Borderland Lives in Northern South Asia

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Borderland Lives in Northern South Asia

edited by David N. Gellner

Duke University Press, 2013

ISBNs

Cloth: 978-0-8223-5542-7

Paper: 978-0-8223-5556-4

eISBN: 978-1-4780-9134-9 (OA)

eISBN: 978-0-8223-7730-6 (standard)

About the Book

Borderland Lives in Northern South Asia provides valuable new ethnographic insights into life along some of the most contentious borders in the world. The collected essays portray existence at different points across India's northern frontiers and, in one instance, along borders within India. Whether discussing Shi'i Muslims striving to be patriotic Indians in the Kashmiri district of Kargil or Bangladeshis living uneasily in an enclave surrounded by Indian territory, the contributors show that state borders in Northern South Asia are complex sites of contestation. India's borders with Bangladesh, Bhutan, Burma/Myanmar, China, and Nepal encompass radically different ways of life, a whole spectrum of relationships to the state, and many struggles with urgent identity issues. Taken together, the essays show how, by looking at state-making in diverse, border-related contexts, it is possible to comprehend Northern South Asia's various nation-state projects without relapsing into conventional nationalist accounts.

Contributors. Jason Cons, Rosalind Evans, Nicholas Farrelly, David N. Gellner, Radhika Gupta, Sondra L. Hausner, Annu Jalais, Vibha Joshi, Nayanika Mathur, Deepak K. Mishra, Anastasia Piliavsky, Jeevan R. Sharma, Willem van Schendel

About the Author

David N. Gellner is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford. He is the editor of Varieties of Activist Experience: Civil Society in South Asia and Ethnic Activism and Civil Society in South Asia and coeditor (with Krishna Hachhethu) of Local Democracy in South Asia: Microprocesses of Democratization in Nepal and Its Neighbours.

Reviews

"Anthropologists working on any issue of contemporary identity or politics would be well served to study this volume, as well as van Schendel's original essay and the literature it has inspired. I expect that, armed with this perspective, researchers will find more borderlands than we anticipated while also finding the entire concept of borders and the entities allegedly bounded by these borders increasingly problematic."

-- Jack David Eller Anthropology Review Database

“Readers from a variety of theoretical and geographical orientations will appreciate its challenge to nation- and state-centric theorizing about borders. In this, the volume offers a most welcome addition to the literature on life where political and scholarly “areas” meet.”

-- Sarah Besky American Ethnologist

"Although the history of Partition, antagonism with neighboring states, and the rich ethnic diversity of border regions make India’s borderlands a unique case, the essays in this volume speak to wider, comparative issues. The book would be significant for undergraduate and graduate courses on South Asia and India, anthropologies of the state, and comparative border studies."

-- Chad Haines Journal of Anthropological Research