Events

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Exequiel Camarig Cabanda, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

PROGRAM

ABSTRACT

Since the nineteenth century, a succession of states has classified the inhabitants of what are now the borderlands of Northeast India and Bangladesh as Muslim “frontier peasants,” “savage mountaineers,” and Christian “ethnic minorities,” suspecting them to be disloyal subjects, spies, and traitors. In Jungle Passports Malini Sur follows the struggles of these people to secure shifting land, gain access to rice harvests, and smuggle the cattle and garments upon which their livelihoods depend against a background of violence, scarcity, and India’s construction of one of the world’s longest and most highly militarized border fences. Sur shows how the division of sovereignties and distinct regimes of mobility and citizenship push undocumented people to undertake perilous journeys across previously unrecognized borders every day. Paying close attention to the forces that shape the life-worlds of deportees, refugees, farmers, smugglers, migrants, bureaucrats, lawyers, clergy, and border troops, she reveals how reciprocity and kinship and the enforcement of state violence, illegality, and border infrastructures shape the margins of life and death. Combining years of ethnographic and archival fieldwork, her thoughtful and evocative book is a poignant testament to the force of life in our era of closed borders, insularity, and “illegal migration”.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Malini Sur is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. She is a sociocultural anthropologist with research interests in India, Bangladesh and Australia. Her recently published book Jungle Passports: Fences, Mobility, and Citizenship at the Northeast India-Bangladesh Border (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021) recasts established notions of citizenship and mobility along violent borderlands. She has also published on borderlands in Cultural Anthropology, Comparative Studies in Society and History and Modern Asian Studies. Photographs from her fieldwork on South Asia’s borders have been exhibited in Amsterdam, Berlin, Bonn, Chiang Mai, Gottingen, Heidelberg, Kathmandu, and Munich.

Itty Abraham is Professor and Head of the Department of Southeast Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore (NUS). Before moving to Singapore, he was director of the South Asia Institute at the University of Texas at Austin (2007-2012) and program director at the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), New York (1993-2005). He is currently completing a book on refugees and host communities in Asia.

Sidharthan Maunaguru is Associate Professor in Anthropology at Department of Sociology and South Asian Studies at National University of Singapore. His research focuses on anthropology of migration, politics, religion, violence, sovereignty, and conscience. His work is placed within the South Asian regions and beyond, it often includes multi-site fieldwork and intersects with anthropology, history and philosophy. He has published in number of peer reviewed journals including Current Anthropology, American Anthropologist, Modern Asian Studies, and Comparative Studies on Society and History. He is the author of Marrying for a Future: Transnational Sri Lankan Tamil Marriages in the Shadow of War (University of Washington Press), 2019.

Jessica Hinchy is Associate Professor of History at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. She researches the history of gender, sexuality, households, and family in colonial north India. In 2019, Cambridge University Press published her first monograph, Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, c. 1850-1900. Her research has also appeared in Modern Asian Studies, Gender & History and Asian Studies Review, among other journals and edited collections.

REGISTRATION

Registration is closed, and instructions on how to participate in this webinar has been sent out to registered attendees. Please write to aritm@nus.edu.sg if you would like to attend the webinar.