Reconsidering Regions in South Asia

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel Proposal Application

Abstract

The contemporary nations of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are constituted by strong regional identities and national and state borders. Yet the continuous formation of new regions is indicative of the fact that cultural regions are constantly evolving and do not fit into the administrative boundaries that circumscribe them. The papers in this panel unpack the normative ideas of modern regions by focusing on ecological and political frontier of the Thar desert and highlight the role of mobility and fluid identities in its evolution.

Specifically, we question the artificial division of the frontier region of the Thar which lies at the intersection of the borders of India and Pakistan, the modern Indian states of Gujarat and Rajasthan, and is also strongly linked with the Indian Ocean trading networks. Through a synthesis of oral narratives, colonial and vernacular ethnographic accounts from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Kothiyal demonstrates how the Thar region’s mobile character was reconfigured as a ‘hostile’ space that needed to be controlled and ‘settled’. Kapadia reads the ethnographic and literary writings of an early twentieth century scholar to argue that the cultural identity of the mobile frontier region of Saurashtra, was in constant dialogue with the forces of colonial and nationalist state formation. Finally, Ibrahim’s ethnographic research from Kachchh questions normative ideas of state borders in India and those between India and Pakistan, calling for a critical re-evaluation of these through the lens of the everyday lives of subjects who experience them. Together, the papers, show how the demarcation of boundaries by the colonial as well as post-colonial states South Asia bases itself on deep hostility and antagonism towards mobility.

Area of Study

• South Asia

Session Organizer

• Aparna Kapadia, Williams Collge

Individual Presentations

• Mobilities, Histories, Identities: The (Un)Making of the Thar Desert - Kothiyal Tanuja, Ambedkar University Delhi

• Re-inscribing a frontier region: Jhaverchand Meghani’s writings on Saurashtra, Gujarat - Aparna Kapadia, Williams Collge

• Crossborder intimacies and the problem with marriage: sex and the state in western India - Farhana Ibrahim, Indian Institute of Technology