Fuzzy Borders: Bureaucracy, Brokerage, and the India-Pakistan Border
The CMS Borders Research Group is very pleased to announce the final event for this term’s Speaker Series, organised in association with the Centre for India and South Asia Research. ‘Fuzzy Borders: Bureaucracy, Brokerage and the India-Pakistan Border’ by Dr. Natasha Raheja is a conversation on the author’s upcoming book From Minority to Majority: Pakistani Hindu Claims to Indian Citizenship, where she discusses the bureaucratic entanglements and experiences of a community in one of the world’s most contested and tense border regions. We invite all to be a part of these multimodal, multimedia and multidisciplinary approaches to discussing pasts, presents and futures of borders.
Dr. Natasha Raheja is a legal and visual anthropologist working in the areas of migration, borders, state power, aesthetics, and ethnographic film. Her current research generates medium-specific insights across writing and film to offer a visual anthropology of the state and advance political theory on majority-minority relations.
Currently in production, her documentary film, Kitne Passports? (How many Passports?), features cross-caste, Pakistani Hindu migrant families in India, visualizing their everyday identifications and disidentifications as they shift between minority and majority status. The film is a companion to her book manuscript, From Minority to Majority: Pakistani Hindu Claims to Indian Citizenship. The book is an ethnographic account of Pakistani Hindu migration to India that theorizes the flexibility of the religious minority form and caste across state borders in South Asia.
The event is open to everyone, but registration is required.
In preparation for the talk, the research group is hosting a reading group session on Oct 31st, 2 – 3.30 pm at Liu Boardroom 316. You are encouraged to get in touch with Mahashewta Bhattacharya at mahash25@mail.ubc.ca for more information and for the materials circulated for the session.
Registration: