This chapter explores the history of the Punjab borderland spanning almost four decades. Its starting point is 1947, when the international boundary was created, and its ending 1987, when in the wake of the Sikh militancy in the Indian Punjab fencing began along a section of the Punjab boundary. This period constituted the development of the border as a continuous boundary-making project, in which broad processes of state-building were shaped as several levels of government were involved in the exercise of negotiating, surveying, cataloguing and mapping the border on the ground. An analysis of the border in this period reveals that boundary making was a work in progress and accordingly it provided opportunities for moving goods and the movement of people. First, this chapter studies the environment of the Punjab borderland and its enforcement, focusing on the borderline itself, from the natural boundaries to the development of border to the man-made institutions such as customs posts and police checkpoints. Second, it traces the difficulty, confusion and delays in demarcating the boundary on the ground. Finally, it investigates the emergence and gradual securitisation of the border that began with the effects of the 1965 war and culminated in the erection of fencing in the late 1980s with the crisis of Sikh militancy in the Indian Punjab. It shows how the act of crossing the border itself served to reinforce the border. Based on archival findings, the chapter challenges the standard narratives about the Punjab borderland as an ‘adult’ one and its Bengal counterpart as an ‘adolescent’, as Van Schendel has drawn. My argument, by contrast, is that the Punjab border, far from being a permanently enclosing frontier, has been as fragile, porous and permeable as its Bengal counterpart.

Haines and Chester have analysed the Punjab border politics during Partition and its aftermath. More recently, Haines has examined the relationship between Indus Basin waters, territory and bilateral politics at the local scale in divided Punjab. Chester argues that Radcliffe was aware of the desirability of preserving the unity of Punjab's canal system and draws attention to some of the problems that the unsettled border presented after Partition. She rightly declares that we comprehend Bengal borderlands more thoroughly than their Punjab counterparts. Van Schendel has provided the most sustained analysis in The Bengal Borderland, and striking contrasts between the Punjab and Bengal borderlands emerge from his work.