Borders and Bordering Practices: A Case Study of Jaisalmer District on India-Pakistan Border

Borders facilitate interactions of various kinds. The nature of these interactions can be friendly or outright hostile. The adjacent states employ bordering practices commensurate to the relationship they have. In a scenario where the relationship happens to be benign, the borders and bordering practices may hardly exist and where there is hostility, the borders are very heavily guarded and the bordering practices severe. In both the scenarios however, the impact of the sheer presence of two different spheres of sovereignty impacts the lives of the people inhabiting the border zone. The line demarcates, if not cultures, traditions and economies, but the conscious of the people and leaves a deep imprint. The paper explores narratives from the border and the prevalent bordering practices at the Indo-Pak border. In the exercise, the paper evokes Chris Rumford's formulation of Seeing like a State vs. Seeing like a Border (Rumford, Chris. 2011. "Seeing like a Border," in "Interventions on rethinking the 'border' in border studies" by Johnson et al. Political Geography 30: 61-9) to evaluate both perspectives from the State and the Border. The methodology is discursive wherein the narratives and stories from inhabitants of the border villages are juxtaposed with the perspective of the state and its apparatus at the border. The Case Study is located in Jaisalmer district of Rajasthan, a province at India's border with Pakistan on its western expanse.