Border Bureaucracy and Discourses: Demarcation and Surveillance of the Punjab Border in the Wake of 1947 Partition

The establishment of state authority over the movement of people and goods across borders became a key marker of statehood after decolonization. In South Asia, India and Pakistan gradually and unevenly asserted territorial and fiscal sovereignty along their new borders. This article examines how the early Pakistani state confronted border anxieties through the bureaucratic practices and discourses of local officials, who embodied state authority at the frontier. This article further explores how the state attempted to regulate and classify cross-border movement and how borderland communities responded—sometimes complying, sometimes negotiating, and at times subverting these controls. Using archival sources and oral histories, the article argues that categories such as “regional” and “national,” “self” and “other” were not fixed or natural, but were produced through contingent interactions between state functionaries and local populations. In doing so, this article highlights the complex and negotiated nature of sovereignty in Pakistan’s borderlands.