Research seminar with Sahana Ghosh: "Threshold: The Transformative Promises of Soldiering in..."
Seminar
Date: Monday 8 December 2025
Time: 13.00 – 14.30
Location: B600
Research seminar with Sahana Ghosh: "Threshold: The Transformative Promises of Soldiering in Postcolonial India"
Abstrakt:
What are the transformative promises of soldiering in postcolonial India and how do recruits encounter it at the threshold of training, of the conversion from civilian to soldier? I take up this question as part of my larger book project on the expansion and entrenchment of militarism through the lens of military labor. Through interviews and observation at training institutes with recruits and instructors in the Indian Border Security, I examine this existential transformation in all its intense registers. In being recruited, young men and women experience the paradox of social elevation and institutional subordination. By tracing the radical shifts and paradoxes that young men and, recently, women experience and come to inhabit, I suggest that training, though meant to be a transitional phase, becomes frozen as a perpetual threshold as new soldiers are strung between radical liberation and freedoms and punishing discipline and regimes of submission for the rest of their working lives. This entry point opens up soldiering not as a rupture from civilian life but a refraction of its inequalities and aspirations and militarism as a signal social formation.
Bio:
Sahana Ghosh is Assistant Professor of Anthropology, at National University of Singapore. She is the author of A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security Across the India-Bangladesh Borderlands (University of California Press, 2023).
Last updated: November 19, 2025
Source: Department of Social Anthropology