Sarah Punathil ed. Lines and Passages: Reimagining Migration and Borderlands in South Asia, Routledge, March 2026

Moving beyond the conventional binary logic of state and society, this book reveals how borderlands emerge as both contested and negotiated terrains shaped by historical legacies and contemporary practices co-produced by the state and people.

Migration across borders has become a more contentious political question in contemporary South Asia than ever, especially in the context of recent populist assertions and migration politics. Going beyond the predominant political narrative, the essays in this book not only engage with everyday life as it unfolds in marriage and kinship relations and ethnic and cultural practices at borderlands but also address critical issues that shape everyday life under socio-political, economic, and legal conditions, such as policing, conflicts and violence, illegality, and other forms of precarity for migrant subjects. This book shows that borderlands are not passive edges of the nation-state but lived, socially vivacious zones where people routinely transgress, reinterpret, and negotiate the meaning of borders.

An important addition to the political anthropology/sociology of migration and borderlands in South Asia, this book will be an invaluable resource to researchers of social and political anthropology, sociology, and South Asian societies. The chapters were originally published as a special issue of Asian Ethnicity and are accompanied by a new discussion essay.