A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security Across the Bangladesh-India Borderlands

What does the ongoing life of bordering look and feel like after seventy-five years of the drawing of the border? Based on long-term ethnographic research in the borderlands of India and Bangladesh, this talk invites us to consider the violence of bordering in the postcolonial world as a gendered ordering of value and a dynamic relationship between mobility and security, real and imagined. The cost of militarization across this officially “friendly” border is devaluation – of agrarian land and crops, of borderland youth undesirable as brides and grooms in their respective national hinterlands, of regional infrastructures now disconnected, and of social and physical landscapes fragmented by surveillance. The talk – and the newly published book – grapples with the stakes of an anthropological account of such a world of transnational borderland connections in a region divided on national terms.