This book analyses the cross-border transactions in North-East India, with particular focus on the Tripura-Bangladesh border. It explores the inter-relationship between community, state and market, and also discusses the spatial identity of Tripura in pre and post-partition era and the implications of partition and border-making to the cross-border communities of Tripura and Bangladesh. It reflects on trade transactions between India and Bangladesh and more significantly, on informal cross-border trade, social transactions and people-to-people contact across the border. The subject matter in this book also captures the community anxieties emerging from land boundary institutions and the issues of conflict and development in the cross-border space of Tripura-Bangladesh. It also discusses the dynamics of community inter-dependence and opposition in the post-partition condition in the Tripura and Bangladesh. Print edition not for sale in South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan or Bhutan)

This book analyses the cross-border transactions in North-East India, with particular focus on the Tripura-Bangladesh border. It explores the inter-relationship between community, state and market, and also discusses the spatial identity of Tripura in pre and post-partition era and the implications of partition and border-making to the cross-border communities of Tripura and Bangladesh. It reflects on trade transactions between India and Bangladesh and more significantly, on informal cross-border trade, social transactions and people-to-people contact across the border. The subject matter in this book also captures the community anxieties emerging from land boundary institutions and the issues of conflict and development in the cross-border space of Tripura-Bangladesh. It also discusses the dynamics of community inter-dependence and opposition in the post-partition condition in the Tripura and Bangladesh. Print edition not for sale in South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan or Bhutan)

Since the nineteenth century, a succession of states has classified the inhabitants of what are now the borderlands of Northeast India and Bangladesh as Muslim "frontier peasants," "savage mountaineers," and Christian "ethnic minorities," suspecting them to be disloyal subjects, spies, and traitors. In Jungle Passports Malini Sur follows the struggles of these people to secure shifting land, gain access to rice harvests, and smuggle the cattle and garments upon which their livelihoods depend against a background of violence, scarcity, and India's construction of one of the world's longest and most highly militarized border fences. Jungle Passports recasts established notions of citizenship and mobility along violent borders. Sur shows how the division of sovereignties and distinct regimes of mobility and citizenship push undocumented people to undertake perilous journeys across previously unrecognized borders every day. Paying close attention to the forces that shape the life-worlds of deportees, refugees, farmers, smugglers, migrants, bureaucrats, lawyers, clergy, and border troops, she reveals how reciprocity and kinship and the enforcement of state violence, illegality, and border infrastructures shape the margins of life and death. Combining years of ethnographic and archival fieldwork, her thoughtful and evocative book is a poignant testament to the force of life in our era of closed borders, insularity, and "illegal migration."

This book examines India’s Northeast borderland – strategically positioned at the confluence of South Asia, East and Southeast Asia – from the perspective of international relations. The volume interrogates the geopolitics of region-making in both colonial and postcolonial times and traces the transformation of Northeast India from a British strategic frontier into a securitised borderland. It situates the region in transnational interactions both in conflict and cooperation with its immediate neighbouring regions of China, Bangladesh, and Myanmar, especially in the context of India’s Look East/Act East policy. The volume paves the way for a new ‘region-state’ framework borne out of the constructivist worldview and offers answers to many conundrums centring border studies. It further delineates approaches to overcoming the present geopolitical and territorial challenges of India’s Northeast with a critical thrust on regional policymaking. The volume will be of interest to students and researchers in the disciplines of social sciences and humanities in India as well as South and Southeast Asia. It will be especially useful to those in politics and international relations, strategic studies, international political economy, foreign policy, development studies and regional development, besides foreign policy-makers and diplomats, development practitioners, economists and policy analysts.