Annual Conference on South Asia

Session: Symposium - Full Day
Room: Off-Site
Floor: Off-Site

The Harappan or Indus Valley script has been a topic of archaeological inquiry since its discovery and publication in the mid to late 19th century. The nature of the script, representing an unknown language with unknown meaning, has perpetuated scholarly interest in the writing system, particularly for would-be decipherers. However, decipherment attempts to date cannot be conclusively accepted or rejected due to the paucity of evidence resulting from lack of bilingual texts, brevity of inscriptions and indeterminate nature of the language being represented. Rather than treading the well worn decipherment route, an alternate approach has the potential to lead to new discoveries. Several scholars have reiterated that consideration of contexts and the media of Harappan inscriptions is a requisite for studies into the script. Such approaches have the potential to shed additional light on the nature of the script that has not been feasible in script-based studies alone. Like all material culture, the Indus inscriptions were situated within a wider sociocultural context which imbued them with meaning through interaction with manufacturers and users. Critical examination of the contexts in which these inscriptions were found will enable links between inscribed artefacts, their use and relationships with other aspects of Harappan material culture to be identified and explored. This is the basis of my doctoral study, which involves detailed study of inscribed Indus objects and published excavation reports from key Harappan sites, including Harappa, Mohenjo-daro and smaller settlements. Quantitative analysis of spatial distribution and relationships between inscribed and uninscribed artefacts, considering variables including material, object type, and iconography, will elucidate patterns that facilitate further insights into the quandary of the Indus script.

Session: Symposium - Full Day
Room: Conference Room 1
Floor: Floor 2

The Nepal Study Center (NSC) at the University of New Mexico, its members and affiliated scholars request letting us organize the Annual Himalayan Policy Research Conference, the 15th in our series at the pre-conference venue of the University of Wisconsin's 49th Annual Conference on South Asia (October 15-20, 2020). We have had grand successes over the years in providing this platform to attract scholars from all over the world. The purpose of the event continues to be to promote scholarly interactions among the scholars with policy research interest on the Himalayan region and the countries in South Asia. We have had highly successful conferences in the past - 2006 through 2019 - at your venue where scholars came to participate from several countries such as the US, Canada, Europe, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal, and Japan. We even did a live internet broadcast of the event in 2010. The abstracts, proceedings, feedback from participants, and photos from our previous conferences are available at the following website: http://nepalstudycenter.unm.edu/SeminarsWorkshopsConferences/HPRC_Conferences/HPRC_C onferecesMainHomePage.html The main theme of the Himalayan Policy Research Conference (HPRC) draws from the fields of development, democracy, governance, and environment. We consider these fields broadly as encompassing socio-economic growth (aggregate or sectoral), political transition, institutional development, governance and administrative reform, poverty and income distribution, education and health, regional development, gender and ethnicity, trade and remittances, aid and foreign direct investment, resource and environmental management, public-private partnership in technology and investment, child labor, and many other issues. The papers are expected to have important implications for public policy in one or more countries of the Himalayan region and South Asia.

Session: Symposium - Full Day
Room: Conference Room 3
Floor: Floor 2

We are writing to propose a nine hour practical workshop on South Asian translation to take place in three hour sessions over three days. The aim of this workshop is for participants and attendees to collaborate on translating and discussing South Asian literature, texts and culture. The workshop will follow the format of Princeton’s South Asia Translation Workshop, which has become a thriving forum for practicing translation from South Asian languages. Each workshop session will focus on a pre-circulated 20th century text, the first in Hindi, the second in Urdu and the third in Bengali. Five roundtable participants will circulate their translations in advance of each session for distribution to other participants and members of the audience. On the day of each workshop, one participant will introduce the selected text for 10 minutes. After this, each member of the roundtable will read their translation and provide a short comment for 10 minutes. Then the floor will be opened for an hour of discussion with the audience. In the final hour of each workshop, audience members will be distributed into five breakout rooms, facilitated by roundtable participants. Audience members will share their own translations with one another in a dynamic translation exercise. Aliya Ram and Meher Ali, PhD candidates in, respectively, Comparative Literature and History at Princeton University, and co-founders of the South Asia Translation Workshop at Princeton, will lead the sessions on Hindi and Urdu. Pinaki Bhattacharya, a translator from Bengali and a human rights activist, will be invited to lead the third workshop on Bengali. Matt Reeck, award-winning translator from Urdu and French, and Robert Phillips, translator and lecturer in Hindi and Urdu at Princeton University, will also form part of the roundtable panel.

Session: Symposium - Full Day
Room: Capitol Ballroom A
Floor: Floor 2

Our symposium seeks to situate emergent comparative and connected methods of worlding modern South Asian histories. South Asia has long been the site of scholarly efforts to resist both the reductive presumptions of global history and the naturalization of the nation-state as the primary container of historical knowledge. Postcolonial methods have taught us to distrust the universality of frameworks constructed with Europe as the archetypal referent; while at the same time insisting that South Asian cases might provide the templates for new types of global knowledge. We see in recent scholarship an opportunity to engage this tradition of both refusing and reinscribing the “global” by putting into conversation histories of South Asia that take comparative, connected, and transnational methods as their points of departure. Drawing from the work of the political theorist Adom Getachew, we invoke the decolonial framework of “worldmaking” as a possible way of reimagining how South Asian histories construct global historical scales, inform situated comparisons, and define disciplinary formations of globally-aspirant concepts. Worldmaking provides a way of holding together the agentive labor of historical actors in shaping world scales, without valorizing a type of agency removed from history, structure, and hegemonic ideas. We seek to build from the approaches outlined by Indian Ocean and Borderlands history, while also pairing the fundamentally geographic and post-nationalist frameworks of these fields with approaches that take comparison and transnationality to different ends. Our goal is to uncover the unlikely archives, cosmopolitan itineraries, and liminal historical subjects that have brought into being real, imagined, and no longer present South Asian worlds.

Session: Symposium - Full Day
Room: University A/B
Floor: Floor 2

We propose a full-day symposium to continue the Regional Bhakti Scholars Network’s nurturing of cross-regional and inter-linguistic conversations by investigating the impact of print technology on bhakti traditions during the long 19th century (roughly 1800-1930). The medium of print—both text and image—offered new possibilities for authorship, representation, and dissemination of knowledge. It conveyed information (both traditionally construed and critically formed) about bhakti groups to new configurations of literate audiences. Limited access to presses, especially when run by Christian missionary groups, privileged some voices over others. This critical period in Indian history, with its new inflows of foreign knowledge and power-knowledge disparities under colonialism, transformed in many ways how Indians perceived and talked about their earlier traditions—discussions that were frequently initiated, caught, and pursued in print. In some languages and regions, print not only brought traditional bhakti canons into publication; it contributed to the very process of canon formation itself. Yet, for as much as scholars and devotional communities today rely on printed materials as sources, the complex conditions under which they first came to be published are rarely considered. On a conceptual level, since early 20th-century scholars relied on printed materials as they theorized about bhakti generally, this medium shaped modern ideas about bhakti—including our own understandings. Across diverse languages and regions, there are many distinct and surprising stories to tell, shaped by local politics and personalities. Just as bhakti traditions differ from one another, these stories do not fit a single mold, and some question the boundaries and constitution of bhakti itself. Juxtaposing multiple histories of print and bhakti will deepen our understanding of this complex historical, textual, and discursive terrain.

Session: Symposium - Full Day
Room: Parlour Room 629
Floor: Floor 6

In South Asian studies, Sheldon Pollock’s book, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men (2006), marked a watershed moment in the field. Pollock’s study divided the history of literary production in South and Southeast Asia into two distinct periods: the first millennium, characterized by the exclusive use of Sanskrit, through which ruling elites expressed political power in their courts; and the second millennium, which witnessed the rise of vernacular languages in courtly settings. A decade and a half after Language of the Gods, our proposed symposium brings together leading junior scholars working on literature and language in South Asia in order to consider new directions in scholarship on the vernacular millennium and the framework that Pollock’s pioneering work has established. We envision the symposium as a venue for teasing out common themes and, conversely, points of divergence in practices of local literary production, by taking advantage of a new critical mass of studies conducted on literature in vernacular languages. Our symposium participants include a range of junior scholars whose work focuses on literature in Telugu, Kannada, Tamil, and Manipravalam, as well as vernacular Sanskrit in South Asia and Southeast Asia. Many of our participants integrate the theme of resistance in their papers—whether it is resistance to kingly patronage, religious authority, or the dominance of Sanskrit. While the symposium highlights the work of junior scholars in the field, we will invite senior scholars working in both Sanskrit and the vernacular to attend the session and participate in our concluding discussions. Through this symposium, we hope to begin an ongoing collaboration across junior scholars working in the field of vernacular literatures with the ultimate goal of another symposium followed by a special issue of a journal or edited volume.

