“Malini Sur’s prose is always clear and often lyrical. Searing insights from many years of indefatigable and intrepid research shine through as Jungle Passports makes contributions to the study of gender, development, human-animal relations, kinship, ethnic strife, and solidarity. Sur shows the enactment of nation-states as tenuous yet brutal entities in the borderlands of South Asia. Her work offers valuable lessons for understanding such phenomena anywhere in the world.”

Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan, Yale University

“Jungle Passports is a wonderful book, combining theoretical sophistication with ethnographic richness. While a lot has been written on borders and borderlands lately, Malini Sur offers novel insights. She is also a great storyteller and writer.”

Bengt G. Karlsson, Stockholm University

“Written in an engaging style, Jungle Passports is a multifaceted work that will have a far-reaching impact. Jungle Passports makes multiple interventions in South Asian Studies, Northeast Indian Studies, borderland studies, multispecies ethnography, the anthropology of bureaucracy and citizenship and several other knowledge-fields. But what is especially commendable about Sur’s book is the close attention to the phenomenology of the body in border spaces, and more importantly, the empathy and humanity with which she narrates the travails of unlettered women like Nehar Bibi who struggle to prove their political identity under cruel citizenship regimes.”

Amit R. Baishya, University of Oklahoma for Feminist Anthropology

“A perspective “from below” on borders, one that attends to the lives of borderlanders, and not just a political vision from a distance—seeing borders as a site of threat, needing control, or conversely as a site of agency-less, innocent victims of state repression—must attend to these generative geographies, ways of life, and forms of expression. Thoughtful accounts of lived experiences of borderlanders like Jungle Passports, then, crucially resist the dehumanization, the political iconization, of borders.”

Josiah Heyman is Professor of Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin for Borderlines

Transnational Flows and Permissive Polities: Ethnographies of Human Mobility in Asia
Freedom from Fear, Freedom from Want: Rethinking Security in Bangladesh
2017. “Constructing Asia: An Introduction,” City Vol 21, No 5, pp 580-586 with Eli Elinoff and Brenda Yeoh.
2020.“Keeping Cities in Motion: Repair and Maintenance in Urban South Asia,” The Economic and Political Weekly, Review of Urban Affairs (in press, with Nausheen Anwar).