Debates over border trespassing and border control shape the contemporary global and local politics. Powerful States control and close their borders to bar the unwanted and the dispossessed to enter their zone of privacy and possession. The relationship between borders and people can be both routinised and random. It is routinised for people living in both geographical and economic borderlines who for reasons related to their legal and illegal livelihood may depend on the borders. This relation is random for people for whom a border may just be an illusionary demarcation, disassociated from their everyday reality. Gautam Ghosh's Shankhachil depicts the relationship between humans and borders from the latter perspective in our contemporary time. Situated at a border village between India and Bangladesh, the references to places like Khulna and Satkhira suggest that the village is in the southern part of Bangladesh, near the Sunderbans. Local school teacher, Muntasir Badal Chowdhury (Prasanjit Chatterjee) is a culturally and historically conscious person, more comfortable with his Bengali rather than Muslim identity. The family of three - Muntasir, his wife Laila Chowdhury (Kusum Sikdar) and their daughter Rupsha Chowdhury (Shajbati) - is a relatively privileged one in the village. Their life is modest, and unlike the extreme poor, many of whom have to rely on illegal border crossing to survive (the movie starts with the remaking of the hanging dead body of a young boy shot by the BSF). The family looks at the border as a memory of their ancestors. How, in 1947, suddenly two different names 'Hindustan' and 'Pakistan' are attached to two dominant religions of the region, Hindu and Islam, and how people's religious identities directed the politics of the nations.
Unprecedented as it is, the movie shows how the border becomes the key to people's lives, even decades after the birth of two nations. Khulna seems to be a long distance from the village, Dhaka is unimaginatively far when Badal's daughter Rupsha needs immediate treatment for her heart condition. India seems to be the quickest and the nearest option – right across the river. Their local social network works for them. Officials within BSF and BGB help them to pass through the river between India and Bangladesh illegally, and the family reaches Taki, a town in West Bengal, India. The cross of the river is symbolic in many ways, perhaps the strongest is its religious associations. It is preferable to be Muslim at the Bangladeshi side of the river and Hindu at the Indian side of it. The family needs to pretend to be Hindu to access the local facilities in the hospitals, first in Taki and then in Calcutta. Thus, in the second half of the movie, we find Kusum Shikder as a Hindu wife with vermillion on her forehead. If anyone misses out the first half of the movie, the viewer will be under the impression that the family is Hindu and they live in India. Without asking questions, without proposing any solutions, the movie challenges the viewers to reflect, “what would you do if you were in that situation?”
Badal and his wife do what they think is best for their daughter, they hide their religious, national identities and pretend to be 'Indians'. Following Judith Butler’s argument that gender is performative, there cannot be any 'doer' before the deed, rather the deeds create the imagined identity of 'doers'. National-religious identity can be another kind of performative, where individuals follow the rules to have legitimacy at a particular political place. Badal and his wife falter at different points, their role-play is not perfect since they are not Hindu nor are they Indians. Like San-Papiers, they just try to copy the rituals to be accepted institutionally.
The family's best of intentions do not work. Rupsha dies at a big private hospital in Calcutta. Badal's wife sees this death as an allegorical punishment for disobeying their religious identity. Badal calls himself a border trespasser to the hospital authority once their daughter dies, thus the couple turns into a case of border judiciary between these two countries. In this world of wired borders, the only way one can return to one's original home is by being a 'shankhachil.' The movie stands on Jibananondo Das's romantic yearning, “abar ashibo fire, dhanshiri tir teere, ei banglay, hoyto ba manush noye, hoyto ba shonkhochil, shaliker beshe.”
All borders are arbitrarily marked at some point of global/local history. Thus, neighbour countries are not actually neighbours, they are the same countries. They same country that has been bullied to be enemies. If borders are historically made, borders can also be made into history. The movie, through its scintillating making and supreme acting, has urged us to see the arbitrary nature of the India-Bangladesh border, and challenge it humanely.