Session: Symposium - Full Day
Room: Parlour Room 638
Floor: Floor 6

This symposium brings together scholars of design with those of housing to provide insights into the production of domestic space in India. “Design” is a growing field in India encompassing architecture, product design, fashion, etc. In the neoliberal era, design epitomizes an entrepreneurial ethos which recasts development as innovation (Irani 2019) – but it has deeper histories, central to colonial and nationalist projects (Mathur 2007; McGowan 2019). Those histories engage not just famous designers, but also the laborers who crucially gave ideas material form. For professionals and laborers alike, a central concern since the mid-twentieth century has been the home: its architectural form, material furnishings, and neighborhood context. Designs for homes offered an important proving ground for female architects, textile designers, international consultants, and architectural schools. Builders, plumbers, and others also brought their own ideas to buildings, shaping the results. Acknowledging these diverse contributors, we examine how design has been used to articulate novel ideals of gender, family, and community. We explore the history of housing design not through stories of iconic buildings, but through explorations of social change and market capital. Even as we rethink design history from the lens of capital, we argue for the need to rethink domestic space through materiality. We consider “the domestic” as instantiated in and shaped by material culture, from the cement used in construction to the textiles woven for furnishings. By attending to the production of material culture, we examine the home as a site of investment and profit marked by struggles over gender, labor, and cultural capital. This symposium is organized to foster cross-disciplinary discussions not possible in one panel session. To generate discussion, all papers will be pre-circulated, and discussants will provide framing. The day will end with a round-table discussion of themes, with an eye towards future publications.

Session: Symposium - Half Day, Afternoon
Room: Off-Site
Floor: Off-Site

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Session: Session 1: Friday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Off-Site
Floor: Off-Site

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Session: Session 1: Friday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Off-Site
Floor: Off-Site

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Session: Session 1: Friday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Assembly Room
Floor: Floor 1

The postcolonial policy of affirmative action through quotas for marginalized castes (ethnic groups) has helped dominant Dalit castes (Scheduled Castes) gain socio-economic mobility. These jatis (caste groups) have influenced electoral politics predominantly through formations of regional political fronts—for instance, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) for Jatavs in Uttar Pradesh (UP) and the Republican Party of India (RPI) for Mahars in Maharashtra. However, the political assertion of dominant Dalit jatis has cultivated resentment amongst numerically less significant Dalit jatis. In turn, this schism has enabled the Hindu right-wing Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) led by elite Hindu castes to co-opt non-dominant Dalit castes, especially in UP—a strategy coterminous with the growing Hinduization of Dalits in the last few decades and the right-wing authoritarian turn of Indian politics. How widespread is this pattern of intra-Dalit fragmentation on jati lines in Indian politics? What does it reflect about the Sanskritizing policies of the Hindu right-wing, in general, and the BJP, in particular? In this panel, we address these questions through original datasets on India’s Dalit Members of Legislative Assemblies (MLAs), especially jati and political dynasty backgrounds, produced as part of the Trivedi Centre for Political Data (TCPD) at Ashoka University and Sciences Po’s project, the Social Profiles of India’s National and Provincial Elected Representatives (SPINPER). Here, we present quantitative data collected through extensive fieldwork in four large states of India, i.e. Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh. We find evidence that the BJP is canvassing more candidates from non-dominant Dalit castes in recent years, leading to a higher number of legislators from non-dominant Dalit castes at the expense of dominant Dalit castes, except in Madhya Pradesh. This trend reflects the evolving and locally sensitive strategy of Hindu nationalists in accommodating Dalit politicians and challenging the Dalit-rights-oriented political parties.

Session: Session 1: Friday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Senate Room B
Floor: Floor 1

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Session: Session 1: Friday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Conference Room 2
Floor: Floor 2

Film, with its vast panoply of visual and aural delights, continues in the 21st century to be a powerful tool for shaping society across South Asia. Mainstream Hindi language films, now collectively termed Bollywood, serve as the principal site for the production of popular music and culture on the subcontinent. Independent art films and non-fiction documentaries, meanwhile, flourish in counterpoint, projecting alternative possibilities and enabling the preservation and reshaping of traditions dimmed by the bright lights of the cinematic mainstream. Focused on how film and music in film in neoliberal India have opened up new means of expressing gender identity, particularly for women and members of the LGBTQ+ community, the four papers of this panel are united in how they account for the ways in which the transnational, especially Western, aspects of film production, marketing, and viewership are likewise involved in the musical-filmic struggle against repressive, socially-entrenched traditions and norms. The opening two papers concentrate on the shattering of age-old constraints imposed on women. The first discusses how female percussionists have used documentaries, video recordings, and online media to establish their reputations and pioneer new avenues for women in Indian classical music, while the second paper interrogates the reel and real world viabilities of female agency presented in current Bollywood songs. Similarly focused on contemporary art and popular cinema and their real-life implications, the two latter papers provide nuanced analyses of the multilayered representations, respectively, of female and male same-sex relationships as expressed through the intricacies of song and dance.

Session: Session 1: Friday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Conference Room 4
Floor: Floor 2

This panel will explore how local and quotidian health practices negotiated with and were discrete from the state and state intervention, during both colonial and post-colonial periods in South Asia. As various imperial interlocutors sought to understand tropical environments, disease and native bodies, colonial medical and public health regimes emerged at intersections of Western and indigenous medical systems, colonial bureaucracy and changing notions of diseases and the body. Moving into the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, urban planning, sanitation and public health interventions became constitutive elements of colonial and then postcolonial governance. Examining health practices and governance as a form of biopower allows us to unpack how a whole host of actors responded to, or sometimes challenged, government policies, and created spaces in which to both have conversations about health and hygiene as well as resist interventions. Crucially, many of these responses were premised upon notional positions on caste, class, and religious borders and boundaries. This panel will also interrogate how these knowledge forms were produced and transmitted to and in familial, organisational and civic routes.

Session: Session 1: Friday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Capitol Ballroom A
Floor: Floor 2

This panel seeks to investigate the relationship between Pakistani literature, nationhood, and identity by bringing together established and emerging scholars working on Pakistani literature. Some of the questions this panel aims to explore include: How is Pakistan as an Islamic nation imagined through literature? What kind of discourse of an “Islamic nationhood” emerges out of Pakistani literature? What role do Pakistani literatures play in crafting or contesting a “national identity?” And how are minorities portrayed in Pakistani literature? Rajender Kaur shows how Kamila Shamsie’s fiction contests the majoritarian logic of Islamic nationalism in Pakistan while Ambreen Hai reads Mohsin Hamid’s and H. M. Naqvi’s fictions as literary responses to 9/11. Muneeza Shamsie explores the “Pakistani” identity in Pakistani anglophone literature and Zain Mian looks at the idea of the "Pakistani writer" in the work of Muhammad Hasan Askari; Mian shows how a particular conception of Pakistaniyat, Islam, and authorship emerge out of Askari’s work. Cara Cilano focuses on the portrayal on the Ahmadis in Pakistani literature and examines how fictional and non-fictional representations of the built environment inform the production and interpretation of what it means to be “Pakistani.” Mushtaq Bilal examines how the Chuhra characters in Hanif’s fiction challenges the construct of “Pak-ness” (purity), which is at the heart of the idea of Pakistan. Nasir Abbas Nayyar explores four distinct traditions of imagining the nation in the twentieth century Urdu poetry of Muhammad Iqbal, Noon Meem Rashid, Meeraji, and Majid Amjad. Sameera Abbas shows how the character of General Zia-ul-Haq in Mohammed Hanif’s novel A Case of Exploding Mangoes could be read as a baroque sovereign.

