Ranabir Samaddar is currently the Director of the Peace Studies Programme at the South Asia Forum for Human Rights, Kathmandu. Earlier he was a professor of South Asian Studies in the Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies, Calcutta. A well-known scholar of South Asian politics, he is the author of a three volume study of nationalism in South Asia – A Biography of the Indian Nation (2001), The Marginal Nation: Transborder Migration from Bangladesh to West Bengal (1999), and Whose Asia is it Anyway? Region and the Nation in South Asia (1996). He has also written extensively on the partition of Bengal.