Description

This project will investigate the fault lines of citizenship, religion, and belonging in South Asia. Although India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka were founded as multiethnic and multi-religious nation states, managing cultural diversity through differentiated legal regimes for each community, contemporary political movements have pushed for uniform national legislation and definitions of citizenship and belonging. “Homeland” has become a key term in the region, in tandem with the advance of aggressive majoritarianism, whereby the national majority positions itself as the racially superior, authentic custodian of the state. In the shift from nation to homeland, minority subjects are increasingly subjected to exceptional measures in the name of national security. This project aims to develop a framework for comparative research on citizenship laws and processes, and their local and regional consequences. The process of inquiry will engage scholarly expertise, local communities, and civil society organizations in five sites in South Asia, to more clearly articulate the shared and unique challenges related to contemporary majoritarian and exclusionary forms of belonging and citizenship. In each site, U.S.-based scholars will collaborate with local research teams and organizations; most of the interviewing will take place on Zoom. These problems, the organizers write, are even more pressing in light of the pandemic, as religious and ethnic minorities who faced targeting in the past are now more vulnerable and less able to withstand political and social violence. The project is co-organized by Angana Chatterji, a research anthropologist at the Center for Race and Gender (CRG) at the University of California, Berkeley, and Thomas Blom Hansen, chair of Stanford University’s Anthropology Department. Chatterji is the founder of people’s tribunals in Odisha and Kashmir on religious freedom, human rights, and social justice. Since 2017 CRG has collaborated with Stanford Libraries to develop an Archive on the Legacies of Conflict in South Asia, which will house materials collected and created by the project. Our grant would support research, public events and symposia, policy briefings in the U.S. and Europe, and the creation of an open access digital exhibit at Stanford’s Archive, journal articles, public media, and an edited volume.
Recommendation: That the Directors of the Henry Luce Foundation approve a three-year grant of $370,000 to the University of California, Berkeley for the project, “From Nation to Homeland: Religion, State and Belonging in South Asia.”