The Program on Refugees, Forced Displacement, and Humanitarian Responses Workshop presents
Samarth Vachhrajani, Yale University, School of Architecture:
“Multilateral Border: Infrastructures that Make the India-Bangladesh Frontier.”
If you look at a map of the India-Bangladesh border, it will appear as a set of continuous lines, stretching across the monumental Brahmaputra River, the Khasi, Garo, and Jaintia Hills of Meghalaya, and the plains of Assam and Bengal. First marked in 1947 - during the partition of the Indian Subcontinent, over the years, simmering concerns of ethnic self-determination movements, the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, and insecure territorial control invented the urgency of marking the border spatially. It is symptomatic of a global clamor for walls and fences that compel us to think in binary terms and promise airtight national sovereignties. However, on the ground, between the seams of global exchanges, border fences and walls are becoming multi-talented objects that are fading sovereignties for capital to move. The illusion of a complete borderline on a map, flattening the political and topographical realities, can warrant expanding state-controlled apparatuses into routines of daily life along the edges of the two nations.
Therefore, by paying attention to apparatuses like the Integrated Border Checkposts, limestone mining and cement factories, and a conveyor belt that moves stones between India and Bangladesh, Samarth Vachhrajani illustrates how a multilateral border is under construction that undermines the logic of a continuous borderline. Through the India-Bangladesh border, he documents how erosion of sovereignty is made possible by the border apparatuses, like fences or checkposts, originally intended for capture and control of mobilities, have themselves doubled as agents for exploitative global connections.