Malini Sur, "Jungle Passports: Fences, Mobility, and Citizenship at the Northeast India-Bangladesh Border," (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021)

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." South Asian Studies Podcast Indian History Podcast Northeast India borderlands Bangladesh-India border studies Jungle Passports by Malini Sur Citizenship and mobility in South Asia Muslim frontier peasants in India Savage mountaineers and ethnic minorities Militarized borders in South Asia Smuggling in Indian borderlands Refugees and migrants in South Asia Border fences and sovereignty Illegal migration and state violence Borderland ethnography in India Life and death at violent borders Northeast India and Bangladesh relations Deportation and migration studies Kinship and reciprocity in border regions Indian borderlands and livelihoods Refugees and undocumented migration Citizenship regimes in South Asia Border infrastructures and migration Cross-border trade and smuggling Ethnic minorities in Indian border regions