Annu Jalais: Tigers, Islam and the Sundarbans

Annu Jalais is at Yale this year having been selected as an Agrarian Studies Program Fellow to work on her second book, tentatively titled, Bangali, not bhadralok. On Wednesday, April 21st, she will give the second-to-last lecture of the 2009-2010 South Asian Colloquia: “From Peerless Pirs to Bold Bauleys: Tiger-Charmers, Islam and the Forests of the Sundarbans.” In this talk, she will discuss one of the topics of her recently published book, Forest of Tigers: People, Politics and Environment in the Sundarbans which developed off her 2004 Ph.D. in Anthropology from the London School of Economics. Her lecture will �weave together the untold stories that lie in-between the transformation of the pirs of old Bengal to the tiger-charmers or bauleys of today.�

Annu recently conducted fieldwork in Bangladesh and India working on a project on the Bengal Muslim Diaspora with Professors Joya Chatterji and Claire Alexander. She is currently working on two books with them, one for high-school children in the UK and the other titled The Bengali Muslim Diaspora: Migration, Displacement and Settlement in Bangladesh, India and Britain. This is the fruit of a three-year Arts and Humanities Council (AHRC, UK) funded project about the Bengali and Bihari Muslims who left West Bengal after 1947 when India was partitioned.

Born and educated in Calcutta (now Kolkata), as a child Annu became fascinated with stories about the Sundarban, the largest natural habitat of Bengal tigers - famous for their man-eating habits! Though she went on to study languages in France, and then anthropology in the UK, she never lost her childhood interest in the Sundarbans tigers. Her current research explores discrimination and marginalization in both Bangladesh and West Bengal.