Whose Border Is It Anyway?: Everyday Stories from India's Borders

About the Lecture

When we picture India's borders, we picture conflict, army men, terrorists. Where are the people who actually live there?

For them, negotiating the border is a Tuesday. It shapes what they eat, who they marry, where they work, which language they slip into, and what they can and cannot carry home.

Filmmaker Samarth Mahajan has spent years making films in these places, and this session is a kaleidoscopic journey into India's deepest recesses — through images, video, anecdote and song. We meet people who deal with borders in their own particular ways, and who manage to come out of the darkest possibilities with lightness, humour and hope. Along the way: migration, kinship, environment, and identities that refuse to sit still.

The invitation is to look past the media's obsession with "Us vs Them", towards something more complicated and more accurate — a world of "Us and Them".

The session explores:

What daily life actually looks like when a border runs through it
Migration, kinship and fluid identity at India's margins
How humour and hope survive in places we only hear about during conflict
Why "Us vs Them" is a poor description of the borderlands — and what replaces it
About the Speaker
Samarth Mahajan is a Mumbai-based filmmaker with a particular interest in narratives from India's border areas. His work includes two national award-winning documentaries: Borderlands (2021), which explores lives defined by India's borders, and The Unreserved (2017), which captures stories from the general compartments of Indian Railways. His films have screened across six continents to favourable reviews and received broadcast and theatrical releases in India.

IIT Kharagpur has recognised him as a Young Alumni Achiever. His other passion is organising food walks through the crowded streets of Old Delhi, South Mumbai and Amritsar, and he is currently wrapping his debut fiction short.

About unLecture

unLecture brings experts out of classrooms and into cafés, bars and neighbourhood spaces across Delhi. Created by three friends from college who wanted learning to feel warm, social and alive — unLecture turns an otherwise ordinary evening into a conversation you may think about long after it ends.