Angana P. Chatterji

Bio

Angana P. Chatterji, PhD, is a research fellow with the Human Rights Center. She is a Research Anthropologist and Founding Chair, Political Conflict, Gender and People’s Rights Initiative, at the Center for Race and Gender at University of California, Berkeley. A cultural anthropologist and interdisciplinary scholar of South Asia, Chatterji’s work since 1989 spans issues of democracy, political violence, gender, religion, caste, cultural survival, land rights, law, and nationalism. She leads the creation of the Berkeley-Stanford Archive on Legacies of Conflict in South Asia. She is affiliated with the Institute for South Asia Studies at Berkeley, and is a Research Fellow at the Center for Human Rights and International Justice, Stanford University. Her formative work with colleagues in Indian-administered Kashmir includes investigations into enforced disappearances, extrajudicial executions, and unknown and mass graves. Chatterji has served on human rights commissions and offered expert testimony at the United Nations, European Parliament, United Kingdom Parliament, and United States Congress, and has been variously acknowledged and awarded for her work. Following expert testimony at the Hearing on Human Rights in South Asia at the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee On Asia, the Pacific, and Nonproliferation in October 2019, she received a Certificate of Special Congressional Recognition in January 2020. Her sole and co-authored books include: Breaking Worlds: Religion, Law, and Nationalism in Majoritarian India (2021); Majoritarian State: How Hindu Nationalism is Changing India (2019); Conflicted Democracies and Gendered Violence: The Right to Heal (2016); Contesting Nation: Gendered Violence in South Asia, Notes on the Postcolonial Present (2012); Kashmir: The Case for Freedom (2011); Violent Gods: Hindu Nationalism in India’s Present, Narratives from Orissa (2009); and the reports: Access to Justice for Women: India’s Response to Sexual Violence in Conflict and Social Upheaval; and BURIED EVIDENCE: Unknown, Unmarked and Mass Graves in Kashmir.

Email: achatterji@berkeley.edu