“Un-homing" in one's land: Ecology, Border Security, and the Muslim Char Dweller, Panchali Ray, Krea University

The talk presents some preliminary thoughts on my ongoing ethnographic research with communities living on the riverine (char) lands of the Ganga-Padma river (Murshidabad district) on the Indian side of the Indo-Bangladesh border. On the one hand, these communities negotiate barbed wires and border security forces, as India’s militarization of its border with Bangladesh has grown alongside a paranoia around the figure of the “infiltrator” made synonymous with the “Bangladeshi illegal migrant”. On the other hand, the river’s meandering has made this border population the most micro-mobile— i.e. moving from one char to another, leaving them at the mercy of the border and its security forces. As the Border Security Forces (BSF) set up outposts, most of these poor char (river island) dwellers had their agricultural land fall within the camps. To access their fields, farmers must submit identity documents and copies of land records, seek permission from the security forces, and gain entry for a few hours. As the BSF operate with impunity, permission is granted and withheld whimsically and/or instead of coercive labour extracted from the farmers to maintain the camps and their personnel. The paper will probe into the subjective relation of the farmers with land and the river to understand the alienation (rather than injustice) Indian Muslims feel from a country increasingly legislating to disenfranchise them (amendment to the Citizenship Act). I take the moment of seeking permission from the state (security forces) and the humiliation associated with it as a moment of 'un-belonging'— when land that is home is alienated (not dispossessed), and the subject occupies a liminal space between belonging and un-belonging. In this talk, I argue that the increasing social alienation of Indian Muslims is further reinforced on borderlands, which, apart from being a primary site of transit and interception, is also an arena for proving belonging. The talk, therefore dwells on the question of alienation, ecology and the spectre of the nation-state as manifested in borders, outposts and security forces to understand how those living a distinct mode of existence in fluid lands that defy strong rootedness are now being rendered immobile. I want to understand further how the “charua mode of existence” is ruptured by marking land, spaces, and lives as il/legal and the experience of alienation when people are forcefully displaced from their life worlds.

Panchali Ray is Associate Professor in Anthropology and Gender Studies and Associate Dean (Academics) at Krea University, India. Her monograph “Politics of Precarity: Gendered Subjects and the Health Care Industry in Contemporary Kolkata” (OUP, 2019) focuses on how class, caste and gender influence women’s experience of labour in the nursing profession. She has since then gone on to work on questions of violence, nationalism and collective politics and edited a volume, “Women Speak Nation: Gender, Culture, and Politics” (Routledge, 2020). Her forthcoming publications include the co-edited volume “Teaching/Writing Resistance: Women’s Studies in Contemporary Times” which emerges from her engagement with feminist knowledge production and the question of interdisciplinarity in formal university spaces. Currently, she is engaged in ethnographic research which on riverine lands (char), borders, migration,and care in Bengal, India.

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