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[On Zoom] The Bangladesh-India Border: Recent Scholarship and New Publications

[On Zoom] The Bangladesh-India Border: Recent Scholarship and New Publications

   14,
  9 - 11 a.m.
   On Zoom

A panel discussion on recent scholarship on Bangladesh-India border-related studies with Malini Sur, Sahana Ghosh, and Navine Murshid.

Event moderated by Elora Shehabuddin, Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies and Global Studies and Director, Subir and Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies, UC Berkeley.

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MALINI SUR 
Jungle Passports: Fences, Mobility, and Citizenship at the Northeast India-Bangladesh Border (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021)

ABOUT THE BOOK: 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. Jungle Passports recasts established notions of citizenship and mobility along violent borders. 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.”
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SAHANA GHOSH 
A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security Across the India-Bangladesh Borderlands (University of California Press, 2023)


ABOUT THE BOOK: On the slow transformation of a connected region into national borderlands. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork in northern Bangladesh and eastern India, Sahana Ghosh shows the foundational place of gender and sexuality in the making and management of threat in relation to mobility. Rather than focusing solely on border fences and border crossings, she demonstrates that bordering reorders relations of value. The cost of militarization across this ostensibly “friendly” border is devaluation—of agrarian land and crops, of borderland youth undesirable as brides and grooms in their respective national hinterlands, of regional infrastructures now disconnected, and of social and physical geographies disordered by surveillance. Through a textured ethnography of the gendered political economy of mobility across postcolonial borderlands in South Asia, this ambitious book challenges anthropological understandings of the violence of bordering, migration and citizenship, and transnational inequalities that are based on Euro-American borders and security regimes.
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NAVINE MURSHID 
India’s Bangladesh Problem: The Marginalization of Bengali Muslims in Neoliberal Times (Cambridge University Press, 2023)


ABOUT THE BOOK: In recent years, Bengali Muslims in India have faced harassment and scapegoating as the trope of the illegal Bangladeshi has gained political currency. India’s Bangladesh Problem explores the experience of Bengali Muslims on the Indian side of the India–Bangladesh border in the context of neoliberal policies, unequal bilateral relations, labor migration, contested citizenship, and increasingly xenophobic government rhetoric. Drawing on extensive research in the borderlands and hinterlands of both countries, Navine Murshid argues that ever-deepening neoliberal policies across the border have shaped how certain ethnic groups are valued and have reconfigured social hierarchies. She provides new insights into the strategic inclusion, exclusion, and invisibility that characterizes Bengali Muslims’ lives, rendering them a group susceptible to manipulation by virtue of their ethnic kinship to the majority of Bangladeshis. In turn, Bengali Muslims simultaneously resist and utilize received neoliberal ideas to sustain their lives and livelihoods at a time when neoliberal development has largely bypassed them.

AUTHOR BIOS

Malini Sur, Associate Professor in Anthropology at the School of Social Sciences, Western Sydney University, serves as the President of Australian Anthropological Society. Her book Jungle Passports: Fences, Mobility, and Citizenship at the Northeast India-Bangladesh Border (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021) was awarded the President’s Book Prize from the South Asian Studies Association of Australia, Bernard S. Cohen Prize (honourable mention) and Choice Outstanding Academic Title (2022). She has published in Cultural Anthropology, Comparative Studies in Society and History and Modern Asian Studies and has co-edited two Special Issues in CITY and Economic and Political Weekly on urban anthropology. 

Sahana Ghosh, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the National University of Singapore, is a social anthropologist, broadly interested in forms and experiences of inequality produced through the intersection of mobility, policing, and gender in our contemporary world. She uses ethnography and feminist approaches to study a range of concerns, such as: borders and borderlands, the mobility of people and goods, citizenship, refuge and neighborliness, the national security state, agrarian change, spatial history, transnational kinship, and the political economy of gendered labor. She conducts research in India and Bangladesh.

Navine Murshid, Associate Professor of Political Science at Colgate University, is the author of India’s Bangladesh Problem: The Marginalization of Bengali Muslims in Neoliberal Times (Cambridge University Press, 2023) and The Politics of Refugees in South Asia: Identity, Resistance, Manipulation (Routledge, 2013).​​​​​​ Her current research is on Rabindrik sensibilities among middle-class Bangladeshis. Her research also focuses on the Rohingya refugee population in Bangladesh and the political economy behind regimes of protection and the selective and strategic sympathy that is afforded to refugees. In addition to scholarly publications, she frequently contributes to public scholarship in the form of public talks and newspaper articles in Bangladesh, India, and the United States.

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Established in 2013 with a generous gift from the Subir & Malini Chowdhury Foundation, The Subir & Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies at UC Berkeley champions the study of Bangladesh’s cultures, peoples and history. The first of its kind in the US, the Center’s mission is to create an innovative model combining research, scholarships, the promotion of art and culture, and the building of ties between institutions in Bangladesh and the University of California.

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PARKING INFORMATION
Please note that parking is not always easily available in Berkeley. Take public transportation if possible or arrive early to secure your spot.

Event is FREE and OPEN to the public.