Jungle Passports - (Ethnography of Political Violence) by Malini Sur

About the Book

"This book is about an in-between period when India started replacing old boundary structures with a new multilayered fence along its borders with Bangladesh, approximately 2007 until 2015. It specifically explores the diverse mobilities of people, goods, and animals amid political, historical, and ecological forces at play in the Northeast India-Bangladesh borderland. I retrace my steps in time to resituate and contextualize the fence in histories of road-building and rice wars that goes back almost two hundred years. In an era of global nationalistic rhetoric, this book seeks to foreground how the ubiquity of border infrastructures that seek to resolve issues of national citizenship and migrant "illegality" establishes their indeterminacy of purpose. The shifting and twisting ecology of the terrain, along with the complex exchanges, continues to defy contemporary visions of homogeneous nation-states"--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"Jungle Passports is a wonderful book, combining theoretical sophistication with ethnographic richness. While a lot has been written on borders and borderlands lately, Malini Sur offers novel insights. She is also a great storyteller and writer."-- "Bengt G. Karlsson, Stockholm University"

"Malini Sur's prose is always clear and often lyrical. Searing insights from many years of indefatigable and intrepid research shine through as Jungle Passports makes contributions to the study of gender, development, human-animal relations, kinship, ethnic strife, and solidarity. Sur shows the enactment of nation-states as tenuous yet brutal entities in the borderlands of South Asia. Her work offers valuable lessons for understanding such phenomena anywhere in the world."-- "Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan, Yale University"

About the Author

Malini Sur is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University.