Book talk: 'A thousand tiny cuts': mobility and security along the Bangladesh-India borderlands

With author Sahana Ghosh and discussants Navtej Purewal (SOAS) and Priyanka Basu (KCL). Chaired by Ammara Maqsoud (UCL)

A Thousand Tiny Cuts (University of California Press, 2023) chronicles the slow transformation of a connected region into national borderlands. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork in northern Bangladesh and eastern India, Sahana Ghosh shows the foundational place of gender and sexuality in the making and management of threat in relation to mobility. Rather than focusing solely on border fences and border crossings, she demonstrates that bordering reorders relations of value. 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. Through a textured ethnography of the gendered political economy of mobility across postcolonial borderlands in South Asia, this book challenges our understandings of the violence of bordering, migration and citizenship, and transnational inequalities, with important political stakes for borders and security regimes in South Asia and beyond.

This event is supported by the UCL Centre for the Study of South Asia and the Indian Ocean World (CSSA), which promotes research and teaching related to the geographical region of South Asia and its intersections with the wider world, including the South Asian diaspora.