3 Review(s)

Women in Indian Borderlands is an ethnographic compilation on the complex interrelationship between gender and political borders in South Asia. The book focuses on the border regions of West Bengal, Jammu and Kashmir and Northeast India. The chapters in the book examine the stories of women whose lives are intertwined with borders, and who resist everyday violence in all its myriad forms. They show how most of the traditional efforts to make geopolitical regions more secure end up privileging a masculine definition of security that only results in feminine insecurities. These essays discuss how women negotiate their differences with a state that, though democratic, denies space to differences based on ethnicity, religion, class or gender. Borders are interpreted as zones where the jurisdiction of one state ends and that of the other begins. What comes out is the startling revelation that women not only live on the borders, but in many ways, form them.