Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: The Global Transformation of Borders and Mobility
- Section I Experiencing Borders in South Asia
- 1 Spaces of Refusal: Rethinking Sovereign Power and Resistance at the Border
- 2 Border Layers: Formal and Informal Markets Along the India-Bangladesh Border
- 3 Experiencing the Border: The Lushai People and Transnational Space
- Section II Mobility in and Beyond South Asia
- 4 Of Insiders, Outsiders, and Infiltrators: The Politics of Citizenship and Inclusion in Contemporary South Asia
- 5 Renegotiating Boundaries: Exploring the Lives of Undocumented Bangladeshi Women Workers in India
- 6 ‘The Immoral Traffic in Women’: Regulating Indian Emigration to the Persian Gulf
- 7 The Journey to Europe: A Young Afghan’s Experience on the Migrant Route
- 8 Hardening Regional Borders: Changes in Mobility from South Asia to the European Union
- Section III Representations of Borders and Mobility in Diaspora
- 9 The Borders of Integration: Paperwork between Bangladesh and Belgium
- 10 Disordering History and Collective Memory in Gunvantrai Acharya’s Dariyalal 229
- 11 Fragmented Lives: Locating ‘Home’ in the Poems of Sudesh Mishra
- Conclusion
- Index
3 - Experiencing the Border: The Lushai People and Transnational Space
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 December 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: The Global Transformation of Borders and Mobility
- Section I Experiencing Borders in South Asia
- 1 Spaces of Refusal: Rethinking Sovereign Power and Resistance at the Border
- 2 Border Layers: Formal and Informal Markets Along the India-Bangladesh Border
- 3 Experiencing the Border: The Lushai People and Transnational Space
- Section II Mobility in and Beyond South Asia
- 4 Of Insiders, Outsiders, and Infiltrators: The Politics of Citizenship and Inclusion in Contemporary South Asia
- 5 Renegotiating Boundaries: Exploring the Lives of Undocumented Bangladeshi Women Workers in India
- 6 ‘The Immoral Traffic in Women’: Regulating Indian Emigration to the Persian Gulf
- 7 The Journey to Europe: A Young Afghan’s Experience on the Migrant Route
- 8 Hardening Regional Borders: Changes in Mobility from South Asia to the European Union
- Section III Representations of Borders and Mobility in Diaspora
- 9 The Borders of Integration: Paperwork between Bangladesh and Belgium
- 10 Disordering History and Collective Memory in Gunvantrai Acharya’s Dariyalal 229
- 11 Fragmented Lives: Locating ‘Home’ in the Poems of Sudesh Mishra
- Conclusion
- Index
Summary
Abstract
This chapter investigates the neglected micronarrative of the Lushai Adivasi people living in the borderlands of Bangladesh in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, examining how they experience and deal with the new border in their everyday life. The chapter explores the broader impact of the postcolonial border on the Lushai, both direct and indirect – from psychological to political, from environmental to economic. It examines how the Lushai negotiated the newly drawn border and continued their struggle to retain their identity, arguing that the Lushai subvert the ‘rigid’ border in their everyday life and demonstrating that the Lushai people living on the borderland of Bangladesh and Mizoram create a Lushai unity that transcends the national borders amidst the increasing surveillance of the nation-states.
Keywords: Lushai, borders, transnational space, Chittagong Hill Tracts, Mizoram
Introduction
The making of borders in once-colonized regions like Africa and South Asia was an arbitrary and tortuous process that disregarded ethnic identities, one of the important bases of the modern nation-state (Hutchinson & Smith 1996: 13). For this arbitrary state and border making, widespread communal riots spread both before and after the Partition of India. Thousands of people were forced to leave their ancestral places; many thousands were killed and raped (Pandey 2001; Chatterji 2007; Zamindar 2007). Apart from the immediate pitfalls of the creation of the border, Partition also ignited the seeds of future clashes, suppression, the marginalization of minority groups, and the further disintegration of these states.
Borderlands are one of the most fertile grounds for researching the process of border-making, cross-border mobility, and its ramifications for states and society, particularly with a focus on indigenous minority groups (eg., Cons 2012, 2013, 2014, 2016; Jones 2009a, 2009b, 2009c, 2012, 2016; van Schendel 2005; Zamindar 2007). In Border Landscapes, for example, Janet Sturgeon concentrated on the Akha in the borderlands of China and Thailand and their transformation of the border landscape (2005). In the end, she finds that in both China and Thailand the Akha were marginalized and their access to resources and land use shrank due to state policies (Sturgeon 2005: 51-62).
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- Borders and Mobility in South Asia and Beyond , pp. 81 - 98Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2018
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