The 4,010-kilometer-long international border between Bangladesh and India is a prime site for the playing out of nationalist anxieties and contestations. The border is among the most violent in the world, as many Bangladeshis are apt to point out; they will invariably add that India's Border Security Forces have little regard for Bangladeshi lives, shooting at will, seemingly. Right-wing discourses in India, in contrast, have long relied on the figure of the Bangladeshi “infiltrator cum Islamic terrorist” to secure otherwise dubious boundary-making projects. The lines between Muslim, Bengali, and Bangladesh are frequently blurred in the process.
One might expect life in this border zone to be shaped by violent negotiations of sovereignty, citizenship, and religious identity. Delwar Hussain's ethnography, however, unfolds along quite different registers. Hussain arrived in Sylhet, Bangladesh, to carry out fieldwork on the barbed wire fence being constructed by India along this contentious border. A combination of serendipity and practical considerations compelled him to choose a site at a remove from direct violence. The result is a refreshing and often provocative account of everyday life in a Bangladeshi borderland.
One of Hussain's explicit goals—in line with his training as an anthropologist—is to complicate and inject specificity to broad theoretical claims about globalization, sovereignty, and border-making under neoliberal regimes. Thus his interest in how decisions made in “places that matter” are made sense of and experienced in “out of the way, marginal places” at the same time that “localized discourses and experiences shape the way large intangible issues are understood” (p. 42).
The narrative juxtaposes two geographical spaces, Khonighat and Boroponi, representative of two distinct ideological moments in the history of the territory that is now Bangladesh. The Khonighat Limestone Mining Project, established in the 1960s, in what was then East Pakistan, embodied the progress narrative at the heart of postcolonial efforts to break with colonial pasts and enter the space of modernity. Thus, the goal of “the Project” was not only to advance industrial self-sufficiency but also to produce newly enlightened secular citizen-subjects who would actively contribute to nation-building. The Project closed down in 1993, a casualty of the neoliberal turn and practices of over-extraction.
The closure corresponded to the emerging prosperity of neighboring Boropani, which is now a booming coal town. With the 1947 partition of British India, and the severing of Sylhet from Assam, the village of Boropani was also divided. The collieries of the Khasi hills, which fed the factories in what had become East Pakistan, were cut off by the newly established international border. The laborers who routinely worked the coal mines found themselves in a different national space on the Bangladeshi side of Boropani.
By the time he arrives in Khonighat, Hussain encounters quite literally “the ruins of progress,” a desolate landscape pockmarked by the crumbling infrastructure left behind by the Project. Saturated with history, it is a landscape to which powerful narratives are attached. Hussain finds that in Khonighat the predictable nostalgia of a former labor aristocracy for the certainties of the past—a steady job with housing, an assured pension—is layered with a profound sense of betrayal and loss. Association with the Project and its forgotten promise of progress mediate local views of the past, present, and future. Most palpable is the sense that the future is elsewhere and has left behind the people in Khonighat. Hussain compares this absence of hope to the “abjection” experienced by Zambian copper belt mine workers of whom James Ferguson writes.
Hussain's interlocutors share with him chinks in the formal narrative of the Project's operations in the old days. For instance, he is told of the frequent necessity of paying a bribe to obtain formal employment. Hussain's eagerness to establish that such “deviations from the norm” do not indicate an insufficient modernity in Khonighat but are illustrations of locally specific “multiple modernities” seems unnecessary. Not only do they imply the existence of a pure and original modernity, but the concept, to which he resorts frequently, also contradicts the modes of transnational governmentality he embraces in his chapter on the state and NGOs.
In documenting the porosity central to borderlander life, Hussain insightfully suggests that without informal practices, the formal economy of Boropani could not reproduce itself. For instance, Bangladeshi workers are preferred by Indian coal mines precisely because of their illegal—and vulnerable—status. Building on Abraham and Van Schendel's idea of the (il)licit—legally banned but social sanctioned practices—Hussain observes that the state apparatus is implicated in and in collusion with local people in the creation of the unstable category of the (il)licit. In other words, states are not just distant and academic but “in borderlands, states have legs, nametags and the ability to look away, permit and sanction” (p. 64).
The reader gets a good sense of how historically composed relationships endure and are remade despite the vagaries and ruptures of nationalist (dis)incorporation. In this respect, the text recalls earlier pioneering work by Willem van Schendel and others on the constitutive instability of border zones.
Going against the grain of much scholarship, however, Hussain also insists on a central paradox of neoliberalism: its ability to open up “local spaces of creative potentialities and possibilities” (p. 21). He argues that groups previously marginalized or ostracized by an earlier singular vision of modernity find acceptability and livelihood in the post-Project-era border economy. In this respect, the most persuasive illustration he offers is the thriving hijra presence in Boroponi. Entitled “The Sexual Life of Borderlanders” (a playful nod to Malinowski's ghost), the chapter on hijras offers valuable ethnographic insights that directly challenge conventional third-gender frameworks and the NGO-based identity politics associated with the latter.
Boropani hijras are not stereotypical figures of disrepute (an assumption even cutting-edge scholarship of South Asia makes) but at the center of mainstream society. Hijras in Boropani claim to be both men and women; their self-presentations are context-specific, mapping on to public and private spheres. Hussain maintains that being within rather than outside the binary gender framework allows hijras to participate in the public, male-dominated world of work. Hussain's claim that hijras are preferable to women as laborers not just because the former do not get pregnant but also because nonmarital sex is locally equivalent to rape is rather less persuasive, at least to this reader. Nevertheless, his basic point—that there are no easy readings of non-heteronormative desires and behaviors—is very well taken.
Contra Aiwa Ong, Hussain argues that the state is thinned out throughout Bangladesh, not just at the nation's borders. He cautions that the conventional wisdom that neoliberal policies lead to state retreat (and the consequent rise of NGOs) does not apply in Bangladesh, where the state is characterized by fragmentary powers and mediated sovereignty. Here Hussain usefully draws on Gupta and Ferguson's notion of transnational governmentality to understand the articulation of local, national, and international forces.
Hussain's final chapter on religious identity charts an unlikely friendship between two men, one a practicing Hindu and the other an active member of the Tablighi Jamaat. The author uses their many travails in trying to go across the border during Eid/Puja holidays to suggest that the primary schism is not between communities but between people and the state. Religious affiliation operates in opaque but pragmatic ways in the borderland.
Boundaries Undermined signals the arrival of a new generation of books on Bangladesh that challenge and transcend the nationalist exceptionalism and conventional subject matter of much existing scholarship. It is a beautifully written book that makes significant theoretical contributions to the scholarship on Bangladesh and the anthropology of borders. It will be a great teaching resource for undergraduate South Asian studies and anthropology classes.
