Malini Sur
Biographic Data
| ID | 197273 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Malini Sur |
| GIVEN NAMES | Malini |
| FAMILY NAME | Sur |
| SIGNATURE | SUR M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Western Sydney University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5744-9648 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 53 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Reading Australia in a grain of rice
By ethnographically reading Australia in a grain of rice, this article recasts Australia's entangled histories with the Asia‐Pacific and the epistemic tensions through which rice emerges as a source of sustenance and metabolic concern in everyday life. I explore rice as a method, showing how the grain gathers anthropological thought and practice in conversation with diabetes research, cereal science and regenerative biology. Tracing the trajector…
Messing with Methods
The introduction to this special issue reconsiders anthropological methods in the lingering shadows of the COVID‐19 pandemic. Bringing together ethnographically grounded contributions across Australia, Bangladesh, Germany, India, Indonesia, Fiji, Myanmar, Pakistan and Western Sahara, it examines how methods are unsettled and reworked in practice. Rather than asking whether anthropology requires new methods, we approach method as it comes to be sh…
Cartographies of Clothing
This article explores the symbolic and material role of clothing in shaping the aesthetics and practices of property among the Garos in the India-Bangladesh borderlands. It argues that clothing functions as a mediator of territorial claims, transcending the legal frameworks of national and customary orders to offer alternative understandings of land ownership and belonging. Through ethnographic and archival research, I examine how clothing, as a …
Cycling as work
Set against the marginalization of cycling in Kolkata and Delhi, this article shows how cargo-cyclists and cycle rickshaw pullers make productive contributions to urban economies and negotiate constraints to their mobility in Indian cities. As cheap vehicles, bicycles and cycle rickshaws not only provide opportunities for social and economic mobility, but also contribute to, generate, and sustain vital urban economies. Cycle workers ensure the sm…
Jungle Passports
In Jungle Passports Malini Sur follows the struggles of the inhabitants of what are now the borderlands of Northeast India and Bangladesh and their efforts to secure shifting land, gain access to rice harvests, and smuggle the cattle and garments upon which their livelihoods depend.
Prahlad and Shanta
This article explores the irreverent and supposedly irrational actions of two protagonists, Prahlad and Shanta, characters that the authors encountered during the course of their extended fieldwork in Kolkata. Prahlad is an Oriya migrant plumber who passionately seeks god at the cost of making money, and resists adhering to rational economic behaviour in the city. Shanta is a grieving mother who relentlessly seeks justice for her son’s disappeara…
Territorial Ironies
This article ethnographically examines the everyday lives and collective activism of undocumented migrants in Belgium as they await the results of asylum appeals and regularisation applications. We show how the values emphasised by state-led migrant legalisation regimes contrast with undocumented migrants’ narratives of their own worthiness. In foregrounding deservingness as a moral and legal threshold, we argue that the Belgian nation-state resp…
Sounds of Trauma
This article explores the sounds of trauma in anthropology. I ask: when, where, and under what circumstances do unmoored sounds and voices gain salience in anthropology? In particular, can methodological insights prepare anthropologists for the intense military scrutiny that societies endure in violent borderlands? Recalling the long tradition of orality in anthropology, I suggest that the slippery registers of sound and voice in trauma is genera…
Time at Its Margins
This article resituates the study of time in anthropology, moving it from the comparative exploration of internally coherent religions and national territories to the very margins of religions, nations, and capital. Borders recalibrate time by imbuing mundane economic activities with political salience. Dangerous border crossings make temporal registers contingent and erratic, and generative of violence and torture. I show how India's prohibition…
Danger and Difference
This article asks what can be learned about affinity and alterity by considering how villagers and state troops collectively live in remote and often dangerous borders. Situating this question along South Asia's longest international boundary-the India-Bangladesh border-I query the political possibilities of conviviality that bear upon altering notions of reciprocity, exchange, and trust, and which have not attracted the attention of either urban…
The blue urban
Since 2012, Kolkata’s ruling political party has mobilized the colours blue and white in a concerted effort to rejuvenate the city by referencing big urban ambitions, corporate capital and cheerfulness. Opponents, however, assert that as a state imposed colour, blue limits freedom and makes the city un-alluring. This article suggests that Kolkata’s contemporary blue urban gathers momentum as a political force. Colour mediates political power, cre…
Constructing Asia
10.1080/13604813.2017.1374777
Battles for the Golden Grain
