Accounts of the Border: Flow and Interruptions in India’s Borderlands
This is my home
this thin edge of
barbwire.
— Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987)
1.1. Borders as Actors of Life
When Anzaldúa wrote about borders – physical, psychological, racial, ethnic, and sexual – as lines designed to separate us from them (1987), I wondered how these imaginary boundaries not only administer our notions of land and territoriality, but also regulate subjectivities, belonging, and everyday governance of the communes whose survival revolves around these very borders. Reading Borderlands/La Frontera in 2025 feels eerily intimate and familiar. To pronounce it more boldly, researching Northeast India’s volatile borderlands and brittle edges during a time of escalating national and global geopolitical crises – the Israel-Palestine war, the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the July revolution in Bangladesh, Myanmar’s post-coup conflict, Iran-Israel airspace conflict, Rio-Grande border-disputes – made it impossible for me to overlook how the modern nation-states are engaged in territorial wars of dissension, where borders have been revived as the antagonist-heroes. Borders are not, however, imaginary lines on cartographic documents – they extend to detention centers, refugee camps, military checkpoints, border security outposts, and sometimes dilapidated homes and missing sons. It, then, becomes imperative to ask how these lines of severance, demarcation, and insularity have informed the lives of those who dwell in transgressive borderlands. During my fieldwork in Dimapur, Nagaland, I had to wait for my Inner Line Permit (ILP) to come through before I could move on to Kohima. What felt like a simple bureaucratic pause quickly reminded me how mobility in these fraught borderlands does not entail only travel; it is tied to permission, surveillance, and the weight of governance. For many in the region, and for those like me passing through, movement is always conditional. With a day to spare, I hopped onto my dormmate’s Himalayan bike and we drifted towards the edge of Dimapur, riding into villages that touched the Assam border (see Image 1). The air shifted as we rode further out, the roads less certain, the presence of the border quietly there even without a visible checkpoint. The need for an official document to cross from the plains of Nagaland to the hills of Nagaland made visible the fragile sovereignties that have shaped Nagaland’s history, marked by decades of separatist struggles. As a researcher, it tested my positionality as I was not just observing how borders were lived and managed, but also experiencing them directly, feeling what it means to be allowed or disallowed by the state.
Kiyeto Village in Dimapur near the Dhansiri River, which acts as the interstate boundary between Assam and Nagaland (Self-photographed)
These fragmented glimpses of rupture and division remind us that borders are not rigid; they are elastic, dynamic membranes where movements are monitored, halted, or deemed illegal (Parker and Vaughan-Williams 2012). Northeast India shares international borders with neighboring countries such as China, Bhutan, Myanmar, Nepal, and Bangladesh. With its frontier borderlands, Northeast India has acted as a totem to India’s ‘cartographic anxiety’ (Krishnan 1994) as it still competes to be a globalized nation-state compared to Southeast and East Asian tiger economies. Its contribution to the new economic corridors, intra-regional connectivity projects, and trilateral highways highlights the tantalizing effect of borders. The territorial demarcations around the Indian subcontinent are often preceded by the colonial imaginaries of race and ethnicity, where borders and boundaries were proposed with the singular aim of creating cartographic pockets that could be identified and categorized for a smoother administrative Imperial blueprint. The Free Movement Regime (hereafter, FMR), instituted in 2018 under India’s Act East Policy, permitted borderland communities along the India-Myanmar frontier to cross up to 16 kilometers without visas. The FMR emerged as a para-legal space of governance that followed a distinct political grammar rooted in tribal epistemologies that perceive borders as fluid, relational, and embodied, thus challenging the modern state’s territorial sovereignty. Its importance lies in legitimizing borderland Indigenous governance within a space for non-state actors to enact a claim to sovereignty outside of the state. Political boundary lines such as the Radcliffe Line, the Johnson Line, the McDonald Line, or the Pemberton Line are disputed territorial lines of the Indian subcontinent that have been contested, modified, performed, and remanufactured to claim notions of a ‘stern’ and ‘singular’ nation-state building in the wake of achieving postcolonial developmentalist utopia. Unlike the sparsely populated Aksai Chin of the northwestern region, the FMR acts as a legitimized buffer zone between the borders of India and Myanmar, where concepts of nationality, citizenship, and mobility are intertwined as a border of 1,463 kilometers stretches across the hilly, rugged terrains of Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur, and Mizoram against the Patkai and Chin hills (Figure 2).
