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Identity and Experience at the
India-Bangladesh Border

The effects of the Partition of India in 1947 have been more far-reaching and
complex than the existing partition narratives of violence and separation reveal.
The immediacy of the movement of refugees between India and the newly-formed
state of Pakistan overshadowed the actual effect of the drawing of the border
between the two states.
The book is an empirical study of border narratives across the India-Bangladesh
border, specifically the West Bengal part of India’s border with Bangladesh. It
tries to move away from the perpetrator state-victim civilian framework usually
used in the studies of marginal people, and looks at the kind of agencies that the
border people avail themselves of. Instead of looking at the border as the periphery,
the book looks at it as the line of convergence and negotiations – the ‘centre of
the people’ who survive it every day. It shows that various social, political and
economic identities converge at the borderland and are modified in unique ways by
the spatial specificity of the border – thus forming a ‘border identity’ and a ‘border
consciousness’. Common sense of the civilians and the state machinery (embodied
in the border guards) collide, cooperate and affect each other at the borderlands
to form this unique spatial consciousness. It is the everyday survival strategies of
the border people which aptly reflects this consciousness rather than any universal
border theory or state-centric discourses about the borders. A bottom-up approach
is of utmost importance in order to understand how a spatially unique area binds
diverse other identities into a larger spatial identity of a ‘border people’.
The book’s relevance lies in its attempt to explore such everyday narratives
across the Bengal border, while avoiding any major theorising project so as not to
choke the potential of such experience-centred insights into the lives of a unique
community of people. In that, it contributes towards a study of borders globally,
providing potential approaches to understand border people worldwide. Based
on detailed field research, this book brings a fresh approach to the study of this
border. It will be of interest to researchers in the field of South Asian studies,
citizenship, development, governance and border studies.

Debdatta Chowdhury is currently an Assistant Professor in Gender Studies at

the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences Calcutta. Her research interests include
border narratives, citizenship and migration discourses, especially across the
South Asian borders. Her research interests also include feminism, caste identities,
queer theories and narratives, especially in the South Asian context.
Routledge Studies in Asian Diasporas,
Migrations and Mobilities

Migration, Micro-Business and Tourism in Thailand

Highlanders in the City
Alexander Trupp

Indian Immigrant Women and Work

The American Experience
Vijaya M. Ramya and Bidisha Biswas

Chinese Transnational Migration in the Age of Global Modernity

The Case of Oceania
Liangni Sally Liu

Identity and Experience at the India-Bangladesh Border

The Crisis of Belonging
Debdatta Chowdhury

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/

Routledge-Studies-in-Asian-Diasporas-Migrations-and-Mobilities/book-series/
RSADMM
Identity and Experience at
the India-Bangladesh Border
The Crisis of Belonging

Debdatta Chowdhury
First published 2018
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2018 Debdatta Chowdhury
The right of Debdatta Chowdhury to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book
ISBN: 978-1-138-21080-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-29681-4 (ebk)

Typeset in Times New Roman

by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Note: The maps in this book are historical maps and they are included here for representative
purposes. The international boundaries, coastlines, denominations, and other information shown do
not necessarily imply any judgement concerning the legal status of any territory or the endorsement
or acceptance of such information. For current boundaries, readers may refer to the Survey of India
maps.
Contents

List of figures vi
List of maps vii
Preface viii
Acknowledgements x

1 Introduction 1

2 Livelihood practices: legal, illegal and the grey-zone

in between 29

3 Spatial disparities: enclaves, Chars and disputed territories 90

4 Ethno-cultural concerns: appropriation of marginal spaces 141

5 Gendered practices: perpetrators, victims, accomplices 177

6 Conclusion 219

Bibliography 229
Index 239
Figures

1.1 Border pillar facing India with Bangladeshi road beyond, 2012. 10
2.1 Fencing along the South Dinajpur border, West Bengal, 2012. 32
2.2 Cattle haat, 2012. 52
2.3 Informal border market beside border outposts. Indian
shopkeeper selling products to Bangladeshi customers, 2011. 65
3.1 Bangladeshi enclave in India, 2012. 95
3.2 Hospital in Dahagram, 2011. 118
3.3 Tinbigha Corridor leading to mainland Bangladesh, 2011. 119
3.4 India’s border fence through which the land indicated above
(Ghoj) passes, 2012. 127
Maps

3.1 Diagrammatic sketch map of Cooch Behar enclaves (Chhits).

Redrawn map. Source: District Map of Cooch Behar, Govt. of India. 91
3.2 Location of Tinbigha, Cooch Behar. Redrawn map. Source: Cooch
Behar District Map, Govt. of India. 114
3.3 Location map of Tinbigha. Redrawn map. Source: Cooch Behar
District Map, Govt. of India. 116
Preface

Cultural and linguistic difference between people is often the genesis of a car-
tographic border formation – an almost natural and obvious boundary-making
between people speaking different tongues and observing different customs. Most
of the borders in the world, be they inter-state or intra-state, have followed this
logic of letting a natural boundary form where a set of socio-linguistic practices
end and a new set of practices begin, often with overlapping traits along the bor-
ders. The Bengal border is a unique case, in being an imposed border, forced
down upon culturally/linguistically similar people, on the basis of religious cat-
egorisations, that too mostly without a rhyme or reason. A mainland was, thus, at a
stroke of a pen, transformed into a borderland – a transformation that was neither
precise nor complete – resulting in a complicated border fabric. The mainstay of
this book, and the study that it has been based on, is an understanding of the pro-
cess of this very transformation of a mainland into a borderland and the diverse
socio-cultural, political and economic narratives that it has produced in the pro-
cess of this transformation. The process of the formation of a borderland can be
best understood by a ripple effect where the nearest areas to the borderline are the
most affected – forming the core border zone – while the farther the area is from
the borderline, the lesser the impact, until the areas cease to identify themselves
with the border and see themselves as mainlanders. This, pretty much, stands as
the logic of calling an area a border zone or mainland.
This book aims to divest the border and the lives of its people of a certain mys-
tery that engulfs a mainlander’s idea of a border. Films, writings, reminiscences
often romanticise the Bengal border as an aftermath of Partition and rarely con-
sider the border as anything beyond an embodiment of loss, grief, separation and
dystopia. A lot of seminal works on the Bengal border have gone a long way in
demystifying it. But most of them have identified the border as a space of subver-
sion and aberration – an abnormal way of life demanding constant control and
rectification by the involved states. This is true of the Bengal border, but not the
entire picture. Most of the existing works have also attempted at theorising the
border or locating it within the larger discourses of border-making. The aim of this
study is not just to demystify or de-romanticise the border but also to consciously
avoid theorising the border, in order to avoid the border narratives from being
enclosed within specific disciplinary frameworks. That would be an injustice to
 Preface ix
the diverse strands of identity formations as experienced by the borderlanders.
The aim is not to reach a conclusion or even form views, but to reveal border life
as and how it is experienced by the border people. It is aimed at highlighting the
lived realities of the people, to focus on their ‘crisis of belonging’ and how they
turn the crisis in their favour in the course of their everyday survival. No single
disciplinary tool can do justice to the dynamism of border life. On the contrary,
it takes away the ambiguities and uniqueness that characterises this border. Sta-
tistical data or graphs have, likewise, been rarely used, in order to maintain the
essence of individual experiences and perspectives, rather than objectifying and
neutralising these experiences into mere statistical information.
Since the focus has been on the narratives, the language and articulation of the
interviewees have been kept intact – the essence of their thoughts maintained as
far as possible. The articulation has often been ambiguous, politically incorrect.
But nothing has been polished or rectified while transcribing, in order to maintain
the spontaneity of the responses.
A lot of varied issues have been discussed, while a lot more have been left
out. Only the recurrent issues, which have spontaneously cropped up in almost
all conversations (open-ended interviews), have been included. The focus has
been essentially on the West Bengal-Bangladesh border and has, thus, left out
India’s north-eastern border with Bangladesh, because of logistical limitations
(my inability to visit Bangladesh’s border with India’s north-east) and because
of the ethno-cultural specificities of India’s north-eastern states, which calls for
separate in-depth study. Issues like connectivity, religious fundamentalism and
terrorism along the borderland have been mentioned, but not as much as issues
like these demand. That is because the interviews were meant to highlight more
of the everyday lives of the border people, and less of the issues of inter-state
bilateral affairs. Very recent trends across this border have also not been touched
upon, limiting the discussion to September 2013, when the doctoral research
was completed. A few updates have been included though, simply to place a few
issues within their current contexts. The book often reads like a string of conver-
sations, rather than a critical analysis of a cartographically sensitised space that
becomes the platform for diverse identity formations. But that, precisely, brings
out the everydayness of a border life, showing how surviving the border is weaved
into the daily lives and practices of its people. Daily lives and practices, rather
than specific events or issues per se, have, thus, formed much of the conversa-
tions. Border-making is not a one-time event, nor is it simply an issue of security,
nationalistic discourses or containment of the subjects of a nation – it is a lived
experience for the people who negotiate it, survive it and use it to serve their
needs. Victimhood is not the only index to understand the border. Agency and
appropriation are as integral to a borderlander’s life. And this is what forms the
crux of this book.
Acknowledgements

This work would not have seen the light of day without the infrastructural and
academic support, and most importantly the studentship support of the Univer-
sity of Westminster. I am immensely grateful to the university for the studentship
and for the help and encouragement I have received from the university staff.
This dissertation would also have been unaccomplished had it not been for the
excellent guidance and supervision provided by my Director of Studies, Dr Radha
D’Souza. To her and to Professor Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, my sec-
ond supervisor, I can only express a lifetime of gratitude.
I sincerely thank the institutions without which I would not have progressed:
the British Library and the School of Oriental and African Studies Library, the
National Library, Kolkata, especially Mr Ashim Mukhopadhyay and Mr Partha
Ghosh; the Ramkrishna Mission Institute of Culture, Kolkata, the West Bengal
State Archives, especially Mr Anandalal Bhattacharya; West Bengal Legislative
Library; Bureau of Applied Economics and Statistics, Government of West Ben-
gal, especially Mr Satya Bhattacharya, and the Office of Indian Census, Kolkata.
I am also indebted to Shaktidas Roy, Chief Librarian, ABP Pvt. Ltd., Kolkata for
providing me with useful information and helping me find the right documents. I
thank the Development Research Communication and Services Centre (DRCSC),
especially Ms Subhadyuti Mitra, for providing appropriate secondary material.
In a similar vein, I wish to thank the National Archives of India, Delhi, the
Directorate of Archives and Libraries, Government of the People’s Republic
of Bangladesh and the Library support staff of the Library of the University of
Dhaka. I am extremely thankful to the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, Dhaka and
especially Professor Sharifuddin Ahmed and Md. Abdul Awal Miah for not just
providing me with hospitality but also relevant inputs. I fondly remember Pro-
fessor Fakrul Alam of the University of Dhaka for putting me in touch with the
relevant people.
Professor Subhendu Dasgupta and Professor Keya Dasgupta’s support and
motivation with regard to my field work cannot be expressed in words. Without
the help of Mr Debiprasad Roy Chowdhury, of the Association for Protection of
Democratic Rights (APDR), who helped me with field assistants in the various
border areas where I worked, I would not have been able to conduct my field stud-
ies. I am deeply indebted to those APDR activists and volunteers who made my
 Acknowledgements xi
field visits not just possible but safe and enjoyable. Samiran Biswas, Swapan San-
yal, Diptiman Sengupta, Krishnapada Ghosh, Subham, Sudipta, Ananda Ghosh,
Abhiranjan Bhaduriand Jatiswar Bharati all deserve my sincerest gratitude. I am
obliged to Binoy Krishna Mullick of Rights Jessore, Bangladesh for providing me
with the necessary logistical support and field assistants during my field visits in
the border districts of Bangladesh. My field visits in Bangladesh were also made
possible by Rostom Ali Mondol and Sarwar Hossen.
Most of the photographs reproduced in this book are mine, and therefore they
appear without acknowledgement. For the others, their sources are duly mentioned.
Without inspiration from Professor Subhas Ranjan Chakrabarty, Dr Paula
Banerjee and Professor Lipi Ghosh, I would not have been able to pursue aca-
demic research. My immense gratitude to Prof. Parimal Ghosh for pushing me
into turning the dissertation into a monograph and for making me believe that
I can. My sincerest thanks to Rajat Kanti Sur for helping me with every kind of
support for my research and for the wonderful discussions and inputs, and most
importantly, for having faith in my abilities. I also thank Ishita Dey for her encour-
agement and inputs.
I do not have enough words to thank Tanmayee Banerjee and Sayandip Mukher-
jee for being my oxygen and sunshine in London. Without them, I doubt if I would
have survived the grey days. Dr Devika Rangachari appeared as a life-saver at
the right moment. I take complete responsibility for all the shortcomings in this
monograph.
Without the freedom to work on my own research and the infrastructural sup-
port of a well-equipped office – my ‘own’ space – provided by the Centre for
Studies in Social Sciences Calcutta, my last days of working on my book would
not have been possible.
I thank Saumya and Radha Chandra for their trust in me. Last, but by no means
the least, I thank my parents, my brother and Saurav for being my patient lis-
teners, punching bags and cheerful victims of my academic zeal. Thank you for
being proud of me.
1 Introduction

The effects of the Partition of India in 1947 have been way more far-reaching
and complex than the existing partition narratives of violence and separation
reveal. The immediacy of the movement of refugees between India and the newly-
formed state of Pakistan overshadowed, for the time being, the actual effect of the
drawing of the border between the two states. As communal violence and refugee
exodus gradually began subsiding, the ground reality of the creation of the border
started revealing itself. Partition affected almost everyone in India and Pakistan,
directly or indirectly, although the effect was most strongly felt in the provinces
of Punjab and Bengal, which underwent the cartographic partition. West Pakistan
was carved out of Punjab and East Pakistan was carved out of Bengal. For the
people who were settled and rehabilitated in the mainland territories of India and
Pakistan, i.e. those not in close proximity to the newly-created border, the effect
of Partition gradually began subsiding as they went about resettling their lives and
livelihoods. However, for the people whose lives, homes and livelihoods were
directly affected by the creation of the border, a new struggle began. The effect
of Partition did not remotely subside for the people who now found themselves
along the newly-created border, either by the turn of events or by choice. Partition
literature (both non-fiction and fiction)1 ended with the ‘creation’ of the Bengal
border but rarely, if at all, ventured into discussing the border as a space where
socio-cultural and spatial identities continued to be made and unmade.
In this regard, this book aims to look at the lives and some aspects of everyday
practices of the people living along the India-Pakistan border, with specific focus
on the West Bengal-East Pakistan border, later the Bangladesh border from 1971,
in order to analyse how border identities are made, unmade and remade.

