Notes from the margins

A common, if cliched, sentiment voiced by mainlanders who travel to the border areas is that the visit infuses them with a sense of nationality and belonging. Often, no one cares to ponder whether those living on the frontier areas too share these sentiments. A line on a map was all it took for these people to become an Indian or Nepali/Tibetan/Bangladeshi/Pakistani, but the line could always have been drawn a few kilometres hither or thither.

Pradeep Damodaran's 'Borderlands: Travels Along India's Boundaries' is about the lives of these people whose identity as Indians is, in a way, an accident of history or geography. Or those like the people living on the Indo-Bangladesh border, whose identity, many decades after the national boundaries were drawn, continues to be fluid.

The self-imposed limited scope of this book could have acted as the spine holding it together, but all it does is make the narrative predictable. The table of contents features the names of the 10 border areas the author visits - Dhanushkodi (Sri Lanka), Minicoy (Maldives), Husainiwala (Pakistan), Tawang (China), Raxaul (Nepal), and Moreh (Myanmar) - prompting the reader to expect vignettes of these places, and there are no surprises.

Damodaran, who quit a gruelling newspaper editor's job to work on this project, fails to extend the novelty of the theme to novelty in presentation.

Travelogues by their very nature are impressionistic and it is pointless for readers to ask how well or for how long the author has known the people and places he writes about. Damodaran is honest, however, never attempting to project intimacy with his subjects, given that he spent only a few hours and, on rare occasions, days with them. Damodaran's journalistic knack for chatting up his subjects produces a treasure trove of stories on the lives of people in the border towns, their hopes, disappointments and the inextricable link between their livelihoods and the border, even when there is no barbed-wire fence.

But Borderlands isn't quite a travelogue, because of the author's attempt to strike a personal tone and place himself in the narrative. In any case, with good roads and connectivity, the act of travelling alone, especially by a reasonably well-heeled Indian male, and a journalist to boot, does not strike as particularly adventurous or novel.

What distinguishes a non-fiction book from a newspaper article is the scope for imbuing the work with literary quality thanks to the greater space, time and freedom at the disposal of the author. Damodaran is a competent writer, but his efforts, crisscrossing a country as vast as India, and visiting places of such vivid contrasts, deserved an editor who could cut through the clutter and trim the passages where the narrative meandered. While the book is not without its moments of magic, such as when Damodaran comes upon a group of burqa-clad women swimming in a lagoon in Minicoy, or businessman and JD(U) leader Ashok Aggarwal's sober story of the rise and fall of trade in Raxaul, these are few and far in between.