Figure 2 – Indo-Myanmar Borderland (Source: Operationworld.org)
1.2. FMR as Indigenous Sovereignty
As a multifaceted policy, FMR created ‘contact zones’ by sponsoring various trade projects, forming border haats and special economic zones. It facilitates the formation of ‘contact zones’ (Pratt 1991) within a more regional, local, and decolonial framework, which seldom finds space in the nationalist “geographical history,” carrying with it the precarity of crossing both material as well as ontological borders. Territory is understood through intersections among genealogy, kinship networks, customary land governance, cultural rituals, and oral histories. Tribal ethnic communities, such as the Khiamniungan Nagas and the Mizo-Chin-Kukis residing along the Indo-Myanmar border (Figure 3), have been fighting for the Free Movement Regime as their economies, livelihoods, land estates, and cultural sensibilities are porous and resist the articulation of territorialization.
Figure 3 – Indo-Myanmar Friendship Gate (Source: E-pao)
The turbulent geopolitical state of affairs in the region, particularly the inter-ethnic tensions in Manipur and the humanitarian crisis in conflict-stricken Myanmar, hinder the active and continued implementation of the FMR. On February 8, 2024, India’s Ministry of Home Affairs formally declared the end of the Free Movement Regime (FMR) at the Indo–Myanmar border, depicting the open boundary as a major risk to internal security due to concerns about cross-border migration and insurgency (The Hindu 2024). Meanwhile, the abolishment of the FMR represents the reinstatement of the state’s monopoly over border-making and citizenship control, as the state seeks to re-territorialize what was never territorial in the nationalistic sense. In recent weeks, opposition to repealing the Free Movement Regime has intensified among various trans-border communities in the Indo-Myanmar border states of Manipur, Nagaland, Mizoram, and Arunachal Pradesh. Numerous civil society organizations, tribal student bodies, indigenous forums, and non-profit entities have organized peaceful demonstrations, expressing a unified tribal identity that collectively opposes the constitutional ontocide being carried out by the central government. The lines that scar this region – the Radcliffe Line, the Johnson Line, the McMahon Line, the Pemberton Line – were colonial efforts to fix fluid worlds into neat administrative boxes. But they never fully succeeded. In my fieldwork along the Indo–Myanmar border, elders remind me: the hills remember. The Free Movement Regime (FMR) was more than a permit – it was the living continuity of kinship for Nagas, Kukis, Mizos split by cartography yet bound by ritualistic continuities : barter, festivals, funerals, weddings (Misra 2000).
Phra Viharn/Preah Vihear Temple (Source: Wikimapia)
1.3. Faith, Conflict, and Borderlands
Interestingly, these territorial contentions are not always based on the rights of resource ownership on land, air, and sea. They encompass haunting tales of division over sites of faith, too. The conflict over the Phra Viharn/Preah Vihear Temple (Figure 3) between Thailand and Cambodia is not simply about a stone shrine – it is about how faith, nationhood, and ancient claims collide when states draw maps across sacred landscapes. The World Court ruled in Cambodia’s favor in 1962, yet skirmishes erupted again in 2008–2011, with soldiers and pilgrims caught in a loop of barbed wire and spent bullet casings at the temple steps (SPICE). Here, too, flow is forced into a buffer zone where tourists visit to offer prayers while border patrol units guard temple peripheries.
Until recently, I believed these entangled flows were unique to Northeast India, my research site. But the Pahalgam attack in May 2025 and the skirmishes that followed between India and Pakistan on the northern and western borderlands unsettled that notion. Living in Jodhpur, a dense military hub for the western frontier, I felt a new proximity to paranoia during city blackouts and convoy sirens echoing across the desert. In those nights of anxious sirens, I found myself thinking of Tanot Mata temple (see Figure 5) near the Jaisalmer-Pakistan border, a shrine where soldiers pray before posting at the border. During the 1965 and 1971 wars, legend says unexploded bombs landed like offerings at Tanot Mata’s feet, sparing the Indian outpost (The New Indian Express 2017; Times of India 2025). Tanot Mata is more than a folk tale; she is a reminder that faith flows into martial defense , and superstition merges with strategy. Even here, borderlands refuse neat categories – spiritual, legal, military, familial, all bleed into each other.
Tanot Mata Temple, closer to the India-Pakistan western border in Jaisalmer (Source: WanderOn)
These geographies are brought together not by a single fence but by the persisting grief that the flow of their trans-border worldviews must be policed. New economic corridors promise smooth movement of goods, capital, and trilateral highways, but fail to cater to the smooth flow of people, kinship practices, and trans-border cosmology. Appadurai (2006), rightly, points out how globalization is not only associated with the flow of capital, goods, ideas, and people but it also pertains to the friction – conflict and resistance – that emanates when these flows meet the boundaries and units of control mechanisms of the nation-state – i.e., border patrolling, immigration laws, and military security. Buffer zones are entrenched in this friction, becoming the state’s alibi for deciding who moves freely and who stays fenced in and cramped up.
