Mobility on the Margins explores narratives, trajectories and interpretations of movement with reference to origin, connectedness, belonging, and other claims to ‘soil’ in South Asia’s eastern borderlands.

Located at the fringes of two of South Asia’s largest states (India and Bangladesh), the people of these borderlands experience marginalization in terms of social hierarchy, economic exclusion and cultural rejection (Adnan: 2006; Van Schendel: 1992). The increasingly coercive presence of the nation-states in these fringes in economic and military as well as social and cultural terms has been and is conducive towards the substantiation and production of ethnicities and indigeneities (Gellner: 2013). Not only are the centres producing themselves through the borderlands that are supposedly marginal to them, the people of these margins also increasingly define themselves, and the groups they belong to, in ‘statist’ terms, such as ‘nations’ (Baruah: 2007, Bhaumik: 2009). Consequently, the post-colonial trajectories of the eastern borderlands of India and Bangladesh are marred by conflicts, militancies, and violent counter-insurgencies set in ethnic terms. These spill over into neighbouring Burma/Myanmar, with which these borderlands are culturally congruent and share a political history (Scott: 2009). False dichotomies such as those between hills and plains, tribe and caste, civilized and primitive, modern and traditional, deriving from crude evolutionist sociological models that originate from the colonial period, create social hierarchies. The people that these refer to increasingly experience these as arbitrary, humiliating and unacceptable, even though they also put these to strategic use. This theme will focus on narratives of origin, migration and belonging, and how these take on new and hitherto unheard meanings in contexts in which ethnicity and indigeneity serve to formulate  claims to scarce resources, political power, and being with or against the state (Karlsson: 2011, Longkumer 2010).

Migrations, Memories, Representations focuses on the field of cultural production where experiences and memories of displacement, refugee exodus, destitution or place-making are reconstituted and refigured in representation – in literary, cinematic or artistic narratives.

The nation is a subject of struggle in South Asia. This struggle lies in its histories of wrestling nationhood from external and internal colonialism, whether it be the pre-1947 resistance against the British colonial state, or post-1947 battles for regional autonomy, border control and population reorganization. Decolonisation became a renewed battleground for forging and policing mobilities and narratives of belonging, captured not only by waves of refugee flows between India, East and West Pakistan (1947-71), but also in iconic struggles like the civil war between West and East Pakistan and resulting in the creation of independent Bangladesh in 1971 (Mookherjee: 2011). These struggles prompted representations of place, dwelling and memory, producing narratives of mobility within and across nation-states (Dadi: 2010; Toor: 2011) that revealed time and again new modes of imagining selves and belongings to past and present. In the post-colonial period, as new states consolidated their frontiers and culture through nationalist assertions of cultural heritage and national-modern art, dissonant cultural imaginations of contra-national and cross-national identifications flourished under the shadow of the nation-state – whether in left-wing cultural movements in India (Gopal: 2005) and postcolonial Pakistan or language movement in East Pakistan (Uddin: 2006), or refugee literatures and films on the cathartic partition that displaced millions, skewing the affective registers of geopolitics in the region forever (Chatterji: 2007). This theme will study the forms, mechanisms and politics through which cultural memories fostered by migrations enter and become narratives that question, subvert or disperse the ‘national imaginary’ in South Asia (Kapur: 2000).