Alienated in one’s own land: ecology, border security, and nationalism in chars of Bengal

The essay draws from my ongoing ethnographic research with agrarian communities living on riverine lands of Bengal on the India-Bangladesh border. Chars or sandbanks emerge and submerge as rivers accrete and erode in the Ganga-Meghna-Brahmaputra delta in Eastern India and Bangladesh, and often become a source of vexation for establishing territorial boundaries, particularly between the two countries. The increasing securitisation of the erstwhile porous India-Bangladesh border has intensified the stigmatisation of char dwellers living on the borderlands, particularly the Muslim settlements, with their members labelled as smugglers, infiltrators, and terrorists. On the one hand, I turn my scholarly and ethnographic attention to how humans dwell with water, silt and sedimentation in what has been called hydrosocial lifeworlds, and on the other, I examine how increasing border security, along with an infrastructure of surveillance, is shaping the politics of being and belonging in riverine borderlands. In effect, I study the two concurring temporalities that affect the lifeworld of the char dweller: continuous and repeated erosion-induced mobility and a state demanding sedentariness as a condition of belonging. By doing so, I emphasise the alienation (rather than injustice) that char dwellers feel from a country increasingly categorising them as infiltrators/illegal migrants. I argue that the imperative to adapt to changing political and citizenship regimes alienates char dwellers from their hydrosocial lifeworlds. I take the moment of seeking permission from the state (security forces) as a moment of alienation where one no longer engages but develops a detached assessment of the world.