In the Sundarbans, storms and cyclones have long forced families across the India-Bangladesh border to survive. In her new book, ‘The Undocumented: One Family’s Journey from Bangladesh to India’, journalist and author Nidhi Dugar Kundalia traces one such journey, that of Safrat and her two children, drawing on thirteen years of fieldwork in a Kolkata slum. On this episode, we talk to Nidhi about why people leave home, the perilous crossings into India, the trafficking networks, the lives of people in slums, and what it really means to live undocumented, from a hospital that won’t release a body without papers to a mother fighting to get her son into school.

References:

1. Nidhi Dugar Kundalia: Instagram, X, LinkedIn
2. The Undocumented: One Family’s Journey from Bangladesh to India by Nidhi Dugar Kundalia
3. Other books by the author: The Lost Generation: Chronicling India’s Dying Professions, White as Milk and Rice: Stories of India’s Isolated Tribes, 10 Indian Tribes and the Unique Lives They Lead
4. The Past is Beautiful: Virginia Woolf
5. How Delhi Police Sent Six Indians To a Bangladeshi Prison by The Telegraph India
6. ‘Disappeared’: In Bengal, Muslims picked up from homes in midnight raids, sent to detention centres by Rokibuz Zaman
7. Last hope: Family of Bangladeshi girl ‘shot by India’s BSF’ waits for justice from Supreme Court by Ariful Islam Kurigram
8. Home by Warsan Shire
9. Why border killing has not stopped by Jamal Uddin
10. How the Climate Crisis Is Impacting Bangladesh by Diego Rojas
11. New Town slum fire sparks political slugfest by The Statesman
12. Episode 9: Journalism, Narratives and Syeda X: In conversation with Neha Dixit

Women’s citizenship in India is a deeply contested subject. Even in the decades preceding independence, a generation of women leaders in India was closely engaging with the Indian state and society, negotiating ideas of citizenship and gender justice across various public spheres. These women leaders did not all share the same views. They were often in deep contention with one another over issues like women’s health, reservation, the rescue and repatriation of abducted women, social service and family planning.

South African Historian Annie Devenish closely examines these complex debates by studying the ideas and activism of leading figures within the All India Women’s Conference and the National Federation of Indian Women, and in India’s Constituent Assembly. Dive into this conversation to know more.

References:

1. Debating Women’s Citizenship in India, 1930–1960 by Annie Devenish
2. A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
3. The Raj Quartet (four-volume novel sequence) by Paul Scott: The Jewel in the Crown, The Day of the Scorpion, The Towers of Silence, A Division of the Spoils
4. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
5. SEWA (Self-Employed Women’s Association) and Ela Bhatt
6. Sarojini Varadappan, Sarla Sharma, Vidya Munshi
7. Founding Mothers of the Indian Republic: Gender Politics of the Framing of the Constitution by Achyut Chetan
8. The Women’s Library at London School of Economics and Political Science
9. Hilda Seligman, Lady Dhanvanthi Rama Rau, Mridula Sarabhai, Muthulakshmi Reddi
10. Kerala Story by Sudipto Sen