Creation of the Bengal border

The basis for the creation of the West Bengal-East Pakistan border was faulty from
its inception. The drawing of the border was far from a ‘clean-cut vivisection’2
of a territory, ‘executed with clinical precision’.3 The Chairman of the Boundary
Commissions and the author of the Boundary Awards, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, was a
complete outsider when it came to knowledge about India and its administration.
He had no prior experience in adjudicating disputes such as the ones leading to the
2 Introduction
Partition and no knowledge of the settlements in the areas to be partitioned. It was
no surprise then that Radcliffe’s drawing of the border on the maps was flawed.
Moreover, the basis of the Partition, as revealed from Partition votes obtained
from the Bengal Legislative Assembly, seemed to bend more towards territorial
considerations rather than communal aspirations, contrary to the general idea
that the partition was executed on a communal basis.4 The Bengal Legislative
Assembly divided itself into two parts – one consisting of the representatives of
Muslim-majority districts and the other consisting of representatives of Hindu-
majority districts. The two units met at the Bengal Legislative Assembly on 20
June 1947 to indicate their views on Partition. Neither of the units, though, had
any knowledge of the actual plan of the Boundary Commission nor to which state
their constituencies would eventually belong when the Award was finally made.5
From the very beginning, territorial considerations gained stronger favour with
the units than the communal right to self-determination, as Joya Chatterji rightly
points out.6 This explains the meeting between the representatives of Hindu and
Muslim-majority districts rather than Hindu and Muslim members ‘to determine
their collective communal will on what was, in its primary form, a communal
question’.7 While communal autonomy might still be achieved within a single
state, i.e. without territorial separation per se, the principle of territorial autonomy
demands a sovereign, bounded space which, in the case of Bengal, could only be
achieved through territorial separation.8
The self-interest and bias of the political parties involved in the Partition Plan,
namely the Congress and the Muslim League, also played significant roles in the
formation of the Boundary Commissions and, hence, the final execution of the
boundary plan. This was coupled with the influence of Lord Mountbatten (the then
Viceroy of India) on Radcliffe in the drawing of the boundary. The immediacy
of the need to finalise the boundary was stressed by Jawaharlal Nehru, mem-
ber of the Indian Constituent Assembly and Prime Minister-designate, on the
premise that once the Boundary Awards were finalised, India and Pakistan would
sort out the rest of the disputes themselves and come to a mutually satisfactory
agreement. Hence, Nehru emphasised on a make-shift border for the purpose of a
quick transfer of power.9 Along with the ‘contiguity of majority areas of Muslims
and Hindus’, another index called the ‘other factors’ was also taken into account
in demarcating the boundary.10 The fact that ‘other factors’, however vaguely
defined, played a crucial and far-reaching role in the creation of the border has
been amply proved, as will be evident from subsequent chapters. Short-term gains
conceived by the political parties and a rushed execution of the transfer of power
by the Viceroy resulted in a territorial fabric which would have long-term effects
way beyond the conception and life span of its creators.
The fact that the Boundary Commissioners were judges and the Chairman a
lawyer created an impression that the Boundary Award was a matter involving
‘legal expertise, resting on judicial rationality’11 and that the ‘rulings met the tech-
nical requirements of legal justice’.12 But, as some studies of the West Bengal-
Bangladesh border have shown and even this book shall reveal, socio-cultural,
political and economic factors have had an overwhelming effect on the creation
 Introduction 3
and evolution of the border – calling into question the legal basis and administra-
tive concerns of the creation of the border.
That ‘territory’ was the most crucial factor underlying the demands of the vari-
ous political parties in the Partition Plan has been proved by their conflicting
claims over territory. Each party had its own reasons and interests in demand-
ing the maximum area of Bengal to accommodate a religious majority, including
the refugees (refugee exodus had already started by 1946 following the Noakhali
riots),13 and to ensure the latter’s economic requirements, even if that meant lay-
ing claims over some of the other religious-majority areas. The decisive political
figures behind the creation of the border had realised that the Radcliffe line would
not simply ‘demarcate the boundaries between two nations’,14 but would also
‘shape the very contours of control and influence in the divided successor states’.15
They had no doubts about the fact that ‘the shape of the border would have impli-
cations for the future of their respective parties’.16 Therefore, the choice and claim
over space required careful consideration. Territory, thus, played a central role in
the vision of the new states to be created.17 Besides, ‘the desire to preserve natural
frontiers, to guarantee the military strategic unity of the new international border
and aid a successful future foreign policy and the political sustenance of the new
Indian nation and citizenship within it, and to ensure economic stability and social
continuity’ were also intertwined with the question of territory, thus, explaining
the scramble for it.18
It would be wrong to assume that the entire public sphere was oblivious to how
the border was being conceived. At least in Bengal, the Bengali public did take
an interest in their political future, instead of being mere passive bystanders, as
Haimanti Roy has shown.19 ‘Rather, they actively wrote to the Boundary Com-
mission, and shared their ideas and suggestions in newspapers and journals too,
feeling that it was their duty to aid the members of the Boundary Commission in
making the right decision’.20 With the help of census data, maps and ‘details about
the religious and national significance of their particular areas’, they explained
‘their petitions for inclusions in either western or eastern Bengal’.21 This shows
that the people, at least in Bengal, had a stake in the boundary-making though the
final plan did not necessarily reflect the public opinion. This explains why the people
who ended up across the border, or settled along it later, were aware of the exigen-
cies of their territorial marginality and were, thus, fast to learn new ways of not
just surviving the border, but being active beneficiaries of the possibilities that
the border created. In the petitions made by the people of Bengal for inclusion in
either half of the newly formed states following the Partition, concerns like reli-
gion, territory, history, patriotism played important roles. Citing Hindu archaeo-
logical heritage or birthplaces of Congress leaders as signs of patriotism, certain
areas were petitioned to be included in Hindu-majority India.22
Despite petitions and newspaper articles, there was confusion regarding the
actual distribution of territories till the Boundary Commission finally announced
the plan on 17 August 1947. Eventually, the Radcliffe line created two states
where the ratio of the majority to the minority population was almost exactly
the same. Thanas (police stations) were taken as the unit for partitioning. The
4 Introduction
Muslim-majority districts of Murshidabad and Nadia went to West Bengal, while
Hindu-majority Khulna went to Pakistan. ‘The Award placed 71% of the Muslim
population in East Bengal (East Pakistan) and 70.8% of the Hindu population in
West Bengal’.23 It ‘assigned 36.36% of land to accommodate 35.14% of popula-
tion to West Bengal, while East Bengal received 63.6% of land to accommodate
64.85% of the population. The two states had an equal proportion of majority and
minority populations in a ratio of approximately 70:30’.24 ‘However, the award
was inequitable in its distribution of the minority population within each area,
as West Bengal contained 16% of the total Muslim population of Bengal, while
East Bengal retained 42% of the total non-Muslims of undivided Bengal. The
boundary divided the five districts of Nadia, Jessore, Dinajpur, Jalpaiguri and
Malda’.25 Though the Boundary Award was generally accepted without much dis-
content, some of the Hindu and Muslim areas (especially in Murshidabad, Nadia
and Khulna) were disgruntled because of their inclusion on the wrong side of the
border and for being ‘shut out of their promised land’.26 The most perturbed were,
for obvious reasons, the people residing in these five districts who, now, went on
to become borderland people after being traditionally mainlanders. While, later in
1950, Cooch Behar became a part of India (West Bengal), sharing its border with
Bangladesh’s Lalmonirhat district, its enclave question could not be resolved,
resulting in statelessness of a considerable number of people, till its resolution as
recently as 2015.

Complex nature of the West Bengal-Bangladesh border

As noted earlier, the border was, from the very beginning, vaguely demarcated, as
it was based on outdated maps of thana and district boundaries. Moreover, it ran
over rivers and agricultural land which were difficult to demarcate clearly except
for an imaginary line. The rivers specifically posed a major problem for the bor-
der because of the seasonal nature of some of them, implying a drying-up during
winter and flooding during the monsoon with disastrous effects on the demarca-
tion as well as the security of the border. Moreover, these rivers often changed
(and still do) their course, resulting in perennial confusion over disappearing and
reappearing lands (Chars)27 along the borderline. In the event of disputes over
territories, the resolution would have to depend completely on the goodwill and
co-operation of the concerned states. Confusion regarding the borderline was
enhanced because of the contradictions between the thana maps and the settle-
ment maps, on which the demarcation was based.28 None of the political parties
or commissioners thought it necessary to survey the land before drawing up the
final borderline. It is, thus, no surprise that the border that was finally created was
full of flaws and inaccuracies, the price for which has been paid ever since by the
people who live along the line.
It is easy to imagine what the outcome of such a hastily-created border pushed
by narrow self-interests and planned without prior ground-knowledge might have
been. The Bengal landscape, therefore, saw the border running right through
homes, hearths and lands, separating people from their families and livelihoods,
 Introduction 5
and the towns from their hinterlands. The border, as Chatterji puts it, ‘ruptured
agrarian communities all along its lengths’.29 The border also had disastrous con-
sequences for peasant movements like Tebhaga,30 cutting off jotedars31 from the
sharecroppers.32 Traditional kin and associate links and economic ties were dis-
rupted, and illegalised, and traditional practices criminalised by the creation of
the international border. The communication system was heavily jeopardised, and
public institutions, like administrative headquarters, hospitals and courts, were
cut off from the suburbs.33
The Bengal border became all the more complex in nature due to the official
intention of the Nehru government to keep it porous, and the regulations regarding
property evacuation and compensation flexible. The Standstill Agreement in 1947
emphasised on the ‘interdependence of the new nations and the need for open
borders’, stipulating that there would be no customs barriers or prohibitive excise
taxes on goods till a long-term trade policy is framed.34 The Inter-Dominion Con-
ference in Calcutta in 1948 also saw the setting up of the Evacuee Management
Boards on both sides of the Bengal border in order to protect the evacuee proper-
ties till their owners returned to claim them. Also, those who lived on one side
of the border and worked on the other could still move freely across the border
on a daily basis.35 Even people living across the border could also move their
land’s produce across to their homes on the other side.36 Water, road and rail links
continued between the two parts, which benefitted India more, since its goods
carriages needed to traverse East Pakistan’s territory for easy communication with
its north-eastern parts.
While this flexibility and porosity remained merely on paper for those migrants
who settled in places far away from the border, it meant a physical practice of
regular mobility for those settled near the border, as they tried to access and exer-
cise their control over their property that was left behind on the other side.37 This
implied that even after years of the Partition and the creation of the border, the
cross-border movement of people and goods was a fact, and an officially rec-
ognised one at that.38 Yet such government policies failed to have the desired
effect of a peaceful border obtained through porosity. This was largely due to
conflicting ideas about the border’s nature and use by the civilians and the border
guards. In their zeal to protect the religious majorities and, thereby, feed into the
nationalistic fervour of their respective states, the border guards and local thana
police attempted to establish complete control over the border, thereby violating
the then-official policies of porous borders and easy cross-border mobility. This
led to the abuse, both physical and verbal, of those who crossed the border.39 With
the expiration of the Standstill Agreement in February 1948, customs barriers
began to be implemented across the border, resulting in confusion regarding the
obtaining of the permit and the fate of perishable goods. This was the beginning of
an uncomfortable relation between the state, on the one hand, represented through
the government policies and the border police (border guards created for the pur-
pose), and the border civilians, on the other, that continues, unabated, till date.
But by the time the states started taking stringent measures to curb and con-
trol the fluidity, cross-border mobility and networks had become commonplace
6 Introduction
and integral to the lives of the border people on both sides of the Bengal border.
Stringent border rules failed to stop such well-networked movements; it simply
tagged such movements as illegal and criminalised the participants. The West
Bengal-Bangladesh border was, thus, an interdependent borderland, characterised
by symbiotic links between societies on both sides of the border, resulting in a
considerable flow of economic and human resources across it.40
The newly-created Bengal border, thus, changed the lives, livelihoods, econo-
mies and politics of the people it directly involved itself with. ‘Village politics
that had, so far, revolved around the caste councils, union boards and tenancy dis-
putes, now began to be the site where citizenship and patriotic duty were propa-
gated, where ideological battles between nations were fought’.41 Categories such
as refugees, aliens, infiltrators attained new definitions in the post-Partition phase,
with colonial subjects turning into national citizens and mainlanders turning into
borderlanders. The mediations around these identities were the most strongly wit-
nessed across the newly-created border, where refugee documents, border slips
and later passports, 1952 onwards, gave dwelling and mobility a new meaning.
Right from the genesis of the border, civilians and citizens across it began realis-
ing the border’s ‘utilitarian purposes’ – for whom, the newly-acquired citizenship
and other official identities were ‘functional, at best and they retained old ties of
wealth, kinship, and local identity even after new nationalities had been imposed
on them through the documentary regime of passports and visas’.42 In fact, it
was the constant flux of migrants and refugees across the border between West
Bengal and East Pakistan ‘that forced India and Pakistan to craft legislations
such as the passport system that ascribed nationality to their minority citizens’,
though the system was implemented initially in a piecemeal way and, thus, failed
to stop questions from state officials to migrants regarding loyalty and national
identities.43
It is in this context of the links between border societies that the following
chapters aim to analyse certain aspects of the negotiations between the civil-
ians themselves and between the civilians and the border guards along the West
Bengal-Bangladesh border. The need to understand patterns of such negotiation
in a complex border like the Bengal border not only enlightens one on the unique-
ness of state-building ideologies in South Asia but also contributes in a large way
to the genre of border studies in general in a global context.

