Paula Banerjee

Women in Indian borderlands

Introduction: Resistance in the Borderlands - Paula Banerjee and Anasua Basu Ray Chaudhury Part 1: West Bengal Bengal-Bangladesh Borderland: Chronicles from Nadia, Murshidabad and Malda - Paula Banerjee Narrated Time and Constructed Space: Remembering the Communal Violence of 1950 in Hooghly - Anasua Basu Ray Chaudhury Part 2: Jammu and Kashmir Womens Voices: From Jammu and Kashmir - Anuradha Bhasin Jamwal and Suchismita Renegotiating Internal Boundaries by Women of Jammu and Kashmir - Sumona DasGupta Part 3: Northeast Sanitized Society and Dangerous Interlopers: Law and the Chins in Mizoram - Sahana Basavapatna Engendered Lives: Women in the West Garo Hills - Anjuman Ara Begum Part 4: Voices Voices of Women in the Borderlands - Aditi Bhaduri Voices of Women in a Border Town called Moreh - Chitra Ahanthem Consolidated Bibliography Index

Bengal Border Revisited

This article deals with the notion of how borders have a penchant for becoming a marker of security. The moment borders become securitized the question of flows across them acquires particular importance. In the colonial period this was marked by concern over dacoits, thugees and hooligans who crossed the district border at will. In the post-colonial period concern remains over undocumented migrants and whether their arrival threatens the nation form. Against this background the article addresses the notion of flows and increasing violence at the borders, fencing as the most recent marker of such violence and how women and the evolution of their relationship to the border is shaped through the discourses of violence.

Introduction: Women in Indian Borderlands

In South Asian social science discourses over the last few years a few studies have appeared on the borderlands but hardly any on the myriad roles that women play there and this collection of essays concentrates on that aspect of the borderlands of India.

Permanent exceptions to citizens: the stateless in South Asia

The purport of this paper is to explain that citizenship and statelessness are part of the same grid. There are many people in South Asia who fall within that grid who will not be accepted as a citizen by competent authorities within a state and neither will they be called stateless by the international legal interpreters. Those in places like Geneva might say that these people should be called citizens by a particular state, and can be called a citizen if the citizenship laws of that state are improved, but the reality remains, the people in question are completely unable to access even the most elementary of the rights attributed to a citizen. This paper will map some of these indeterminate people in South Asia and discuss how national and international practices instead of helping them often leave them as permanent exceptions to citizenship.

The Acts and Facts of Women’s Autonomy in India

This paper addresses questions of women’s autonomy in India and analyses its location within the legal discourse. The women’s movement has primarily tried to analyse questions of women’s autonomy through exploring women’s position in law. Among other indicators, women’s position in society is often analysed through marriage, divorce and property acts. This paper analyses the evolution of these acts and critiques whether they have led to women’s autonomy or merely subsumed questions of autonomy resulting in further marginalization of women in the polity. The paper begins with the assumption that locations matter and that laws affect different women differently, particularly in the context of India where civil law is constantly pitted against personal and customary law. To understand the situation of women in India, therefore, an understanding of the evolution of laws seems necessary, because laws are considered to be primary markers of autonomy.

Sita Ranchod-Nilsson and Mary Ann Tetreault (eds.), Women, States and Nationalism: At Home in the Nation? London and New York: Routledge. 2002. 246 pages. Rs. 1,182

concern. They do not merely question women’s positioning within nationalism, but also seek to mainstream gender in nationalist discourses. They are concerned about the lack of dialogue between . theorists of nationalism and feminists. This collection of essays is a conscious effort to begin a conversation between these two groups in the post-Cold War period. Global resurgence of nationalism is viewed in the light of recent feminist scholarship on identity, political movements and the state. The work spanning women’s experiences of nationalism from India, Zimbabwe and Kuwait to Northern Ireland and the United States is an effort to push past ideological and disciplinary barriers and broaden the scope of scholarly works on nationalism by homesteading women squarely in the centre of such discursive practices. Feminist scholarship on nationalism has gone through a number of phases. Initially, the focus was on women’s active participation in struggles of national liberation. Feminists tried to work against