This essay explores the fragmentation of provincial rice fields into warring postcolonial territories in mid-twentieth-century South Asia. I focus on rice as a powerful grain that connected the shifting borders of British colonial Assam and Bengal, and later Northeast India and East Pakistan (1930-1970). I show how state repression and competing claims to rice harvests contended with shifting terrains. At important historical junctures, rice came…
Through Metal Fences
This essay explores the changing material configurations of the India–Bangladesh border, the longest international boundary in South Asia. Following the entanglements of commodities and people, I engage in a dialogue with scholarship on informal transnational circuits, material cultures and sovereignty at borders. The interplay of sovereign violence, and what I call forms of sovereign indulgence, guides the politics of transnationality. Such poli…
Bamboo Baskets and Barricades Gendered Landscapes at the India-Bangladesh border
Bamboo Baskets and Barricades
Introduction My contribution argues for plural engagements with undocumented border crossings. I posit that trans-border mobilities, especially in regions where borders divide similar societies, are located at the intersection of sovereign violence and social legitimacies. This paper explores such intersections by following bodies in motion, and bodies that are selectively intercepted and deported at the heavily patrolled and militarised India-Ba…
Introduction
This is a book about transnational mobile practices. The contributors share a common concern: to push social analysis beyond received notions of legality and illegality and to think outside the box of state authority versus criminal behaviour. In doing so, we join a growing group of social scientists searching for new ways to understand the relationship between human behaviour and multiple authorities. For us, simple dichotomies will not do; inst…
Introduction. Mobile Practices and Regimes of Permissiveness
Transnational Flows and Permissive Polities
This book is a collection of ethnographies of transnational migration and border crossings in Asia. Interdisciplinary in scope, it addresses issues of mobility and Diaspora from various vantage points. Unique to this volume is an emphasis of studying globalisation from below, privileging the narratives and views of —people on the move ̃ or the transnational underclass and their sense of belonging to places and communities. The collection is f…
Transnational Flows and Permissive Polities
This book is a collection of ethnographies of transnational migration and border crossings in Asia. Interdisciplinary in scope, it addresses issues of mobility and Diaspora from various vantage points. Unique to this volume is an emphasis of studying globalisation from below, privileging the narratives and views of "people on the move" - or the transnational underclass - and their sense of belonging to places and communities. The collection is fu…
Mixing methods, tasting fingers
This article was published in the HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory [ © 2011 School of Social and Political Sciences ] and the definite version is available at : http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau1.1.009\tThe Journal's website is at: http://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau/issue/view/hau1.1
Women’s Right to Education—A Narrative on International Law
Placing women’s right to education within an essentially androcentric international legal framework, this article underpins various legal and social constraints that deter the translation of this right into a lived experience. Though international law illustrates education lucidly, especially in conjunction with non-discriminatory provisions and emphasises non-derogability, its implementation is dampened by feeble state obligations. Contrasts are…
Time at Its Margins
This article resituates the study of time in anthropology, moving it from the comparative exploration of internally coherent religions and national territories to the very margins of religions, nations, and capital. Borders recalibrate time by imbuing mundane economic activities with political salience. Dangerous border crossings make temporal registers contingent and erratic, and generative of violence and torture. I show how India's prohibition…
Transnational Flows and Permissive Polities
This book is a collection of ethnographies of transnational migration and border crossings in Asia. Interdisciplinary in scope, it addresses issues of mobility and Diaspora from various vantage points. Unique to this volume is an emphasis of studying globalisation from below, privileging the narratives and views of "people on the move" - or the transnational underclass - and their sense of belonging to places and communities. The collection is fu…
Through Metal Fences
This essay explores the changing material configurations of the India–Bangladesh border, the longest international boundary in South Asia. Following the entanglements of commodities and people, I engage in a dialogue with scholarship on informal transnational circuits, material cultures and sovereignty at borders. The interplay of sovereign violence, and what I call forms of sovereign indulgence, guides the politics of transnationality. Such poli…
Battles for the Golden Grain
This essay explores the fragmentation of provincial rice fields into warring postcolonial territories in mid-twentieth-century South Asia. I focus on rice as a powerful grain that connected the shifting borders of British colonial Assam and Bengal, and later Northeast India and East Pakistan (1930-1970). I show how state repression and competing claims to rice harvests contended with shifting terrains. At important historical junctures, rice came…
