Review: Jungle Passports: Fences, Mobility, and Citizenship at the Northeast India-Bangladesh Border -- by Malini Sur

Abstract

Jungle Passports: Fences, Mobility, and Citizenship at the Northeast India-Bangladesh Border. By Malini Sur. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. Hardcover: $75.00. Pp. 248. ISBN: 9780812252798.

Jungle Passports provides a people-centred understanding of borders by creating the concept of "border societies". Sur counters the national narrative through this concept, which frames the communities living on the border as either "criminals or victims". Moreover, her "ethnographic and historical fieldwork" challenges the idea of the traditional archive by using the ever-changing landscape of the Indian–Bangladesh borderland as an archive to analyze the dynamics and societal transformation of the region.