Borders of West Bengal is an explicit example of how the process of statecraft has made borders look like lines, whereas, they are lands––borderlands and there is a lot that happens in these borderlands. There is a constant need of the state to make its presence felt in the everyday life of the borderlanders through two specific means––the borderguards and the media. These two variables are used by the state to understand how bordering spaces are used by people for negating the idea of state and representing them as smugglers. On the other hand, these instances are recognized by the border guards as issues of forced smuggling to help the borderlanders in their everyday survival. The borderlanders also through their public narrative of the borderguards and through their border talks about the presence of the borderguards neither completely ignore their oppression nor accept it. This forms a sense of a common identity between both the groups of people who reside here. This identity is mixed and matched and multi-scalar in nature. Their identity is however not what brings the communities and state together. On the contrary, it tells that state is not the only authority in the margins. This paper therefore, attempts to show how borderlands are spaces that determine the existence of state in its peripheries. Through an ethnographic study in one of the border districts of Bengal, this paper would elaborate the case of Arvind, a borderguard and Hamid Miya and his family, the borderlanders. Through their stories the paper would make an attempt to point out that both these sets of people together make up the space called as borderland. Unlike the state’s narrative of marking borders a peripheral zones of its territory, it points out these are spaces where sovereignty survives beyond territorial limits.