Topography, habitation, livelihood, local governance,

border guards, fences and zones: a brief description
of the West Bengal-Bangladesh border

Topography
The stretch of Bengal (including West Bengal and Bangladesh) through which
the border passes can be broadly categorised into plain land and riverine, with
no natural obstacles. It is heavily populated and cultivated ‘till the last inch of
the border’.44 The boundary line, in most places, is marked by border pillars.
 Introduction 7
The riverine borders are of specific concern to the border guards because of
the difficulty in marking the border through the rivers. Borders, in the case of
rivers, are merely imaginary lines perceived as equidistant from the banks on
both sides. Moreover, the changing course and flooding of the rivers also pose
a challenge to border management due to the disappearing of borderlands and
the reappearing of chars in the midst of the rivers. Chars are strategic locations
both for control of the border by border guards on both sides, as well as for the
cross-border smugglers and infiltrators who use the ambiguous location of the
chars to operate.45 Border rivers have, perpetually, been a cause of concern and
dispute between India and Bangladesh over their sharing of waters, building of
dams and maintenance of navigability. Disputes over the Farakka Barrage and
the sharing of the water of the river Tista are examples of such disputes between
India and Bangladesh.46

Habitation
The entire stretch of the West Bengal-Bangladesh border is densely populated.47
Hence, the border passes through residential areas, cutting through houses and
plots of lands. The profile of the people on both sides of the border is largely simi-
lar in terms of ethnic origin (Bengali), physical characteristics, language (Bangla)
and culture.

Livelihood
Given the vast stretch of farmlands along the border, it is easy to understand the
predominance of agriculture and agriculture-related occupations along it. Fishing
constitutes the next most prominent livelihood activity due to the presence of riv-
ers in the region. Cottage industries like beedi-manufacture,48 handicrafts and gar-
dening also contribute towards the economy of the border area, as do small-scale
industries like brick-kilns, rice-mills and jute-mills. The border itself has created
a vast range of livelihood opportunities for the people, including the camps of
the border guards, border Land Ports (LP) as well as illegal trade. The currency
of West Bengal is Indian Rupees (Rs.) and that of Bangladesh is the Bangla-
desh Taka (Tk.), though that does not deter nor hamper cross-border transactions,
either official or unofficial, in any way.

Local governance
West Bengal (like the other 28 states in India) has its own Legislative Assembly
(Bidhan Sabha), at the provincial level, where the various constituencies are rep-
resented through their Member of Legislative Assembly (MLA) and are repre-
sented in the House of the People (Lok Sabha) of the Parliament of India (Sansad)
through Member of Parliament (MP). The districts of West Bengal also have their
local three-tier governance system, consisting of the Gram Panchayat (at village
level), the Panchayat Samiti (group of Gram Panchayats) and the Zilla Parishad
8 Introduction
(group of Panchayat Samities). There are local governance systems at the village,
block and district levels of West Bengal consisting of elected representatives from
the respective villages.
The districts of Bangladesh are represented by their elected ministers (MPs)
from respective constituencies in the Parliament of Bangladesh (Jatiyo Sansad
Bhavan). The districts also have their own local governments (Union Parishad)
consisting of nine wards (one village is considered a single ward), each ward
containing a chairman and twelve members. The number of wards in a district
depends on its size.

Border guards
The origin of border guards along the West Bengal-Bangladesh border can be
traced to the initiative of the Pakistani government to build a non-official military
organisation called the Ansar Bahini in February 1948 for the purpose of guarding
its borders with India,49 though a separate paramilitary force was also formed out
of the existing Eastern Frontier Rifles (EFR: formed under the colonial adminis-
tration in 1920) and was renamed East Pakistan Rifles (EPR) in 1947 following
the Partition. After the creation of Bangladesh as an independent state in 1971,
the EPR was renamed Bangladesh Rifles (BDR). Following a coup in Febru-
ary 2009, the BDR underwent organisational changes and was renamed Border
Guards Bangladesh (BGB). The BGB is under the administrative control of the
Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh.
The BGB has its Central Headquarters in Pilkhana, Dhaka, besides its North East-
ern (Sarail), North Western (Rangpur), South Eastern (Khagrachari) and South
Western (Jessore) Regional Headquarters.
West Bengal also created its own semi-military frontier corps in March 1948
called the Jatiya Rakshi Dal (Bengal National Protection Brigade) formed of vol-
unteers from the six border districts of Jalpaiguri, West Dinajpur, Malda, Mur-
shidabad, Nadia and 24 Parganas. This force was administered in each district by
the Magistrate, Superintendent of Police, the president of the District Congress
Committee and the local Assembly Member.50 Following the Indo-Pakistan War
of 1965, the Border Security Force (BSF) was officially created as a part of the
Central Armed Police Forces for the purpose of guarding its international borders.
The BSF is under the administrative control of the Ministry of Home Affairs,
Government of India. The BSF has its Force Headquarters at New Delhi, its West-
ern Theatre Headquarters at Chandigarh, and its Eastern Theatre Headquarters at
Kolkata. The Eastern Theatre Headquarters includes North Bengal, South Bengal
and Malda Frontier of West Bengal (besides other frontiers in Assam, Tripura and
Mizoram).
Both the BSF and the BGB have their respective Border Outposts (BOP) along
the border. There are approximately 725 BSF BOPs (located at a distance of
approximately 2–3 kilometres from each other) and 650 BGB BOPs51 (located
at a distance of approximately 5–6 kilometres from each other) along the 4096.7
kilometres-long border between India and Bangladesh, of which more than half
 Introduction 9
the BSF BOPs are along the 2216.7 kilometres-long border between West Bengal
and Bangladesh.
The exchange of fire between the BSF and BGB is a common occurrence along
the West Bengal-Bangladesh border, especially over issues of infiltration and
attacks by miscreants of the neighbouring state.52 However, the BSF and BGB
also meet at the border to discuss issues related to infiltration, smuggling or any
other border-related incident that might be resolved between the border guards of
the two states, without resorting to violence. Such meetings are called Flag Meet-
ings53 in official parlance. These meetings are usually held at a particular place
on the land between the zero point (borderline) and India’s border fence, which
in official terms is known as No-Man’s Land. Flag-bearing troupes of the border
guards, led by the Company Commanders of the concerned outposts, meet to
discuss the issues at hand. Meetings are also held in mid-river in riverine border
areas where the BSF and BGB meet in the middle of the river at an equidistant
location from both the banks on official speed boats which carry the flags of both
states.

Border fence, border roads and floodlights

The Ground Rules formulated by the Military Sub-Committee of the Indian and
Pakistan delegations on 20 October 1959 stipulated that: ‘After an identifiable
boundary line whether real or working has been demarcated, neither side will have
any permanent or temporary border security forces or any other armed person-
nel within 150 yards on either side of this line. Also no permanent posts will be
constructed till the final demarcation has been done…. If defensive works of any
nature including trenches exist in the stretch of 300 yards (150 yards on each side of
the working boundary) they must be destroyed or filled up’.54 These Ground Rules
were confirmed in the Joint India-Bangladesh Agreement for Border Authorities
of the Two Countries in 1975.55 Consequently, India planned and began execut-
ing the construction of a border fence (on grounds of preventing infiltration) and
a border road at a distance of 150 yards (137 metres) from the ‘zero point’ (actual
borderline), which left substantial areas of Indian farmland and homesteads (about
450 villages)56 outside the fence.57 These lands and houses can be accessed through
gates constructed along the border fence guarded by BSF guards, on presenting
identity cards at the check-posts. Whenever a person needs to cross the gates
either for cultivating his land outside the fence or for moving in and out of his
house across it, he needs to submit/present his identity card (Voter Cards, in most
instances) to the guards or the commander at the check-post near the gate.
Bangladesh, on the other hand, objected to the construction of fences within
150 yards from the International Border (IB) on the pretext that fencing and bor-
der roads violated the guidelines of the Ground Rules.58 Hence, Bangladesh nei-
ther has border fence nor border roads.
Till 2012, 1222 kilometres of fencing of the sanctioned 1528 kilometres had
already been completed;59 of the 1770 kilometres of border road sanctioned in
West Bengal, 1616.57 kilometres had been constructed;60 of the sanctioned 2840
10 Introduction
kilometres of sanctioned flood lighting along the India-Bangladesh border road,
775 kilometres had been completed (including 277 kilometres of flood lighting
along West Bengal-Bangladesh border), while another 750 kilometres was in
progress.61 Construction of fences is scheduled to be completed by the end of
2018 as confirmed by the Secretary of the Border Management Division under
the Ministry of Home Affairs.62

Border zones
The definitions of the various zones of a border region by Willem van Schen-
del and Michiel Baud63 help us to understand the characteristic features of the
geographical region of the West Bengal-Bangladesh border. The border heart-
land consists of the zone on the border or zones dominated by the border. Here,
the social networks are directly shaped and affected by the border. The networks
depend on the border for their survival and have no option but to adapt to its
caprices; the intermediate borderland consists of the region which is affected by
the border with varying intensity, from moderate to weak; and the outer border-
land consists of those regions which feel the effect of the border at certain times
and under specific circumstances.64 It would be helpful to keep these definitions
of the border zones in mind while studying the West Bengal-Bangladesh border
in order to understand the effect of the border on the people and the extent of its
influence on the surrounding regions.

Figure 1.1 Border pillar facing India with Bangladeshi road beyond, 2012.
 Introduction 11
Why was I drawn to this study?
In March 2008, I was working as a research associate in an organisation in Kol-
kata that researched issues related to refugees, migration, human rights, social
justice and gender politics. I went on an official visit for two days to a bor-
der village in the border district of Nadia (West Bengal) for a survey of the
situation of violence perpetrated by the BSF on the civilian65 population living
along the West Bengal border. I had certain pre-conceived notions about life in
the border areas, especially along the international borders – notions pertaining
to the stringency of border regulations and the patrolling of border guards. I
had never been a border resident and so my knowledge about border areas was
restricted to newspaper reports and a few official survey reports. Most of the
existing literatures on borders pertained to dealing with them as issues of inter-
national relations and bilateral affairs between the states concerned, i.e. India and
Bangladesh, and were, understandably, a simplistic narrative of diplomacy and
international relations.
The works of Avtar Singh Bhasin,66 Farooq Sobhan67 and Garry Purcell68 con-
stituted literature which dealt with bilateral ties between India and Bangladesh at
a purely diplomatic level, highlighting aspects of trade and economy which these
states could pursue for improved relations. Narratives of (and from) the border
between the two states were conspicuous by their absence in these literatures.
While these works gave me a fair idea about bilateral ties between the states, they
failed to highlight the local narratives of the people who negotiate the border –
which was the purpose of my visit to the border village.
A brief survey of reports and articles prepared by the government officials of
India and Bangladesh before the visit exposed the dearth of literature which dealt
essentially with border life.69 These reports were primarily viewing the border
areas as disorderly spaces in need of stringent disciplining mechanisms and as
sites in need of strengthened security apparatuses.70 Literature prepared by the
various NGOs and human rights organisations, on the other hand, emphasised
more on the hapless condition of the border residents under the state machinery.71
As part of a research organisation working on human rights and social justice, my
visit was meant to serve a similar purpose, i.e. to take stock of the situation in the
border village with regard to the condition of the border villages in general under
the stringent presence of state machinery.
The visit served a bigger purpose than initially aimed. Apart from giving me an
idea about the various instances of human rights violations of the border civilians
by the border guards and the hazards associated with the daily lives of the people
along the border (these formed part of my official study), the visit made me realise
that the responses, perceptions and activities of the people living along the border
reveal much more than meets the eye. The everyday lives and activities of the
people produced a narrative which might be vastly different from the narratives
of a person who lived away from the border, like myself. I was convinced that
a closer study of such narratives would yield an interesting and possibly unique
understanding of the border as the state’s space for wielding control and as the
12 Introduction
civilians’ space for negotiating such control mechanisms. James Scott’s idea of
the ‘everyday forms of resistance’72 had, in the meantime, drawn my attention
to the importance of everyday narratives of people and micro-histories which
constituted larger events, i.e. the Partition of India in my case. Though my ideas
about the nature of these narratives and ways to obtain them were still vague,
given the short length of my initial stay in the village, I came back only to go back
to them.
I began learning more about the West Bengal-Bangladesh border and the India-
Bangladesh border at large, apart from surveying literature on border studies in
general. Eventually, my interest turned into my doctoral project.
I realised that a study of the entire India-Bangladesh border73 would be too ambi-
tious a project, given the limited time. So I narrowed the scope of my study down
to issues which would help me analyse the border narratives in logistically feasible
ways without compromising on the larger theoretical or empirical rigor. The fact
that I shared the same language (Bangla) and similar ethnic origin/cultural traits
(of being Bengali) with the majority of the people living along the West Bengal-
Bangladesh border74 was an important factor behind my decision because I could
grasp their socio-cultural aspects without having to learn a new language or the
cultural traits of the majority of the people.

