Bordering as Method: A Conversation with Sahana Ghosh

Sahana Ghosh's A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security across the Bangladesh-India Borderlands stands out as a nuanced ethnographic study of bordering as an ongoing practice that permeates the everyday lives of residents in northern Bengal's India-Bangladesh borderlands.

Rather than viewing the border as a static, monolithic line marking a singular rupture in time and space, Ghosh reframes it as a dynamic, accumulative process. This process shapes physical, social, political, and mental landscapes through transnational connections across kinship, economy, and intimacy. Her core insight—that bordering operates as a form of value-making—reveals how cross-border movements generate hierarchies of value, devaluing certain lives and mobilities while privileging others, often blurring the lines between private familial ties and the public machinery of state power.

She spoke to the editors of the DAG Journal, expanding on some of the methodological challenges she faced in the process of navigating her field, which was located in northern Bengal's Cooch Behar and, across the border, in Bangladesh's Rangpur region.

Ghosh spoke about linking the geopolitical to the intimate, showing how unequal regimes of value sustain relational hierarchies that challenge public-private divides. For instance, she illustrates how border residents navigate simantey jibon (life at the border) through embodied practices of mobility, where everyday acts like smuggling goods or maintaining family ties across the fence become sites of valuation and devaluation. This positions bordering not merely as state-imposed control but as a 'world-making project' constitutive of gendered spaces and national identities.

Critically, Ghosh dismantles Euro-American border scholarship, which often fixates on security, surveillance, infrastructure, and overt violence. Instead, she foregrounds the subtle, accumulative 'tiny cuts' of bordering—embodied experiences that render borderlands as transnational sites pivotal to nation-making.

This shift is methodologically innovative, urging scholars to treat borderlands as fluid, knowable only through lived relationalities rather than abstracted securitisation. It allowed her to develop her own practice of photography as she said:

'Over the course of a decade of ethnographic research, my photographic practice developed as a method of archiving, diagnostic of the ever-expanding presence of national security, the feeling of being in a militarised borderland. At first photography seemed impossible, for I could not point a big, fancy camera at the fence from either side, let alone carry it through frisking at checkpoints. As a young, lone woman, living with and accompanying Muslim and Rajbangshi borderland residents on daily itineraries made me suspicious in the male gaze of the security state like the 'locals', an English term used in Bengali and Hindi speech by the (Border security officials of India and Bangladesh), who are routinely criminalised and harassed. Although my privileged positionality afforded me protections that meant we were unequally vulnerable in the risks we could take.

The border fence close to the Hili Border station in West Bangladesh. Image courtesy: Wikimedia Commons

Many of the images (in the book) were taken with a mobile phone camera, much the same way that residents do, pausing to frame and steal sights of security eruptions. Residents and security forces alike practice a visuality of partial, 'situated knowledge' as necessity, not inadequacy. Embracing this partiality is to reckon with the 'untaken, the inaccessible, the unshowable' in the visuality of bordering. My use of images in this book furthers the argument the 'vision is always a question of the power to see—and perhaps the violence implicit in our visualising practices,' brought to bear on the spaces, times, and scales of militarised bordering. The more Euro-American borders become archetypal, the more repetitive is the visual repertoire of borders.'

Zarina Hashmi, Untitled, 1971, Serigraph on paper, 19.0 x 17.0 in. Collection: DAG

South Asian artists have grappled with similar legacies of hardening borders over the many decades since 1947, challenging such categorical closures with their open-ended inscriptions of memories, patterns and repetitions of disrupted living.

How do the disciplinary domains of history and anthropology further add to the naturalisation of differences that were otherwise upheld through kinship ties and relationships that cut across the borders? Ghosh says, 'Within South Asia, transnational kinship is bracketed as a thing of the past, whether in scholarly work or in statist visions. A past ruptured violently by Partition, the loss of a thriving life of kinship was inflicted by states invested in a national-territorial reordering of families. This temporal framing of transnational kinship ties is reflected in the scholarly division of labour too: the study of Partition and its immediate effects is the domain of historians and literary scholars while the contemporary life and political economy of borderlands has come to be the province of anthropologists. Ruptured kinship is the past, today's transnational ties are part of the 'illicit flows' defying border security.'

Rabin Mondal, Crossing the Border III, 1977, Oil on paper, 21.0 x 26.5 in. Collection: DAG
The 1970s was a decade when Bengal had to revisit the issue of the political border—for the third time in the twentieth century—when the country of Bangladesh was created from the erstwhile Bengal province of Pakistan, after a war in 1971. The monumental event unleashed a new wave of displacement, which saw refugees spilling into the Indian side of the border and Calcutta bore the brunt of it. Rabin Mondal, who had already matured his individuated syntax of expressing the ills of the society through his primitivist figuration style, responded with several works giving a grim depiction of the displaced people, of which this work is an example.

Grounded in fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork across the India-Bangladesh border, the book employs a transnational feminist lens to interrogate Ghosh's own positionality as a dominant-caste Bengali Indian woman. This reflexivity is a highlight: she openly grapples with how her privileges shape her access to narratives, using the 'politics of devaluation' to amplify marginalised voices—particularly those of Muslim women and lower-caste men—whose mobilities are differentially policed. By scaling analysis from intimate kinship networks to state economies, Ghosh illuminates how language and practices of difference (especially religious or gendered markers) underpin bordering's persistence.

While Ghosh's work powerfully critiques mobility politics amid surveillance regimes, it also marks the particularity of the field with which it engages, requiring broader anthropological methods to be translated for the environment and preventing these insights to be carried over to other borderland spaces, such as Kashmir. The ethnography's temporal scope (pre-2019 Citizenship Amendment Act) also leaves unanswered how recent policy shifts exacerbate value hierarchies, a pitch that has only increased over the last few weeks and months. That said, these gaps do not diminish the book's provocations. It compels us to rethink borderlands as gendered, value-laden arenas where national subjects are forged through intimate transgressions, offering a vital counterpoint to vulnerability-centric narratives.

A Thousand Tiny Cuts enriches border studies by insisting on ethnography's role in unsettling fixed ontologies. It raises urgent questions: How do residents sustain transnational ties amid immobility? What worlds emerge from bordering's devaluations? Ghosh's paradigm does provide some tools for analysing not just Bengal's fringes but any periphery where state intimacy breeds resilience and rupture.

Rabin Mondal, Relation, 1975, Watercolour wash and ink on handmade paper, 15.0 x 16.0 in. Collection: DAG