Organizer: Dolly Kikon, Stanford University
Chair and Discussant: Willem van Schendel, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
The British Empire in South Asia and the Soviet Union
in Central Asia were two ambitious attempts at corralling together diverse
peoples into a territorial whole, where new technology and enterprise were
to fundamentally reshape peoples lives and histories. Both forms of territorial
engineering involved resettlement of peoples and restrictions on mobility,
as well as introduced new forms of agricultural industry. These changes and
alterations upon a vast swathe of land and people –labelled either as Central or South Asia – were
severely tested with the reorganisation of British Empire and Soviet Union
into states. Arising out of the break-up of empires, this panel, therefore,
addresses the following questions (a) how did the creation of borders affect
livelihoods and identities?; (b) how are new legal categories computed for
mobile populations and commodities? and; (c) what are the effects of the collapse
of imperial projects for controlling population flows and economic activities?
Thieme’s paper addresses the problem of multi-local livelihoods which
take people from villages in Osh oblast (in Kyrgyzstan) to different cities
like Almaty (Kazakhstan) and Moscow (Russia) in search of jobs. These movements
are often deemed illegal, yet tolerated as necessary processes following the
growth of (some) economies and transformation of rural collectives. Sur’s
paper deals with the politics of what constitutes illegal and licit in the flow
of people and goods across Assam’s porous borders with Bangladesh. Barbora’s
paper deals with the collapse of colonial and Soviet experiments embodied
in the plantations and the kolkhoz and enquires into the conditions of those
who participated in these projects. Kikon looks at the manner in which law is
used for surveillance and control of peoples across newly constituted borders
of South Asia, especially towards its conflict-ridden east where indigenous
communities share greater affinity with peoples of Southeast Asia. Taken together,
the four papers represent a historically constituted problematic of culture,
economics and politics in post-empire societies that have had comparable (yet
different) trajectories.
Susan Thieme, University of Zurich, Switzerland
Russia and Kazakhstan are major destinations for labour migrants from rural
places in South Kyrgyzstan. The whole migration process is strongly facilitated
by transnational kin networks, where relatives and friends facilitate travel,
job and accommodation and remittance transfers. While elderly people take care
of children, younger men and women migrate in search of livelihoods and for
a better income. Although Russia and Kazakhstan depend on labour force from
countries like Kyrgyzstan, they do not provide migrants a humane legal framework
to work abroad. As a consequence migrants are overwhelmingly de facto working
illegally on territory where they would have had the same citizenship and rights
only some years ago, including all vulnerability and stigma that illegality
implies. Despite resulting risks for their livelihoods, it appears that under
the current international migration regime, it is (for a majority of migrants)
more costly to take part in legal contracts than to pay the social price of
being undocumented.
Therefore the paper asks: Why do people choose a path of illegal migration?
And, how does it affect their livelihoods and that of their non-migrating family
members back home in Kyrgyzstan? The results presented derive from my own multi-local
research, having studied individual migration trajectories considering family
members, as migrants and non-migrants in receiving (Moscow, Russia; Almaty,
Kazkhstan) and sending regions (Osh oblast, South Kyrgyzstan) in 2006 and 2007.
Malini Sur, Amsterdam School of Social Science Research, Netherlands
The central argument of my paper seeks to question what is conventionally
regarded as subversion, and relegated to the arena of criminality – such
as ‘clandestine’ migration and ‘smuggling’ in the borderland.
I argue that both state and social practices concur in supporting and enabling
circular flows of people and goods; they shape and confer meaning to each other
in geographical and moral spaces where the tensions between law/outlaw ease
out. This paper will be an account of shadow traders in the borderland between
Assam and Bangladesh - exposing how traders negotiate the border, amidst flamboyance
of border patrolling and fencing. Cattle trading in this borderland, which several
years ago were relegated to thugs and criminals, has assumed the status of normalcy.
While on the one hand, traders are conscious that the presence of an international
border between Bangladesh and India and escaping the tax regulatory gaze of
the state makes this business – “ du nombori” (second hand
business), they do not regard it as “haram” or sin – as it
sustains families and villages.
In other words, what I argue, after Kyle and Siracusa (2005) and van Schendel
and Abraham (2006), is that notions of acceptable practices are generated
through moral discourses that borderlanders invoke and stand in opposition to
state led discourses. My fieldwork in the Assam Bangladesh borderland exposes
the fluidity with which people and goods move in marginal and contentious geographies,
that interpolates with statecraft that regulates movement and settlement.
The frequent presence of people without authorization in spaces where they are
not ‘citizens’ and
yet tolerated, encouraged and supported demonstrates a curious interplay
of complicity and exclusion. This interplay reclaims nations and sub-nations,
states and societies, legality and illegality, licitness and illicitness, citizens
and aliens from their oppositional positions.
Sanjay Barbora, Panos Institute, South Asia, India
Plantations (in South Asia) and kolkhozes (in Central Asia) are examples
of interventions based on a certain notion of scientific rationality aimed at
reordering pre-existing social organisations. While the plantations were instrumental
in linking regions with a subsistence agriculture-based economy to world markets,
the kolkhoz was a unique attempt to collectivise agricultural and pastoral production
under socialist principles. While plantations were the site of a particular
form of colonial control and regimentation of daily life for production of a
single commodity, kolkhozes were celebrated as unique experiments aimed at an
equitable sharing of resources with help from a socialist state. Perhaps the
only common thread for institutional comparison is the fact that both forms
involved the calculated settlement and employment of large numbers of people.
Clearly, both forms of organising production have become redundant in the twenty
first century, but they continue to impact upon the lives of those who participated
in them in myriad ways.
This paper traces the different strategies of controlling the conduct of population
within the Fordist-production lines of the plantation and the kolkhoz. In doing
so, it hopes to shed light on the present predicament of its inhabitants in
geographically distant places such as Assam (in India) and Osh (in Kyrgyzstan).
I look at the manner in which both the plantation and the kolkhoz are inscribed
in the narratives of those who are forced to come to terms with their collapse.
These narratives, I argue, upset the easy linearity of post-empire politics
of belonging and livelihoods and force one to reconsider the many ways in which
particular classes continue to be marginalised
Dolly Kikon, Stanford University
This paper focuses on communities who inhabit the Patkai foothills, where
remnants of a colonial resource regime, such as plantations and oil exploration
companies, coexist with draconian security laws and regulations in postcolonial
India. It presents an ethnographic account of the Assam-Nagaland borders
(Patkai foothills). Northeast India is an example of how frontier locations
continue to exist as zones of contradictions and inherent dilemma for postcolonial
nation states that have to contend with issues of rights, security and legality
following their independence from colonial powers. In the 19th century, colonial
cartographers demarcated these foothills from the adjoining hills and established
legal frameworks to regulate and control movement of people and trade to the
plantations. Such developments created a series of new legal categories, which
effected markets, borders, and identities. This paper seeks to explore how inhabitants
located in the margins of the state negotiate such transitions. Considering
spaces as spatial identities, which emerge out of intersections between forms
of hierarchal power relations with cultural constructions of locality or communities,
it focuses on the interactions and networks that communities in the margins
negotiate when transitions of powers take place. Drawing on the categories and
definitions of ‘margins of the state’, where the state continuously
redefines legibility and illegibility (primarily through documents) and finally
as spaces which exist between the body, law and discipline, this paper seeks
to further the discussion by analyzing transitions in spaces where the state
and its subjects continue to redefine history, legality, and politics.
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