Literature survey: preparation for field studies

The literature survey gave me a broad overview of border studies from the 1960s
till about 2011, which is when I visited border areas as part of my empirical
research. I understood that the study of borders had moved from being primarily a
theorisation of the bordering process and understanding terminologies associated
with borders75 to being sociological and cultural studies of borders and the people
who live in proximity to them.76
There has also been much writing on borders as geographical spaces of exclu-
sion and the formation of peripheral subjectivities,77 besides works studying them in
the context of state and security issues.78 These works are studies of the vulnerable
nature of the border as demarcations of the state’s sovereignty and how these vulner-
abilities are policed by the state. The other significant contribution of these works
towards border studies has been their emphasis on going beyond discursive studies
of borders, and highlighting the importance of empirical studies as integral parts of
methodological questions in studying these. The shift from studying borders as a
straightjacketed political phenomenon to understanding them as catalysts for identity
formations was also increasingly gaining pace.79
The existing studies either related to certain specific issues (mostly smuggling or
trafficking)80 or focussed on the deprivation of civilians from resources and basic
facilities that their marginal lives entailed. The prime focus is on the victimhood
of the people living across the border and their deprivation vis-à-vis the states,
which was not necessarily the case, as my primary field observation hinted. Every-
day narratives, in the forms of rudimentary practices of life and livelihood, culture,
 Introduction 13
festivities, local politics did not find a major thrust in the existing works – van
Schendel’s work being the only major exception and by far, the closest indicator to
what I was aiming to examine.
The aim of my study was, thus, to understand the lives of the people living on
both sides of the West Bengal-Bangladesh border, including civilians and border
guards, and to understand if their narratives did, in fact, reproduce and reinterpret
the border. My aim was also to understand if such narratives were, in any way, sub-
versive and belligerent in nature in terms of questioning the strength of the state’s
sovereignty at its seams.
A study of secondary materials in the various libraries and archives in India
and Bangladesh in 201081 formed my initial knowledge of the areas which I was
to study, in terms of an idea of the changing profile of the population (from the
first census of the states in the second half of the twentieth century till date) and
statistical information about the economic, ethnic and religious aspects of the
people whom I intended to interact with during my field visits. Newspaper reports
related to the West Bengal-Bangladesh border played an important role in shaping
my idea about the chosen area of study. Both national and regional newspapers
from India and Bangladesh were consulted during the pre-field visit period as well
as later, during analysing the field data. Ananda Bazar Patrika, the Bengali-daily
published from Kolkata, has been the most frequently cited newspaper, due to its
consistency in reporting border-related issues, at least in its district supplements,
as well as its effort in addressing some border issues, otherwise neglected by offi-
cial reports or other media.
Of the ten border districts in West Bengal82 and sixteen border districts in Ban-
gladesh,83 I chose to focus on six border districts of West Bengal84 and eleven bor-
der districts of Bangladesh85 between September 2011 and March 2012. My choice
was informed by the geographical peculiarities of the areas (covering land borders
and riverine borders), as well as their being important areas in terms of strategic
location and economy (covering Enclaves,86Chars and Border Land Ports).87
The structure of fieldwork consisted mainly of interviews with the people liv-
ing in the border areas, including civilians involved in a wide variety of liveli-
hood practices, and across gender, religion and caste; border guards posted along
the border outposts; public figures associated with administrative offices, mainly
Panchayat members and heads (since most of the border areas are rural in charac-
ter and, hence, form parts of local village governance) and political figures.
Borders, as territorial delimitations of a state, are spaces which mark the stron-
gest manifestations of a state’s sovereignty. Thus, they are also the spaces which
witness the most visible presence of state machinery in terms of border fences,
border guards and surveillance mechanisms. While the people living along
the border areas negotiate such state presences in their everyday lives, the borders
are virtually inaccessible, if not completely out of bounds, for a person living
elsewhere but wanting to visit/study the borderlands, as in my case. My interac-
tions with the senior members of the border guards regarding my plans of field
visits also indicated the sensitivity of the state towards its borders. A feeling of
14 Introduction
suspicion and apprehension was present throughout our conversation as they took
note of my plans. The paraphernalia included obtaining consent from the ethics
committee of my university for conducting field studies and convincing them of
my plans for handling possible risk hazards; preparing the Questionnaire, Consent
Form (CF) and Participant Information Sheets (PIS); obtaining permissions from
the Headquarters of the border guards of BSF and BGB for visiting the border
areas and talking to border guards (written permissions were not available); con-
tacting key persons and field assistants in the field areas which I planned to visit;
arranging for my accommodation and travel in and around my field areas and
chalking out the dates for my visits. The process of setting up the scene for the
actual field work to take place was tedious and bothersome. This also, in a way,
made me realise the gap between institutional research procedures and actual field
studies. The formalities associated with institutional research procedures often
fail to address or gauge the complexities of lived reality, especially when it comes
to sensitised places like the borders. They often fail to see the everyday survival
negotiations from their straightjacketed viewpoints. These gaps became visible to
me even before I started my field visits. My experiences during my field visits only
confirmed my apprehensions about the gap. Having gone through the ordeal of
preparing for my field work, I set out on the much-awaited experience. Equipped
with a recorder, a notepad and the pertinent field documents, I went about inter-
acting with the people living along the West Bengal-Bangladesh border.

Choice of experience-centred narratives

The border narratives obtained in the course of the interviews have turned out to be
powerful texts, amply reflecting the ways that the border space is re-interpreted in
the everyday lives of its inhabitants. The narratives bear possibilities of question-
ing the sovereign nature of the state, though the narratives themselves are open
to interpretations in various different ways. The narratives obtained through the
interviews have been mostly experience-centred,88 though event-centred narratives
have also been recorded from time to time. Given the vast scope of interpretation
that the narratives created, it has often been difficult for me to logically interpret
or analyse the data. Yet I sincerely believe that the everyday life experiences of the
narratives (which is what the narratives mostly consisted of) have been the nearest
credible expressions of reality – as constructed by the narrators – the border people
themselves. Experience-centred narratives often ‘vary drastically over time, and
across circumstances within which one lives, where a single phenomenon may
produce very different stories, even from the same person’.89 This explains the
challenge I faced in accommodating contradictory responses, while, at the same
time, being true to their spontaneous nature. But despite such challenges, the
choice of experience-centred narratives of the border people was driven by their
human nature and their capacity to ‘re-present experience, reconstituting it as
well as expressing it’.90 Their capacity to ‘display transformation’ has helped me
highlight the evolution of border narratives expressed by the border people over a
period of six decades.
 Introduction 15
Field studies
The idea was to cover many categories of people across caste, religion, gender and
livelihood so as not to restrict myself to a particular strand of narrative. Accord-
ingly, I did not chalk out focus groups for my interviews and deliberately kept the
questionnaire open-ended.91 Apart from some fundamental questions related to
the identity (name, age, religion, caste, gender, profession) of the person, the con-
versations were left to follow their own path, though roughly centring on certain
larger issues which I had planned beforehand.92 The aim was to provoke various
kinds of outcomes from the conversations and not restrict them to a set pattern of
responses.
The experience of carrying out the actual field work was far more exciting
and challenging than I had imagined it would be. Getting access to the border
areas, interacting with the local people (sometimes as individuals, sometimes in
a group), interacting with the border guards, staying in the residences of the local
civilians or in a tourist lodge in the border area, moving from one area to another
in the private vehicles of the local people (mostly motorbikes and sometimes
bicycles) and sometimes in hired cars as well: none of these activities turned
out to be trouble-free, and understandably so. To travel around the border areas
alone and as a woman, to be ferried around the place on a bike/bicycle driven
by a man,93 having to answer the border guards every now and then about my
identity and purpose of visit,94 being prevented from visiting certain areas of the
border by them on the grounds of ‘security issues’, and getting them to speak to
me were some of the recurrent troubles throughout the visits. To add to that was
the expanse of area that I had planned to cover on both sides of this border within
a limited period of six months.
Carrying out fieldwork in sensitised areas such as the borders, especially inter-
national ones, posed several challenges in not just interacting with the local civil-
ians or the border guards, but also on deciding the ways of data collection, since
organised settings for carrying out interviews were often not available.95 Record-
ing every response or using recorders was often not possible or even welcomed.
This made the process of data collection and data storage difficult. Field diaries
played important roles in filling these gaps. Besides being used for noting down
the details of the places and circumstances of the interviews, they were often used
for jotting down entire interviews as well.
Briefly put, the fieldwork enriched me not simply as a researcher but, more impor-
tantly, as a person, as it helped me know myself better. I learnt my own capacities,
drawbacks, stamina and, often, the lack of it, during the process. I returned with a huge
amount of field data and a larger amount of questions than what I had set out with.
The open-ended interactions brought out certain responses which I had least
expected, which provided new dimensions to my study. In the course of the field
work, the responses which I gathered fell into thematic clusters reaffirming not
just the resilience of analytical categories in contemporary sociological discourses,
but also the fact that these themes reflected the border narratives in their most
spontaneous forms. Conversations around those themes seemed to have emerged,
almost automatically, in every interaction. Likewise, the process of categorising
16 Introduction
my data into themes or chapters became easy, with some of the recurrent issues
forming chapters in themselves – themes which, I felt, had not found resonance in
earlier work on the West Bengal-Bangladesh border.96
I noticed a pattern in the responses of my interviewees that was characterised
by the overwhelming presence of the reality of the border in their lives. Many
of the issues which formed parts of the interviews were no more unique to the
border than to any other non-border area, either in Bangladesh or in India. How-
ever, what was noticeable was the recurrence of the border, both as a spatial and
a socio-cultural unit, in the responses regarding such issues. Worth noticing was
also the fact that some of the concerns common to any other place in India and
Bangladesh changed its nature and form when experienced or perceived in the
light of the border. The responses also suggested (a hint of which I had borne
with me right from my first interaction with the border people) that the people
living along the border have their own ways of perceiving and interpreting its
reality. The (re)interpretations are neither necessarily engineered by the state, nor
are they necessarily signs of victimhood of the people. This is not to suggest
that victimisation is absent along the border, but is meant to draw attention to
the complex relation between the state and the border people which might not
always be addressed through the straightjacketed binaries of the perpetrator-state
and victimised-civilians.
Such perceptions create a common platform of identity formation for the people
who negotiate their existence as border people – including the civilians as well
as the border guards. The responses of the border guards and their spontaneous
answers to some of my random curiosities revealed the irony of their situation –
uncomfortably wedged between their duties as representatives of the state at the
borders and their everyday negotiations with the reality of border life. In the process
of living along the border over a period of time (ranging from six months to a few
years depending on the terms of their posting), the border guards undergo similar
hazards as the civilians do, albeit in different versions. But the reality of surviving
the border is a hard reality for both. Border life, thus, makes the border guards more
a border people, often overshadowing their roles as representatives and spokesper-
sons of the states concerned. It is the overarching presence of the spatial uniqueness
of the border and the everyday negotiations of the civilians and the border guards
which form the fundamental content of what I choose to call border narratives.
Border narratives contribute towards the understanding of the negotiations
between the border people and border laws and regulations. Many aspects of
the West Bengal-Bangladesh border, including the undercurrents of violence
and cross-border smuggling practices, have been consequences of the very laws
designed to contain and control it. Having been affected by the Partition and the
consequent creation of the border, the people who eventually became the border
people have devised ways of negotiating the laws and regulations which were
devised to control them – through violation, re-interpretation and reproduction.
While the basic idea and knowledge about the West Bengal-Bangladesh border
was premised on the existing secondary materials (census reports, survey reports,
 Introduction 17
newspaper reports) and literature, my understanding of this border as a socio-
spatial process required me to look at the border lives myself as an active observer
and as a direct communicator with the border people. Analysis of the interviews
cleared my thoughts with regards to the re-interpretation and reproduction of the
border space by the people who negotiate it every day. It also highlighted the
pattern of psyche, i.e. a particular mind-set or mental make-up, in the people that
expressed itself spontaneously but persistently, nevertheless, in their responses.
Newspaper reports were used in support for some of my arguments as well as in
highlighting the recurrence of some of the border-related issues in the narratives.
In the process of understanding the responses, some of my pre-conceived ideas
about the West Bengal-Bangladesh border changed considerably. The more dif-
ficult parts of analysing the data were:

• Narrowing down the relevant data, i.e. deciding the importance of one set of data
over another, largely because of the overwhelming amount of data collected.
• Interpreting and analysing contradictions in the responses of the interviewees
in support of my argument.

