South Asia and the Mobilities Turn
Over the past two decades, “mobilities” has become a key theoretical and empirical concept across the social sciences and humanities. Our new book, South Asia on the Move: Mobilities, Mobilizations, Maneuvers, highlights the value of applying a mobilities perspective to South Asia and, conversely, of de-centering extant mobilities literature through the proliferation of South Asian perspectives and case studies. Comprising ethnographic and historical chapters across multiple locations, the volume takes an expansive view on questions of movement and its role in social life.
Before sketching some of the journeys explored within the book, it is worth noting the long journey that finally brought South Asia on the Move to print since its initial inception nearly ten years ago. In 2014, I was a PhD student at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Tarini Bedi was a crucial member of my dissertation committee. As I prepared for my preliminary exams, Tarini agreed to supervise an independent study on the topic of mobilities, enabling us to read some of the key texts in the still-blossoming scholarship. Mobilities literature draws on diverse antecedents in transport geography, urban studies, human geography, science and technology studies, anthropology, and more. However, the emergence of a veritable “mobilities turn” in social theory – a “new mobilities paradigm,” as it was sometimes called – began around 2006, when several articles sketched the contours of the emerging framework.1 Coupled with the inaugural issue of the journal Mobilities, these sources set the tone for two decades of future research.
At its core, the mobilities paradigm highlights the ubiquity of movements at multiple scales, demonstrating the revelatory insights that can emerge when we challenge traditional philosophical assumptions of fixity and stability, or what the anthropologist Liisa Malkki dubbed a “sedentarist metaphysics.”2 By the time Tarini Bedi and I had begun reading together for my independent study, scholars from a wide array of disciplines had joined the mobilities trend, applying a mobilities perspective to everything from tourism to migrant labor, from placemaking to dance choreography. Notwithstanding its diverse applications, mobilities work was spearheaded by a group of geographers and sociologists working in the United Kingdom, Northern/Western Europe, and (to a lesser extent) the United States. Despite earnest calls by many of those same scholars for research on and from other regions, the early years of mobilities scholarship remained dominated by Western/Northern case studies and perspectives. The relative under-emphasis of the Global South called for intervention, and this volume represents one such intervention.
Fig. 2: Book cover of South Asia on the Move (IIAS/Amsterdam University Press, 2025).
Back in 2014, we discussed these issues at length throughout our independent study. Mobilities literature suggested a new suite of theoretical and methodological tools for understanding social life, and Tarini and I found that toolkit extraordinarily useful in our respective research projects. For my own work, mobilities would offer a concrete approach to the dynamism and incessant transformation of my field site, the cosmopolitan neighborhood of Thamel in Kathmandu. With some key exceptions, most people experience Thamel as a space of transience, flux, and liminality. Mobilities helped me capture that atmosphere, both conceptually and ethnographically.
At the same time, as anthropologists, both Tarini and I felt it was crucial to expand the geographical and cultural horizons of mobilities research. Working in India and Nepal, respectively, we gravitated towards an exploration of South Asian mobilities in particular. At one level, research from different parts of the world enriches scholarship, and a more diverse literature thus offers a value in and of itself. On another level, however, the focus on South Asian mobilities encompasses far more than encouraging representation for its own sake. It provokes a radical decentering of scholarly assumptions, helping to mitigate against a host of cultural and intellectual biases. As I wrote in the introductory essay to the volume: “An excessive focus on Western/Northern mobilities not only yields explanations of questionable utility and applicability to the rest of the world. It also tends to position Western experiences, concepts, and formations as universal, despite being, in fact, particular and situated.” 3
The genesis of this book can be traced to those conversations during our independent study. The year following our initial reading group, Tarini emailed me to inquire about producing a book on the topic of South Asian mobilities. We traded emails back and forth for some time before deciding to pursue an edited volume. Many of the contributors to the final book were on our minds from the very beginning, whereas several others came aboard only in subsequent years. We wanted to approach the theme with the broadest possible scope. “Mobilities” for us included everything from mediated photographs to porous borders, from disabled bodies to Instagram imaginaries, from immigrant entrepreneurs in the United States to Western tourists in Kathmandu. The book tries to showcase the breadth of mobilities research on the subcontinent, not just as a collection of individual research projects, but also as a general shift in perspective towards the many ways in which movements of all kinds continue to re-shape South Asia and its place on the global map.
