The Journey between Two Lands: A Study of the Indo- Bangladesh Women Migration with Special Reference to Jalpaiguri District

Abstract

The work, women in border area, the author wishes to highlight the ethnographic compilation on the complex interrelationship between gender and political borders in South Asia, particularly in the major areas of Jalpaiguri districts of West Bengal which shares it’s border with the country of Bangladesh. The author attempts to examine the stories of women whose lives are intertwined with borders, who are its markers and who resist everyday violence in all its myriad forms. The borders become zones, where the power and control of one state ends and the other begins. The result is the startling revelation that women not only live on the borders, but in many ways, they form them and are a crucial part of them. The borders become symbolic of spaces where socio-economic and political contests of inclusion and exclusion are played out every day. The work wishes to elaborate the ways in which women negotiate their differences within a state, which in the guise of being democratic, denies space to differences based on ethnicity, religion, class, or gender. Borders become hostile zones of widespread aggression, where masculinity is privileged. It shows how most of the traditional efforts made to make geopolitical regions more secure, are nothing but attempts to privilege a masculine definition of security that only results in feminine insecurities. The India–Bangladesh border is negotiated and reproduced in the everyday spaces of people living in the borderland that is often overlooked by the usual representation of geopolitical nationalism and hard realities of the barbed wire.