The Centre de Sciences Humaines is pleased to invite you to the CSH Seminar on:
Erosion of Land and Citizenship: Dispossession and Eviction of Muslim Lives, Stories from Assam’s Char-Lands
Speaker: Bhargabi Das (Shiv Nadar University)
Discussant: Anupama Roy (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
To register: Please fill out the registration FORM
CSH Seminars are in hybrid mode. Please pre-register for offline and online registration before Monday, 16 February, 2:00 p.m. IST.
About the Talk:
Since June 2025, the majoritarian state in Assam have brutally evicted more than 4000 families, most of whom are Bengali Muslim families. So then, who are these evictees? And what is their story? This talk, based on my long-term ethnographic fieldwork, will look at this story of violence, doubt, allegations of ‘illegal Bangladeshis’ and continued non-belongingness through the char-lands in western Assam, India. It will examine how continuous erosion and increasingly devastating floods are directly contributing to the citizenship crisis of the Bengali Muslim char–dwellers by making them landless and forcing them to migrate to nearby grazing reserves or cities where they provide cheap labour and keep the capitalist economy running while their own socio-economic and political rights remain precarious. Through the tropes of eviction and embankment politics and politics of the majoritarian state, this talk will show how Muslim bodies are devalued. I will argue how a historically migratory community has been systematically turned landless, deskilled and made politically precarious by the majoritarian state using environmental factors wherein old histories and memories of migration of char-dwellers have been systematically destroyed to be replaced by new ones. It is in this context that the continued recent spate of violence (particularly evictions) by the majoritarian state in Assam against migrant Bengali Muslims will be explored too.
About the Speaker
Bhargabi Das is an Assistant Professor at the Rural Management Program, School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Shiv Nadar University, Delhi-NCR. Her research focuses on state-society relations among marginalized communities living in liminal, unstable riverine island ecologies in Northeast India. As a social anthropologist and sociologist by training, she also writes on racialization, precarity and erosion of academic freedom in neoliberal academia from a decolonial perspective. Her larger interests lie in environment, water, state, bureaucracy, affect, citizenship and decolonization of academia. She has written multiple publications focusing on these areas. In the past, she has been an Irish Research Council Scholar and Hume Doctoral awardee.
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