Angana P. Chatterji

Angana P. Chatterji is Founding Chair and Research Anthropologist, Initiative on Political Conflict, Gender and People’s Rights at the Center for Race and Gender, University of California, Berkeley.  A cultural anthropologist and interdisciplinary scholar of South Asia, Chatterji’s work is rooted in local knowledge, witness to post/colonial, decolonial conditions of grief, dispossession, agency, and affective solidarity. Her foundational investigations with colleagues in Indian-administered Kashmir includes inquiry into unknown, unmarked and mass graves. Chatterji’s recent scholarship focuses on political conflict and coloniality in Kashmir; prejudicial citizenship in India; and violence (as a category of analysis) as agentized by Hindu nationalism, addressing religion in the public sphere, state power, gender and caste, racialization, and cultural survival and accountability. Her research also engages questions of memory and belonging, and legacies of conflict across South Asia. Chatterji has served on human rights commissions and offered expert testimony to the United Nations, European Parliament, United Kingdom Parliament, and United States Congress, and has been variously awarded for her work. Her sole and co-authored publications include: Breaking Worlds: Religion, Law, and Nationalism in Majoritarian India (2021); Majoritarian State: How Hindu Nationalism is Changing India (2019); Conflicted Democracies and Gendered Violence: The Right to Heal (2016); Contesting Nation: Gendered Violence in South Asia; Notes on the Postcolonial Present (2012); Kashmir: The Case for Freedom (2011); Violent Gods: Hindu Nationalism in India’s Present; Narratives from Orissa (2009); and reports: Access to Justice for Women: India’s Response to Sexual Violence in Conflict and Social Upheaval (2015); BURIED EVIDENCE: Unknown, Unmarked and Mass Graves in Kashmir (2009).