The book took shape in fits and starts over the course of many years, and it was always a team effort. Tarini and I alternated at the helm, trading duties and meeting periodically to check in about progress. By 2020, after I had completed my PhD and Tarini had earned tenure at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the steady progression of the book accelerated once again. We organized the table of contents, solicited one final contribution, and began finalizing the text.
The resulting manuscript included eight body chapters on diverse themes and topics. Malini Sur’s chapter examines the lives and temporalities of married women in ecologically shifting borderlands between India and Bangladesh (Chapter 2). In Chapter 3, Rashmi Sadana draws on her work about the Delhi Metro to illuminate the role of a safehouse for intercaste couples fleeing ostracization and family violence for their forbidden romances. Following this, daniel dillon explores ethnic tensions in postwar Sri Lanka through a careful exploration of driving and differential policing in Jaffna (Chapter 4). In Chapter 5, Mark Liechty links temporality and infrastructure to historicize the emergence, development, and transformation of tourism in Nepal. Picking up the key postcolonial theme of Orientalist imaginaries, Rumya S. Putcha (Chapter 6) explores the nexus of media representations and Instagram influencers that fuel and reflect Western fantasies of South Asia as a region of spiritual salvation. Following this, Andrew Nelson brings us to the gas stations of North Texas in the United States (Chapter 7). Focusing especially on those owned and operated by Nepalis, who often purchased them from previous Indian owners, the chapter demonstrates the nuanced labor hierarchies that emerge between different South Asian diasporas in the United States. The final two chapters explore medical (im)mobilities through two very different case studies. In Chapter 8, Sarah Pinto digs into the colonial archives of psychiatry in India to theorize the role of and response to various modes of medical immobility, from temporary paralysis to trance-like states. Finally, Michele Friedner and James Staples write about the ways that disabled people move through contemporary India, especially highlighting how disability can sometimes enable the emergence of new modes of mobility, solidarity, and opportunity.
In the Afterword to the volume, co-editor Tarini Bedi sketches the pedagogical dimension to mobilities. In many ways, her essay returns to the genesis of the book itself – that is, how the classroom can and should foster engagement with mobilities. Notably, this does not only entail reviewing the scholarly literature, as she and I did together during our reading sessions in 2014. Rather, Tarini lays out a suite of pedagogical, experiential resources that she has utilized in her own courses from Chicago to Heidelberg. These include a list of multimedia teaching resources as well as several experiential exercises (e.g., algorithmic walks, mobility journals).
After some much-appreciated final editorial assistance from Amna Pathan, who served as Tarini’s research assistant at Heidelberg University in 2022, we submitted the completed manuscript to Amsterdam University Press, and the volume proceeded relatively swiftly to publication from there. In addition to all of the contributors to the volume, we would like to extend sincere gratitude to Mary Lynn van Dijk, the Publications Officer at IIAS, who shepherded the project since our initial proposal and offered key logistical and editorial assistance. Many others deserve our thanks as well, especially Inge Klompmakers (Commissioning Editor at AUP), Jasmijn Zondervan (Production Editor at AUP), Tak-Wing Ngo (“Global Asia” Series Editor), as well as the peer reviewers, copyeditors, and designers who worked to improve and sharpen the final book.
This book was the outcome of an extended conversation. That conversation began between Tarini and myself when I was a pre-fieldwork PhD student. It continued in subsequent years, as we both worked on our respective ethnographic research projects and, simultaneously, as we solicited contributions from other mobilities scholars in our networks. At the same time, South Asia on the Move does not represent the culmination of that conversation, but rather a dramatic extension of it. As I note in the volume’s introduction, we hope that the book inspires further interest in South Asian mobilities and, indeed, in mobilities research beyond the Global North more generally.
Benjamin Linder is Coordinator for Public and Engaged Scholarship at IIAS. Email: b.linder@iias.nl
This Open Access title can be downloaded using the link on: South Asia on the Move | Amsterdam University Press