Methods of tackling such difficulties were, interestingly, found in the data them-
selves. I could recognise that there was an internal logic to the narratives. This
logic bound the smaller socio-cultural narratives into a larger spatial narrative,
though some of the responses in the narratives seemed contradictory on the sur-
face. From here, the field data started shaping up into a thesis.
Theoretical discourses dealing with spatiality and subalternity in the context
of the omnipresence of the state machinery vis-à-vis the marginal people (geo-
graphical marginality as seen from the state’s perspective) seemed to form the
basic tools of analysis. While ideas pertaining to spatial reproduction have been
used to understand how the border space becomes the platform for convergence
and conflict of a state and its subjects,97 the idea of ‘everyday forms of resistance’
has helped me realise the importance of everyday experiences in understanding
larger structures of state formation, identity creation and the point at which the
two cross paths. Works by scholars of subaltern studies98 provided the necessary
understanding of subalternity in the context of Indian social, political, economic
and cultural discourses. The idea of subalternity has been used here more as a form
or set of practices by which people find alternative ways to access resources and
gain agency to establish identities. It has been used to define the practices which
the border people – the civilians and the border guards alike – have devised to not
just survive their marginality but, often, to gain from it. The idea of a thirdspace99
has been, specifically, helpful to that end. The idea has been evoked here to look
beyond the use of the borderland as simply the space for the exercise of the state’s
unquestioned sovereignty or as the space for the complete subjugation of the sub-
jects, and to look at the border as a space where the two meet, collide, communi-
cate. The concept of the thirdspace gives shape to the ideological conflict between
the border as a line of containment for a people and a line of convergence of two.
18 Introduction
Focus of the argument
Everyday forms of negotiation which the border people produce over the years
crystallise into a pattern of consciousness characterised by a common psyche
among the people which is not necessarily consciously designed. The conscious-
ness is spatially-driven, i.e. affected by the specific socio-cultural features of the
borderland and the kind of life it exposes its inhabitants to. The social, political
or economic narratives which constitute borderland narratives are not necessarily
unique to the borderland in terms of their structural form. What they are unique in
is the spatial specificity that they obtain in the borderland areas as well as giving
a sensitivity to the event in terms of its occurrence across an international border.
The term ‘border consciousness’ has been adapted from Gloria Anzaldua’s
concept of ‘Mestiza consciousness’, which she describes as a specific form of
consciousness resulting from hybrid ethnicities of people born out of mixed par-
entage between the US and Mexico.100 While people belonging to such hybrid
ethnicities can mostly be found along the US-Mexico border, she uses the Mestiza
or border consciousness as more of a social consciousness – born out of social
marginalisation that these people of hybrid ethnicities (and also alternate sexuali-
ties) face. I have used the concept of border consciousness as more of a spatial
consciousness in analysing how the specificity and the reality of surviving the
border bind all those who live along it.
Spatial consciousness in the context of the border differs from spatial con-
sciousness witnessed elsewhere; for example, in spaces where a specific social/
ethnic/religious/gendered community comes together. In such instances, it is the
coming together of the community in a ghetto that eventually produces the spa-
tial consciousness. But in the case of borderlands, as exemplified by the West
Bengal-Bangladesh border, it is the specificity of the space itself that produces the
consciousness across socio-culturally diverse people. Examples of such spatial
consciousness, whereby a specific form of spatial zone forms a common platform
for such a diverse people, are rare.
Since this study is primarily based on empirical study, the methodological chal-
lenge lay in justifying such claims, purely through the process of analysis of the field
data. The recurrence of the spatial disposition of the borderland in the responses of
my interviewees, including the border guards, helped me give shape to my under-
standing of the border consciousness. In fact, the varied nature of my interviewees,
in terms of their socio-political, economic and professional locations, helped me
realise that the borderland engulfs all those living along and across it, into forming
a border culture – a border milieu. Some of the more recent works on the Bengal
border and South Asian borders, at large,101 as well as some of the contemporary
debates on state sovereignty and globalisation, helped me give shape to my ideas.
Debates on globalisation have emphasised the imminent possibilities of a bor-
derless world,102 especially in the context of economic interaction between states
and the increasing flexibility of border rules in some parts of the globe. These lit-
eratures have focused on the need for states and business corporations to adapt to
globalisation and the borderless world.103 Yet studies by some scholars of border
 Introduction 19
studies have, in fact, emphasised the significance of borders amidst such debates
on borderlessness.104 While it is a fact that the blurring of boundaries has, indeed,
been a significant feature of economic interaction around the world from the mid-
twentieth century, it is also worth keeping in mind that such economic interaction
has found more relevance in certain parts of the world like Western Europe, where
inter-state borders increasingly became irrelevant with the free movement of the
inhabitants of the European Union.105 While the borders of the EU became much
more interdependent and integrated, those of others like India and Pakistan (also
Israel and Palestine) hardened and became increasingly alienated.106 Moreover,
the increasing stringency of immigration regulations highlights a contradictory
trend – that of making the borders of states non-flexible like never before. Move-
ment of people across a border has been far more problematic than the movement
of wealth around the globe.
Some of the recent works on the West Bengal-Bangladesh border have studied
the distortive nature of the border narratives of the border people in the context
of the various cross-border practices that they practice. According to Reece Jones
(2012), these border practices challenge the state sovereignty by refusing the exis-
tence of either India or Bangladesh along the border and where the presence of
either India or Bangladesh is disregarded by the border people.107 My understand-
ing of the border narratives of the West Bengal-Bangladesh border digresses from
Jones’ understanding, in terms of the perception of the border residents about the
bordered spaces. My field study suggests that these border narratives do indeed
challenge the sovereignty of the states concerned, i.e. India and Bangladesh, at
their boundaries. But the nature of the contest is not through the blurring of the
border through cross-border practices but, in fact, by making it more visible and
real. The border, thus, becomes a space where both states meet, i.e. a space of
both India and Bangladesh, contrary to the ‘neither India nor Bangladesh’ dis-
course suggested by Jones.108 Moreover, Jones’ idea of borderlands as spaces of
‘refusal’ indicates a conscious decision on the part of the border people to refuse
and in the process, challenge the state. My study suggests that the everyday forms
of re-interpretation and reproduction of the border space are not an organised or
planned narrative of refusal of the state as suggested by Jones, but rather rudimen-
tary narratives of survival well within the hegemonic structure and model of the
state machinery, reflective of Scott’s ‘everyday forms of resistance’.109 The con-
vergence of states at its border, lived through its people and their livelihoods, is a
bigger ideological deterrent to the role of the ‘state as a container’.110 The domi-
nant presence of the states as the all-encompassing sovereign power at its border
is highlighted in the official journals of BSF, where ‘suggestions to improve bor-
der domination’ are integral to their vision.111 Re-interpretation and appropriation
of the borderland by its inhabitants comes as a threat to the territorial imperative
of the concerned states, questioning the basic premise of Partition and territo-
rial redistribution. Moreover, continued existence of cross-border practices, as is
characteristic of the West Bengal-Bangladesh border, question the control regime
of the state. Such ‘horizontally articulated rhizomatic linkages among states’
put the vertically scaled ‘hierarchical conceptions of political spaces’ to test.112
20 Introduction
Globalisation and capital flows perform a similar function of blurring borders
and questioning the role of the ‘state as the container’. But the official movement
of people across states with valid documents, the flow of capital through invest-
ments, and the everyday movements of people and goods across the border mostly
through illegal means, must not be confused.113 While there has been an increas-
ing flexibility of borders in some parts of the world and a growth of global money
through computer and telecommunication technologies,114 which hint at an appar-
ent blurring of borders, the reality hints at a re-interpretation and reproduction of
the border (rather than blurring or even refusal), making it all the more visible and
significant in the backdrop of debates regarding a borderless world. Gearoid O
Tuathail (1999) rightly observes: ‘The development of borderless worlds does not
contradict but actually hastens the simultaneous development of ever more bor-
dered worlds’.115 Border narratives provide discerning ways of analysing cross-
border practices which are neither universal nor planetary, despite constituting
long-distance networks across borders.116 They also provide hints to questions as
to who the benefiters and promoters of borderlessness are. They reveal that the
people who survive along the border and depend on it for their livelihoods rarely,
if at all, are champions of borderlessness.117
Responses gathered from interviews revealed that border lives do not necessar-
ily fit into the paradigm of ‘a space of expropriation, peripheral subjectivity and a
platform for claiming inclusion’.118 They are also a space for redefining notions of
citizenship, legality, licit/illicitness, to suit the needs of the ones who inhabit the
space, including the border guards. An interesting observation was that the role of
the border guards is often plagued by deceptiveness. While it seems that as repre-
sentatives of the state, they administer and control the border space, ‘in practice,
however, they substitute another space for it, one that is first economic and social,
and then political. They believe they are obeying something in their heads – a
representation (of the country, etc.). In fact, they are establishing an order – their
own’.119 And it is through this re-ordering of the border that the border guards re-
interpret the border differently from the order of the state.
Chapter 1 will look at some of the aspects of livelihood practices along the
India-Bangladesh border – practices which are directly or indirectly dependent on
the border. Some of them are traditional practices (i.e. existing from pre-border
days), which have been affected by the creation of the border in 1947. Others
are border-induced. This chapter will establish how the spatial uniqueness of
the borderland affects both traditional and non-traditional livelihood practices to
form a larger spatial narrative, characterised by the overwhelming presence of
the borderland milieu in the lives of the border people – both civilians and border
guards. The discussion, in this chapter, on livelihood practices across the India-
Bangladesh border will also feed into the larger framework of border conscious-
ness, including discussions on community identities/links versus a state-imposed
control mechanism.
Chapter 2 will look at certain geographical specificities, like enclaves, Chars
(pocket-lands), Ghoj (protruding lands) and other disputed territories along the
India-Bangladesh border in the light of their strategic significance of being located
 Introduction 21
across an international border and how their geographical uniqueness affects both
the lives of the people and security concerns of the states. Discussion on the
recently-exchanged enclaves between India and Bangladesh will form the main
thrust of the chapter, including the historical background leading to the formation
of these enclaves, followed by a discussion on the six decades of negligence and
destitution which the enclave-inhabitants faced, the movement for their exchange
that its inhabitants have tirelessly carried on, the significance and politics behind
the recent exchange and finally what this exchange holds for its inhabitants in the
future. Discussions in this chapter will form the second strand of narrative in the
larger framework of spatial consciousness to be established in the conclusion,
especially in the context of narratives and counter-narratives of citizenship status
revolving around these enclave dwellers.
Chapter 3 will look at how spatial marginality affects the socio-cultural identi-
ties of the ‘border people’, like caste, religion, language, ethnicity. It will take up
‘caste’ as the main parameter of cultural identity to be discussed in this chapter,
though language, religion, ethnicity will be no less important. This chapter will be
important in establishing my basic argument that the centrifugal pull of the socio-
cultural identities questions the states’ attempt at homogenising the border and
establishing an organised control-mechanism across their borders. Discussions on
‘community links’ vis-à-vis ‘spatial consciousness’ will be integral to this chapter.
Chapter 4 will look at various forms of interaction between the civilian border
people and the border guards along the India-Bangladesh border through gender
discourses. The interaction between the male, female and other gendered cate-
gories of civilians, and the largely male border guards, throws light on certain
gendered aspects, which are both physical and social in nature. These gendered
narratives are doubly affected for simultaneously being part of border narratives.
At one level, it will highlight the need to see the gendered nature of every other
socio-cultural, political or economic narrative in the context of border studies
by highlighting how gender issues have cropped up in the preceding chapters as
‘parts’ of other socio-political issues, justifying in the process the need to have
a separate chapter on gendered practices across the India-Bangladesh border. At
another level, it will contribute towards the larger discussion on socio-cultural
identities vis-à-vis state-induced universalistic homogenising identities as seen
across this border.

Flexible approach
The spontaneous narratives of lived experiences of the border people, and flexible
approaches to methodological and theoretical questions, have helped me under-
stand the complex nature of border life at the West Bengal-Bangladesh border.
They helped me reveal the multi-dimensional narratives which are produced by
the border people – narratives which accommodate religious, social, political
and economic factors and yet cut across all these strands to create a psyche that
has its foundation in the unique spatiality of the borderland. An interdisciplinary
approach towards analysis of the narratives, bringing together discourses on state
22 Introduction
theories, space, geography and subaltern studies, has helped me in explicating
the complex yet interesting web of relations laid out along this border. That the
fruitfulness of research lies not in ‘proving the correctness of a hypothesis’120
but in ‘finding out something’121 has been amply qualified by my own research
trajectory.
As Maria Tamboukou explains, narratives constitute realities and shape the
social, rather than being determined by it.122 Border narratives, as revealed in the
following chapters, do indeed shape other social narratives into a spatial narrative
to produce a psyche that binds the narrators together.

