Jungle Passports: The tales of border societies interacting beyond the lines

Years ago, on a spring morning, we were hiking through the Rema-Kalenga Wildlife Sanctuary in Habiganj district, located near the Bangladesh-India border. Just across the border was the Indian state of Tripura.

As we were heading south towards Rema forest beat, a group of people - men, women and children, apparently a family - suddenly appeared out of the cover of the lush vegetation, silently crossing the trail. Just from the look, we knew they were not tourists.

The local guide with us asked them which village they were from, and they named one. After a brief exchange, the guide said, you are from India, aren't you?

The family replied in the affirmative and said that they came to visit their relatives in the village they mentioned earlier, inhabited by Tripura people.

Even earlier, during a trekking trip in Bandarban, we noticed that our young guide from a Bowm family used every break to pull out his mobile phone, and if a network was available in the remote trail, he would be talking to someone, with a hushed voice and soft tone.

So we asked him where his girlfriend lived, and the answers both surprised and amused us.

The guide was actually dating an Indian girl, from across the border, from Mizoram.

He said he used to visit the girl once every one or two months, crossing the border.

Seventy-five years back, when Cyril Radcliffe was commissioned to draw the borders that would divide British-ruled India into two new, independent nations, and was given just five weeks to do so despite him having never travelled to India, he split many communities, and even families in two, who became citizens of two different countries overnight.

But the kinship never died, and people from both sides of the border kept travelling to visit their loved ones. Many just continued informal transboundary trades (officially called smuggling) across the border, which remained very porous for many decades.

Although Indian authorities put up a fence on the border that instilled fear with the help of violence committed by border troopers, the interactions among the people living on the two sides of the border hardly stopped. The rivers, the chars, hills and forests make it difficult to make the border impenetrable.

It is common knowledge that many people living along the international border between Bangladesh and India frequently visit the neighbouring country without a passport or visa.

But Malini Sur, an anthropologist, has done an ethnographic study on the topic and opened a new window to peek through it. 'Jungle Passports: Fences, Mobility, and Citizenship at the Northeast India-Bangladesh Border' details how ethnicity, religion, language, families and trading ties spill over the confines of national territories.

The book starts by setting out a historical context of the region, especially the areas across the northern border of current-day Bangladesh and India, namely Assam, Meghalaya states in India, and Mymensingh and Sylhet districts in Bangladesh.

The title of the book, Jungle Passports, derived from the author's conversation with Garo women who travel across the border to sell Bangladeshi clothes to Indian villages; who said they have 'jungle passports' to make the journey.

The book is of course, not only on the kinship maintained across the border. It is also about the illegal cattle trade which the author illustrated in the third chapter. And in the last chapter, the author illustrates how the recent Citizenship Amendment Act continues to shatter the lives of Muslims living in Assam, labelled as 'Bangladeshi' – how they are maligned, ridiculed and dispossessed of Indian citizenship.

Sur started the fieldwork for this study in 2007 when India was constructing a new fence, and the book was published in 2021. This time difference allowed Sur to witness the changes that the fence and the rising Hindu nationalism brought in.

Being an ethnographic work, the book takes the readers right into people's everyday lives, lived in opportunities and in fear as the states practise their sovereignty through barbed wire fences and heavily militarised checkposts.

For example, she writes about  Aladdin, a politician from a border char in lower Assam, who made arrangements with the local police to seize cattle - brought in from faraway states of India - while also negotiating their release, only to be smuggled to Bangladesh. There is also this Hindu politician, Ghosh, whom Muslim traders respected as a religious Hindu, and they did not mention the word 'goru' (cow) in front of him, but Ghosh continued making money from the illegal cattle trade.

But the scene at the other part of the border was different.

"Unlike the aggressive verbal economy that guided cattle lines in India, documentary practices guided the seizures in Bangladesh. State agents and volunteers who levied the penalty of Tk500 per head of cattle and handed out auction counterfoils to traders made cattle a "legal" commodity," the author found out.

This continued till 2017 when many cases of lynching and violent mob attacks on Muslim cattle dealers in India made Bangladesh authorities officially announce that Indian cattle could only enter the country through designated animal corridors.

Fear and respect, 'Ambi Acchu' and 'Mama'

Despite the kinship and trade across the boundary, fear dominates the border communities as the states materialise and enforce the idea of sovereignty through violence. 

The author tells stories of how reverence coupled with fear prevents Garo border villagers from calling the border troops by the name of their agencies. They call the soldiers 'mama' (maternal uncle), as they refer to the elephants as ambi achhu (grandparents in Garo language).

Soon, the newly built fence also evoked the same fear and nervousness among the borderlanders and trespassers.

The author mentions veteran fence cutter Moi Ali, who once proudly narrated how he had cut through India's old, single-layered border fence. 

Years later, Moi shared with Sur, "We hold pliers with shaky hands . . . we are scared to go near it." Sur interprets, by not mentioning the 'new fence,' "Moi reinforced its ominous presence in his life. Like the elephants and border troops, it could not be referred to."

Facing frequent interrogation in the outposts while working for years at this troubled borderland, characterised by violence and brutality, the border continued to reshape the author's mind and body, she writes, even after she left the border.

"I jumped out of my skin at the sight of patchy-uniformed men—even when they were not border troops and soldiers," Sur writes.

This is how intimately the writer lived with the subjects of her study, and this is what makes you want to read every line of the book religiously, although you had probably planned to speed-read it.

When the author started her fieldwork in 2007, Sur said, she intended to follow the journeys and lives of undocumented Bangladeshi migrants. Her work, however, "took a life of its own when India started constructing a new fence along its borders with Bangladesh around the same time". 

That surely happened for the better, and the outcome - this book - is not only worth reading, but it belongs to one's must-read list for those who subscribe to the criminalisation and dehumanisation carried out against the border people who undertake perilous journeys in order to make a living.

According to the author, "Notwithstanding the incursions of violent nationalism from federal to regional politics into people's lives, rural societies will claim and refashion the border. This is because the Northeast India–Bangladesh border divides and sustains far more than just two nations, religions, tribes, ethnicities, citizens and troops."