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. Navigating her field, which was located in northern Bengal's Cooch Behar and, across the border, in Bangladesh's Rangpur region, her work also reveals methods of analysis through developing critical modes of visuality and representation.

She spoke to the DAG Journal, and what appears below is an edited version of the conversation.

Q: We’ve been engaging closely with your work and were very interested in how you think about borders, bordering, and the use of visual methods in your research.

Sahana Ghosh: Thank you, that’s very generous. It’s always encouraging to know that the work is being read in such careful and engaged ways. I’m especially glad that these questions are emerging in your own work as well, because I see these conversations as part of a larger, ongoing dialogue rather than something confined to a single project.

I think art opens up a different register of engagement—it allows us to think and feel beyond the constraints of conventional academic language. Visual practices, in particular, can communicate across boundaries of literacy, language, caste, class, and gender in ways that written texts sometimes cannot.

More recently, I’ve been in conversation with curators and practitioners in the art world, which has been quite a new experience for me. Academic work often circulates within relatively closed circuits, so thinking about how research can travel into public-facing spaces—through exhibitions, collaborations, or pedagogical initiatives—has been both challenging and exciting. It also raises important questions about translation: how do we carry the complexity of research into formats that remain accessible without being reductive?

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

Q: One of the most compelling aspects of your work is your insistence on distinguishing between ‘borders’ and ‘bordering’. Could you elaborate on that shift?

Sahana: Yes, this distinction is really central to my argument. Borders are often imagined as fixed, territorial entities: lines that were drawn at a particular historical moment, especially during Partition, and that continue to define nation-states. But this way of thinking can be quite limiting.

What I propose instead is that we think in terms of bordering—as an ongoing, dynamic, and incomplete process. Partition certainly marks a critical historical rupture, but it does not ‘finish’ the making of borders. Bordering continues to unfold in the present, through everyday practices, administrative procedures, and social interactions.

This shift allows us to see borders not as static objects, but as something continually produced and reproduced. It also foregrounds the lived experiences of people who inhabit these spaces, rather than treating borders as purely geopolitical abstractions.

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

Q: That also seems to reframe how we understand borderlands themselves.

Sahana: Exactly. Borderlands are often marginalised in dominant narratives of migration and nationhood. When we think of migration, we tend to imagine large-scale movements into metropolitan centres, but we rarely consider borderlands as spaces of everyday life.

In my work, I begin by situating borderlands as lived, material environments. These are places where people build homes, sustain relationships, and navigate complex socio-political realities. They are not just zones of transition or crisis—they are enduring spaces shaped by both connection and division.

Q: Mobility seems to be a key theme in your analysis. How does it relate to bordering?

Sahana: Mobility is absolutely central. In many ways, bordering is about the regulation of movement—who gets to move, how, and under what conditions. This includes not only cross-border migration, but also everyday forms of mobility: visiting relatives, accessing markets, going to work.

What’s important is that these movements are not neutral, but are constantly monitored, evaluated, and categorised. Some forms of mobility are seen as legitimate, while others are treated with suspicion. These distinctions are shaped by broader social hierarchies, including gender, class, and community affiliations.

Rabin Mondal, Crossing the Border III, 1977, Oil on paper, 21.0 x 26.5 in. Collection: DAG

Q: Could you expand on how gender shapes these experiences?

Sahana: Gender plays a significant role in how mobility is interpreted. For instance, women traveling for familial reasons may be perceived as more ‘legitimate’ or even deserving of sympathy. In contrast, women engaged in trade or independent economic activities might be viewed with suspicion or moral judgment.

So, mobility is not simply about physical movement, it is also about the meanings attached to that movement. These meanings are deeply embedded in social norms and expectations, which makes the experience of bordering highly uneven.

Q: We were particularly interested in your use of visual methods. You describe your work as involving a ‘photographic practice’ which is more than simply taking photographs.

Sahana: Yes, that distinction is important to me. In highly surveilled border regions, it is often difficult or even impossible to photograph obvious markers like fences or checkpoints. But rather than seeing this as a limitation, I began to think of it as an opportunity to reflect on what can and cannot be seen. I also moved away from the assumption that ‘spectacular’ or obvious images like barbed wire or militarised infrastructure are the most meaningful. Instead, I began questioning my own ideas of what is ‘picture-worthy’.

Photographic practice, for me, is not just about producing images. It’s about engaging with the conditions of visibility—what is rendered visible, what remains hidden, and why. It also involves attending to the sensory and affective dimensions of borderlands: the atmospheres of uncertainty, fear, anticipation. In that sense, photography becomes an exploratory and reflexive method: a diagnostic tool to recognise the field, rather than a purely documentary one.

Q: You also use kinship diagrams as part of your methodology. Could you talk about that?

Sahana: Yes, I often draw kinship charts, which might seem like simple family trees. But I approach them as dynamic and interpretive tools. These diagrams are created collaboratively, and they evolve over time as new information emerges.

They help map not only familial relationships, but also spatial and historical connections across borders. In doing so, they reveal how people understand and narrate their own histories.

Q: Your work also highlights the importance of silence and partial knowledge.

Sahana: That’s right. One of the things I learned during fieldwork is that knowledge is never fully available at once. People often disclose information gradually, sometimes after months of interaction. For example, someone might initially omit the fact that they have relatives across the border, and only share this later when a certain level of trust has been established. These moments of delayed disclosure are incredibly significant, because they tell us about the social and political conditions that shape what can be said, and when.

From a feminist epistemological perspective, this reinforces the idea that all knowledge is situated and partial. What we know is always shaped by our relationships, our positionalities, and the contexts in which knowledge is produced.

Q: How does this shape your approach to the question of ethics in research?

Sahana: Ethics, for me, is not just about formal protocols; it’s about relationships. As a feminist ethnographer, I try to foreground care, reciprocity, and long-term engagement.

The people I work with are not just ‘informants’—they are collaborators in the process of knowledge production. Even something like naming becomes a shared decision. Many of the names in my work are pseudonyms chosen together, which reflects a commitment to protecting identities while also respecting agency.

Q: Finally, how would you define ‘bordering’ in its most fundamental sense?

Sahana: I would say that bordering is fundamentally relational. It is about producing distinctions: between people, places, and identities, but also about negotiating those distinctions over time.

It is not a one-time act of drawing a line; it is an ongoing process that shapes how people live, move, and relate to one another. And it is precisely in these everyday negotiations that the complexity of borderlands becomes visible.