Session: Session 1: Friday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Wisconsin Ballroom
Floor: Floor 2

Family roles and the material and affective labor they entail for individual members are often explicit, widely recognized, and easily articulated within a given social group. For Sinhala families in Sri Lanka, they are typically distinguished by gender and generation; they entail obligations for caregiving, household tasks, financial contributions, and schooling. Gender and generation are also axes along which authority and deference are distributed. The explicit hierarchy of family roles, however, conceals the additional unseen labor that family members—particularly those without formal power—often perfom; this labor vital to maintaining the social standing and wellbeing of the family and individual members. This panel offers closely drawn portraits of such unseen labor in a variety of circumstances and settings. Abeyasekera describes how the COVID-19 lockdowns intensified the precarity of working-class women in Colombo, as they struggled to find ways to ensure that their families would survive the plunge into abject poverty. Marecek and Senadheera, studying the aftermath of adolescent girls’ suicide-like acts, uncover the extensive work that mothers undertake to manage their menfolk’s anger and to prevent the reputational harm caused by such acts. Udalagama describes the labor that rural women do to maintain marital and family relations so that the family’s home will be deemed a “good house” by others. Gamburd draws a portrait of elders and family caregivers, showing how elders craft identities for themselves through their negotiations about food and medicine with doctors and family caregivers. These negotiations are laced with the gendered and generational power dynamics that always underlie kin roles, obligations, and options. All four papers show those without overt power in families (e.g., women or frail elders) engaged in labor that is necessary for their own and their family’s reputations and security. Ironically, these efforts succeed best when they remain invisible.

Session: Session 1: Friday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: University C/D
Floor: Floor 2

This panel is an exploration of commonplace, mundane examples of sacred geography in South Asia. Marshalling scholarships in anthropology, art and architecture history, religious studies, this panel asks of ‘sacred geographies’: how is sacrality produced in and through commonplace spaces? Canonically defined, a sacred geography stands in for the interconnectedness of ritual and cosmic significance embedded in a landscape - at a particular site, along particular routes and in particular emergences. It is the manifestation of the sacred that gets institutionalized when we speak of sacred geography. By ‘commonplace’, we mean the spaces that are not marked in the grid of pilgrimages and other marks of established, high religion. We provide accounts of mundane spaces that are enshrined and treated as sacred by surrounding populations, and in one paper, used to propel state ideology. This panel moves away from the received theory of ‘tirtha’ (a threshold-crossing holy journey) in Hindu cosmology. Instead, it concentrates on descriptions of the routine productions of the sacred amidst the mundane. Atreyee Majumder speaks of the everyday production of the sacred geography of Braj in Uttar Pradesh through the infrastructural network of the e-rickshaws – three-wheeled vehicles running on batteries, that promise to move the pilgrim through of the network of temples dedicated to Krishna in the region around Vrindavan, Mathura and neighboring small towns. Bhoomika Joshi speaks of the micro-cartography of shrines and temples along the national highways in Kumaon (Uttarakhand)- reflecting on how a geography of death (by road accidents) can become a geography of pilgrimage. Sarover Zaidi writes about ordinary affect of shrines in Mumbai and the political horizons of minarets. Radhika Govindrajan writes on the ethnonationalist Hindu right (re)producing the mountainous Himalayan region as a sacred, sentient geography. Kajri Jain, a noted scholar of bazaar icons will be our discussant.

Session: Session 1: Friday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Parlour Room 629
Floor: Floor 6

The last several years have seen a watershed in grassroots social protest movements in South Asia, including remarkable uprisings from Kashmiris, Muslims, Sikhs, and Dalits in India, and Balochis, Sindhis, and Pashtuns in Pakistan. This phenomenon is so apparent that Narendra Modi recently addressed the “Andolan Jeevi,” or one who lives to protest, as a constant variable in the country. In the context of the increasing authoritarianism in Modi’s government, this surge in protests suggests that democracy in South Asia arguably lives most vitally in the people’s continued drive to create alliances across identitarian lines to promote diversity, pluralism, and freedom. To address South Asia’s vibrant protest culture, this roundtable panel will discuss the recent protests--including anti-CAA protests and Shaheen Bagh, the ongoing farmers’ protest, the Kashmiri movement, the Pashteen Tahaffuz Movement (PTM), in the light of democracy and authoritarianism in South Asia. Participants: Hafsa Kanjwal, History, Contributing Kashmiri Narratives, Lafayette College. Farooq Yousaf, Politics, contributions on the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement, University of Newcastle Sara Hakeem Grewal, Comparative Literature, contributions on the anti-CAA protests, MacEwan University Harjeet Singh Grewal, Religious Studies, contributions on thr Farmer’s protests, University of Calgary Gurbeer Singh, Religious Studies, Sikh involvements in protests, University of California, Riverside Tejpaul Bainiwal, Religious Studies, Farmer’s protests, University of California, Riverside

Session: Session 1: Friday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Parlour Room 638
Floor: Floor 6

This panel explores how women both as voters and elected representatives are reshaping politics in India and Pakistan. New research has documented women’s increasing participation in politics as voters, party workers, candidates, and political representatives; however, various obstacles continue to block women’s full participation in these spaces. Papers in this panel use a political economy approach to examine the origins of the gender gap in participation and the impact of women representatives in South Asia. First, the paper by Thompson and Rahman investigates the role mobility constraints play in the political participation gender gap in Pakistan. The authors use innovative survey experiments to study this problem and they find that increasing women's mobility can lead to higher participation, knowledge, and efficacy. Second, Jamil’s paper focuses on another obstacle to women’s participation: resources. This paper leverages a large-scale cash transfer program in Pakistan and a cutting-edge research design to study how women’s access to state transfers can increase women’s voter turnout and reduce reliance on traditional intermediaries. Third, Brule and Toth argue that it is women who face discrimination on account of both their gender and ethnicity who are the most likely to transform society. Using data on quotas for women and Scheduled Tribes, the authors find that it is when these two sets of quotas intersect that we find greater social cohesion, increased political participation for women, and lower levels of caste-conflict. Finally, the paper by Kaur et al. further substantiate the importance of female politicians by demonstrating that quotas for women increase women’s participation in civic groups. Together, these papers build new theory and provide rigorous empirical evidence on obstacles to women’s participation and their potential for transforming social relations once elected to office.

Session: Session 2: Friday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Assembly Room
Floor: Floor 1

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Session: Session 2: Friday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Caucus Room
Floor: Floor 1

In nineteenth- and twentieth-century South Asia, artists, performers, and artisans employed in the subcontinent’s many “princely states”-- quasi-autonomous polities under British colonial oversight-- negotiated shifting state visions of regional heritage and identity. Under the patronage of some rulers, princely states also mounted narratives of resistance to claims of a pan-Indian culture, by stressing their difference from it through art and their specific cultural, linguistic, and religious heritage. Though informed by colonial concepts of “modernity” and “tradition” within the arts and industry, princely state claims on heritage were refracted through localized historical, religious, and political narratives. This panel therefore asks how members of artist and artisan groups, as well as the institutions established to preserve and promote that heritage such as museums and schools of art, adapted their work and technical practices in response to princely articulations of heritage. Studies of princely states have traditionally been dominated by a small number of animating questions, many focused on the political positionality of states within the British imperial system. This panel seeks to move beyond these questions, centering instead the art, institutional histories, as well as the work and lived experiences of the residents of these states. We ask how local forms of cultural authority were experienced and reinterpreted by diverse groups of artists, artisans, and performers. The papers analyze the ways in which artists and artisans engaged with, repurposed, or resisted both princely and imperial claims on their work. While the papers together offer the potential for comparisons across states, they also take seriously state claims to singular and localized heritage and artistic forms.

