Cross-border activities in everyday life: the Bengal borderland.

This paper will address the multiple forms and layers of porosity that give borderlands, such as the Bengal borderland, their distinctive nature as zones of contestation. Cross-border interactions continue to be an integral feature of everyday life in the Bengal borderland despite increasing militarisation and regulation by the Indian government in the last decade. Criminalization of local cross-border flows has driven them underground - while organized cross-border crimes (smuggling and trafficking) enjoy considerable attention, the breadth and depth of informal cross-border interactions in the quotidian lives of borderlanders remain understudied. What is the significance of such daily cross-border transactions? How do they feed into the local perceptions of the state policies of border control? How do they relate to larger organized flows of smuggling and trafficking? Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork in the border district of North 24 Parganas in West Bengal, India, this paper critically examines the rationales and practices of such informal 'illegal' cross-border interactions and problematizes the territorial logic of the postcolonial nation-state as it is contested in the realities of the borderland. Such a focus also enables a construction of the social history of those people in whose worlds an international border appeared in the monsoon of 1947, thus relating the present configurations of porosity to the regional unity that existed in the pre-Partition past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]