A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security Across the Bangladesh-India Borderlands
February 20, 5:00 PM CST on Zoom
What does the ongoing life of bordering look and feel like in South Asia after seventy-five years of the drawing of the border? Drawing on a decade of fieldwork in northern Bangladesh and eastern India, this talk- and the recently published book- chronicles a world of transnational borderland connections in a region divided on national terms. It shows the foundational place of gender and sexuality in the making and management of threat in relation to mobility. The cost of militarization across this ostensibly “friendly” border is devaluation—of agrarian land and crops, of borderland youth undesirable as brides and grooms in their respective national hinterlands, of regional infrastructures now disconnected, and of social and physical geographies disordered by surveillance.
About the Speaker
Sahana Ghosh is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the National University of Singapore. She studies gendered labor, mobility, borders and borderlands, and the national security state through ethnographic and feminist research in India and Bangladesh. Her first book A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security across the Bangladesh-India Borderlands is published with University of California Press (2023) and she has published widely in academic journals as well as public-facing platforms. She is currently conducting research on soldiering as a form of work in postcolonial India and working/dreaming about an illustrated book for children on borders.
Twitter handle @sahanagee