Through metal fences : material mobility and the politics of transnationality at borders

This essay explores the changing material configurations of the India-Bangladesh border, the longest international boundary in South Asia. Following the entanglements of commodities and people, I engage in a dialogue with scholarship on informal transnational circuits, material cultures and sovereignty at borders. The interplay of sovereign violence, and what I call forms of sovereign indulgence, guides the politics of transnationality. Such politics transcend the well-investigated dichotomy of the privileged/deprived and articulate how commodities, people and border landmarks are ascribed with differing meanings. This essay shows how motifs of circulation derive meanings from a simultaneously fluid and dangerous border and expose the overlaps between historical formations, commercial trajectories and the paradoxes of militarisation.