Stateless in South Asia: the Making of the India-Bangladesh Enclaves
Author(s)
Van Schendel, Willem
Abstract
Only in the eyes of the law we are Indians. With these words Anu Chairman sketched the position of tens of thousands of people living beyond the reach of state and nation in dozens of enclaves in South Asia. Much of the recent wave of literature on the nation is concerned with critiquing an earlier generation of scholars who tended to assume a correspondence between nations and states. In the new literature, the connections among nation, state, territory, sovereignty, history, and identity ate all problematized. Nations are seen as being socially constructed in many different ways. Thus, there ate nations without states, new nations that are invented before our eyes while older ones disintegrate, and older diasporic nations that ate being joined by a host of new transnational communities. Nations are now conceived as more fluid, malleable, and unpredictable than ever before. If there is a common assumption in this new literature, it is the notion of territorial contiguity. Almost all nations ate imagined, or constructed, in connection with a specific area of the globe, a homeland in which that nation is naturally rooted by means of a “divine cartography.” In the nationalist imagination, and in the scholarly literature about it, this homeland is seen as uninterrupted, homogeneous, and bounded. Unlike the world map of states-with its clearly demarcated, contiguous, and fairly stable units-the world map of nations is imagined as made up of units that spill over state borders, overlap each other, and are continually pushing for their own, exclusive national space.