In that case, what is flow if not the unyielding will of life to seep through lines that purport to seal it shut? The borders represent Anzaldúa’s “open wound,” and her open wounds signify the “borders” that are constantly pulsating and transforming. In these tumultuous borderlands, flow is harsh – it is unruly, unfair, devoid of love, and filled with memory. Perhaps this is the reality: the border is not just a slender line of barbed wire but a realm of perpetual strain – a disputed area where identity, belief, family ties, and fairness linger in a legal gray area, acknowledged on documents yet perpetually at risk from the next ICE raid or administrative order.
1.4. Conclusion
What links these borderlands is not just a fence but a continuous process of monitoring and discretionary authorization. Diplomatic economic corridors facilitate smooth transportation for trucks, pipelines, and finances, but those very governments impose checkpoints, buffer zones, and identity checks that hinder the daily interactions essential for borderland populations: families visiting each other, farmers trading across hidden lines, pilgrims journeying for seasonal occasions, and smugglers transporting contraband and endless chatter. These actions are considered hostile and unlawful when they exceed the state’s profit motives.
Buffer zones transform into tactical holding areas – environments where communities exist with limited rights. In Meghalaya and Assam, families from Khasi and Garo communities are losing their farmland to designated “neutral zones,” established for anti-smuggling, while leaving their traditional livelihoods uncertain (Hussain 2008). In Manipur and Nagaland, the repeal of the FMR transforms daily bartering and ritual crossings into instances of trespassing. Troops monitor the routes that elders used to traverse without shoes to exchange salt, rice, or tales.
Flow is not fluid here; it alters routes, discovers concealed trails beyond surveilled and state-mandated lines. Nevertheless, it persists: in the footsteps of Garo Christian traders using jungle passports along the Indo-Bangladesh border (Sur, 2021); in whispered prayers under the watch of border security personnel; in rivers claimed by multiple nations and clans; in traders bootlegging contraband media and thrifted clothes, and beauty products. Sacred sites like Tanot Mata or Phra Viharn root communities in contested regions, offer us a way of defiance against forms of bifurcation and monitoring. The harsh truth of the border is that it is not merely a thin strip of barbed wire; it functions as a volatile zone of conflict, where societies must constantly debate who is permitted to travel, who may stay, and who is forced to vanish in the name of safety. Flow and movement in these borderlands are never definitive; they are negotiated continually and rendered delicate by barriers and regulations that can disrupt them suddenly. However, as Anzaldúa notes, the “thin edge of barbwire” is a wound and a site where borderland communities turn rupture into passage.
A view captured on my road journey from Kohima, Nagaland, to Imphal, Manipur (Self-photographed)
Works Cited
Anzaldúa, Gloria E (1987): Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 4th ed, Aunt Lute Books.
Appadurai, Arjun (2006): Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger, Duke University Press.
Hussain, Monirul (2008): Interrogating Development: State, Displacement and Popular Resistance in North East India, SAGE.
Krishnan, Sanjay (1994): “Cartographic Anxiety: The Politics of Representation in the Indian Subcontinent,” Modern Asian Studies, Vol 28, No 3, pp 507–535.
Parker, Noel and Nick Vaughan-Williams (2012): “Critical Border Studies: Broadening and Deepening the ‘Lines in the Sand’ Agenda,” Geopolitics, Vol 17, No 4, pp 727–733.
Pratt, Mary Louise (1991): “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession, No 91, pp 33–40.
Sur, Malini (2021). Jungle Passports: Fences, Mobility, and Citizenship at the Northeast India-Bangladesh Border. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Web Sources
“India to End Free Movement Regime with Myanmar” (2024): The Hindu, 8 February (https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/india-to-end-free-movement-regime-with-myanmar/article67896949.ece).
“Jaisalmer Keeps Being Guarded by Miraculous Shield of Tanot Mata” (2025): The Times of India, 2 May (https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/jaipur/jaisalmer-keeps-being-guarded-by-miraculous-shield-of-tanot-mata/articleshow/121047765.cms).
Anand, S (2017): “You Saw It in Border: A Temple Amid the Dunes Feeds Barracks Lore,” The New Indian Express, 18 August (https://www.newindianexpress.com/nation/2017/aug/18/you-saw-it-in-border-a-temple-amid-the-dunes-feeds-barracks-lore-1644627.html).
“Thailand and Cambodia: The Battle for Preah Vihear” (n.d.): Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE), Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University (https://spice.fsi.stanford.edu/docs/thailand_and_cambodia_the_battle_for_preah_vihear).