Fractured Settlements

This book examines the exchange of enclaves, or chhitmohols, between India and Bangladesh, challenging the assumption that it was merely a territorial issue. Focusing on the lived experiences of communities inhabiting these enclaves and their surrounding locales, the study engages with how sovereignty, citizenship, and belonging were negotiated amidst conditions of their ‘stateless’, peripheral existences. Through an exploration of how these spaces generated strategic repositionings to state power, the book uncovers the intricate and multifaceted dynamics of adaptation to argue that even in statelessness, they remained locally embedded.

Grounded in an ethnography of communities from these former enclaves and its surrounding locales, the book offers a situated reading of how they generated contingent forms of adaptation to navigate the reordering of everyday life, brought about through state intercession in these spaces. The book, therefore shifts attention to ‘the local’ as both a site and lens to understand the complexities of how state power is mediated, resisted, and also, reworked. Through this, it offers a broader reflection on the uneven and ongoing nature of the incorporation of spaces and people into the state at the borderlands.

This volume is an essential resource for students and researchers in Politics and International Relations, Conflict Studies, Borderland Studies, Sociology, and History, offering valuable insights into the complexities of borderland communities and their interactions with state systems.

Surya Sankar Sen is Assistant Professor of Politics and International Relations at RV University, Bengaluru. His research broadly explores the interfaces between people and governance, with a focus on the everyday interactions through which its authority is encountered and interpreted, particularly in conflict-affected settings. His research interests are especially attentive to borderlands as critical sites of inquiry, studying how contestations over identity shape state–society, as well as trans-local relations in these peripheral spaces.

He holds a PhD from the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Bengaluru, and works across political anthropology, and peace and conflict studies.