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Angana P. Chatterji (born in November 1966) is an anthropologist and feminist historian. Born and raised in Calcutta, India, she is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the California Institute of Integral Studies, a progressive, accredited institution of higher education based in San Francisco, California.

A public intellectual, her work focuses on the 'structural violence through which postcolonial nation-states govern identity, difference, and territory, and systemically disenfranchise subaltern groups'. Chatterji's thought, research, teaching, and social justice work are concerned with biopolitical governance and identity politics; nation-state and nationalisms; self-determination, and gendered violence; and development, globalization and cultural survival. Since 1984, she has worked with marginalized peoples and movements for justice. Chatterji has worked with land rights and public policy connected to public lands reform in India, addressing issues of indigenous land rights and cultural survival, community governance, and grassroots resistance as mediated by class, ethnicity and religion, and migration, displacement and statelessness. She is currently working on issues of Hindu majoritarianism and nationalism, and social and gendered violence in Orissa, India, and on issues of militarization and states of exception, gender and identity, Islamphobia, religionization, and self-determination in Indian-administered Kashmir. Chatterji also works with issues of hyper-nationalism, diaspora, and identity politics in the United States.

Influence and Commitments
Angana Chatterji was raised in communally tense Narkeldanga and Rajabazar in Calcutta in the late 1960s and 1970s. Raised by mixed caste parents, grandmothers, and Muslim and Catholic aunts, Chatterji is the daughter of Anubha Sengupta Chatterji and Bhola Chatterji. Bhola Chatterji (1922-1992) was a socialist freedom fighter against British colonialism and an intellectual. Chatterji left Calcutta for Delhi in 1984 and then to the United States in the 1990s. Her life-partner is Richard Shapiro of the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at CIIS.

Chatterji lives and works both in India and San Francisco. She maintains her Indian citizenship and is a permanent resident of the United States. Chatterji holds a B.A. and an M.A. in Political Science, and a Ph.D. in the Humanities, and is multilingual. Chatterji's thinking is immersed in the works of Michel Foucault, Karl Marx, Edward Said, the Subaltern Studies Collective, Postcolonial Studies, the Frankfurt School, Third World and Working-class Feminisms, and self-determination, and indigenous struggles.

Angana Chatterji's work is characterized by broad, detailed scholarship that combines sophisticated social analysis with real commitments to social action. Multiple constituencies and communities of practice are impacted from the diversity of social processes and forms of expression in which Chatterji engages the struggles and possibilities of the present. She is active and concerned with the major issues of our times. Her work reflects the values of rigorous scholarship as it combines research and advocacy, working closely with varied stakeholders, including activists, academics, human rights defenders, lawyers, artists, and others across a broad range of local and international groups and institutions. Her prolific integration of scholarship, research, and citizenship enable new capacities to think and form complex alliances. Her scholarship enables and reflects social processes that facilitate creative intervention in the social world.

Postcolonial Anthropology at California Institute of Integral Studies
Since 1999, with Richard Shapiro, Chatterji worked to re-envision the Anthropology Graduate Department at CIIS to create a new academic center in postcolonial anthropology, rigorous in prioritizing issues of social and ecological justice in the context of a multicultural world.

Chatterji's teachings encompass subaltern historiography, critical social thought, experimental methodologies including genealogy and archaeology and applied participatory research, cross-cultural issues in social and environmental justice, globalization and development, and nation-states, biopolitics, and nationalisms. Her teaching and scholarship are framed by issues of class, gender, race, religion, and sexuality as they are formed by history and place.

After 9/11, Chatterji convened a series of public peace and justice panel discussions at CIIS. Chatterji served as the Director of Research, Asia Forest Network, initially housed at the University of California, Berkeley, and was involved in coordinating Network groups with Mark Poffenberger, in member countries in South and Southeast Asia. From 1989-97. She worked with policy and advocacy research, including with the Indian Social Institute and Planning Commission of India, before joining, in 1997, the faculty at California Institute of Integral Studies.

