Stateless in South Asia: The Making of the India-Bangladesh Enclaves

“ Only in the eyes of the law are we indians.” With these words Anu Chairman sketched the position of tens of thousands of people living beyond the reach of state and nation in dozens of enclaves in South Asia. Much of the recent wave of literature on the nation is concerned with critiquing an earlier generation of scholars who tended to assume a correspondence between nations and states. In the new literature, the connections among nation, state, territory, sovereignty, history, and identity are all problematized. Nations are seen as being socially constructed in many different ways. Thus, there are nations without states, new nations that are invented before our eyes while older ones disintegrate, and older diasporic nations that are being joined by a host of new transnational communities. Nations are now conceived as more fluid, malleable, and unpredictable than ever before.