Session: Session 2: Friday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Senate Room B
Floor: Floor 1

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Session: Session 2: Friday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Conference Room 2
Floor: Floor 2

This panel engages with contemporary Indian cinema of the new millennium, particularly the cinema during and after its digital turn from the celluloid, to explore the way its form and content is getting shaped by the availability and affordances of technology, spaces for distribution/exhibition, including the OTT platforms and the social media, enabling the travels of clips and memes as paratexts. This panel also addresses the cinema that aspires to the classical style of theatrical distribution along with the contemporary digital spaces. Towards this end, the papers in this panel point to the fluid and fragmentary nature of contemporary cinema in its reinvention of the traditional comedy and musical sequences/song picturizations and dance choreography. It also argues for the cohesiveness of films as predicated on the needs of the anticipated spectator embedded in the text as it circulates in the middle-class homes of the OTT subscribers. It also explores the traces of the political cinema of the past in the mountainous terrains of the Western Ghats to foreground the counter voices within the all subsuming reaches of digital capitalism. While star texts, and innovative lyrics and hybrid songs, and the relationships predicated on class and caste in their reimaginings continue to drive contemporary Indian cinema, this panel foregrounds the way its melodramatic yearnings for affirming the status quo is undermined by the socio-cultural milieu and the economic conditions of its production/reception.

Session: Session 2: Friday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Conference Room 4
Floor: Floor 2

The cyclones that regularly ravaged the littorals of the Bay of Bengal--sinking ships, damaging crops, devastating villages and livelihoods--became a site for scientific and financial experiments throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Vernacular forms of prognostication, prediction, counting and arbitration in India were repurposed in the pursuit of minimizing weather damage and making agrarian production more efficient. This panel investigates the rearticulation of astrological and other tacit knowledge systems within colonial conditions and institutions. Taking prognostication and hedging as unifying themes, all four papers examine the role of astrological knowledge or Jyotisha in agricultural production and speculation, as well as in the legal and scientific dimensions of nautical travel. Kumar demonstrates how figures like CR Chary produced astronomical data for navigation and revenue surveying at the Madras observatory, using British nautical data to imagine the prospects of a ‘reformed jyotishastra’. Bhattacharya draws attention to another site of colonial modernity: the maritime court. Bhattacharyya explores how the machinations around recruitment to the Bengal Pilot Service and Marine Court trials of pilots through the eighteenth century were early attempts at financial hedging against tidal waves and cyclonic wrecks in the Bay of Bengal. Carson draws on the genre of ‘cyclone poetry’ in Bengal in the mid-nineteenth century. Carson highlights caste and rural/urban fractures to illustrate the layered nature of these texts, and demonstrates how they amalgamated putatively economic ideas of hedging within the cosmopolitical ambit of ‘dharmic risk’. Finally, Chakrabarti looks at the adaptation of astrological models of rural agrarian manuals, like khanarvacan and bhadlivakya, for the purposes of spot betting on commodity prices, in the markets of Bombay and Calcutta. His paper demonstrates how astrological knowledge was repurposed in the twentieth century, in order to naturalize the idea of 'legitimate’ market speculation in India.

Session: Session 2: Friday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Capitol Ballroom A
Floor: Floor 2

Scholars have characterized a shared historical trajectory for modernism across South Asian literatures that locates its rise in 1930s progressivist discussions about the purpose of literature and its evolution to late modernism in the 1950s and 1960s due to pressures imposed by decolonization. Yet, the influence of postindependence social and political changes—spurred by the atrocities and displacement of Partition; frenzied debates about national language; brutal struggles over land and resources; and intense protest surrounding caste, religious, and regional identities—on aesthetic debates in the subcontinent have not been deeply examined. This panel seeks to explore the relationships between these changes and new forms of modernist experimentation in postindependence Hindi, Urdu, and Bengali literature. In particular, it seeks to offer inroads for understanding how South Asian late modernism unfolded, simultaneously intersecting with and departing from the concerns of the postindependence developmental state in complex—and sometimes contradictory—ways. How did late modernist literary trends reject, reconfigure, or renew earlier progressivist and experimentalist literary positions to address postindepence social and political life? How did they theorize the relationship between politics and literature? Through an exploration of postindependence aesthetic debates about modernity and tradition, Hindi and Urdu poetics, political radicalism, and gendered subjectivity, this panel suggests that the 1950s and 1960s marks a shared moment of highly self-conscious, politically troubled modernist theorizing across South Asian literatures.

Session: Session 2: Friday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Wisconsin Ballroom
Floor: Floor 2

Although the #metoo movement has recently played a key role in the conviction of Harvey Weinstein this year bringing some semblance of justice to the issue of gender-based violence in North America, the same cannot be said for the women’s resistance movements that have taken place in India. Our panel addresses and questions the complexities and nuances that women’s resistance movements face as they struggle to come to fruition at a time when the culture of fear is reinforced in India creating power structures that silence the victims of gender-based violence in the #metoo era reinforcing the sinister rape culture that exists in the country. Through the examination of the history and conflict in North East India as these states have faced draconian laws that continue to plague the region, the conflicts that are taking place in the Indian film industry, and the #Dalitwomenfight - a media initiative that aims to highlight the caste-based sexual violence, we seek to engage into the difficult and often uncomfortable questions that surround these resistant movements: how does a woman’s body become a site of resistance and power? Is speaking up, as what #metoo movement celebrates, merely a utopian fantasy in India? Can the grassroots movement, with the help of social media and digital storytelling, help these women seek justice for the marginalized and vulnerable Dalit women? We will explore these issues through the examination of testimonials from women from the North East, the analysis of #metoo initiatives in the Indian film industry as well as representation of gender-based violence in short films and popular feature films, and through activist blogs, videos, and social media of Dalit women.

Session: Session 2: Friday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Parlour Room 627
Floor: Floor 6

Debates about Islamic modernism in South Asia often circle back to a handful of select figures, texts, and institutions, such as the college at Aligarh, Syed Ahmad Khan, Syed Ameer Ali, and Muhammad Iqbal. This panel will explore South Asian Islamic modernism beyond those well-trodden paths by looking at less-explored thinkers, institutions, and writings that were part of the modernist enterprise as well in order to shed new light on the work of both famous and lesser-known Muslim intellectuals. What constitutes a modernist ‘theology’? How were modernist ideas taught and disseminated? How did other Muslim scholars and lay thinkers react to these debates? Does the standard categorization of these debates into rival ‘modernist’ and ‘fundamentalist’ camps properly reflect the complexity of the ideas contained therein? Can we nonetheless speak of a modernist “canon”, and if so, how did it emerge and evolve over time? What are the social and political aspects of a modernist Muslim culture? These are some of the questions we ask. The panel explores the wider history of Islamic modernism in South Asia through a number of key figures and themes that have received inadequate attention in the historiography so far. By doing so, it will address debates about religious identity, religious authority, and the social history of reformist movements in both colonial and postcolonial South Asia.

Session: Session 2: Friday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Parlour Room 634
Floor: Floor 6

The late colonial and early postcolonial period in South Asia necessarily catalyzed the emergence of new areas of socio-political thought. This moment of intellectual vigor, professed nationalism, and marked cultural change characterized the myriad elements defining everyday social life (such as caste and urban planning) as much as overarching systems of political economy (from capitalism to communism). Indeed, the interpretation, innovation, and enactment of ideals discussed across the breadth of society, from vocal public intellectuals, to caste groups staking claims in particular political projects, to architects envisioning novel physical landscapes, signaled a decisive turn in subcontinental history, when conceptions of history and society were re-imagined for the region’s independent nation states. The papers herein chronologically trace this history of transitions to modernity through four cases of socio-political reformation. The first questions the process through which several communities sought to unify and legitimize their “ancient” caste status in the decades immediately preceding independence. The second traces mid-twentieth century shifts in thinking on social structure and evolution that located India’s communist roots in the Vedas. The third highlights the intersection of caste and political economy in postcolonial south India, to examine the processes of social inclusion and exclusion propelled by the nation’s burgeoning capitalist enterprise. The fourth looks to the built environment of later twentieth-century Delhi to illustrate a re-imagining of Indian architecture on Indian terms, that pushed against older European influences. Rather than stand alone, each of these papers seeks to address various perspectives of socio-political transition (micro and macro, cultural and economic) that together bear witness to an important period of change as South Asia re-conceived significant facets of its history. The discussant will place these analyses in broader cultural-historical context by mapping contemporaneous developments in Sri Lanka.

