What does it mean to migrate to a settler colonial state while carrying the hierarchies of caste and the wounds of colonialism with you?
CAMBRIDGE: How are the struggles against settler colonialism in Palestine, Turtle Island, Kashmir, and the Chittagong Hill Tracts connected? And how is our liberation intertwined? These were guiding questions for a book talk and panel discussion, “Indians on Indian Lands,” hosted by the Boston South Asian Coalition on 22 November, 2025 at the Cambridge Community Center.
It featured presentations, a moderated conversation, and an audience Q&A with Nishant Upadhyay, an associate professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Nafisa Nipun Tanjeem, an associate professor in the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at Worcester State University, and Saleh A., an organizer with the Palestine Youth Movement.
Bridging academic research and community activism, the event was structured around questions and themes raised by Upadhyay’s new book, Indians on Indian Lands: Intersections of Race, Caste, and Indigeneity, published in October 2024 by the University of Illinois Press.
Upadhyay’s book is a study of the dominant caste Indian diaspora in Canada, and theorizes the Indian diaspora’s complicity in the ongoing colonization of Indigenous peoples by the Canadian state. It deals with the racialized immigration of Southasians as laborers to Canada, the oppressive ideas around caste and gender they bring with them, as well as the potential of various kinds of intimacies between Southasians and Indigenous people, including gendered and class solidarity and experiences of sexual intimacy.
Professor Nafisa Nipun Tanjeem explains how women participated during the 2024 student uprising in Bangladesh. Photo credit: BSAC 
Saleh A. begins his presentation on the role of development in the colonial occupation of Palestine. Photo credit: BSAC 
The panelists gather for a moderated discussion and audience Q&A.
As a part of their research, Upadhyay interviewed engineers who work in the oil industry in Fort McMurray, Alberta; retired lumber and cannery workers in Vancouver, British Columbia; and Indigenous solidarity activists in Toronto, Ontario.
Upadhyay kicked off the event by disrupting the idea of Canada as a multicultural liberal nation-state. Instead, they highlighted the urgency to understand Canada as a colonial state that has dispossessed and displaced Indigenous peoples across the country since its inception. Upadhyay argued that through their participation in the Canadian state and economy, the Indian diaspora and other immigrant communities become invariably complicit in these colonial processes. When Indians move to Canada–and other settler colonial states like the US, Australia, and New Zealand–in pursuit of better education and career opportunities, their affiliation with these nation-states becomes a way to normalize colonization.
In their talk, Upadhyay offered concrete examples of the Indian diaspora’s involvement in the Canadian settler colonial project through their labor, and particularly the way that ideas around caste are imported into the Canadian context. They described how dominant caste Indians use caste-coded language to perpetuate racism against Indigenous peoples.
For instance, the Indian engineers used similar markers of backwardness to describe Adivasi peoples in India and Indigenous peoples in Canada. The Indian diaspora also make themselves the victims of reservation and positive affirmation policies in India and Canada, arguing that they are harder workers and have more social merit when compared to Indigenous people in Canada and Dalit, Bahujan, and Adivasi communities in India. Upadhyay ended their talk by highlighting the urgency for an anti-caste and anti-colonial politics within the Indian diaspora to resist the fascism in India and North America.
Tanjeem picked up on issues of gender and sexuality in her presentation on the role of cis and transgender women organizers during the July uprising in Bangladesh. Tanjeem highlighted these women’s successful participation in protests and direct action, and their work caring for the wounded and dead. She also noted important failures on the part of the women organizers in the wake of the uprising to account for their class privileges and their complicity in the oppression of Indigenous Bangladeshi women.
Finally, Saleh spoke to us about settler colonialism, focusing on how economic and infrastructural development have been used to dispossess Palestinians of their land for over a century, from British colonial rule in the early twentieth century to Zionist and American policies today. Saleh focused on Trump’s plans for development in a “post-war” Gaza and contextualized this plan within the long history of disguising the Zionist occupation in the name of development.
Saleh provided examples from Herzl’s plans for economic isolation of Palestinians pre-1948, to the facade of the Palestine Electric Company, to the settling of Rawabi as the first planned city in Palestine. All these development projects, Saleh illustrated, have served the interests of the colonizer. Trump’s current plan of reconstruction, which includes AI smart grids, creating securitized and surveilled communities, “voluntary” relocation, global investment, are all continuation of the genocide and occupation veiled as development. Saleh ended the talk by highlighting the efforts of the Boston based coalition fighting the genocide. The local organizing makes clear connections between the liberation of Palestine and social justice organizing in Boston.
The wide-ranging discussion that followed covered the role of academic research in movement spaces, particularly the work of incarcerated writers theorizing prison abolition; settler colonial violence and militarism in the Chittagong Hill Tracts in the ostensibly postcolonial state of Bangladesh; the commodification of the Palestine solidarity movement in the Global South, and the importance of going beyond ethical consumerist actions and in favor of more uncomfortable, challenging, and radical organizing; the current state of the Indian left; and the importance of liberating Palestinians, Indigenous people, and those persecuted by Islamophobia and casteism from their oppression and liberating their oppressors from the ideologies and material privileges of colonialism.
In all, “Indians on Indian Lands” was an illuminating and generative event. The presentations and conversations should move us to further critical materialist study and action.
— BSAC, the Boston South Asian Coalition is an inter-generational South Asian-led organizing collective in unceded Wampanoag territory (Boston), and a Sapan Founding Charter endorser.
Lead Image: Prof. Nishant Upadhyay discusses the key interventions of their book, Indians on Indian Lands (2024). Photo credit: BSAC
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