Who owns No Man's Land?

As West Bengal’s border with Bangladesh continues to be fenced off and patrolled by security forces, a journey along the eastern line of Partition throws up far more questions about national identity than the colour of your passport.

- Suchitra Vijayan

Along India’s 15,000km land border, between Bangladesh in the East and Pakistan in the West, exist communities for whom India means something else than it does to anyone who lives even 100 km “inland”. They are in the country but not necessarily of it.

A three-hour drive from Kolkata, across the serpentine Ichamati River, sits the lush and crumbling village of Panitar, one of more than 250 hamlets that straddle India’s border with Bangladesh. Panitar’s division is as direct as it is arbitrary: The houses on either side of a dusty lane occupy two neighbouring countries. But what makes this village the natural starting point for any exploration of the Indo-Bangla border has to do with a foot-high concrete block on the riverside, marked “border pillar number one”. Most other pillars that punctuate the border are faded pyramid-shaped blocks that appear in the backyards of homes as much as in the middle of a field. A number of pillars have gone missing over the years. In some areas you can still see “Pakistan” marked on pillars, and a few more have been lost to the Ichamati as it changes course every few years. For the kids from either side of border pillar number one in Panitar, it’s simply a handy cricket stump.

Seeing me arrive with armed Border Security Force (BSF) guards, a group of boys disperse from their makeshift wicket, and the couple that linger are hurriedly shooed away with one guard’s gun, clearing the area for a forlorn photograph of pillar number one set against a cloudy afternoon sky. “Take photo,” says one guard.