From Professor to Author: Anthropology, Kashmir and Robots

Mona Bhan is a Political Anthropologist and Assistant Professor of Anthropology at DePauw University. This semester is my first introduction to Professor Bhan, and I have come to find that she is one of the most interesting ladies I have ever met. Her demeanor is professional, but relaxed and friendly at the same time. She makes the classroom a comfortable environment for debate and conversation; students do not have to raise their hand to speak and discussion flows like an intelligent conversation. When I heard that she was writing a book, I could not wait to interview her.
 
Professor Bhan’s book, a revision of her dissertation, explores how development agendas and policies of the civil-state and military shape religious and ethnic identities of local communities living on the line of control between India and Pakistan. She looks at how development uses counter insurgency strategies to fight terrorism, not just by the U.S. military, but also by Indian military.
 
Bhan received her Masters in Anthropology from Delhi University in 1999, and her PhD from Rutgers University in 2006. She originally started with her undergrad as Biology at Delhi University (where she met her husband at age 18). “I was doing Biology, he was doing Anthropology. I became fascinated and read more of his stuff than my own. I got excited by what he was doing and I ended up in Anthropology,” said Bahn.
 
Bahn’s most recent project focuses on a lake community in Kashmir. Located on the border of India and Pakistan, Kashmir has been living on a lake for several years. Now that water is becoming the second most important resource, after oil, the government has started paying attention to the lake, and the community is being asked to relocate. Bahn’s question: Who get’s to decide what is the best thing to do for this resource? Under the banner of conservation, the government is trying to promote tourism and the lake as an aesthetic spectacle. This is similar to cases of “conservation” around the globe that are really about Neo-Liberalism, Capitalism and Tourism. Amita Baviskar has greatly influenced Bahn. Baviskar’s work discusses water as a fluid resource, fluidity meaning how people understand water and its use. There is a constant struggle among different interests trying to use water for particular reasons, i.e. Tourism vs. Livelihood.
 
Mona Bhan was recently among the speakers of a Stanford University Symposium “Grounding Kashmir: Experience and Everyday Life on Both Sides of the Line of Control,” which was presented by Stanford’s Center for South Asia and the University’s Abbasid Program in Islamic Studies. When asked if she could choose speakers to present at DePauw, Bahn named “Aihwa Ong, to talk about Neo-Liberalism, Amita Baviskar, to talk about water, and Gyatri Spivakm to talk about post-Colonialism.”
 
Finally, when asked if she could pick one more class to teach, Bahn said Robots. “I am interested [in] how war and militarism use robots. They are being incorporated into warfare and have become a national security threat. NASA is working to create a different kind of human that can colonize space. From an Anthropology prospective, it is interesting looking at what it means to be human in the 21^st Century, where the very idea of humanity is an open ended question.”