ABSTRACT
Contemporary social discourse is heavily concerned with narratives of belonging. Who is included, under what circumstances, and why someone should be kept out; these questions gain the centre stage when the panoptical vision of the state has penetrated every aspect of our life worlds. As a colony, India had political formations and representative elections, but lacked a notion of citizenship. Independence and partition drastically impacted cartography and laid the foundation of a modern notion of citizenship, drawing legitimacy from the Constitution. ‘Borders’, ‘Borderlands’, and ‘Mainland’ entered the political lexicon visualised through the prism of the security apparatus. Statist constructions aided by biometrics demarcated the citizens from the aliens. This study analyses the construction of citizenship in the context of the borders of Northeast India and the resultant creation of marginality. It further argues that the narratives of the borders are masculine in nature, privileging male modes of discourses and power compulsions. It makes the plea to reverse the machismo-fuelled discourse by focusing on the historical agency of the people living in the borderlands. Finally, the study concludes with Appadurai’s notion of a ‘statizen’ whereby blood, ethnicity, and origins are no longer the alphabets of citizenship, but bureaucratic documentation is the sole requirement.
