| Migration in Modern South Asia

Why do people move? What can they carry? What must they leave behind? What can they recreate? How do I answer the question, „where are you from‟?

Contemporary South Asia is composed of many migrant communities occupying varying and contested positions as citizens, immigrants, refugees, and asylees vis-à-vis modern nation-states such as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. In this course, we will study different instances of migration within and outside of South Asia from the colonial period to the present. We will ask how older norms of mobility and connectedness, notable features of the pre-colonial and colonial past prior to well defined national boundaries, have shaped these communities‘ notions of belonging in the 20th and 21st centuries?

To what extent have the (il-)legalities of international border-crossing and exclusion along ethnolinguistic lines marked out the limits of belonging for different communities? Are all diasporic communities characterized by uprootedness and dispersal, or do some of them find lost homelands or make new homes through their movement? What resources do diasporic communities shore up in order to counter anxieties about decay and loss? How does distance, both in space and time, influence fears of decay, and how is it experienced inter-generationally?

The course brings together historical, sociological, anthropological, and literary accounts of migration and citizenship, including studies of labor migration and indenture, newly emerging regimes of border control at the cusp of decolonization, networks of trade and pilgrimage, and legal discourses around deportation and asylum.

The first part of the course dwells on the colonial and early independence period and includes studies of indenture and colonial trade networks, the violence of marking physical borders during the Partition of 1947, as well as newly emerging regimes of citizenship-making and exclusion in postcolonial South Asia. The second part of the course turns to gendered labor and marital networks to understand the intersection of tradition and individual aspiration with state power, as well as the ways of the many customarily itinerant communities in South Asia living on the fringes of ̳settled‘ society. Finally, we look at more recent experiences of exile, and of aspirational immigration from South Asia to the United States and the United Kingdom through the economic, political, and cultural production of diasporic communities, and the impact of the waves of ̳voluntary‘ migration and ̳forced‘ dislocation on host and home communities.

Although primarily ensconced within the discipline of South Asian history, we work with a wide range of primary sources such as indie films, fiction, music, archival materials, ephemera, and public-facing scholarship (tweets, vlogs, blogs). This encourages us to critically engage with the content we encounter every day, and reflect on how it has informed our assumptions.

Along the way, we will learn a few new skills such as decoding bureaucratic language and historical maps, as well as practice the arts of thinking, reading, and writing like an historian. We will also have opportunities to reflect on the process of learning itself: through reflective writing,―holding‖ intractable problems and looking at them with curiosity and intellectual humility. In the end, we might re-discover that learning is indeed fun, and that the pursuit of this joy is valuable in and of itself, and can co-exist with the pursuit of arcane knowledge, practical skills, and academic success.

This is a standalone elective course; it has no pre-requisites, and is open to students from all disciplines and majors. The first class session of the week will comprise seminar-style discussion on an article or selections from a longer scholarly work of about 30 pages. In the second session, we will have a Socratic discussion or a workshop on primary materials related to the day‟s readings. We work with a range of primary sources in this course: indie films, historical maps and census data, oral histories, archival documents, writ petitions, fiction, and poetry.