ABSTRACT
Enclaves are small fragments of land owned by one country, inside the geographical boundaries of another country (van Schendel, 2002). India and Bangladesh share the largest group of enclaves in the world, a historical legacy that had retained its existence despite Partition during Independence in 1947 and the later fragmentation of Pakistan to form Bangladesh in 1971. There are about a hundred thousand people living inside these enclaves, with no access to either basic fundamental rights or any form of livelihood. This chapter looks at the experiences of the residents of Bangladeshi enclaves in India as liminal spaces – not only as borderlands in the sense of their proximity to the international Indo-Bangladesh border, but also as a lived experience. They are the living embodiment of the borderlands – living near the borders as well as the unique challenges of borderlands that enclaves put up. The idea of their being Bangladeshi citizens erects a social, economic, and cultural border at every moment between them and the people in the surrounding areas. The border is not a fence that is a few kilometres away, separating their mother country from them. The border is the very symbolic idea that has kept them segregated socially and economically from their neighbours. The cartographic idea of a border then has become the real divider of the ‘imagined community’ that they experience. And this segregation is further strengthened through the state’s citizenship rights that are unavailable to them. Based on 50 interviews with the residents of six enclaves in the Cooch Behar district of West Bengal in India, this chapter draws a picture of their lack of citizenship in an era when the nation-state is playing an ever-increasing role in shaping the lives of its people. Here I specifically look at the gendered role of the women living in and around the enclaves as they circumnavigate the borderland experience. This takes place by using the patriarchal norms of marriage to access citizenship. In other words, it is the women who became the mediators between the home and the world. These women thus become the embodiment of this borderland in their lived experiences.
