was bulletproof on the charge of Muslim appeasement—that of Narendra Modi's Hindu fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party—in partnership with the Bangladeshi regime to effect just such an exchange of the enclaves in 2015. As of May of that year, the enclaves (barring Dahagram which is, ironically too well-connected and institutionalized now) were dissolved and finally disappeared from the maps, at least in theory. Cons is justly skeptical as to whether the enclave issue has been resolved with finality or whether those geopolitical anomalies will yet resurface, as there is always political capital to be made. Students of South Asia, critical geography, and postcolonial nationalism will gain much from this thoughtful and lucid engagement with social life on contested borderlines.