ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how the reorganization of internal and external borders seeks to settle an otherwise moving population and thus triggers a contest over homelands resulting more often than not in alarmingly regular cycles of violence in the region. It also points out, with the help of a case study of Bodoland movement in adjoining Assam and the flight of population to North Bengal, that it triggers how the space hitherto ‘lived’ by the communities in common with each other gets fractured, and that different kinds of space are reconfigured in the wake of contest over homelands and the violence associated with it.