Notes
1 Following are some of the more important non-fictional and fictional works on the
Partition of India, and specifically Bengal: Non-Fiction – Samaddar, R. (Ed.). (1997)
Reflections on Partition in the East. New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House; Butalia, U.
(1998) The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India. New Delhi, Lon-
don: Penguin; Kaul, S. (Ed.). (2001) The Partitions of Memory: The Afterlife of the
Divisions of India. New Delhi: Permanent Black; Chatterji, J. (1994) Bengal Divided:
Hindu Communalism and Partition, 1932–1947. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press; Menon, R. and Bhasin, K. (1998) Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s
Partition. New Delhi: Kali for Women; Chatterji, J. (February 1999) The Fashioning
of a Frontier: The Radcliffe Line and Bengal’s Border Landscape, 1947–52. Modern
Asian Studies. 33(1). pp. 185–242; Talbot, I. and Singh, G. (Eds.). (1999) Region
and Partition: Bengal, Punjab and the Partition of the Subcontinent. Karachi: Oxford
University Press; Fraser, B. (2006) Bengal Partition Stories: An Unclosed Chapter
(trs. Sheila Sen Gupta). London: Anthem; Pandey, G. (2001) Remembering Partition:
Violence, Nationalism and History in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press;
Ahmed, I. (Ed.). (2002) Memories of a Genocidal Partition: The Haunting Tales of
Victims, Witnesses and Perpetrators. Colombo: Regional Centre for Strategic Studies;
Chatterji, J. (2007) The Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India, 1947–1967. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press; Sengupta, D. (2016) The Partition of Bengal: Fragile
Borders and New Identities. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press; Fiction – Zaman,
N. (1999) A Divided Legacy: The Partition in Selected Novels of India, Pakistan, and
Bangladesh. Dhaka: The University Press Limited; Bandyopadhyay, A. (1971) Nilkan-
tha Pakhir Khonje. Calcutta: Karuna Prakashan; Ganguli, S. (1988) Purba Pashchim.
Calcutta: Ananda Publishers; Sengupta, M. (2003) Bishadbriksha. Kolkata: Subar-
narekha; Sikdar, S. (2008) Dayamayeer Katha. Kolkata: Gangchil.
2 Chatterji, 1999, p. 186.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid. pp. 188–189.
5 Ibid. p. 189.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid. p. 190; Jinnah’s two-nation theory, in fact, was not a territorial concept but
a demand for parity between Hindu and Muslim representation in the soon-to-be-
formed government of independent India. Jalal, A. (1985) The Sole Spokesman:
Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
9 Chatterji, 1999, pp. 191–193.
10 Ibid. p. 196.
11 Ibid. p. 197.
12 Ibid.
 Introduction 23
13 The Noakhali Riot was a communal riot that broke out in the Noakhali district of the
Chittagong division of the eastern part of Bengal in October 1946 following the deci-
sion to partition Bengal on religious grounds. The then undivided district of Noakh-
ali, with 80.57% Muslims and 19.31% Hindus, became the hotbed for a communal
breakout, where Hindu lives and properties came under attack from the Muslims, and
included forceful conversions of Hindus to Islam. Mohandas K. Gandhi camped in
Noakhali and toured the district for four months in an effort to restore peace, though
with little positive outcome. A majority of the survivors of the riot migrated to West
Bengal, Tripura and Assam.
14 Chatterji, 1999, p. 212.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid. pp. 199–202.
18 Roy, H. (2012) Partitioned Lives: Migrants, Refugees, Citizens in India and Pakistan,
1947–1965. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. p. 43.
19 Ibid. p. 40.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid. p. 41.
23 Chatterji, 1999, pp. 215–216.
24 Roy, 2012, p. 46.
25 Ibid. pp. 46, 48.
26 Chatterji, 1999, pp. 217–219.
27 Char is the Bengali term used for a strip of land which appears on the riverbed when
the river deposits silt or changes course. The Chars along the riverine borders gain
strategic importance due to their location on the border and, hence, become reasons
for dispute between the states on both sides of the border who claim control over the
Char. Chars became a perennial source of dispute between India and Pakistan, given
the formation of new Chars every year due to the changing course and flooding of
the rivers. The idea of treating the Chars as ‘no-man’s land’ did not work out well for
either of the states, given that these often housed entire villages who had lost lands
to river erosion and had, thus, re-settled on the Chars when they happened to appear
mid-river. Many such Chars had actually to pay the price for being located along the
borderline, when its people had to prove their allegiance to either India or Pakistan
as the situation demanded. A lot of the Char residents lost their lives to cross-border
firing between the border guards and the police.
28 Chatterji, 1999, pp. 220–222.
29 Ibid. p. 226.
30 The Tebhaga movement was a militant campaign of the peasants (mainly tenants or
sharecroppers) led by the Kishan Sabha (peasant front of the Communist Party of
India) in Bengal in 1946, where the peasants demanded that only one-third (Tebhaga)
of the harvest be given to the landlord as his share instead of the existing rule of giv-
ing half the produce. In many areas, the movement became violent, forcing the zamin-
dars to flee their villages. For detailed knowledge of Tebhaga, see Chattopadhyay, K.
(1986) Tebhaga Andolaner Itihas. Kolkata: Progressive Publishers.
31 Jotedars were the tenants of the revenue-collecting zamindars and taluqdars in Ben-
gal, who owned sizeable portions of village lands and cultivated their broad acres
with the help of sharecroppers, tenants-at-will and hired labourers. Ray, R.K. and
Ray, R. (1975) Zamindars and Jotedars: A Study of Rural Politics in Bengal. Modern
Asian Studies. 9(1). p. 82.
32 Chatterji, 1999, p. 226.
33 Ibid. p. 230.
34 Roy, 2012, p. 62.
35 Ibid. p. 62.
24 Introduction
36 Ibid. pp. 62–63.
37 Chatterji, 1999, pp. 232–233.
38 Ibid. p. 232.
39 Ibid. p. 233.
40 Martinez, O. (1994) Border People: Life and Society in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands.
Tucson: University of Arizona Press. pp. 5–10. Besides the model of interdependent
borderlands, the other three models of borderlands suggested by Martinez are alien-
ated borderlands: where animosity between the two sides of the border prevents any
kind of cross-border interchange; coexistent borderlands: where despite unfriendly
relations, a minimum cross-border exchange exists; and integrated borderlands: where
all barriers to movement of economic and human resources have been abolished.
41 Chatterji, 1999, p. 241.
42 Roy, 2012, p. 10.
43 Ibid. p. 11.
44 Jamwal, N.S. (January–March 2004) Border Management: Dilemma of Guarding the
India-Bangladesh Border. Strategic Analysis. 28(1). p. 8.
45 Ibid.
46 Roy, A. (6 May 2012) Bangladesher arthamantri ke shangey niyei Dhakaye Pranab.
Ananda Bazar Patrika. [Online] Available from: www.anandabazar.com/archive/
1120506/6bdesh2.html. [Last accessed: 17 September 2013]; Staff Reporter. (9 May
2012) Tista o Chhitmahal chukti niye fer chap dilen Dipu. Ananda Bazar Patrika.
[Online] Available from: www.anandabazar.com/9bdesh3.html. [Last accessed: 17 Sep-
tember 2013]; Staff Reporter. (10 May 2012) Farakkar gate bodol. Ananda Bazar Patrika.
[Online] Available from: www.anandabazar.com/archive/1120510/10mur4.html. [Last
accessed: 17 September 2013].
47 The population density of West Bengal is 1029 per sq. kms, according to the Census
of 2011. The population densities for the border districts, according to their ranks in
descending order, are as follows: North 24 Parganas-2463, Murshidabad-1334, Nadia-
1316, Maldah-1071, North Dinajpur-956, Cooch Behar-833, South 24 Parganas-819,
South Dinajpur-753, Jalpaiguri-621, Darjeeling-585. Census of India 2011. Ministry
of Home Affairs, Government of India. According to the 2011 Census, the popula-
tion density of Bangladesh is an average of 964, with the density in its border dis-
tricts (with West Bengal) as follows: Kushtia-1207, Nilphamari-1162, Rajshahi-1069,
Jessore-1068, Lalmonirhat-1006, Chapai Nawabganj-960, Chuadanga-954, Joy-
purhat-942, Meherpur-910, Jhenaidah-895, Kurigram-893, Dinajpur-864, Thakur-
gaon-762, Naogaon-750, Panchagarh-696, Satkhira-511. Bangladesh Bureau of
Statistics, Ministry of Planning, Government of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh.
48 Beedi is a thin, Indian cigarette filled with tobacco flake, and wrapped in a tendu
leaf tied with a string at one end. It is widely popular in South Asia and parts of the
Middle East – the cheap price being one of the major reasons for its popularity. Beedi
consumption outpaces that of conventional cigarettes, though they are more harmful
than the latter. Due to restrictions on factoryregulations, beedi production over the
years became a cottage-industry with a home-based women’s workforce predomi-
nantly employed in beedi rolling, while males continue to be employed in all aspects
of beedi production.
49 Chatterji, 1999, p. 236.
50 Ibid. p. 238.
51 Jamwal, 2004, p. 9.
52 Staff Reporter. (30 October 2009) BSF-BDR guli binimoy. Ananda Bazar Patrika.
[Online] Available from: www.anandabazar.com/archive/1091030/30south11.htm.
[Last accessed: 17 September 2013].
53 Staff Reporter. (3 November 2009) Simantarakshi der flag meeting Raninagar e. Ananda
Bazar Patrika. [Online] Available from: www.anandabazar.com/archive/1091103/3mur6.
htm. [Last accessed: 17 September 2013].
 Introduction 25
54 Bhasin, A.S. (Ed.). (2003) India-Bangladesh Relations: Documents, 1971–2002, Vol-
ume 5. New Delhi: Geetika Publishers. p. 2738.
55 Ibid. pp. 1902–1907.
56 Van Schendel, W. (2005) The Bengal Borderland: Beyond State and Nation in South
Asia. London: Anthem. p. 213.
57 Jamwal, 2004, p. 30.
58 Ibid.; Agreed Minutes of the 4th Meeting of the Indo-Bangladesh Joint Working Group
(JWG), Dhaka, October 20 1997. In Bhasin, A.S. (Ed.). (2003) India-Bangladesh
Relations: Documents, 1971–2002, Volume 1. New Delhi: Geetika Publishers. p. 446.
59 Out of the total 3436.59 kilometres of sanctioned fencing in India (including West
Bengal, Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura, Mizoram), 2760.12 kilometres had been com-
pleted by 2012.
60 Out of a total 4426.11 kilometres of border roads sanctioned in India (including West
Bengal, Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura, Mizoram), 3605.20 kilometres had been con-
structed by 2012.
61 Management of Indo-Bangladesh Border. Available from: http://mha.nic.in/pdfs/BM_
MAN-IN-BANG(E).pdf.
62 PTI. (25 June 2016). Indo-Bangla Border Fencing Work to Finish by 2017. The Indian
Express. [Online] Available from: http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/
indo-bangla-border-fencing-work-to-finish-by-2017-2875548/. [Last accessed: 24 July
2017].
63 Van Schendel, W. and Baud, M. (1997) Toward a Comparative History of Borderlands.
Journal of World History. 8(2). pp. 221–222.
64 Ibid.
65 The people who live at the border areas, i.e. those common people who are not the
official border guards or who do not belong to the police/military force in any way,
are generally called ‘civilians’. This term has become part of the everyday vocabu-
