Author: Sahana Ghosh
Publisher: Yoda Press
Price: Rs. 699
Sahana Ghosh’s A Thousand Tiny Cuts presents a disturbing picture of the dehumanisation of a borderland lifeworld. Her study area is north Bengal, broadly the territory that once constituted the Princely State of Cooch Behar. At the time of Partition, the Rajbangsi population here wanted the kingdom to remain an independent country, but ended divided by Radcliff Line drawn to separate Hindu and Muslim territories to be awarded to India and Pakistan.
The author’s ethnography approach is to live with and attempt to understand the life of people on either side of this borderland as they live it. She develops a convincing narrative how the degradation of life here is not by any singular event but the residue of many tiny injuries.
This “friendly” international border, now fenced and guarded, becomes not just a physical barrier to mobility. It is also shown as having splintered a natural economic region besides the nostalgia of a past sense of community and kinship. Invisible to the outside world, the residents have had to acclimatise and reinhabit new constantly churning social spaces.
The Westphalian state’s idea of national territory and security are shown sharply contrasting with the understanding of traditional livelihoods means and economic connectivity. On the Indian side, this is stark in the bewilderment of Hindi speaking Border Security Force personnel at the disinclination of the people to stick to their sides of the border. This is reciprocated by a sense of alien intrusion amongst the Bengali speaking peasantry who have difficulty communicating in Hindi.
Traditional trade chains get silently calibrated against scales of legality and morality too. Hence, trading cash crop tobacco, vastly different varieties of which grow on either side of the border, though technically is smuggling, continues without guilt. Ganja, also a traditional cash crop grown in Rajbangsi homes, gets the guilt screen pass too. However, some would not touch cattle trading for this is seen as immoral.
Gainful employment avenues are scarce and young men are expected to leave and look for employment in heartland cities. Those who do, suffer stigmas of suspicion of being illegal immigrants at work places, those who remain behind are constantly fearful of being seen as informers of the neighbouring country. This boundary barrier extends even to airwaves. SIM cards of both countries work on either side and there is nothing illegal about their transborder usage, yet people are fearful of possessing SIM of one country in the other country lest they attract suspicion scanner.
Even the marriage prospects of the young warp. Young men increasingly find it difficult to get brides from settlements away from the borderland, likewise, determined by the demand-and-supply market logic, dowries expected from young women wishing to marry away from the borderland become prohibitive.
The book is a call for people to open their eyes to the twilight world of borderlands, transformed grotesquely by these numerous tiny cuts. This plight is summed up in a foreboding verdict of a BSF personnel the author interviewed: “…here the soil itself was bad, corrupt, and corrupting.”
This review was first published in The Telegraph. The original can be read HERE
Editor, Imphal Review of Arts and Politics and author
