Paper short abstract:

How do extensive family networks and kinship practices across the India-Bangladesh borderlands negotiate the increasing militarization of the border? This paper offers an ethnographic view on mobile practices through generations of borderland family histories.

Paper long abstract:

The India-Bangladesh border has had a varied life in terms of real and discursive management since its inception in 1947 - neither constant nor unilinear in its changes. In the subcontinent's east, massive cross-border displacements and migrations accompanied the Partition riots of 1946-47 and subsequently Bangladesh's Liberation War of 1971. The border of 1947, still in the making, cuts through historically united and densely populated regions with deep socio-cultural ties. This paper asks how the changing life of border control relates to family practices of mobility serving kinship along and across the border, looking not at moments of historical crisis but ordinary times between them.

In this paper I turn to the domain of kinship to see how practices of cross-border marriages and the upkeep of kinship relations have changed over generations within families residing in the borderlands of India and Bangladesh. Mapping family histories along and across the border over its life-course offers, I suggest, valuable insights into the entanglement of spatial and social mobility at individual and community levels as the newly formed states of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh have sought to instill national belonging. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research in the borderlands of northern Bengal with residents, administration and security forces of both countries, I argue that the interface between the state policies of border control and socio-economic strategies of mobile borderland residents produces new pressures and priorities for the maintenance of kinship ties and family relations in these communities.