Session: Session 2: Friday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: PDR
Floor: Floor 1

This panel explores the nature of political resistance in contemporary Pakistan both at the everyday level and in the form of organized political movements. The political sphere has transformed dramatically over the last few years in particular following both an increasing militarization along with the opening up of new spaces for democratic engagement, particularly via social media. At the national level, the revival of the nationalist insurgency in Balochistan after 2006, the military operations against the Taliban from 2007 onwards in former-FATA and Swat, and the attack on the Army Public School in Peshawar paved the way for increasing control by the military which has manifested in the form of increased numbers of enforced disappearances and curbs on the media and freedom of expression in general. The space for formal political organizing has also shrunk at the local level in cities like Karachi, which has witnessed a paramilitary Operation since 2013. While formal political organizing has been deliberately dismantled by the state apparatus, new movements and avenues for individual expression and resistance have emerged in recent years. The papers in this panel explore emergent forms of political resistance in recent years—a period that has been shaped by neoliberalism and new forms of authoritarian control by the state.

Session: Session 3: Friday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Senate Room A
Floor: Floor 1

At least since the nineteenth century, if not earlier, India’s agricultural “sector” has been both a site of productive plentitude as well as degradation and immiseration. Only recently, the COVID-19 pandemic brought into stark relief the gross unsustainability of how India’s majority population live, stuck precariously between the rural and the urban, between agriculture and industry, and between debt and development. This panel stages a broad, but also focused, set of questions on the recent and historical relationship between “the peasantry,” the state, and colonial-capitalism; and how these are materially situated in a region. The panel points to some peculiarities that characterize the place of agriculture in India. The agrarian is caught in an impossible paradox: The colonial and postcolonial states have successively intervened to make the agrarian yield surpluses for the urban and the industrial. Given that the normative routes by which people transition from the rural to the urban have been routinely stymied, this paradoxical formation of agrarian dependence without a functioning industrial and manufacturing economy has produced a category of the peasant-worker who is forced to be mobile between the village and the city. And it is these populations that were made brutally visible during the migrant crisis of 2020. It is these themes that the individual papers elaborate on. Chhabria and Khorakiwala examine the role of famine and public works in the construction of the peasant worker, a source of constant cheap labor. Sethi’s paper describes the new economy of hybrid cotton cultivation that produced a brief plenitude for dominant caste groups in Maharashtra. Balakrishnan’s paper traces the consequences of these agrarian transformations for the urbanizing Maratha middle-classes. Each of these papers provides a perspective on the farmer’s movement today, since many of these issues come to a historical head at this moment.

Session: Session 3: Friday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Conference Room 1
Floor: Floor 2

This panel on Northeast India explores multiple thresholds of social, cultural and political life that articulate ambiguities from sites of actual and lived experience as well as from imagined and fictional worlds. We emphasize the term threshold as it signifies simultaneous insides and outsides. We also highlight how thresholds are in flux and represent objects of action by ethical agents. To this end, narratives of belonging, positionality and violence are also relevant for a borderland region like Northeast India. The four papers negotiate questions of agency and narratives of ethical being and being-together in a postcolonial space. Precarious and grievable lives, whether signified variously as indigenous or immigrant, simultaneously reveal agency. Fiction, poetry and other articulations in language enable claims to territory and identity. All these forms of politics are played out in the battleground that the fraught northeast of India assumes as it accommodates itself within the ‘nation.’

Session: Session 3: Friday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Conference Room 3
Floor: Floor 2

Within scholarship on colonial South Asia, the previous focus on the operations, institutions, and archives of the colonial state, and in particular its unwieldy institutionalized bureaucracy, has begun to shift. Scholars are increasingly taking into account the activities of indigenous actors, the importance of the concurrent emergence of new forms of institutions developed outside the realm of the state, and uncatalogued government records left outside of national and state record rooms. These stories are comparatively absent from state records and thus, are significant gaps now being addressed. Comparing and contrasting material collected from an assortment of such archives, this panel examines a range of influential institutions central to the development of the prominent North Indian city of Allahabad. Allahabad is a productive site in which to situate this inquiry for two reasons. First, it was perhaps the only city of such stature situated within the landlocked “heartland” and away from the coastal metropolises which witnessed such a wide spectrum of changes during its modern urban formation. Second, the city’s development was framed by both state-led apparatuses (such as the court and the university) alongside independent institutions rooted in civil society activity. Taking this historic city as its point of focus, the four papers thus examine different institutions and their archives, considering the networks they produced, and the individuals and communities that belonged to them. In doing so, we look at the ways in which these various institutions shaped, and in turn were shaped by, the social, political, religious, and economic life of the city. Moving across institutions situated at different places across the state-society divide, the papers examine the unpublished legal records of the Allahabad High Court, the American Presbyterian missionaries records relating to the Allahabad Agricultural Institute, archival material pertaining to the Kayastha Pathshala Trust, and indigenous knowledge production from Hindu pilgrims’ genealogical ledgers.

Session: Session 3: Friday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Conference Room 5
Floor: Floor 2

These four papers draw on Indian philosophical ideas to think through current issues. Thus, necessarily comparative, the breadth of the papers, including Sāṃkhya, Tantra, Advaita Vedanta and Jainism, offers a compelling case for thinking across Indian traditions, pointing to the relevance of the Indian philosophical tradition for contemporary Western debates. The first paper offers an insightful analysis linking the precisely adumbrated taxonomy of three different layers of self from the 14th century Advaita Vedantin philosopher Vidyāraṇya to current philosophical analyses of subjectivity. Vidyāraṇya points to a phenomenological self, akin to a current phenomenology derived from Husserl, arguing that Vidyāraṇya outlines a yogic meditative practice as a method of de-narrativization of the self. The second paper draws from the 11th century Indian philosopher Abhinavagupta’s formulation of a dual-aspect monism to intervene in a current hotly debated issue: the mind-body problem. Abhinavagupta’s dual-aspect monism offers a much-needed fresh perspective with two key divergences from most contemporary models today addressing this “hard problem” of linking matter to consciousness. These divergencies offer a novel solution to the mind-body problem, along with a different set of problems to address. The third paper traces out a key term within the early philosophical tradition of Sāṃkhya, mahat-buddhi, arguing that the pivotal mahat-buddhi functions as an impersonating agency. Drawing from the Sāṃkhya Kārikā’s theatrical metaphors, this paper suggests that the telos of mahat-buddhi is to imitate a great self who loses itself on a stage of ignorance only to then again remember its innate freedom. The fourth paper draws on Umāsvāti’s Tattvārthasūtra’s division of bound (saṃsārin) and liberated (mukta) souls to point to the ways in which Jaina philosophers addressed the problem of identity and difference within the seemingly undifferentiated group of liberated beings, in the process, distinguishing their metaphysics of liberated selves from the rival philosophical doctrines.

Session: Session 3: Friday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Capitol Ballroom B
Floor: Floor 2

Consistent with this year’s theme of “Resistance,” I propose an Author Meets Critics Roundtable Session for discussion on Ather Zia’a recently published book Resisting Disappearance (University of Washington Press, 2019). Resisting Disappearance is a brilliant, bold, and urgent ethnography centered on Kashmiri women of the APDP (Association of the Parents of the Disappeared Persons). By combining meticulous historical analysis, ethnographic intimacy, and profound attention to the aspirations and tragedies of everyday life, Zia documents the discursive mechanisms and affective registers through which women of the APDP deploy and enact mourning as a politics of resisting the settler colonial regime of India in Indian Occupied Kashmir, especially its ghastly enforced disappearance of over 10,000 Kashmiris. Lyrically written, this book details and navigates the fascinating as well as courageous strategies of resistance mobilized by members of the APDP, while also sketching a vivid and at many times harrowing picture of Indian state brutalities and conditions of colonial rule that Kashmiris, including women of the APDP, must constantly contend and negotiate. Resisting Disappearance moves seamlessly between crafting intimate individual portraits of resistance, and describing the broader terrain of colonial occupation that informs, shapes, and limits the arc and practice of resistance. The key themes engaged in this book include “affective law” and its challenge to modern state sovereignty, gendered choreographies of resistance, military humanitarianism and its insidious operations, archive fever and the politics of mourning, and the interaction of poetry and ethnography. Resisting Disappearance is a theoretically sophisticated and politically powerful book that marks a groundbreaking moment in the anthropological study of Kashmir and South Asia; this gender inclusive and multidisciplinary roundtable panel will discuss and engage its key arguments and interventions with the aim to generating new questions and avenues of future research on the problem of “resistance” in South Asia.

