Fractured Settlements by Surya Sankar Sen

This book critically examines the exchange of enclaves, or chhitmohols, between India and Bangladesh, challenging assumptions that have accreted to constitute its popular discernment. 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 undergirding their “stateless”, peripheral existences. Through an exploration of how these spaces and their residents generated strategic repositionings to the intercessions of state power, the book uncovers the intricate and multifaceted dynamics underlying their many adaptive contrivances, arguing that even in statelessness, they remained locally embedded.

Grounded in an ethnography of communities from these former enclaves and their surrounding locales, the book offers a situated reading of how they inter-relationally generated, contextually contingent forms of adaptation to navigate the reordering of everyday life, brought about through different forms and scales of state intervention 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 comprehensive reflection on the uneven and ongoing nature of the processes underlying the incorporation of borderland spaces and people into the state.

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 existences and the varied nature of their interactions with state systems.