Romola Sanyal Reviews "Jungle Passports: Fences, Mobility, and Citizenship at the Northeast India-Bangladesh Border" (Penn Press) in Antipode (original) (raw)

Geographers, and particularly political geographers, have long been interested in questions around borders, boundaries, sovereignty, territory, and citizenship. The work on borders has evolved considerably within our discipline, with diverse methods and concepts used to analyse them. Scholars are attentive to the performativity and social production of borders, to their porosity, the practices of sovereignty outside the state, and the varied nature of borders and bordering across the world (Megoran 2012; Paasi et al. 2022). It is not only a violent site of state formation, but also a space where lives are lived, upended, and reshaped through shifts in social, political, cultural, and economic practices. Malini Sur's book, Jungle Passports, is a bold text that explores and expands on these themes through an exquisite biography and ethnography of the India-Bangladesh boundary along the Northeastern Indian states of Assam and Meghalaya. The partition of 1947 that