Session: Session 3: Friday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: University A/B
Floor: Floor 2

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Session: Session 3: Friday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Parlour Room 627
Floor: Floor 6

Patronage of religious architecture was a widely adopted strategy for the expression of royal and imperial authority in early modern South Asia. Hindu and Muslim rulers alike sought to forge connections in stone between their territorial domains and older sacred landscapes of shrines and temples dedicated to gods and goddesses, gurus, Sufi preceptors, and martyred warrior-saints. While appeals to the miracle-working abilities of sacred figures aimed to perpetuate dynastic lineages, evidence from inscriptions, documents, and narratives shows that shrines produced spaces of contestation and resistance between state-based and individual donors, patrons, and worshippers. The potential for transgressive re-configurations of sacred and secular power was even greater amidst the fragmentation of Mughal sovereignty in the eighteenth century. Focusing on sites across northern, western, and central India, this panel of historians and art historians makes an interdisciplinary case for the salience of the built environment to competing struggles for recognition in a world without a single sovereign authority. Thelen’s paper analyses the implications of Rajput and Maratha patronage of the shrine of Mu’in al-Din Chishti at Ajmer and construction of temples and ghats at Pushkar for both high politics and local communities. Vendell examines how patronage of the dargah of the warrior-saint Shah Abdul Rahman at Achalpur cemented a friendship between the Afghan nawabs of Achalpur and the Maratha rajas of Nagpur in the context of joint revenue collection in Berar. Cummings’ presentation explores the complex provenance and strategic aims of the temple-building programme of the rajas of Nagpur at Ramtek Hill, especially their citation of architectural traditions from outside the Maratha heartlands. Finally, Shin shows how the Banaras rajas’ construction of the Sumeru Devi temple in Ramnagar, and support of the associated Ramlila festival, highlights the importance of local patronage in the re-making of a trans-regional pilgrimage centre.

Session: Session 3: Friday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Parlour Room 638
Floor: Floor 6

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Session: Session 3: Friday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: PDR
Floor: Floor 1

Jugaad, the low-cost, constraint-driven hustle of marginal actors has come to be regarded as a subaltern strategy of resistance to the expansion of neoliberal capitalism in contemporary India. Scholarship in this field has shown how material and discursive practices of jugaad enable marginal actors to create their own meanings of enterprise and resist the hegemony of caste and corporate elites. This scholarship has highlighted how practitioners of jugaad circumvent law in favor of convenience, create temporary hacks and leverage connections to generate economic mobility. Therefore, jugaad, it is argued, helps proliferate multiple cultural and economic imaginaries of entrepreneurship in contemporary India. In this paper, I trace the practices of jugaad within venture-capital driven, elite startup spaces, dominated by technological and financial companies. At first glance, there is either little reference to jugaad in startup workshops and investment summits or it is actively repudiated as a backward cultural trope. Indeed, the well-resourced investors and entrepreneurs at such sites seem far removed from the marginalized hustler. Yet, drawing from 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork with entrepreneurs in Delhi, I show that despite this discursive erasure, jugaad thrives in the daily activities of startups wherein informality, flexibility, creating connections and building reputation are key drivers of entrepreneurial success. Even as jugaad itself is dismissed as a regressive cultural trait, its actual practices are adopted by entrepreneurs and investors. Hence, entrepreneurs use their networks to access investors, practice barter with colleagues and create temporary solutions while awaiting resources. These practices, when undertaken by contemporary entrepreneurs are framed as entrepreneurial ingenuity rather than unruly hustle. Therefore, adding a new dimension to scholarship on jugaad, this paper shows that ideologies of resistance are also appropriated by elite actors and institutions to reinforce dominant narratives about entrepreneurship and reify the position of socio-cultural elites.

Session: Session 4: Friday, 3:45 pm - 5:30 pm
Room: Off-Site
Floor: Off-Site

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Session: Session 4: Friday, 3:45 pm - 5:30 pm
Room: Caucus Room
Floor: Floor 1

Photography’s indexicality ties it inexorably to the moment the image was captured. But how does the meaning of the work shift as it is re-presented across contexts and continents? Taking up Walter Benjamin’s famous invocation of photographic afterlives, this panel explores shifting conditions of photographic re-presentation within the South Asian (and diasporic) context. Our panelists consider shifting conditions of production, exhibitionary contexts as well as instances of photographic images being “recycled” in the creation of other works. How have photographs been used to frame their context, as opposed to context being used to frame the photograph? How have documentary images been translated into subjective explorations of affect and memory, or alternatively, images created within the fine art tradition been repurposed as documentary evidence? How have photographs been re-animated through conventions of theater and forms of participatory practice? This panel interrogates the stability of artistic authorship and illustrates some of the many ways that artists, curators, and collectors are “opening up” photographic practice in new projects of world-making. These papers trace oscillations between objectivism and subjectivism as photographs move through a range of commercial, familial, ritualistic and museological registers. Through the cross-examination of case studies, this panel excavates new archaeologies of the archive, and reframes the “archival impulse” in South Asian photographic practice across space and time.

Session: Session 4: Friday, 3:45 pm - 5:30 pm
Room: Senate Room B
Floor: Floor 1

Engineering practices were closely tied to the development nation state in Post-Independence India. Most prominently, civil engineers fulfilled a variety of roles in development projects ranging from infrastructure to industrialization. But civil and other types of engineers served other roles inside and outside state agencies apart from those envisioned by state-led modernization. Especially after economic liberalization and the expansion of informatics during the 1980s and 90s, engineers have increasingly operated on everyday transactions as wide ranging as property transactions to the design of houses to the management of cyber security in government offices. Rather than limit an understanding of engineering practice to the solving of objective problems, a characterization found in social science literature, the panel seeks to engage with engineering worlds that are made and remade through a host of everyday practices in specific contexts. The panel includes papers from multiple disciplines that examine different practices of engineering, including how engineers work and how they imagine the social milieu in which they operate. Papers shed light on the constraints and material forms of daily practice, ranging from objects such as paper receipts, building materials, and “soft” objects such as computer files and databases, to problems of scale and verification across different arenas of knowledge production. How, we ask, do everyday engineering practices rework or extend historical notions of the engineer’s role in society?

Session: Session 4: Friday, 3:45 pm - 5:30 pm
Room: Conference Room 2
Floor: Floor 2

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Session: Session 4: Friday, 3:45 pm - 5:30 pm
Room: Conference Room 5
Floor: Floor 2

The papers on this panel, rather than assuming that acts of social service and charity are informed solely by internal emotive elements of selflessness, empathy, and compassion, explore intentionality with contextual and temporal specificity to identify processes of ideational and practical accommodation, adaptation, and maturation. Drawing from the burgeoning fields of moral anthropology and faith-based philanthropy, panel contributors focus on various areas of India, including the states of Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat, and specific diasporic settings, including Antwerp and London, to analyze how service practices popularly known in India as Sevā, Dāna, Chandah, and Zakat among other designations interact with contextual norms of ethicality, societal ideals of civic duty, and institutional doctrines of moral ambition and formation. The first paper focuses on Muslim communities in Lucknow harmonizing Qur’anic injunctions to maintain secrecy and modesty in almsgiving with public gifting practices becoming an ethical identity marker for Muslim communities in north India. The second paper explores how Sikh sevādars in Delhi conceptualize worthiness of recipients of sevā (service) through Sikh ethics. Drawing upon ideas of sangat and kinship, this conceptualization creates a relationship between giver and receiver that differs from mainstream care providers within urban India. The third paper studies how female ājīvan sevaks (lifelong volunteers) within the devotional Hindu movement known as the Swaminarayan Sampraday, interpret and utilize the socio-religious practice of sevā in their everyday lives to achieve theological ideals and establish social and spatial forms of agency. The final paper traces how multiple Jain diasporic communities in Europe and the United States (re)interpret the Jain doctrinal principle of soul interrelationality to become and remain active in local charity work in these transnational locations. A senior scholar, whose work considers philanthropy and development in South Asia, will serve as panel respondent.