Works
In March 2009, based on six and a half years of intensive collaborative and theoretical research, Chatterji published a seminal study on Hindu nationalism entitled, Violent Gods: Hindu Nationalism in India's Present; Narratives from Orissa. The first such compendium on Orissa, the book is an erudite and elegiac exploration of Hindu nationalism in India today, published by Three Essays Collective. Violent Gods documents Hindu majoritarian and nationalist mobilizations against Christians, Muslims, Adivasis and Dalits in Orissa, set within the larger context of Hindu majoritarianism and the failures of the Indian state. It is a compelling and incisive genealogy of Hindu nationalism as "an authoritarian movement manifest throughout culture, polity, and economy, religion and law, class and caste, on gender, body, land, and memory". The text was met with critical acclaim.

Chatterji's list of publications include various research monographs, reports, and books. In 1990, she co-published her work on immigrant women's rights in Delhi slums and resettlement colonies. In 1996, based on extensive and participatory research on indigenous and Dalit land rights issues and caste inequities, she published Community Forest Management in Arabari: Understanding Socioeconomic and Subsistence Issues (1996). She co-edited a special issue of Cultural Dynamics, a Sage Journal with Lubna Nazir Chaudhury, entitled, 'Gendered Violence in South Asia: Nation and Community in The Postcolonial Present' (2004, Volume 16, 2/3). In 2005, she co-edited Dark Leaves of the Present with Shabnam Hashmi, a book for the public-at-large. Her present writings include two forthcoming titles, Land and Justice: The Struggle for Cultural Survival, and a co-edited volume, Contesting Nation: Gendered Violence in South Asia; Notes on the Postcolonial Present.

Land Struggles
In 1989, Chatterji became involved with the work of the Narmada Bachao Andolan, Save the Narmada Movement, which was protesting the building of a series of thousands of dams on the Narmada river in western India, which has so far resulted in the displacement and dispossession of hundreds of thousands of rural communities, disproportionately indigenous peoples. She has written on the issue  and organized or participated in actions in solidarity with dam-affected peoples, such as visits to the Narmada, one of which included harassment from the Gujarat police, and a three-day fast in front of the World Bank in Washington D.C. in 2004. In 2004 she and Harsh Mander led an inquiry commission on the experiences and struggles of persons affected by the Indira Sagar dam, one of the 30 mega-dams on the Narmada.

Following work in Delhi slums (1989-90), Rajasthan (1990), and Arabari in Medinipur, West Bengal (1993-96), Chatterji began working in the eastern Indian state of Orissa in 1995 with communities on forest land reform and community governance of land. With Ashok Babu and Vasundhara, she worked with, and initiated, processes with village groups in Orissa for sustainable governance of local resources, in ways that support women's leadership.

Hindu Nationalism
Deeply influenced by the ethnic cleansing of Sikh communities in 1984, when she worked in relief camps, and the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, since 2002 her work has focused on the rise of Hindu nationalism in Orissa. Various predictive articles by Chatterji, including one entitled, "Orissa: A Gujarat In The making" written in November 2003, warned about the impending Hindu majoritarian violence against minority Christian groups in Orissa, largely of Dalit and Adivasi descent, and Muslims and other disenfranchised peoples.

Also in 2005 she co-convened a People's Tribunal to record testimonials on the experiences and concerns of different stata of people on the rise of the Hindu nationalist Sangh Parivar in Orissa. In this, Chatterji worked with Indian People's Tribunal on Environment and Human Rights, with Mihir Desai, Retired Chief Justice K.K. Usha of Kerala, Sudhir Pattnaik, Ram Puniyani, and Colin Gonsalves and others. In June 2005, as the People's Tribunal on Communalism in Orissa was ongoing, Sangh members disrupted the Tribunal's proceedings and threatened to rape and humiliate women members of the Tribunal. The threats and disruption received international attention, also bringing Orissa into focus. The Tribunal released a detailed report in October 2006, warning of future violence. The Government of Orissa and the Government of India failed to response to the concerns raised by the Tribunal's report.