lary of both the civilians themselves as well as the border guards all along the West
Bengal-Bangladesh border.
66 Bhasin, A.S. (Ed.). (2003) India-Bangladesh Relations: Documents, 1971–2002.
New Delhi: Geetika Publishers.
67 Sobhan, F. (Ed.). (2005) Dynamics of Bangladesh-India Relations: Dialogues of
Young Journalists Across the Border. Dhaka: The University Press Limited.
68 Purcell, G. (2006) India-Bangladesh Bilateral Trade and Potential Free Trade Agree-
ment. Dhaka: World Bank Office.
69 For example, Jamwal, 2004, pp. 5–36.
70 For an idea on how the state (mis)reads border activities, see Samaddar, R. (1999) The Mar-
ginal Nation: Transborder Migration from Bangladesh to West Bengal. New Delhi: Sage.
71 Reports prepared by organisations such as Odhikar (www.odhikar.org) and Human
Rights Watch (www.hrw.org) exemplify such literature.
72 Scott, J. (1985). Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New
Haven, London: Yale University Press.
73 Bangladesh shares its border with West Bengal, Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram
in India.
74 A stretch of 2216.7 kilometres.
75 Prescott, J.R.V. (1968) The Geography of State Policies. London: Hutchinson & Co;
Prescott, J.R.V. (1978) Boundaries and Frontiers. London: Croom Helm.
76 Donnan, H. and Wilson, T.M. (Eds.). (1994) Border Approaches: Anthropological
Perspectives on Frontiers. Lanham, London: University Press of America; Donnan,
H. and Wilson, T.M. (Eds.). (1998) Border Identities: Nation and State at Interna-
tional Frontiers. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press; Donnan, H.
and Wilson, T.M. (1999) Borders: Frontiers of Identity, Nation and State. Oxford:
Berg; Martinez, O.J. (1994) Border People: Life and Society in the US-Mexico Bor-
derlands. Tuscon: University of Arizona Press.
26 Introduction
77 Aggarwal, R. (2004) Beyond Lines of Control: Performance and Politics on the Dis-
puted Borders of Ladakh, India. Durham: Duke University Press; Kumar Rajaram,
P. and Grundy-Warr, C. (Eds.). (2007) Borderscapes: Hidden Geographies and Poli-
tics at Territory’s Edge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; Eilenberg, M.
(2010) Negotiating Autonomy at the Margins of the State: The Dynamics of Elite
Politics in the Borderland of West Kalimantan, Indonesia. South East Asia Research.
17(2). pp. 201–227.
78 Samaddar, R. (1999) The Marginal Nation: Transborder Migration from Bangladesh
to West Bengal. New Delhi: Sage; Van Schendel, W. (2005) The Bengal Borderland:
Beyond State and Nation in South Asia. London: Anthem; Van Schendel, W. and
Abraham, I. (Eds.). (2005) Illicit Flows and Criminal Things: States, Borders, and the
Other Side of Globalisation. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press; Coleman, M.
(2009) What Counts as the Politics and Practice of Security, and Where? Devolution
and Immigrant Insecurity after 9/11. Annals of the Association of American Geogra-
phers. 99(5). pp. 904–913; Jones, R. (2009) Geopolitical Boundary Narratives, the
Global War on Terror and Border Fencing in India. Transactions of the Institute of
British Geographers. 34. pp. 290–304.
79 Asiwaju, A.I. (Ed.). (1985) Partitioned Africans: Ethnic Relations across Africa’s
International Boundaries, 1884–1984. London: C. Hurst & Co; Anzaldua, G. (1987)
Borderlands/La frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books; Sah-
lins, P. (1998) State Formation and National Identity in the Catalan Borderlands dur-
ing the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. In: Wilson, T.M. and Donnan, H. (Eds.).
Border Identities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 31–61; Stokes, M.
(1998) Imagining ‘the South’: Hybridity, Heterotopias and Arabesk on the Turkish-
Syrian Border. In: Wilson, T.M. and Donnan, H. (Eds.). Border Identities. pp. 263–
288. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
80 Van Schendel, W. and Abraham, I. (Eds.). (2005) Illicit Flows and Criminal Things:
States, Borders, and the Other Side of Globalisation. Bloomington: University of
Indiana Press; Banerjee, P. and Basu Ray Chaudhury, A. (Eds.). (2011) Women in
Indian Borderlands. New Delhi: Sage.
81 National Archives, New Delhi, India; National Library, Kolkata, India; Bureau of
Applied Economics and Statistics, Department of Planning, Government of West
Bengal, India; Census of India Regional Office, Kolkata; Ramkrishna Mission Insti-
tute of Culture, Kolkata, India; West Bengal State Archives, Kolkata, India; Dhaka
University Library, Bangladesh; National Archives, Dhaka, Bangladesh; National Library,
Dhaka, Bangladesh.
82 Cooch Behar, Jalpaiguri, Darjeeling, North Dinajpur, South Dinajpur, Malda, Mur-
shidabad, Nadia, North 24 Parganas, South 24 Parganas.
83 Kurigram, Lalmonirhat, Nilphamari, Panchagarh, Thakurgaon, Dinajpur, Jaypurhat,
Naogaon, Nawabganj, Rajshahi, Kushtia, Meherpur, Chuadanga, Jhenaidah, Jessore,
Satkhira.
84 Cooch Behar, North Dinajpur, South Dinajpur, Murshidabad, Nadia, North 24 Parganas.
85 Kurigram, Lalmonirhat, Panchgarh, Thakurgaon, Rajshahi, Kushtia, Nilphamari,
Chuadanga, Jhenaidah, Jessore, Satkhira.
86 Enclaves are pockets of land surrounded completely by territories of the neighbouring
state. The West Bengal-Bangladesh border enclaves are examples of a unique territo-
rial configuration, not to be found anywhere else in the world (discussed in Chapter 2).
87 Discussed in Chapter 1.
88 Andrews, M., Squire, C. and Tamboukou, M. (2009) Doing Narrative Research. Lon-
don: Sage. p. 5.
89 Ibid. pp. 5–6.
90 Squire, C. (2009) From Experience-Centred to Socioculturally-Oriented Approaches
to Narrative. In Andrews, Squire and Tamboukou, 2009, p. 48.
 Introduction 27
91 The total number of interviews conducted during the first phase of my field work
in 2011–12 was 137. For details of the interviewees, see Appendix 2. The names of
my interviewees have been anonymised (unless specified otherwise) to protect their
identities; later in 2016, 20 interviews were conducted in Jalpaiguri and Cooch Behar.
92 For the structure of the questionnaire, see Appendix 1.
93 This was often a cause of considerable embarrassment for the man doing it, given that
I was not of his family relation.
94 The border guards often did not seem to be satisfied by my answers and continued
being suspicious of my purpose.
95 Situations were often not conducive for a formal set-up of the interviews or going
through the formalities of Consent Forms, Participant Information Sheets, etc. Many
of the interviews were impromptu and quick. Some of the informal conversations
turned into interviews eventually, with no prior preparation.
96 Aspects related to some of the themes such as gender, caste and livelihood practices
(besides illegal cross-border practices) along the West Bengal-Bangladesh border have
not been studied by Willem van Schendel, Ranabir Samaddar or Paula Banerjee –
researchers who have worked extensively in this area.
97 Lefebvre, H. (1991) The Production of Space (trs. Donald Nicholson-Smith). Oxford:
Basil Blackwell; Soja, E. (1989). Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space
in Critical Social Theory. London, New York: Verso; Soja, E. (1996) Thirdspace.
Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
98 Guha, R. (1988) Selected Subaltern Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Guha,
R. (1997) A Subaltern Studies Reader, 1986–1995. Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press; Amin, S. and Chakraborty, D. (1996) Subaltern Studies IX: Writings on
South Asian History and Society. New Delhi: Oxford University Press; Chatterjee, P.
(2004) The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the
World. New York, Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press; Chakravorty,
S., Milevska, S. and Barlow, T.E. (2006) Conversations with Gayatri Chakraborty
Spivak. London: Seagull Books.
99 Soja, 1989, 1996.
100 Anzaldua, 1987; For further understanding of Anzaldua’s concept of Mestiza con-
sciousness, see Feghali, Z. (2011) Re-Articulating the New Mestiza. Journal of Inter-
national Women’s Studies. Special Issue. 12(2). pp. 61–74; Aigner-Varoz, E. (Summer
2000) Metaphors of a Mestiza Consciousness: Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera.
Melus. 25(2). pp. 47–62.
101 Kalir, B. and Sur, M. (Eds.). (2013). Transnational Flows and Permissive Polities:
Ethnographies of Human Mobilities in Asia. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University
Press; Roy, H. (2012). Partitioned Lives: Migrants, Refugees, Citizens in India and
Pakistan, 1947–1965. New Delhi: Oxford University Press; Misra, S. (2011). Becom-
ing a Borderland: The Politics of Space and Identity in Colonial Northeastern India.
New Delhi: Routledge; More recent ones which helped me with insightful under-
standing of the Bengal/South Asian borders are Gellner, D. (2014). Borderland Lives
in Northern South Asia. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan; Cons, J. (2016). Sensitive
Space: Fragmented Territory at the India-Bangladesh Border. Seattle and London:
University of Washington Press.
102 Ohmae, K. (1990) The Borderless World. New York: Harper Collins; Shapiro, M. and
Alker, H. (Eds.). (1996) Challenging Boundaries: Global Flows, Territorial Identi-
ties. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
103 Ohmae, 1990; Ohmae, K. (1995) The End of the Nation State. New York: Free Press.
104 Newman, D. (2002) Boundaries. In Agnew J., Mitchell, K. and Toal, G. (Eds.). A Com-
panion to Political Geography. Oxford: Blackwell. pp. 123–137; Newman, D. (2006) The
Lines that Continue to Separate Us: Borders in a Borderless World. Progress in Human
Geography. 30(2). pp. 1–19; Newman, D. and Paasi, A. (1998) Fences and Neighbours in
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
 334 INDBX— DESCENDANTS & THOSE THEY MARRIED.
Kame. Page. Stokes — Edward C.264 268 Fannie L. . .259 Frances C.
. 93 Frances . . .267 Frances N. .147 Frederick . .103 Frank 218a
Frances J. .219 Fredonia . .220 Flora 220 Franklin . .226 98-99-223b
Gen. George H. 94 Granville W. 98-99 George M. . 99 George ...IS3
98c-223b George S. . .271 Granville . . 98c George C. .258 George P.
. .261 Hannah ... 12.. .14-18-19-26•37-23-39-40-45 Hollingshead
223a Hillyard .. .275d Hezekiah . 59 47 Henrietta T. 93 Herbert N. 97
223a Harry W. . . 103 Howard .153a 2I2-223b Hannah H. 103-121
Henry N...103 Horace T. .218a Hilyard .. . .213 Henry . . . .213. . .
.226-261-94 Henry J. . .220 Helen 259 Horace B..220 Isabelle .. .220
iS3a Israel ...37-93 Isaac ...54-59. . . .88-140-261 Isaiah 60 Name.
Page. Stokes — I. Collins. .140 200 John . .8-12-15.. .18-21-25-
26....37-47-2i8a. . . 226-98c-223b Joseph . . .8-12.. .14-19-21-23.
.38-46-57-121 John, Jr. . . . 12 John J 220 Judith . . . 12-19 Joshua .
.14-21.. .22-26-46-150 Job 14 Jacob . . .15-26 Jarvis .. .18-38. .2i8b-
26i John H., M. D. ...19-21-40-45 Jacob J 25 John L 27 Joseph W. .
46 James ..59-218 212 John N 93 Jarrett .... 94 John W... 98. . .l82-
262-223b Joel A..98-2i8b John E. .98-153 John S.. 98-139 145
James M..101 216-275 Joseph C. . .153 James R. . . .153a J.
Spencer. .103 John H...103 121 John D....223b Jarvis M. . .218a
Josephine L. 2I9-223b Jefferson F. .219 Joseph, M. D. 212-226
James G. . .220 Juliet 220 Josephine . .223b Joanna . . . .220 John C
259 266 Kesiah ..15-57 Keturah B..147 Name. Page. Stokes — Laura