Territorial Ironies
This article ethnographically examines the everyday lives and collective activism of undocumented migrants in Belgium as they await the results of asylum appeals and regularisation applications. We show how the values emphasised by state-led migrant legalisation regimes contrast with undocumented migrants’ narratives of their own worthiness. In foregrounding deservingness as a moral and legal threshold, we argue that the Belgian nation-state resp…
Cycling as work
Set against the marginalization of cycling in Kolkata and Delhi, this article shows how cargo-cyclists and cycle rickshaw pullers make productive contributions to urban economies and negotiate constraints to their mobility in Indian cities. As cheap vehicles, bicycles and cycle rickshaws not only provide opportunities for social and economic mobility, but also contribute to, generate, and sustain vital urban economies. Cycle workers ensure the sm…
Danger and Difference
This article asks what can be learned about affinity and alterity by considering how villagers and state troops collectively live in remote and often dangerous borders. Situating this question along South Asia's longest international boundary-the India-Bangladesh border-I query the political possibilities of conviviality that bear upon altering notions of reciprocity, exchange, and trust, and which have not attracted the attention of either urban…
Constructing Asia
10.1080/13604813.2017.1374777
Cartographies of Clothing
This article explores the symbolic and material role of clothing in shaping the aesthetics and practices of property among the Garos in the India-Bangladesh borderlands. It argues that clothing functions as a mediator of territorial claims, transcending the legal frameworks of national and customary orders to offer alternative understandings of land ownership and belonging. Through ethnographic and archival research, I examine how clothing, as a …
Women’s Right to Education—A Narrative on International Law
Placing women’s right to education within an essentially androcentric international legal framework, this article underpins various legal and social constraints that deter the translation of this right into a lived experience. Though international law illustrates education lucidly, especially in conjunction with non-discriminatory provisions and emphasises non-derogability, its implementation is dampened by feeble state obligations. Contrasts are…
Mixing methods, tasting fingers
This article was published in the HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory [ © 2011 School of Social and Political Sciences ] and the definite version is available at : http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau1.1.009\tThe Journal's website is at: http://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau/issue/view/hau1.1
Bamboo Baskets and Barricades Gendered Landscapes at the India-Bangladesh border
Bamboo Baskets and Barricades
Introduction My contribution argues for plural engagements with undocumented border crossings. I posit that trans-border mobilities, especially in regions where borders divide similar societies, are located at the intersection of sovereign violence and social legitimacies. This paper explores such intersections by following bodies in motion, and bodies that are selectively intercepted and deported at the heavily patrolled and militarised India-Ba…
Introduction
This is a book about transnational mobile practices. The contributors share a common concern: to push social analysis beyond received notions of legality and illegality and to think outside the box of state authority versus criminal behaviour. In doing so, we join a growing group of social scientists searching for new ways to understand the relationship between human behaviour and multiple authorities. For us, simple dichotomies will not do; inst…
Introduction. Mobile Practices and Regimes of Permissiveness
Transnational Flows and Permissive Polities
This book is a collection of ethnographies of transnational migration and border crossings in Asia. Interdisciplinary in scope, it addresses issues of mobility and Diaspora from various vantage points. Unique to this volume is an emphasis of studying globalisation from below, privileging the narratives and views of —people on the move ̃ or the transnational underclass and their sense of belonging to places and communities. The collection is f…
Transnational Flows and Permissive Polities
This book is a collection of ethnographies of transnational migration and border crossings in Asia. Interdisciplinary in scope, it addresses issues of mobility and Diaspora from various vantage points. Unique to this volume is an emphasis of studying globalisation from below, privileging the narratives and views of "people on the move" - or the transnational underclass - and their sense of belonging to places and communities. The collection is fu…
Through Metal Fences
This essay explores the changing material configurations of the India–Bangladesh border, the longest international boundary in South Asia. Following the entanglements of commodities and people, I engage in a dialogue with scholarship on informal transnational circuits, material cultures and sovereignty at borders. The interplay of sovereign violence, and what I call forms of sovereign indulgence, guides the politics of transnationality. Such poli…
Battles for the Golden Grain