In December 2007, Hindu supremacist groups targeted and brutalized Christian Dalit groups in Orissa. Chatterji testified to the Panigrahi Commission on the Kandhamal violence of 2007, and warned of further violence. She asked that Hindu supremacist groups, such as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Bajrang Dal, and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad be investigated for their actions seeking to convert India into a Hindu state. In August 2008, once again, Hindu militant/Sangh-incited violence broke out in Orissa, this time gigantic in scale. Chatterji wrote to inform the public and raise questions of accountability. In December 2008 she testified before a U.S. Congressional Taskforce on International Religious Freedom regarding the 2008 anti-Christian violence in Orissa, and submitted recommentations to the taskforce shortly after.

In March 2009, she published Violent Gods which exhaustively documents the last decade of Hindu nationalism's brutality in Orissa, including the violence of 2007 and 2008. Commenting on the book, K.N. Panikkar has written: "Prof. Angana Chatterji's study of the communal situation in India stands apart from the existing literature on the subject, both in terms of empirical details and analytical rigour. The extensive fieldwork she has undertaken in Orissa exposes the inhuman and brutal interventions of Hindu communalism and its possible implications for the future. This is by far the most outstanding work on the subject."

Diasporic Hindu Nationalism in the USA
In 2002, Chatterji worked with the Campaign to Stop Funding Hate in the production of a report on the funding of Sangh Parivar service organizations in India by Maryland-based India Development and Relief Fund. In 2005, with activists, academics, and other concerned citizens, she helped form and worked with the Coalition Against Genocide to raise public awareness and protest the visit of Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi to the United States as an honored guest. She co-authored the report, "Genocide in Gujarat The Sangh Parivar, Narendra Modi, and the Government of Gujarat". The Coalition Against Genocide's work led to the barring of Chief Minister Narendra Modi to the United States. Modi is now under investigation for complicity in anti-Muslim violence in 2002 The Coalition was subject to much public targeting, and an anti-Chatterji online petition to the President and Board of Trustees of CIIS appeared.

In her work with Hindu nationalism, Chatterji's work has triggered strong responses from the Sangh and from other Sangh supporters in India and the U.S. Chatterji has lived with threats from Hindu supremacists and militants, including death threats, cyber and physical. Her movements have been monitored and followed. When the Bajrang Dal website was still functioning, Chatterji's home phone number and address were listed on the website's "Blacklist" as part of the "evil forces that are against the Hindu people". There is also a blog on Blogspot, last updated in 2007, describing her as an "anti-India activist".

Indian-Administered Kashmir
In 2006, Chatterji began working with civil society institutions and local communities in Indian-administered Kashmir, at the invitation of Advocate Parvez Imroz. Imroz is a human rights lawyer and co-founder and President of Jammu & Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS) and the Association for Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) (which he co-founded with Ms. Parveena Ahangar in 1994, and of which he is a Patron). In April 2008, Chatterji and Imroz co-founded and co-convened the International People's Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in the intensively militarized conflict zone of Indian-Administered Kashmir. The Tribunal's stated mandate is to document the mass graves, torture, extrajudicial killings, fake-encounter deaths, draconian laws, disappearances, the condition of 'half-widows', gendered and sexualized violence perpetrated on Kashmiri people since 1989. The Tribunal also proposed to internationalize these issues, many of which remain hidden from the global arena. Chatterji and Imroz were joined by Gautam Navlakha, Zahir-Ud-Din, Mihir Desai, and Khurram Parvez. The Tribunal also sought to document the state of juvenile justice, prisoner rights, the use of landmines, illegal detentions, and minority issues. Based on research, the Tribunal's seeks to analyze the conditions in Kashmir wrought by Indian military occupation and the subjugation of movements for self-determination, as well as the cycles of violence they produced, including and the earlier armed militancy of 1990s until 2007.

