At borders and at margins
Pradeep Damodaran’s book “Borderlands: Travels Across India’s Boundaries” is a journal as the author visits places along the borders of the country.
The theme is a rich and interesting one. And as it happens, is also something which Suchitra Vijayan has been working on. I am looking forward to reading that one when it is available.
A set of travels along the border is often a fleeting view of life at the margins. The borders are mostly demarcated by tokens and signs. There is a national myth around borders being fenced off, but a cursory glance at the geography and terrain would help understand how impossible that would be. The trade along the borders are mostly fluid, the customs and the language being similarly interchangeable. However, the complete absence of improvement plans is what is repeated as a theme. Be it at the “border” between India and Sri Lanka or, at Raxaul — the distance from the heartland is well-felt. Cultural influences have more in common with the neighbors “across” the border than the homogeneous view one acquires in metros and big cities.
The narrative of life in these towns and villages along the border should be useful to those who have not felt the need to move out and see for themselves what the geographical edges look like. And, how people at the margins cobble together an existence that is bereft of most of the institutional welfare infrastructure. Pick any aspect of our urban existence that we take for granted — roads, medical care, schools, power, clean water — and you’d begin to understand the struggle to “make do”. The amount of energy that individuals and families spend each day to ensure that they have enough to live forward into the next day is a sobering thought.
The chapters which I liked the most were around Minicoy (I really had no idea and then ended up reading a lot about the region); Hussainiwallah and Moreh. The concept of a visitor, a “foreigner” is more sharp as in these self-sustaining and adjusting lands someone from the mainland stands out both in the inability to comprehend the flows and because they do not blend in.
