Bio
Angana P. Chatterji is a Research Fellow at the Center for Human Rights and International Justice Stanford University. Chatterji is the Founding Chair, Initiative on Political Conflict, Gender and People’s Rights at the Center for Race and Gender, and Research Anthropologist, at the University of California, Berkeley. Chatterji’s work since 1989 has been rooted in local knowledge, witness to post/colonial, decolonial conditions of grief, dispossession, agency, and affective solidarity. A cultural anthropologist and interdisciplinary scholar of South Asia, she is also affiliated with the Institute for South Asia Studies and is a Research Fellow at the Center for Human Rights at University of California, Berkeley. She is also a Global Fellow at the Center for Law and Transformation, Chr. Michelsen Institute and the University of Bergen; and a Distinguished Fellow, Rafto Foundation for Human Rights, in Bergen, Norway. Her foundational investigations with colleagues in Indian-administered Kashmir includes inquiry into unknown, unmarked and mass graves. Chatterji’s recent scholarship focuses on political conflict and coloniality in Kashmir; prejudicial citizenship in India; and violence as agentized by Hindu nationalism. Her research also engages questions of memory and belonging, and legacies of conflict across South Asia. 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, including with a Certificate of Special Congressional Recognition in 2020. Her sole and co-authored publications include: Breaking Worlds: Religion, Law, and Nationalism in Majoritarian India; Majoritarian State: How Hindu Nationalism is Changing India; Conflicted Democracies and Gendered Violence: The Right to Heal; Contesting Nation: Gendered Violence in South Asia; Notes on the Postcolonial Present; Kashmir: The Case for Freedom; Violent Gods: Hindu Nationalism in India’s Present; Narratives from Orissa; and reports: Access to Justice for Women: India’s Response to Sexual Violence in Conflict and Social Upheaval; BURIED EVIDENCE: Unknown, Unmarked and Mass Graves in Kashmir.