| Summary/Abstract |
India’s border with Bangladesh figures in the Indian national imagination as a unifying construct for multiple anxieties from illegal immigration to cattle smuggling, thus garnering public support for increased border security. What does a view from the lived and messy realities of the borderlands offer when we shift our focus from the fetish of the borderline as a political and religious marker of difference? This essay tracks the binary of legal–illegal through which cattle in the borderlands are framed, showing how bovines move across different terrains of the agrarian, the sacrificial and everyday cross-border trade in the borderlands and so resist this binary.
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