Session: Session 4: Friday, 3:45 pm - 5:30 pm
Room: Capitol Ballroom B
Floor: Floor 2

From theriomorphic deities to anthropomorphized talking companions, from divine consorts to creaturely saints, nonhuman animals have populated South Asian religious imaginaries for centuries. Sacred religious texts, epics, folktales, oral narratives, storytelling traditions, and performative genres from across a wide spectrum of religious affiliation and spiritual sensibilities have underscored the dynamic influence of nonhuman animals in shaping human discourses of ethics and morality. Whether it is the right-wing appropriation of the Hindu monkey-god Hanuman’s visual imagery, the communalization of bovine creatures by the proponents of sectarian politics, the material-symbolic instrumentalization of domesticated animal bodies during communal violence, or the institutionalization of ethnocentric masculinities through symbolic appropriation of animal-taming sports, religion-motivated appropriation of nonhuman animals animate contemporary social and political lives in South Asia. South Asian literary narratives are uniquely attentive to the discourses that emerge as a consequence of interspecies encounter through cultural critique, appropriation, invocation, and reinterpretation of animals in religious discourses, alongside focusing on the contextual specificities of multispecies sociality. Narrative genres from a diverse range of religious practices often use the figure of the nonhuman animal to talk about social responsibilities, moral righteousness, and ecological concerns. This panel analyzes the relationship between religiosity and nonhuman animals in narrative genres generating from Buddhist, Hindu, and Islamic religious traditions in South Asia. By focusing on how South Asian oral and textual narratives historicize nonhuman animals and represent them as intelligent, sentient, agential beings with metonymic qualities, this panel will analyze the importance and consequences of human-nonhuman interactions and multispecies cohabitation on the dissemination of religious knowledge.

Session: Session 4: Friday, 3:45 pm - 5:30 pm
Room: University A/B
Floor: Floor 2

This panel considers the methodological, epistemological and political challenges involved in studying South Asian performance traditions through archives, textual documents, and visual artifacts at large. While para-textual documentary sources, such as scripts, librettos, promotional photographs, online content, and drawings, art works, etc, can be found and be a primary source for researchers, such documents are often marginal to how performance arts are taught, memorized, remembered and performed in South Asia. In the case of arts that are “dying,” or are no longer performed, what does it mean to access a form of performance through an archive, and what are the blind spots of the analysis, reconstitution, and reinvention this can support? To what extent is it possible to understand movement-based practices in the still forms through which we access them? As to contemporary performance arts, what biases and challenges do the formation of their future archive reveal, be they institutional undertakings, the spontaneous accumulation of data online, or the ethnographic records of a researcher? Does this limitation of imagining movement in its preserved forms contribute to the perception of South Asian performance arts as always under threat, as eternally disappearing traditions? In this panel, we invite performance arts scholars to engage with this question through their own research, whether it be tied to already constituted archives or through documents they have been gathering on their own, whether it is focused on past performance traditions, or contemporary ones.

Session: Session 4: Friday, 3:45 pm - 5:30 pm
Room: Parlour Room 627
Floor: Floor 6

Sacred spaces are central to the consolidation of religious and political power; they are often cast and recast through narratives, whether etched in stone, sung in song, or otherwise. This panel responds to the conference theme, “resistance,” by considering how sacred spaces and their narratives interact with mainstream religious and political powers – sometimes buttressing and other times challenging them. Our presentations highlight an array of sources germane to the negotiation of place and the sacred, ranging from architectural features such as samādhis and monumental sculpture to textual sources including māhātmyas and kāvya, to the rituals and pilgrimages that structure how people spend time in such places. We will address the ways preexisting conceptions of sacred space succeed and fail to determine built environments, and vice-versa. Aalekhya Malladi’s presentation explores the characterization of sacred space in a pilgrimage site in Tirupati. She extrapolates how the vernacular māhātmya resists and/or reinforces the Sanskrit version, while examining how contemporary rituals reconfigure sacredness in Tirupati. Nick Tackes details the transposition of mainstream Hindu (and other) myths into the art and architecture of the Brahma Kumaris and their headquarters in Mount Abu, Rajasthan. Through a spatial and material analysis of Burhanpur’s urban fabric, Rachel Hirsch analyzes the appropriation of the city’s appeal to Sufi authority as it changed hands from Faruqi to Mughal rule. Aditya Chaturvedi describes how the sacredness of Mithila has been (re)conceptualized through a local Ramayana and the samādhi of a king. Addressing various geographies and religious contexts across South Asia, these presentations highlight how sacred spaces have been reconfigured to meet different religious, political, and social needs over time. The four panelists are graduate students in departments of Religion and Art History. The discussant, Dr. Harshita Mruthinti Kamath, is a professor of Telugu literature and performance at Emory University.

Session: Session 4: Friday, 3:45 pm - 5:30 pm
Room: Parlour Room 634
Floor: Floor 6

Recent historical works have examined the nature of the colonial state in India by turning to exceptional displays of state power —emergency ordinances, repressive legislation, the horrors of the colonial prison and detention camps, and the use of torture. But colonial power also invaded ordinary life in South Asia in more insidious ways. “Policing Thought, Surveilling Bodies: Everyday Operations of State Power in Colonial India” considers how there was an expansion in systems of policing and surveillance in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the colonial state intensified its watch over everyday life. Faced with various forms of unrest, including the threat of mass nationalism, peasant agitations, and incipient communism, the state established new agencies such as the Central Investigation Department and the Intelligence Bureau, while also expanding its existing infrastructures of policing and control within the empire. The nature of these emergent systems is the subject of “Policing beyond Surveillance: Crime and Detection in British India, 1868-1920” and “The Adventures of Detective Luck and Sergeant Chance: The Advent of Political Surveillance in 20th Century India.” “A Tale of Two Sentries: Everyday Incarnations of Police Power in 20th Century Colonial Punjab” examines how new state practices made and re-made colonized bodies. Meanwhile, “The Mansfieldian Moment: Defending Free Speech in Late-Colonial India” reveals that dissidents and newspaper editors routinely invoked eighteenth-century common-law precedents to challenge these repressive legal innovations. The four papers draw upon a diverse archive—from recently declassified police and intelligence reports, colonial laws and court cases, newspapers and journals, to detective fiction—in Hindi, Bengali, Urdu, Punjabi and English. Taken together, they reveal the inner workings of an expanding colonial governmentality and offer a better understanding of state practices still endemic to the post-colonial world.

Session: Session 4: Friday, 3:45 pm - 5:30 pm
Room: PDR
Floor: Floor 1

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Session: Session 5: Saturday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Caucus Room
Floor: Floor 1

The events of the Second World War have incited numerous scholarly and artistic responses that have largely remained European and US-centric, commemorative, and oblivious to the ‘small voices’ from ex-colonies. The Bengal Famine of 1943, especially, has been usurped by the grand narratives of the Second World War, Partition and Indian Independence, and its long-term repercussions are much less discussed, as recent scholarship has pointed out (Mukherjee, 2015). ‘By predating the genocides and displacements of 1947, the famine in fact set the terms through which the region could enter the “promise” of freedom’ (Sunderason, 2020: 8). As the ‘famine activated multiple and contesting forms of art becoming political’, it equally elicited emotional responses of people directly involved in the war effort as soldiers, women labourers and cultural activists. This panel brings together scholars working on the various aspects of such ‘small voices’ of war and famine histories by looking closely into the South Asian context and exploring emotional responses emerging out of photographs, letters, interviews, literature and performances. Annu Matthew and Diya Gupta navigate photographs and letters related to Indian soldiers during the war to unravel the complex ‘politics of remembrance’, and the disjuncture between colonial authorisations of subjective experiences and textual responses to atrocities. Urvi Khaitan brings to the fore the hidden histories of low-caste and Adivasi women as employed by the Bengal Labour Corps during the famine, the coercive conditions of their work and their emotional responses to it. Priyanka Basu explores literary and artistic responses to show how the cultural labour during the 1940s has been disproportionately mapped in histories. By writing such underappreciated and seemingly peripheral responses back into the historiography of the war and famine, this panel seeks to answer why such a methodology is crucial to the decolonisation of existing archives, arts and sentiments.

