*The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library*
cordially invites you to a* Seminar*
at 3.00 pm on Monday, 15th December, 2014
in the Common Room, Annexe Building
on
*‘Peasants, Spies and Stolen Harvests:*
*The making of the Northeast India East Pakistan border, 1930-1970’*
by
*Dr. Malini Sur,*
National University of Singapore,
Singapore.
*Abstract:*
In this talk, the speaker engages with overlapping and contested claims
over land and rice along South Asia’s northeastern borderlands. She shows
how the conversion of agricultural land into provincial and national
territories, and religious and political mobilizations that defined
affiliations and citizenship, altered prior conceptions of locality and
belonging. The entangled histories of two peasant and border communities
who may be broadly described as Muslim cultivators of Bengali origin and
the mostly Christian Garos tells the story of rice wars along the
edges of colonial
Assam and eastern Bengal. These provincial margins were fought over,
redrawn and mapped to form the post-colonial borders of Northeast India and
East Pakistan (1930-1970). As intersecting projects surrounding land came
to mark borders, evicted and displaced peasants not only lost but also
acquired each other’s land and rice harvests. Combining a close reading of
late colonial and early post-colonial archives with ethnographic fieldwork,
the speaker shows how the politically charged semantics of rice complicates
the romantic pastoral of land loss, disrupts the “citizen-refugee” analytic
that South Asia’s partition historiography has privileged and connects
disparate histories of migration and settlement.
S*peaker:*
Dr. Malini Sur is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Asia Research Institute,
National University of Singapore. Her research interests connect three
broad areas—borders, mobility, and citizenship—with a focus on South Asia.
She has lectured at the University of Amsterdam, held a writing fellowship
at the University of Toronto and worked for Social Science Research Council
(New York). Dr. Sur has published in anthropology and interdisciplinary
journals including HAU, *Mobilities*, *Indian Journal of Gender Studies*
and *The Economic and Political Weekly*.
cordially invites you to a* Seminar*
at 3.00 pm on Monday, 15th December, 2014
in the Common Room, Annexe Building
on
*‘Peasants, Spies and Stolen Harvests:*
*The making of the Northeast India East Pakistan border, 1930-1970’*
by
*Dr. Malini Sur,*
National University of Singapore,
Singapore.
*Abstract:*
In this talk, the speaker engages with overlapping and contested claims
over land and rice along South Asia’s northeastern borderlands. She shows
how the conversion of agricultural land into provincial and national
territories, and religious and political mobilizations that defined
affiliations and citizenship, altered prior conceptions of locality and
belonging. The entangled histories of two peasant and border communities
who may be broadly described as Muslim cultivators of Bengali origin and
the mostly Christian Garos tells the story of rice wars along the
edges of colonial
Assam and eastern Bengal. These provincial margins were fought over,
redrawn and mapped to form the post-colonial borders of Northeast India and
East Pakistan (1930-1970). As intersecting projects surrounding land came
to mark borders, evicted and displaced peasants not only lost but also
acquired each other’s land and rice harvests. Combining a close reading of
late colonial and early post-colonial archives with ethnographic fieldwork,
the speaker shows how the politically charged semantics of rice complicates
the romantic pastoral of land loss, disrupts the “citizen-refugee” analytic
that South Asia’s partition historiography has privileged and connects
disparate histories of migration and settlement.
S*peaker:*
Dr. Malini Sur is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Asia Research Institute,
National University of Singapore. Her research interests connect three
broad areas—borders, mobility, and citizenship—with a focus on South Asia.
She has lectured at the University of Amsterdam, held a writing fellowship
at the University of Toronto and worked for Social Science Research Council
(New York). Dr. Sur has published in anthropology and interdisciplinary
journals including HAU, *Mobilities*, *Indian Journal of Gender Studies*
and *The Economic and Political Weekly*.
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