What are the transformative promises of soldiering in postcolonial India, and how do recruits encounter them at the threshold of training, the moment of conversion from civilian to soldier? This seminar examines these questions as part of a broader book project on the expansion and entrenchment of militarism through the lens of military labor. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic observation at Border Security Force training institutes, the talk explores the intense existential transformation experienced by recruits.

Enlistment produces a paradox of social elevation and institutional subordination. Young men and, increasingly, women find themselves suspended between the promise of liberation and mobility and the realities of punishing discipline and regimes of submission. Although training is intended as a transitional phase, it becomes a perpetual threshold that shapes soldiers’ lifelong experience of service. This perspective reframes soldiering not as a rupture from civilian life but as a refraction of its inequalities and aspirations, revealing militarism as a powerful and pervasive social formation.

Sahana Ghosh is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the National University of Singapore. A social anthropologist conducting research in India and Bangladesh, her work uses ethnographic, feminist, and historical approaches to examine mobility, borders, and security regimes, foregrounding the violence, inequalities, and values shaping migration, citizenship, kinship, and militarization.

Her first book, A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security Across the India-Bangladesh Borderlands (University of California Press, 2023 / Yoda Press, 2024), traces the transformation of a connected region into national borderlands and highlights the central role of gender and sexuality in migration and border security practices. The book received an Honorable Mention for the 2023 Critical Ethnography Book Prize from the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology. She has edited special issues in Social Text, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, and Critical Military Studies, and published widely across anthropology, South Asian studies, and gender studies. During autumn 2025, she is a fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS), Uppsala University.

This seminar is co-organized by the Department of Social Anthropology and Stockholm Center for Global Asia, Stockholm University.