A Review of Borderlands by Samarth Mahajan
“Borders are scratched across the hearts of men
By strangers with a calm, judicial pen…”
Marya Mannes
There’s a fleeting scene in Samarth Mahajan’s film Borderlands that I keep returning to. Dhauli, a Bangladeshi woman living in a BSF camp village in Nargaon, West Bengal—separated from her family since she crossed the border before the fence went up—is going about her daily chores. And there, in the background, hanging casually on the barbed wire, are her clothes hung out to dry. A fence designed to divide nations, used as a clothesline, presents a subtle mockery of a grave purpose. That image, quiet and understated, captures the essence of Samarth Mahajan’s approach with this film. He won’t give us the borders we are accustomed to — the hyper-masculine kind immortalized by Bollywood, featuring soldiers, standoffs, and blazing guns, with flags rippling in slow-motion. This film shows what living with and along a border actually looks like.
Borderlands (2021) follows six people— Deepa, Surjakanta, Kavita, Dhauli, Rekha, and Noor— across India’s frontiers with Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal, and the border state of Manipur. Between them, they map a version of India’s borderlands that seems nothing like the one we have been sold by mainstream and popular media. I, like many others, have grown up seeing the Wagah-Attari border ceremony, with its theatrical chest-thumping, abuzz with soldiers, guns, and symbols of martyrdom. On an Indian film poster, the word ‘border’ conjures up images like the one of Sunny Deol tearing a hand pump out of the ground. Our popular cinema has spent decades constructing a very specific mythology around India’s frontiers, glorified and heavily militarized, populated almost exclusively with male soldiers, virtually devoid of locals who spend their lives there. The border in Bollywood is not a place, but a symbol of a nationalism the State wants to evoke in people; it exists so that men can perform patriotism before it. Popular films like Border, LOC Kargil, Uri — all treat the frontier as a stage for masculine heroism and sacrifice, so much so that it has become difficult to imagine a border story that doesn’t have a soldier at its centre. Civilian life on either side hardly receives a mention.
Mahajan dismantles this very mythology of borders being a man’s subject. Five of his six characters are women. Not a single one is a soldier and nobody fires a gun. Nobody delivers an emotionally charged speech about the motherland. When the Wagah ceremony does appear in the film, the camera doesn’t focus on the soldiers’ drill, instead, on something far more spontaneous and joyous.
One of the characters is Deepa, a Pakistani Hindu who has relocated to Jodhpur, India and is trying to build an academic career. At first glance, she seems likely to fare well because she can converse in Hindi. However, since the medium of her education had been in Sindhi and Urdu, she is unable to read the Devanagari script. The language she speaks comfortably in does not match the script of her new home—a script that holds the key to all further opportunities for her and that she thus has to learn anew. In one of the film’s lighter scenes, she does a nursing roleplay with the crew, practising for the career she is striving to achieve. Somehow that seemingly small and silly act of pretense conveys the steadfastness of her ambition in defiance of her displacement.
Then there’s Surjakanta, a filmmaker in Imphal who makes movies about the Manipuri freedom movement, encouraging young people to keep telling their own stories. In one scene, he screens one of his short films about two brothers—one, an insurgent fighting for an independent Manipur, the other, a man whose identity and loyalty lie with the Indian state. The film-within-the-film mirrors Borderlands itself: ordinary people pulled apart by the accident of geography and political whims that drew lines around their homes and minds.
Kavita, at the India-Nepal check post in Birgunj, monitors cross-border human trafficking. Disabled since childhood, she walks with a limp, and looks like someone who has had to fight her way through life. Her disability here becomes a border that tries to determine what she can or cannot do. Yet, she not only crosses that boundary, but goes on to police a far larger frontier, interrogating suspected traffickers — calm, direct, sharp-eyed, and sure of herself.
The film places her story in deliberate conversation with that of Noor, a Bangladeshi girl who was trafficked into India and is now living in a shelter home in Kolkata, waiting for repatriation, a victim of bureaucratic limbo. While the paperwork crawls, Noor falls in love. She explores her sexuality, finds a partner, finds something worth holding onto despite all odds. Far away from her home, she finds refuge in a companion. In this way, love defies, resists, and actively redefines borders. Her story reminds us why loving each other fiercely and holding on to that love in today’s divisive world has become more urgent than ever. The film doesn’t present Noor’s story with a sympathetic or a pitying eye. Instead, it lets her be as she is, and presents her tale with dignity.
The most unexpectedly moving thread is the one closest to home. Mahajan includes his own mother, Rekha, who has lived her whole life near the Wagah border in Dinanagar, Punjab. In the film, he takes her to the Wagah ceremony, at a place a few kilometres from where she has lived for decades, but has somehow never visited—held back by the thankless and never-ending cycle of domestic labour that consumes the entirety of a homemaker’s existence. As she takes in the ceremony, she dances in childlike joy and wonder. But this is not a joy only rooted just in patriotism, but it reflects a rare freedom she doesn’t usually get to enjoy — a day where she is just a woman watching a parade and not a housewife or a mother. And then in another scene, quieter and harder to watch, she breaks down on camera, confiding in her son that she feels lonely and abandoned when he doesn’t reply to her texts. Mahajan, to his credit, doesn’t shy away from including that tense moment between mother and son. Not all borders are drawn consciously; the inevitable march of time and the pursuit of ambition often etch such lines between relationships without one’s realisation.
Perhaps the most striking thing about the film is what Dhauli tells us about the Milan Mela, the annual fair held on Poila Boisakh (the Bengali new year) where, for one day, the Indian Border Security Force and Border Guard Bangladesh allow families to meet across the fence. Passing gifts through the concertina wire, people are compelled to compress and share years of grief and love, as well as important news, into a few hours. As one reviewer put it, this exchange acquires a Manto-esque quality, conveying a sense of the Partition’s deep wound that had been once sewn up hurriedly and haphazardly, reopening annually with tokens of love being passed through barbed wire. But how could borders drawn by politicians at the top ever destroy the spirit of a Bengal which was once united, where families, friends, lovers, all lived together? How could such borders make incisions in a culture determined to prevail despite them?
A singular feature of the documentary is the predominance of female characters and their stories. What Borderlands understands—and what most border narratives usually miss—is that women don’t just live near borders. They embody borders. They are treated as territory that gets divided, managed, surveilled, and restricted, long before any wire fences are erected. The film understands, intuitively, that the vocabulary of borders — territory, control, violation, crossing, belonging — is also the vocabulary of how women move through the world.
The film ends with the song Aami Tomake Bhalobashi (I Love You), composed by Laurie Kallevig and the Survivor Girl Ukulele Band—a song that drives one both to joy and tears. The closing song effectively captures how the obvious tragedy of separation by borders is offset by the irrepressible love that marks the stories and the people who feature in Borderlands. It shows us how the people whose lives are most deeply shaped by borders, are just as capable of transcending them—sometimes quietly, sometimes stubbornly—but on their own terms.
–Written by Chenab Guha, 1st year, B.A. Hons. Journalism and Media Studies