Search

Marginalization based on geographic-isolation has serious repercussions on construction of identities. Identities in geographically isolated borderlands in Jammu and Kashmir are doubly-marginalized due to lack of development and the impact of ongoing conflict and dispute between the nation-states of India and Pakistan. Dard-Shins; one such tribal borderland community of village Kilshey in Gurez, Kashmir have been living as 'non-registered non-rehabilitated refugees'. This research while tracing their displacement from across the border during the time of partition in 1947 to the present day refugee-camps and resettlement colonies, studies the concept of belonging and place-attachment vis-à-vis transition and mobility among the refugees here. The displacement led migration across hostile borders has made both the idea of home unsettled and identity uncertain for them. Caught up between these two is the idea of marginality that further informs their bonds of nationalism with both India and Pakistan. Survival as a borderland community in India has not been without the geographical-isolation and under-development that has further led to psychological-distancing and social-disability. Invoking their ancestral links to uss paar/the other side of the border they migrated from becomes pertinent while imagining a life outside decades of marginalization as has been experienced on iss paar/this side in India. This intersection of marginality, identity and displacement thus creates an interesting sphere where aspirations of moving out of the category 'refugee' are stronger than having lived as refugees for ages in the hope of just and fair rehabilitation and resettlement policies in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper explores the politics of community making at the India–Bangladesh border by examining the public and private narratives of history and belonging in a Bangladeshi enclave—a sovereign piece of Bangladesh completely territorially surrounded by India. Drawing on framings of political society, this paper argues that understanding populations at the margins of South Asia and beyond requires attention to two processes: first, to the ways that para-legal activities are part and parcel of daily life; and second, to the strategies through which these groups construct themselves as moral communities deserving of inclusion within the state. Border communities often articulate narratives of dispossession, exceptionality, and marginalization to researchers and other visitors—narratives that are often unproblematically reproduced in academic treatments of the border. However, such articulations mask both the complicated histories and quotidian realities of border life. This paper views these articulations as political projects in and of themselves. By reading the more hidden histories of life in this border enclave, this article reconstructs the notion of borders as experienced by enclave residents themselves. It shows the ways that the politics of the India–Bangladesh border are constitutive of (and constituted by) a range of fractures and internal boundaries within the enclave. These boundaries are as central to forging community—to articulating who belongs and why—as are more public narratives that frame enclave residents as victims of confused territorial configurations. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]