This essay explores the fragmentation of provincial rice fields into warring postcolonial territories in mid-twentieth-century South Asia. I focus on rice as a powerful grain that connected the shifting borders of British colonial Assam and Bengal, and later Northeast India and East Pakistan (1930-1970). I show how state repression and competing claims to rice harvests contended with shifting terrains. At important historical junctures, rice came…
The blue urban
Since 2012, Kolkata’s ruling political party has mobilized the colours blue and white in a concerted effort to rejuvenate the city by referencing big urban ambitions, corporate capital and cheerfulness. Opponents, however, assert that as a state imposed colour, blue limits freedom and makes the city un-alluring. This article suggests that Kolkata’s contemporary blue urban gathers momentum as a political force. Colour mediates political power, cre…
Constructing Asia
10.1080/13604813.2017.1374777
Danger and Difference
This article asks what can be learned about affinity and alterity by considering how villagers and state troops collectively live in remote and often dangerous borders. Situating this question along South Asia's longest international boundary-the India-Bangladesh border-I query the political possibilities of conviviality that bear upon altering notions of reciprocity, exchange, and trust, and which have not attracted the attention of either urban…
Prahlad and Shanta
This article explores the irreverent and supposedly irrational actions of two protagonists, Prahlad and Shanta, characters that the authors encountered during the course of their extended fieldwork in Kolkata. Prahlad is an Oriya migrant plumber who passionately seeks god at the cost of making money, and resists adhering to rational economic behaviour in the city. Shanta is a grieving mother who relentlessly seeks justice for her son’s disappeara…
Territorial Ironies
This article ethnographically examines the everyday lives and collective activism of undocumented migrants in Belgium as they await the results of asylum appeals and regularisation applications. We show how the values emphasised by state-led migrant legalisation regimes contrast with undocumented migrants’ narratives of their own worthiness. In foregrounding deservingness as a moral and legal threshold, we argue that the Belgian nation-state resp…
Sounds of Trauma
This article explores the sounds of trauma in anthropology. I ask: when, where, and under what circumstances do unmoored sounds and voices gain salience in anthropology? In particular, can methodological insights prepare anthropologists for the intense military scrutiny that societies endure in violent borderlands? Recalling the long tradition of orality in anthropology, I suggest that the slippery registers of sound and voice in trauma is genera…
Time at Its Margins
This article resituates the study of time in anthropology, moving it from the comparative exploration of internally coherent religions and national territories to the very margins of religions, nations, and capital. Borders recalibrate time by imbuing mundane economic activities with political salience. Dangerous border crossings make temporal registers contingent and erratic, and generative of violence and torture. I show how India's prohibition…
Jungle Passports
In Jungle Passports Malini Sur follows the struggles of the inhabitants of what are now the borderlands of Northeast India and Bangladesh and their efforts to secure shifting land, gain access to rice harvests, and smuggle the cattle and garments upon which their livelihoods depend.
Cycling as work
Set against the marginalization of cycling in Kolkata and Delhi, this article shows how cargo-cyclists and cycle rickshaw pullers make productive contributions to urban economies and negotiate constraints to their mobility in Indian cities. As cheap vehicles, bicycles and cycle rickshaws not only provide opportunities for social and economic mobility, but also contribute to, generate, and sustain vital urban economies. Cycle workers ensure the sm…
Cartographies of Clothing
This article explores the symbolic and material role of clothing in shaping the aesthetics and practices of property among the Garos in the India-Bangladesh borderlands. It argues that clothing functions as a mediator of territorial claims, transcending the legal frameworks of national and customary orders to offer alternative understandings of land ownership and belonging. Through ethnographic and archival research, I examine how clothing, as a …
Reading Australia in a grain of rice
By ethnographically reading Australia in a grain of rice, this article recasts Australia's entangled histories with the Asia‐Pacific and the epistemic tensions through which rice emerges as a source of sustenance and metabolic concern in everyday life. I explore rice as a method, showing how the grain gathers anthropological thought and practice in conversation with diabetes research, cereal science and regenerative biology. Tracing the trajector…
Messing with Methods
The introduction to this special issue reconsiders anthropological methods in the lingering shadows of the COVID‐19 pandemic. Bringing together ethnographically grounded contributions across Australia, Bangladesh, Germany, India, Indonesia, Fiji, Myanmar, Pakistan and Western Sahara, it examines how methods are unsettled and reworked in practice. Rather than asking whether anthropology requires new methods, we approach method as it comes to be sh…
Sociology (12 works) · Political science (11 works) · Geography (10 works) · Law (8 works) · Politics (8 works) · South Asian Studies and Conflicts (8 works) · Law (7 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (6 works) · Political economy (6 works) · Anthropology (5 works)