Preface

‘The border is a beautiful piece of paper folded carelessly in half.’¹

– Alberto Ríos, The Border: A Double Sonnet

The partition of India into India and Pakistan in 1946 created new borders. Borders divided communities and families. Borders were random lines drawn on paper which simply crossed over people overnight.² My grandmother, Charu, was a young woman in Bangladesh (then East Pakistan), when she found herself living amid raging communal violence between Hindus and Muslims. With a recently deceased husband, and with five little children to support, she decided to move to Kolkata (then Calcutta) in India to seek safety. Resourceful and brave, she brought up her children without any time or space for considering her own needs.

Fostered at times by distant relations, and often separated from their other siblings, Charu’s daughters made their way in the world. Her elder daughter, Bela, became an adored educator, a head teacher at a school that served a large community. Her younger daughter, Gouri, became renowned in her Kolkata neighbourhood for going on hunger strike for her university place which Charu could not afford to fund. Eventually winning scholarships to complete her education, Gouri became a successful writer, with numerous books on the English Romantic poets to her credit. Yet both Bela and Gouri carried the burden of the child migrant’s journey throughout their lives. Border crossing was not just the dangerous train ride they took to come to India from the newly created East Pakistan (Bangladesh); it was also social exclusion as newly impoverished children, with accents and manners from a different land, to be lost only with time and with considerable embarrassment.

Charu is now no longer alive to see that her grandchildren, Gouri’s daughters, also migrated. But, unlike hers, theirs have been travels of choice and privilege. I am Gouri’s younger daughter, who lived and worked in New York City before moving to the UK where, in time, I moved quite seamlessly from long-term migrant to British citizen without losing wanderlust.

Over three generations, migration has been both compulsion and choice created and constrained by borders. From Charu to her granddaughters, there has been a passage from empire to nation state and then again to new world orders. Global geopolitics and legal orders may have changed, yet despite new borders, many issues about migration and migrants endure across time. Perhaps this is because these are fundamental questions about the human condition: what it means to exist on one planet while having different life experiences, whether structural constraints of inequality and barriers of domination will prevail, or resistance and cooperation will restructure in favour of equality, and whether free movement (which is natural in the animal kingdom and arguably also prevalent for generations of human ancestors) can ever be truly free again.

Such questions have a philosophical, and even mystical aura, but can be grounded firmly in law, legal texts and stories of law through the sociology of law and its history. A book about borders, subjecthood and citizenship is not about comparing the past and the present; it is about unearthing how empire and subjecthood are still part of the beating heart of state and citizenship today. This can be done by looking at law as a technology in the arsenal of both bordering and governance, whether states, international groupings or empires.

As Charu’s peripatetic younger granddaughter, a sociologist and a lawyer trained in both the metropole and the periphery of the erstwhile British Empire, writing this book is for me a call to action. After all, both my mother’s professional achievements and her sense of loss from forced childhood migration and displacement are a legacy of my own childhood. This book is for her, my beloved mother, Gouri Sen, who passed away while I was writing it. I am so glad she had read its draft preface. I shall love you, my Ma, forever.