Angana P. Chatterji

RESEARCH ANTHROPOLOGIST, UC BERKELEY
FOUNDING CHAIR, POLITICAL CONFLICT, GENDER AND PEOPLE'S RIGHTS INITIATIVE

Angana P. Chatterji is Research Anthropologist and Founding Chair, Political Conflict, Gender and People's Rights Initiative, at the Center for Race and Gender at University of California, Berkeley, and her appointment is in the UC Professional Research Series at the Full Rank. Dr. Chatterji is a cultural anthropologist and interdisciplinary scholar of South Asia. She leads the creation of the Berkeley-Stanford Archive on Legacies of Conflict in South Asia. She is affiliated with the Institute for South Asia Studies and is a Research Fellow at the Human Rights Center at Berkeley, and is also a Research Fellow at the Center for Human Rights and International Justice, Stanford University. As well, she is a Global Fellow at the Center for Law and Transformation, Chr. Michelsen Institute and the University of Bergen, and a Distinguished Fellowat theRafto Foundation for Human Rights, in Bergen, Norway.

Chatterji’s work since 1989 has been rooted in local knowledge, witness to post/colonial, decolonial conditions of grief, dispossession, agency, and affective solidarity. Chatterji’s recent scholarship focuses on political conflict and coloniality in Kashmir; prejudicial citizenship in India; and Islamomisia, caste, gender, and violence as agentized by majoritarian, Hindu nationalism. Her research excavates issues of decitizening, impunity laws, everyday militarizations, and their incursion on rights protections and defenders. Addressing issues of religion in the public sphere, state power, and cultural survival, she engages questions of memory and belonging, accountability and social justice, and legacies of conflict in South Asia.

Previously, Chatterji co-founded (2008), and was co-convener of (2008-2012), of the People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Kashmir, and her foundational investigations with colleagues called international attention to extrajudicial executions and enforced disappearances there. In 2005, Chatterji founded the People’s Tribunal on Religious Freedom and Human Rights in Odisha. In 2004, Chatterji served on a two-person independent commission on displacement and rehabilitation in the Narmada Valley. Chatterji participated in affective solidarity work following the pogroms targeting the Muslim community in Gujarat in 2002 and the Sikh community in Delhi in 1984.

Chatterji has served on human rights commissions and offered expert testimony to Indian Commissions of Inquiry, United Nations, European Parliament, United Kingdom Parliament, and United States Congress, and has been variously awarded for her work. Following expert testimony at the Hearing on Human Rights in South Asia at the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee On Asia, the Pacific, and Nonproliferation in October 2019, she received a Certificate of Special Congressional Recognition in January 2020. During August-October 2022, she was a Global Fellow at the Center for Law and Transformation, Chr. Michelsen Institute and the University of Bergen, and a Distinguished Fellow at the Rafto Foundation for Human Rights. During 2015-16, she was a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights, Columbia University. Chatterji taught doctoral seminars in anthropology and philosophical foundations of education in 2013-2014 at the University of San Francisco’s School of Education as Adjunct Professor. Previously, Chatterji served on the faculty in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the California Institute of Integral Studies, where she co-created a graduate curriculum in postcolonial anthropology as Professor (2009-2011), Associate Professor (2000- 2009), and Adjunct Professor (1997-2000). Between 1989-2002, Chatterji worked with the Indian Social Institute and Planning Commission of India, and as Director of Research at the Asia Forest Network, initially housed at the University of California, Berkeley.

Chatterji holds a B.A. in Political Science, an M.A. in Political Science, and a Ph.D. in the Humanities. Her sole and co-authored publications include: Breaking Worlds: Religion, Law, and Nationalism in Majoritarian India (2021); Majoritarian State: How Hindu Nationalism is Changing India (2019); Conflicted Democracies and Gendered Violence: The Right to Heal (2016); Contesting Nation: Gendered Violence in South Asia; Notes on the Postcolonial Present (2012); Kashmir: The Case for Freedom (2011); Violent Gods: Hindu Nationalism in India’s Present; Narratives from Orissa (2009); and reports: Access to Justice for Women: India’s Response to Sexual Violence in Conflict and Social Upheaval (2015); BURIED EVIDENCE: Unknown, Unmarked and Mass Graves in Kashmir(2009); and Without Land or Livelihood (PDF file) (2004).