In June 2008, Chatterji and Imroz were harassed, intimidated, and targeted by the security forces. On June 30, 2008, Imroz and his family were targeted, reportedly by state forces, and a grenade hurled at his home. In July of the same year, she published on the realities of mass graves in Indian-administered Kashmir. Chatterji was stopped at the airport in Delhi en route to San Francisco. In July 2008, Chatterji and Imroz were invited to testify to the Human Rights Subcommittee of the European Parliament to testify on the realities of mass graves in Indian-administered Kashmir.

Chatterji was legally charged by the Kashmir Police with inciting and acting against the state for her work on mass graves. In July 2008, Chatterji and Imroz were invited by the Human Rights Subcommittee of the European Parliament to testify on the realities of mass graves in Indian-administered Kashmir.

More information on the Tribunal can be found in MTV-Iggy's media public-awareness campaign on Kashmir of April 2009. Chatterji is featured in five videos, describing the work of the Tribunal, and the documentation of militarized realities and Kashmiris' struggles for dignity and self-determination. The MTV-Iggy site also features two videos describing the work of the Tribunal.

As an economic blockade against Indian-administered Kashmir was becoming a humanitarian crisis in August 2008, Chatterji led a group of faculty, activists, and intellectuals in sending a letter of appeal to the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

In September 2008, as state violence continued against non-violent protesters in Kashmir, Chatterji submitted a collaboratively researched letter to the Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Killings, Summary or Arbitrary Executions, Dr. Philip Alston, a dossier documenting a "list of 51/52 civilians reportedly killed by Indian military and paramilitary forces; and a list of reported attacks on medical facilities, personnel, and vehicles." In February 2009, the Tribunal sent a memorandum to the new Chief Minister, Omar Abdullah, asking for the state government's attentiveness to a series of concerns raised by the people of Kashmir, including: disappearances, fake encounter killings, torture, gendered violence, the rights of former militants, landmines, etc.

The rape and killing of two women, Asiya Jan and Neelofar Jan, in Shopian again triggered non-violent protests and actions from May to July 2009. The Tribunal was invited to speak with the family of the women and community leadership, and released its report on July 19th, contextualizing the deaths within a highly militarized society and describing the state failures to secure justice for the women, the family, and the community.

On November 12, 2009, Harvard University's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy launched the Kashmir Initiative, a series of speaking events seeking to ensure that "the voice of Kashmiris who have suffered internal conflict and human rights abuses... not be lost in the cacophony of realpolitik". Chatterji was a featured speaker at the first panel.

Commitment to Justice
Chatterji's work organizing Tribunals for Social Justice and Human Rights in Orissa, in eastern India, and Indian-administered Kashmir evidences the power and relevance of her labor. She stands with subaltern constituencies and their allies to ask that dignity, difference, freedom, and life be active commitments in the organization of culture, economy, and polity. These commitments have brought her into confrontation with state forces and Hindu nationalist extremists and their supporters, putting her safety and well-being at risk. Hindu extremists have threatened her with rape and public violence, while state forces target and harass her and her colleagues in Kashmir. She receives a steady stream of hate e-mails and threatening phone calls in relation to her work, some anonymous, some not, while supporters of Hindu nationalism have attempted to restrict her academic freedom through petitioning and calling the administration at CIIS.

Her work as scholar/citizen insists that it is our ethical obligation to actualize these commitments and that we can only assess our 'progress' in these matters through listening to those most disenfranchised, demonized, and debased by current global and local structures. Those voices most distant from dominant concerns, made mute through 'business as usual', hold center stage in her work and life. As India seeks its place among the powerful and wealthy, Chatterji points to the costs involved in embracing the current order of things, as nations devour bodies, peoples, dreams, imaginations, practices, and histories without justice, and without time for remorse, reflection, grief, and mourning.