Srishtee largely works within the ambit of borderlands and migration and has completed her PhD research on the same from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences. As a sociologist, she is interested in the lifeworlds of borderland communities and how ‘border management’ encompasses their aspirations. Additionally, she aims to explore which specific legacies of Partition continue to affect the community as well as understand cross-border migrant emplacement within the intertwined networks of political and cultural power. Read our Q&A with Srishtee!
Srishtee used to be an Assistant Professor at Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, where she was teaching and mentoring research for Master’s students. At Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration, Mussoorie – a civil service training institute, she completed a monograph for IAS officers to be posted at border districts of India.
During her PhD, she was a CSDS fellow and an Erasmus plus fellow at the University of Tampere, Finland conducting doctoral research with Pakistani-Hindu refugees at the western frontiers of India and Pakistan. She undertook multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Jaisalmer and Jodhpur, Rajasthan and Lahore, Pakistan. She has steered independent and collaborative research for initiating small-town narratives on Partition beginning in Dehradun, Uttarakhand.
From 2022-2023, Srishtee was Mittal Institute’s India Fellow in New Delhi. During the fellowship, her focus was to understand how ‘borderlanders’ perceive the frontiers as well as the often abstract concepts of state power and the nation. What remains of the ‘idea of home’, notions of ‘undivided homeland’ and liminal landscapes of Partition 1947. Srishtee was mentored by Professor Jennifer Leaning.
Srishtee is now an Associate with the Mittal Institute. Her research focuses on the interplay of sovereignty, borderlands, and national identity in the wake of the 1947 partition of India, with a particular focus on Rajasthan.
