[Reader-list] i-fellow introduction

[Farhana Ibrahim]

Hello,


I have recently completed a PhD in Socio-cultural Anthropology from Cornell
University. My dissertation, titled "Mobility, Territory and Memory in
Kachchh: The Making of a Region in Western India", examines the production
of national political cultures through the conceptual prism of state
formation and settlement along the borders of modern nation-states. I argue
that the production of national borders is an enactment that is a political,
but also a social and cultural process. I conducted ethnographic research in
Kachchh district, Gujarat, along the border with Pakistan and critically
interrogated Gujarat's contemporary nationalist identity, formulated in a
Hindu nationalist idiom. In this discourse, Pakistan is a Muslim state, and
a cultural and political 'other' for the region's self image. My ethnography
among the Jatts, who are Muslim pastoralists on both sides of the border, as
well as other political migrants (post Partition "refugees") across this
border, allowed me to complicate nationalist histories of place and identity
by foregrounding alternative projections of history, memory and territory.

 While an independent research Fellow at Sarai, I plan to continue with my
research on mobility in Kachchh. This time my focus will be on exploring the
nature of maritime migration between Kachchh and Mumbai. My research
project, "Maritime Histories, Merchant Networks and the Production of
Locality in Western India" will involve exploring the relationship between
two old port towns in Kachchh – Jakhau and Mandvi – which have for different
reasons, been progressively declining in prosperity since 1947 and Mumbai,
which has been steadily populated with Kachchhi merchant immigrants. The
Kachchhi merchants of Mumbai have in many instances moved in circles
variously removed from the actual point of origin. Movement between
Zanzibar, Muscat, Karachi, Kachchh and Mumbai was not uncommon and often
took place across generations from the mid-19th century onwards. I will
conduct ethnographic as well as archival research in Kachchh and Mumbai, and
contribute a research paper as well as a collection of photographs that can
be read as archival evidence both of urban development and decline.

Farhana
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