268 Lydia ...14-46 S9 Lissie 153a Levi B 139 La Fayette. .2 i8c Lucy
Ann. .219 Lancaster . .213 Lillie M. ...220 Locke 220 Lisle 223a Lee
221 Lucy J 220 Lewis . .261-236 Louisa . . . .259 Lavinia . . . .259
Mary 8-12...18-38-46-47.. •S4-iS3-i53a.. .213-261-264.. .258-267-
223a Martha .... 12• .37-51-94-147 223b Martha H..275d Mary
S....220 Mordecai . .38 q8c Maria . .40-45 98-98C Martha B . . 59 99-
153 Mary Ann . . 59 147 Martha E.. .93 103-121 Martha W. . 98
Milton 99 Mark 147 Mary Emma 103-121 Mary R...272 223b Mary S
218a Martha J.. .218a Mott 220 Meigs 220 Marietta ...221 Melvina . .
.259 Nathan . 12-267 Nancy E. . .40 45-47 Nathaniel . .40 45-47
Name. Page. Stokes — N. Newlin, M. D 93-103 Nathan H. . 98
Norman B..258 Nathaniel B. 258 Pelletier . .275d Priscilla . . 59 147
Phebe M.. .142 Rebecca . . . 12.. .21-40-45-60. . . .98-212-259
Rachel ... 14...10-26-37-54. ..261-59-213 98c Rosana .... 15 Rachel
S. . 93 139 Rebecca W. 99 Rachel W. . 99 Robert B. . .147 Reeves .
...153a Ruthanna . . 139 Rowland . .213 Ralph W. . .220 Rhoda A. .
.220 Rush 220 Robert 267 Sarah ... .8- 12....19-38-147.. .132-212-
229 267 Sybilla . .22-60 Samuel ... 12.. .19-21-26-38.. .140-200-261
54-57 Samuel. M. D. 37 Stogdelle . . 2,7. . . .38-212-226 Susan A. .
40 45 Samuel E. . 40 45 Susan .... 93 37-222:\ Susan W . . . 97
Sarah W. .101 261 Stella . .220-264 Samuel G. .275
 INDEX— DESCENDANTS & THOSE THEY MARRIED. 335
Name. Page. Stokes — Samuel W..261 Thomas . .8-12 14-26-46
226-261 Thomas L. H. 220a I Unity ..98-2i8a Uriah W . . . 99 Vera
271 Virginia P. 219-220 William . . 21.. -37-39-54-57...94-i53a-99.
.2i8a-2i6-267 271 Wm. J. W. 220 Whitall 142 Woolman . . 98 Wm.
H., M. D. 98 Wilson 142 William, Jr., 153a William E..i53a Walter
153a W. de Witt 2i8a W. G 219 William D..2i8c William C..275 Wistar
H...258 Walter P...261 William WWilliam H..264 ■ 238 Smith—
Charles . . . .275d Daniel 39 Emma S... .275c Elizabeth . . 93 George
210 Hannah ... 47 Ida 180 James 210 John 93 Jar vis .93-98-99
Louisa B. . .258 Mar}' 2750 Maria 251 Newton . ...210 Oliver 210
Robert 210 Samuel R. . . 87 Name. Page. Smith— Stafford . . .2i9g
Samuel . . .250. .258-210-101 93-103 268 Sidney 251 Timothy 210-
37 Thomas . ..210 22s William ...225 260 Satterthwaite — Ann 213
Anna 246 Lydia 214 Stevenson — Mary 2.j SWARTZLANDER —
Franklin . ..211 , M. D. 210 Stricker— Abigail 159 Elizabeth Ann 62-
98 Emma I59 Howard . . . 159 Hannah .62-94 98 Keturah 62-159
Lizzie 159 Louisa 62 Mary 62 Priscilla ... 62 Philip ...28-62 158-159
Rebecca 62-159 Richard ... .159 Sarah .. .62-159 Thaddeus . .159
Theodore ..159 i Sh.\llcross — • Anna 212 j SOMERS — j Rebecca ...
36 SciLL — Anna 216 Name. Page. Shinn — Ann 216 Charles H.
.200a Henry 152 Mordecai . .271 Ruth 54 Sloan — Mary S 216 Silver
— Morrice W.22oa Stiles — Martha 251 Stacy 69 Thomas ... 47 Sears
— Ella 221 Saunders — • Elizabeth 111-135 Lydia 135 Rachel I35
Sarah I35 Solomon ... 52 Slusser — Benjamin F 226 Sharpless —
Casper 227 Jesse 243 Shute— Elizabeth . . 21 SCHULL — Mary 54
Sh REEVE — Benjamin F. 24s Caleb 224 Louezer .... 54 Martha
....140 Sharp — Abigail ....252 Andrew ...252 ; Abigail R. . . 186 j
Elizabeth ..189 Hannah 189 Name. Sharp — Hugh 188 Isaac W..
..256 Jennie 251 Japheth 189 Jane Ann. ..189 Kesiah 189 Laura 256
Richard . ...256 Sarah 178 Samuel 189 Susannah . . 189 Shoemaker
— Amy 60 Agnes 60 Stockton — Aneliza . . . .161 Charles 161
Franklin . . . i6x Harriet 38 Jonathan .. .161 Lewis ...62-161 Simmons
— Elizabeth 63-80 Rebecca . ...176 Sarah 97 Shaw — Ann M 229
Stout — Mary 236 Sarah 139 Sherwood — John loi Sellars — Kate 80
Spangler — Margaret . . 92 Swain — Sarah 93 Severs — Asbury ....
144 Shivers — Jehu 149
 336 INDBX-DBSCBNDANTS & THOSE THBY MARRIED.
Name. Page. Name. Page. Name. Page. Name. Page. Slatcher —
Snyder — Thorn — Townsend — Ella L .256 C. William •275 Hannah
. .. Samuel . . . .106 . 87 Frank .... .212 Scott — SiMPKINS —
Tresslar — David .... .189 Franklin . . .268 Thorp — Addie M.. .220
George . . . .159 Margaret 1^ .261 Algernon S . 220 Henry . . . .
•152 SiMMONTON— Hiram .... .219 Julia Ann. .189 Hiram .... .2i8c
Thomas — Jessie J. ... .220 Sarah . . . . ■159 Lucy .2i8c Bertha A. .
.259a Mabel .220 Leonidas .. .2i8c Beulah M. .259a P. Lavinia .220
StACK — William S. .2l8c Benjamin J .259a George . . . .250 Charles
. . . .259a Thompson — Slawter — Carrie E. .. • 2593 Rebecca W
.118 Sutton — William H. .270 Arthur H.. .259a Sarah . 38 Anna . . .
. .256 William, Jr 269 Anna Elmer H. . •255 .259a Tomlin —
Stratton^ Say— Emma .... •255 Drucilla . .. . 29 Ida L .256
Benjamin, M. D. Ernest B.. .259a Marv L. .■• .256 • 17 Elwood ... •
139 • 259a Sarah ■193 Gilbert E.. Edward . . 102Troth — Esther ....
• 155 Franklin . Florence . . .256 .220 ..T''? Shoup — James . .40-
45Jacob ■173 Hannah ... . 83 Howard . . ■ 255 .102 John •174
Henry H.. .212 Jonathan . • •59 John .102 Joseph E. . .224 Joseph
L. . .255 Sweeney— John . 99 Levi S . . . . •259 Taylor — Helen S...
■139 Lizzie H. . .224 Lydia .121 Ann .266 StrawbridgeMary Emma
Mary . 58 Anna .261 Edward . . .266 .224 Mary M. .. • 259 Anthony .
. ■ 50 Susan .... . 69 Robert P.. • 259 Caleb •125 Sumner — Susan
H.. . .224 Susan . . . . • 255 Caroline . . • 99 Alfred W. 266Sarah W.
William . .. .169 .212 .103 • 259 Emma .... Franklin . .277 Samuel C.
. •125 Anna P.... .277 William . . • 255 Joseph .... .205 Edwin R. .
.277 Trotter — William S. .136 Michael ... ■ 125 John N.... .277 Anna
.126 Robert .... .125 Isaac .216 Task— Sarah ■125 Scull — Amanda
M .250 Thomas . .. •125 Deborah . . .185 Tedrick — Anna D. . . .132
Mary .248 Charles F. .250 Throckmorton — Sine— Elizabeth . .132
Susanna . . . 98 Aden .180 Tomlinson — Joseph H . . .132 Ann • 53a
Joseph . ... • 51 VOORHEES — Sexton— Anna .154 Mary .132 Walter
.... ■277 Elizabeth . •174 Aquilla . . . .149 Mary C... .250 Cooper ....
.204 Thomas . .. .132 Von Leer — StackhouseEsther .... .149
Thomas, J. .250 Sarah .216 George . . . .204 Frances . .. .235 Maria
. . . . .201 Isaac • 59 Tyler— Vainey — Samuel . . . .206 James .. 161
Mary -123 .149 Mary .264 Joseph .... • 17 SORVER — Samuel S.
.149 TiBBALS — Vansciver — Kate .272 William H .149 Alice Wallace
. .. .220 .220 J. B .236 61 Street— Alice .272
 INDEX— DESCENDANTS & THOSE THEY MARRIED. 337
Name. Page. Venicomb — Ann 74 Vanderbildt,180 VanSlyck —
George F. . .260 William H..258 William H., Jr. 260 Vanstoven —
Sarah 58 Venable — Hannah — 218b Wills — Amos ..29-178 171
Anna E 181 Amy 64-73-140 Anna ...61-118 Alexander C. 178-183
Benjamin E. 171 Benajah ...247 Catharine W. 243 Chalkley .. .154
Charles 73i David 98 Edward ... .117 Eliza Esher 181 Elizabeth S.
216 Elizabeth C. 171-64-85 George W. .247 Hannah E. . 64 Henry W.
. . 46 Henry 247 Isaac H 85 Joshua S. ..118 Jacob ..247-165 178
James 169 Joab'.i7i-64-83 John M.. 171-73 Jane Elizabeth 171
Joseph 69 Lydia E....232 237-118 Mary 243-39-73 Name. Page. Wills
— Mary B 154 Mark . .109-178 Mariana . . .247 Micajah R. 183-165
Mary C 165 Mary L 171 Micajah ... 64 Martha 165 Priscilla M.169
Priscilla N. 80-171 Priscilla ... 64 Rebecca . ...247 Rachel 247 Robert
247 Rebecca Ann 183-178 Rachel A... 118 Rebecca W.223 Rebecca
H. .165 Rebecca C. .171 Sarah F. ...118 Stacy 247 Sarah .185-171 64
William S..2i8b William R..165 Zebedee R. 184-165 Zebedee M.. 64
Zebedee — 29 WOOLMAN — Abigail 38 Ann . . .97-127 182-262
Edwin 223a Edith 51 Eliza 223a Elizabeth 37-62 Emma 223a
Granville . . S7 John S 98 Mary E....I55 Mary . . .87-223a Patience ...
11 Samuel . . . .253 Walton — David 98c Daniel 212 Eliza 116
Harriet . . . .233 Joseph 61 Mary . . .82-104 Name. Page. WiLKINS
— Abigail 62-158 159 Bathsheba .. 41 Caleb 233 Caroline . . .158
Charles 62-180 158 Esther 26 Henry 231 John 19-69 Joshua B. .105
U7 Keturah 28-32 180 Lewis .. .72-158 Mary 158 Rebecca
...158...230-231-265 Sarah B 177 Sarah 41-62-156 Thomas 158-204
Uriah 158 William .33-41 82 William H. .230 Woodward — Anna
153a Benajah . . .100 Esther 275d Elizabeth . .125 Frances . ...249
Louisa 221 WoOLdTON — Amanda . . .272 Charlotte . . 62 Mary Ann
97-127 Matilda . ...loi Margaretta 131 Rachel 114 Thaddeus ..116
Wright — Rachel 8 Thomas . ...137 Weaver — Jacob 255 Wooden —
Alberta , ..256 Name. Page. Watkinson — Webber 256 Watts —
William ...258 Walter — Sidney P. . .259 Waln — Joseph 23 Warder^
Jeremiah ... 16 Warrington — Abraham ... 36 * Mary E.103-121
Martha .... 72 Rebecca .... 48 Williams — Anthony . . .264 Annie 213
Alice 213 Benjamin .'.174 Charles .266-94 Esther 266 Edward .
...211 Elizabeth ..212 Ellen 213 99 Franklin . . .212 George ..93-267
Henry 2ir Isaac 174 Israel 212 Jonathan .. .174 John . ...209-68
Jesse . ...211-93 Joseph S.. . .213 John. Jr 213 Jonathan G. 114
Mary 266 Martha M. .174 Martha 213 Morris 213 Rachel 267
Rebecca . ...174 Robert 93 Sarah B....242 Susan 267 Sarah 174
Samuel ... .211 Tacy .. .209-213 William K. .174
 !38 INDEX— DESCENDANTS & THOSE THEY MARRIED.
Name. Page. Woodruff — Ella E 260 Wood — Alexander 103-121
Henry 72 Hannah .... i8oa Mary 124 Maria i8oa William ....181
Zeckariah . . 72 Wilson — Ann Mahlon . . . Mary A. .. Robert . ...
Samuel . . . Stephen . .. Theodore . 54 8q 154 72 202 39 266 Name.
Page. Wetherill — 131 WOOSTER — Sarah 68 Weir — Margaret . .
149 White — 32 A. Alice 220a Wiley — Christiana ..150 159 Warner
— • William ...175 Wiggins — Rachel 197 Name. Page Winters —
Eliza 204 Watson— John .. .158 Wilton — Edward ....268 Worrell —
.268 WiTHROW — Caroline A.. 275 Walters — John 212 Wharton —
Timothy .. .218a Name. Page. W;ndlE — William . ...219 WoLCOTT—
Eva 219 Wharff — Maud 219 Webster— Josiah 36 Lydia 140 Watkins
— Sarah 68 Yates — Josephine A. 99 Zelley — Mark 142 Sarah 43-93
 INDEX. 339 BLANKS. Name. Page. Carrie 93 David 58
Elizabeth 45 Elizabeth 140 Elizabeth 104 Emma 267 Flora 229 Fannie
205 Sarah 58 Susan 104 GENEALOGICAL NOTES. Burrough, Samuel
292 Burr, Henry 293 Borton, John 296 Cowperthwaite, Hugh 281
Cole, Samuel 284 Hinchman, John 279 Hancock, Timothy 283 Hugg,
John 286 Hollingshead, John 290 Heritage, Richard 290 Hilyard,
John 298 Jarrett, John 297 Lippincott, Richard 294 Lancaster,
Thomas 297 Matlack, William 293 Marriages 5 Roberts, John 291
Stratton, William 288 Thorn, William 278 Warrington, Henry 299
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES Name. Page. Braddock, Kichard S., M. D
205a Cemetery at Rancocas 300 Cole's, Elizabeth , letter to her son,
John Green 301 Early History 6 Haines, George, M. D i68a Lippincott,
J. B 177a Moore, Bloomfield Hames 200a Parry, William 95 Stokes,
Charles 94 Stokes, James M 275b Stokes, Samuel 275a Stokes,
William J. W 2i9f Stokes, William H., M. D 2196 Stokes, Benjamin A
219b Stokes, Granville W 219a Stokes, Franklin 2i8e Stokes, Joel A
2i8e Stokes, Jarvis 2i8d Stokes, William 98a Stokingham 300 Stokes,
Irish branch 299 Stokes, Thomas, the first 7 Stokes, Jarrett 213a
Stokes, Charles 275e Will of Thomas Stokes 9 Williams, Charles 212a
ADDENDA. Rachel Barton and Simeon Eastlack's descendants. Sarah
Barton and Abel Hillman's descendants. Samuel Stokes and Marion
Conrow's descendants. Edward H. Stokes' portrait. Edward H.
Stokes' residence. Edward A. Stokes' portrait. Biographical sketch of
Edward H. Stokes. Sketch of Woodlawn, residence of Edward H.
Stok:;s. Samuel Stokes and Sarah Ellis' descendants, 307a.
The text on this page is estimated to be only 10.20%
accurate

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