Agrarian Studies Colloquium with Natasha Raheja

"Rishtedari and Relatedness across the Thar Desert Region"

Natasha Raheja is a political and visual anthropologist working in the areas of migration, borders, state power, aesthetics, and ethnographic film. Their current research generates medium-specific insights across writing and film to advance political theory on majority-minority relations and majoritarianism. In the context of cross-border migration and immigration policy in South Asia, they ask, how do majorities come to imagine themselves as minorities? Conversely, how do minorities come to imagine justice as part of majorities? How do majority-minority politics exceed the parameters of states, in ways that are not nation bound?

Currently in production, their documentary film, Kitne Passports? (How many Passports?), features cross-caste, Pakistani Hindu migrant families in India, visualizing their everyday identifications and disidentifications as they shift between minority and majority status. The film is a second project that emerges from first project and forthcoming book, Selective Welcome: Pakistani Hindus in India. The book is an ethnographic account of Pakistani Hindu migration to India that theorizes the flexibility of the religious minority form across state borders in South Asia. Together, these works explore the relationships between religious nationalism, state machinery, and modes of cross-border belonging in the context of majority-minority relations in liberal democracies.

Extending their interest in uneven mobilities and borders, they are also completing an experimental short film series on the movement of non-human animals and everyday objects across the India-Pakistan border. Films in the series include: A Gregarious Species, Kaagaz ke chakkar, and Enemy Property. They believe that the study and production of film offer insights into the embodied, sensory dimensions of knowledge production. Their first ethnographic film, Cast in India, raised questions around the relationship between built infrastructure in New York City and labor infrastructure in Howrah, India in the context of everyday urban objects such as manhole covers.