Until 2015, the map of Bangladesh’s northwest border with the Indian state of West Bengal looked as if it had broken out in a nasty rash. It was studded with enclaves—small tracts of Indian territory inside Bangladesh and vice versa. There were counter-enclaves—pockets of Indian territory surrounded by Bangladesh, in turn surrounded by India, and the other way around. And even the world’s only counter-counter-enclave. Go ahead—you can figure out that geographical oddity.
In total, there were 162 enclaves, ranging in size from 10 square miles to less than an acre (see inset area on map). How did they come to be? The most colorful version of the story has two traditional local rulers passing time in their palaces with a game of chess in which villages and rice paddies were used as wagers. The more likely historical explanation is that the patchwork was the result of a series of messy treaties between the princely state of Cooch Behar and the Mughal Empire in the early 18th century.
Area of enclaves indicated above
Whatever the origins of the enclaves, they made little difference in the daily lives of their residents until the partition of British India in 1947. A hastily-drawn boundary line between India and what was then East Pakistan (later Bangladesh) left thousands stranded in their enclaves, without passports enabling them to travel outside and lacking clinics, schools and basic services. It took almost half a century for India to agree to a land swap.
Bangladesh’s border with India is more than 2,500 miles long, making it the fifth-longest land border between two countries in the world. It’s almost half as long as the 5,558-mile US-Canada border, the longest, and more than 300 miles longer than two of Russia’s borders—with China and Mongolia.
The statistic is a surprising one, even to most Bangladeshis I know, because the country is one of the smallest in Asia, about the size of Iowa or Illinois. Apart from its short southern border with Myanmar, Bangladesh is completely surrounded by its larger neighbor. From the Bay of Bengal, the border meanders north for 1,378 miles, with West Bengal to the west. At its furthest northwest point, it forms the southern edge of the Siliguri Corridor, the strategically vital stretch of land that connects mainland India to its northeastern states; at its narrowest point, Bangladesh is separated from Nepal by only 17 miles. The states of Assam and Meghalaya form the northern border with Bangladesh; to the east, the border jogs around three sides of the former princely state of Tripura before heading south again with the state of Mizoram separating it from northern Myanmar. Until 2015, it would have been even longer if the boundaries around the enclaves had been included.
Why is Bangladesh such a strange shape, with a border that zigs, zags and occasionally turns back on itself? The answer, as with many cartographic puzzles, lies in decisions that were hastily made by a colonial power.
In the summer of 1947, the British were in a hurry to leave India. The decision to partition the sub-continent along religious lines—into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan—meant that national borders had to be drawn. The main challenge was in two large provinces—Punjab in the west and Bengal in the east—which had roughly the same numbers of Hindus and Muslims. Cyril Radcliffe, a British lawyer with no experience in India, was tasked with heading a commission to draw the borders and was given just five weeks to do it. They had little reliable demographic data and worked with outdated maps and inaccurate census figures. No neat lines could be drawn to divide communities that had lived side by side, mostly peacefully, for centuries.
The so-called Radcliffe Line was announced on August 17, 1947, a few days after independence; in some places, it ran through villages, and even through the middle of houses. Roughly 12 million people found themselves on the wrong side of the line and tried to move; between half a million and one million were killed in the ensuing religious violence. Radcliffe burned all his notes before leaving India. At home, he was knighted for his achievements, but he realized the consequences of the commission’s decisions and never returned to India or Pakistan. “There will be 80 million people with a grievance looking for me,” he wrote. “I do not want them to find me.”
There’s much more on the enclaves and the India-Bangladesh border in “The world’s craziest border,” Chapter Six in Postcards from the Borderlands, to be published by Open Books in November. You can pre-order here. Here’s what readers who had a sneak preview are saying about it:
“An entertaining and informative book that gives character, shape and meaning to places we too often file away in a narrow category such as ‘Third World.’” -Alan Wilkinson, biographer, travel writer and novelist, Durham, UK
“David Mould is NOT a mints-on-your-pillow kind of traveler. He steps out of the tourist bubble and explores the action, people and history of back alley markets, crowded neighborhoods and bustling wharves.” -Lynda Berman, teacher and artist
Preview of chapter: “The world’s craziest border”
India and Bangladesh have the fifth-longest land border in the world, almost half as long as the US-Canada border. It zigs and zags its way for 2,500 miles, with Bangladesh almost completely encircled by Indian states. How did the two countries end up with what The Economist calls the “world’s craziest border”? The answer is the decision in 1947 to partition British India along religious lines, which led to the division of the province of Bengal. Partition led to mass migration, communal violence and, a quarter of a century later, the Liberation War in which the Bengalis of East Pakistan gained independence as Bangladesh. Until a land swap in 2015, thousands were left stranded and stateless in the more than 200 territorial enclaves on both sides of the border. To the south, in the Bangladeshi city of Rajshahi, I walk along the shoreline of the broad Padma (Ganges) which forms the border for 70 miles. There’s no border crossing, so most of the cross-river commerce is by smugglers. India combats illegal migration with a border fence, trigger-happy border guards and legal measures. I examine the controversy from the perspective of Assam, the state to the north of Bangladesh. It is home to generations of Bengali Muslims who may now face deportation if they cannot prove they arrived before 1971.
