For most residents of India’s bustling metros and big towns, nationality and citizenship are privileges that are often taken for granted. The country’s periphery, however, is dotted with sleepy towns and desolate villages whose people, simply by having more in common with citizens of neighbouring nations than with their own, have to prove their Indian identity every day. It is these specks on the country’s map that Pradeep Damodaran rediscovers as he travels across India’s borders for a little more than a year, experiencing life in far-flung areas that rarely feature in mainstream conversations. In Borderlands, he recounts his encounters with the war-weary fishermen of Dhanushkodi at the southernmost tip of Tamil Nadu, who live in fear both of the Indian Coast Guard and the Sri Lankan navy; farmers in Hussainiwala, a village on Punjab’s border with Pakistan, who are unwilling to build concrete houses for fear of them being destroyed in the ever looming war; Tamil traders of Moreh, a town straddling the Manipur–Myanmar border, who pay bribes to at least ten different militant organizations so they can safely conduct their business; and ex-servicemen in Campbell Bay who were resettled there three generations ago and have long been forgotten by the mainland. From Minicoy in Lakshadweep to Taki in West Bengal, Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh to Raxaul in Bihar, Damodaran’s compelling narrative reinforces the idea that, in India, a land of contrasts and contradictions, beauty and diversity, conflict comes in many forms.

Women in Indian Borderlands is an ethnographic compilation on the complex interrelationship between gender and political borders in South Asia. The book focuses on the border regions of West Bengal, Jammu and Kashmir and Northeast India. The chapters in the book examine the stories of women whose lives are intertwined with borders, and who resist everyday violence in all its myriad forms. They show how most of the traditional efforts to make geopolitical regions more secure end up privileging a masculine definition of security that only results in feminine insecurities. These essays discuss how women negotiate their differences with a state that, though democratic, denies space to differences based on ethnicity, religion, class or gender. Borders are interpreted as zones where the jurisdiction of one state ends and that of the other begins. What comes out is the startling revelation that women not only live on the borders, but in many ways, form them.

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."

While India has been a popular subject of scholarly analysis in the past decade, the majority of that attention has been focused on its major cities. This volume instead explores contemporary urban life in a smaller city located in India's Northeast borderland at a time of dramatic change, showing how this city has been profoundly affected by armed conflict, militarism, displacement, interethnic tensions, and the expansion of neoliberal capitalism.

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of William Cooper's Town comes a dramatic and illuminating portrait of white and Native American relations in the aftermath of the American Revolution. The Divided Ground tells the story of two friends, a Mohawk Indian and the son of a colonial clergyman, whose relationship helped redefine North America. As one served American expansion by promoting Indian dispossession and religious conversion, and the other struggled to defend and strengthen Indian territories, the two friends became bitter enemies. Their battle over control of the Indian borderland, that divided ground between the British Empire and the nascent United States, would come to define nationhood in North America. Taylor tells a fascinating story of the far-reaching effects of the American Revolution and the struggle of American Indians to preserve a land of their own.

This book explores the India-Myanmar relationship in terms of ethnicity, security and connectivity. With the process of democratic transition in Myanmar since 2011 and the ongoing Rohingya crisis, issues related to cross-border insurgency are one of the most important factors that determine bilateral ties between the two neighboring countries. The volume discusses a diverse range of themes - historical dimensions of cooperation; contested territories, resistance and violence in India-Myanmar borderlands; ethnic linkages; political economy of India-Myanmar cooperation; and Act East Policy - to examine the prospects and challenges of the strategic partnership between India and Myanmar, and analyzes further possibilities to move forward. The chapters further look at cross-border informal commercial exchanges, public health, population movements, and problems of connectivity and infrastructure projects. Comprehensive, topical and with its rich empirical data, the volume will be useful to scholars and researchers of political studies, international relations, security studies, foreign policy, contemporary history, and South Asian studies as well as government bodies and think tanks.