South Asia on the Move

This book sustains and expands the new mobilities paradigm by focusing such theoretical advances on South Asian scholarship. When it comes to analytical approaches to movement, the mobilities turn has been tremendously provocative, particularly in the last twenty years. However, much of that literature remains rooted in the priorities, ontologies, and geographies of the West/Global North. This volume extends earlier approaches by centering South Asia as a critical site through which scholars can advance new empirical research, develop fresh theoretical tools, diversify mobilities studies, and pose a challenge to predominant models. Through a diverse set of interdisciplinary chapters, South Asia on the Move makes a sustained argument about the value of decentering (im)mobilities research. In so doing, the collection redirects the regional, theoretical, and methodological foci of the mobilities turn, demonstrating the relevance of South Asia for thinking about varieties of movement within the region and around the world.

Benjamin Linder is an anthropologist and cultural geographer with interests in transnational mobilities, cultural transformation, and urban place-making in Nepal. He serves as the Coordinator for Public and Engaged Scholarship at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) at Leiden University, the Netherlands. Tarini Bedi is Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Program Director for Cultural Anthropology at the National Science Foundation (USA). Her research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of urban, political, and economic anthropology, environment and ecology, anthropology of infrastructure and mobilities, cultural geography, science and technology studies, and gender studies. She is the author of two published books, The Dashing Ladies of Shiv Sena: Political Matronage in Urbanizing India (SUNY Press, 2016) and Mumbai Taximen: Autobiographies and Automobilities in India (University of Washington Press, 2022).

1. Introduction: South Asia on the Move by Benjamin Linder, 2. Gendering Proximity and Distance: Marriage and Mobility in Bangladesh's Riverine Borderlands by Malini Sur, 3. At the Love Commandos: Narratives of Mobility Among Intercaste Couples in a Delhi Safe House by Rashmi Sadana, 4. Driving While Tamil: Policing as a Regime of Mobility in Post-War Jaffna, Sri Lanka by Daniel Dillon, 5. Adventure Time: Adventure Tourism and the Annihilation of Space by Time in Nepal by Mark Liechty, 6. After Eat, Pray, Love: Tourism, Orientalism, and Cartographies of Salvation by Rumya S. Putcha, 7. The Mobility of Regional Labor Hierarchies: Nepali Employment and Entrepreneurialism in the 'South Asian' Gas Stations of North Texas by Andrew Nelson, 8. Sometimes She Stands Like a Statue: Immobility in the Archives of Colonial Psychiatry by Sarah Pinto, 9. Disability On The Move: Disabled Mobilities In Contemporary India by Michele Friedner and James Staples, 10. Conclusion: Thinking Theory, Pedagogy, Practice by Tarini Bedi.