The edge of Kaladan : A ‘spectacular’ road through ‘nowhere’ on the India-Myanmar borderlands

Abstract

Using the case of India’s mega-infrastructure build-up, the Kaladan Multimodal Transport Project (KMMTP) in the ‘remote’ and ethnically contentious borderlands between India and Myanmar, this chapter takes an ethnographic approach to understand the meaning of spectacular connectivity and infrastructure on remote borderlands. Based on six months of fieldwork, the chapter explores the voices, visions, spatial and ethnic worlds of border residents who subsequently have to position themselves and their remoteness to absorb the Indian state’s spectacular new connective infrastructure. The chapter narratively traverses along this newly constructed road, to the very edge of a hitherto informal and flexible border with Myanmar. In doing so, it highlights the need to investigate the banal, unspectacular and interethnic lived realities of the borderland. The chapter argues that spectacular infrastructures such as the KMMTP are harnessed in the pursuit of territorial control, making the remote legible and for extracting profits. The chapter introduces the analytic of the ‘spectacle’ to demonstrate how powerful states and ethnic communities rely on grand infrastructural spectacles and cross-border projects often at the expense, erasure and displacement of those at the edge of borderlands, who have the least stake in shaping such spectacular infrastructures.