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Moving beyond the conventional binary logic of state and society, this book reveals how borderlands emerge as both contested and negotiated terrains shaped by historical legacies and contemporary practices co-produced by the state and people.
Migration across borders has become a more contentious political question in contemporary South Asia than ever, especially in the context of recent populist assertions and migration politics. Going beyond the predominant political narrative, the essays in this book not only engage with everyday life as it unfolds in marriage and kinship relations and ethnic and cultural practices at borderlands but also address critical issues that shape everyday life under socio-political, economic, and legal conditions, such as policing, conflicts and violence, illegality, and other forms of precarity for migrant subjects. The book shows that borderlands are not passive edges of the nation-state but lived, socially vivacious zones where people routinely transgress, reinterpret and negotiate the meaning of borders.
An important addition to the political anthropology/sociology of migration and borderlands in South Asia, this book will be an invaluable resource to researchers of social and political anthropology, sociology, and ethnography and South Asian societies. The chapters were originally published as a special issue of Asian Ethnicity, and are accompanied by a new discussion essay.
List of contents
Introduction: Migration and Borderlands: Ethnographic Explorations from India 1. Moving Borders in South Asia 2. Infrastructures of (im)mobility: maps, mines, militarization, and the making of remote borderland in Kargil 3. The ongoing partition: narratives of belonging and separation in the borderland of Kargil, Ladakh 4. In-between borders: mapping belonging and citizenship in the Bengal borderland 5. Identity, migration and embedded cosmopolitanism: interrogating multiple Muslim identities in Assam 6. Citizenship revocation and ruptures in lifeworlds: analysing the aftermath of the national register of citizens in Assam 7. The poiesis of new migrant subjectivities: resistance and re-signification in Miya poetry 8. Practising border: contextualising criminality of mobility at the West Bengal-Bangladesh border 9. Migrant aspirations, migrating dreams: belonging, materiality, and migration in urban Darjeeling 10. Detection, Detention and Deportability in India - A Discussion 11. Afterword: Testing the limits of statism: concluding reflections on migrations and Borderlands
About the author
Salah Punathil is a sociologist and teaches at the Centre for Regional Studies, University of Hyderabad, India. His research interests include ethnic violence, migration and borderlands, citizenship and the intersection of archives and ethnography. He is the author of the book Interrogating
Communalism: Violence, Citizenship and Minorities in South India is published by Routledge in 2019.
