Sites and Objects of Memory: Cross-Border Dwellers in Kargil

Join us at: https://bit.ly/39wAfkc Meeting ID: 856 0469 2577 Passcode: 372653

This week Radhika Gupta shares some of her work on Balti evocations of Baltistan with a focus on objects in which nostalgia and memory reside and on the Museum of Memories in Hundarman, Kargil. Interspersed with conversations with Abeer Gupta this session will take us on a journey through the historiography of the region and introduce the idea of people/cultures/multiple flows in the region, thereby challenging our imagination of it and introducing a new way of thinking about the border from the perspective of cross-border dwellers—those who have experienced the partition not once but twice.

Radhika Gupta is a social anthropologist and an assistant professor at Leiden University. She has been working on the Kargil borderland since 2007. Her work explores the capacious horizons through which the Shia Muslims of Kargil negotiate belonging within India amidst heavy militarization, surveillance, and the absence of cross-border mobility. She is currently finishing a book manuscript on this subject.

Abeer Gupta is currently the director of the Krishnakriti Foundation in Hyderabad and the Achi Association India in New Delhi and Leh. He has directed several documentary films and curated art, education and community media projects. His research is based in the western Himalayas, in Ladakh, Jammu and Kashmir around oral histories, material cultures, and visual archives. His publications include, The Visual and Material Culture of Islam in Ladakh (2014), Discovering the Self and Others in Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh (Sage, 2014), and A Sense of Place: Islam in the Western Himalaya (Marg, 2018).