Staging friendship: towards an anthropology of everyday geopolitics in South Asia

This article studies Indian‐Bangladeshi friendship ethnographically, as a contested political imaginary, claim, and relation, from the vantage of its shared borderlands. Staging friendship, I show, is a geopolitical project that engages equally the highest echelons of the Indian and Bangladeshi states and ordinary residents of its marginalized borderlands. In conversation with the anthropological and interdisciplinary scholarship on friendship and the political aesthetics of nationalism, I develop an ethnographic frame to study friendship in and as geopolitics. Zooming in on friendship as political aesthetic and ethical practice allows us to grapple with the hegemonies and hierarchies, the elasticity and the power of such histories, and the everyday practices that constitute the geopolitical as a lively horizon. Moving beyond a traditional conception of geopolitics, this article is an invitation to imagine instead a geopolitics of friendship that centres and takes seriously the difficult work of living solidarity through differences, that many communities are not only engaged in, not as occasional, but as everyday acts of making a liveable world.