Session: Session 5: Saturday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Senate Room B
Floor: Floor 1

The aim of this panel is to discuss and review the re-making of post conflict/disaster worlds in South Asia. Natural disasters and human induced cataclysms can often bring about profound transformations that cause the dramatic unravelling of previously existing social, economic and political arrangements and provide contexts for subsequent efforts for renewal and the re-making of different worlds. The 2001 Gujarat earthquake in Western India, for example, paved the way for Narendra Modi to become the Chief Minister of Gujarat in 2001. The 2002 Gujarat communal carnage also contributed to Modi consolidating his power base and pivoted him to becoming the Prime Minister in 2014. In a similar vein, the 2015 Nepal earthquake proved crucial in getting the country to adopt a new constitution, reworking the notion of national integration and creating a fresh rhetoric around the notion of ‘New’ Nepal. Clearly, post-conflict/disaster events can enable us to analyze South Asian social dynamics and understand how new worlds are created. Drawing upon the insights from post disaster and conflict studies, this panel will debate four specific instances of how natural and human induced ruptures in South Asia have proved to be defining in re-creating new social and political possibilities. Nakamizo will discuss the creation on the ‘new normal’ after the major riots in India. Ito discusses the post-earthquake reconstruction in urban Nepal under the influence of the new local governments that emerged as a result of the enactment of the constitution. Appuhamilage will debate how the cultural, socio-political and psychological implications of death help communities negotiate against the alarming rise of disappearances in post-war Sri Lanka. D’Souza reviews the many policy challenges for urban flood management in South Asia, especially with handling the shocks from the emergence of ‘Anthropocene Rain’.

Session: Session 5: Saturday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Conference Room 2
Floor: Floor 2

This panel will consider how cultural productions are fueled by experiences and imaginaries within contexts of state repression, confinement and contested spaces in South Asia. We bring together literary and cinematic articulations of these experiences and imaginaries to critically investigate audiences and publics. We argue that these audiences and publics both constitute and are constituted by these articulations in notional, empirical, and affective terms. Thus, the panel will also consider how the authors of these cultural productions create sites of discursive contestation, which problematize local and scholastic understandings of their relationships with dominant forms of ordering. The panel works with the recognition that these sites are imbricated in power hierarchies which span gender, class, religion and time. Building on the aforementioned concepts, this panel brings together texts and contexts to ask: how do custodians of subjugated forms of knowledge mobilize the popular to develop an architecture of dissent which allows them to be critical of, and sometimes act in collusion with, hegemonic nationalist discourses? Consequently, the cultural productions under consideration inspire challenges to how we read the elision of ‘realism’ and imagine productive pasts in the works of Khadija Mastur and Ismat Chughtai; Hindi, Urdu and English narratives of political prisoners in postcolonial India; digitally mediated practice of poetry recitation in contemporary Kashmir; and the political imagination of the Kashmiri state as manifested in a Bollywood film like Haider and the documentary drama ‘A Valley of Saints’.

Session: Session 5: Saturday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Conference Room 4
Floor: Floor 2

The COVID-19 pandemic-induced nationwide lockdown and social distancing measures have added a layer of marginality to communities that were already dealing with issues of stigma, social exclusion, oppression, and inequality in society for their caste, religion, disability, gender identity, and lived experiences of domestic violence/sex work/poverty. This roundtable, comprising scholars who have conducted ethnographic/qualitative research with diverse South Asian marginalized communities, such as, Dalits, indigenous tribes, people with disabilities, and survivors of domestic violence, will shed light on the unique ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic- has affected the health and safety needs of these communities and how despite their plight being visible in mainstream media, they remain invisible within the policies and programs developed by the government.  Prasad, having conducted ethnographic/social mapping research with Dalit women in Bodh Gaya, Bihar, will discuss the unique effects of social distancing measures implemented by the government on the Dalit communities in India.  Sinha, based on her extensive research with sex workers in Kolkata, India, will draw attention to the unique health and safety issues for transgender sex worker communities, and rising internet-based sex work during COVID-19.  Azhar will discuss how the livelihoods and mental health of khwaja sira who are sex workers in Swat, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan have been impacted by the stay-at-home orders during the COVID-19 pandemic.  Deka draws on her research and practice experience with South Asian survivors of domestic violence in the United States to discuss the barriers/service utilization issues faced by the community during the pandemic. Kindo, who has expertise in the areas of law and critical indigenous studies, will examine the pandemic from the lens of indigeneity and explore its effects on indigenous tribes in India.  Chowdhry, a disability scholar herself, will discuss how the pandemic affected people with disabilities in India using a disability justice perspective. 

Session: Session 5: Saturday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Capitol Ballroom B
Floor: Floor 2

Ronit Ricci’s Banishment and Belonging: Exile and Diaspora in Sarandib, Lanka and Ceylon is a study of the histories, traditions and attachments of the group now referred to as the “Sri Lankan Malays.” Their use of the Malay language identifies them as coming from Southeast Asia and their history can be traced to connections between Sri Lanka and Indonesia when both were Dutch colonies. As a group, Sri Lankan Malays number approximately 40,000, make up about 0.20% of the total Sri Lankan population. Their potential to contribute to our understanding of the histories of Sri Lanka, in particular, and South Asia, more generally, belies what such numbers might seem at first to suggest. Ronit Ricci’s book helps to make this apparent. While Ricci’s book focuses on the exile and diaspora of the Malay community in colonial Sri Lanka, its lessons go far beyond that particular subject. It raises questions and suggests new possibilities on how we might think about the presence of communities in South Asia which see themselves as defined by their relations with communities beyond that region; how we might think about the presence of South Asia and South Asians in areas beyond that region; and most generally how we might better think about the relationship between South Asia and its diasporas as well as the value of transnational historical work for our understanding of modern South Asia itself. Drawing out some of these lessons is the purpose of this roundtable discussion. Presenters will focus on the trajectories of different lessons, thematically distinguished, and Ronit Ricci herself will be present to respond. As a roundtable, there will be ample opportunity for the audience to participate in the discussion.

Session: Session 5: Saturday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: University A/B
Floor: Floor 2

The presenters have all done sustained ethnographic fieldwork in India or Pakistan, researching and documenting the lives and work of performers from vulnerable communities, many of whom are LGBTQ+ or on the trans-kothi-hijra/kinnar/khwaja sira spectrum. Pamela Lothspeich and Harshita Kamath, discussing female gender performance in Ramlila dance and Kuchipudi dance, respectively, present case studies of performers who dance in female roles and in sartorial guises that audiences read as feminine, showing how audiences respond to them variously based on their perceived gender, sexual orientation, and social status as determined by caste, class and religion. Lothspeich constructs a tentative, gender-sensitive genealogy of Ramlila dance over the past two centuries, while Kamath writes of spaces of alterity within a dance form dominated by brahmin masculinity/patriarchy. Claire Pamment and Jeff Roy explore critical issues related to ethnographic engagements with khwaja sira, trans and hijra communities. Pamment elaborates Pakistani khwaja sira negotiations of izzat (respect) in/across sexuality, religion, gender, kinship and class through performances of badhai. Amidst liberal rights’ translations of izzat into respectability, Pamment considers the ethical, affective and political limits and possibilities of acting on methodologies of izzat in ethnographic research. Roy explores ethnographic filmmaking that documents the lives and work of transgender and hijra performers in Mumbai, prompting us to consider questions of power, representation, and ethics when “outsiders,” especially those from the western academy, are the documenters. All of the presentations on this panel speak to the ways in which intersectionally marginalized performers often face exclusions, discrimination, and structural barriers in their respective performance contexts and wider societies. The presenters will also briefly speak to some of the ethical questions and challenges they navigate in the field, ones not captured by formal IRB protocols and itineraries, as they research and write about performers in conditions of extreme precarity.

Session: Session 5: Saturday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Parlour Room 627
Floor: Floor 6

This two-part panel brings together researchers of South Asian religion to present papers on their current work researching evidence for a brand new thesis regarding two major converging and diverging currents which increasingly shape contemporary Hindu practices and beliefs, namely intensification and sweetening. Comprised of scholars at different career stages and in several disciplines, these panels will pay particular attention to the increasingly visible move to insist on the continuing relevance of more rigorous—and frequently marginalized—religious practices and beliefs, in contrast to the long prevailing currents to mellow divine personalities, standardize ritual performances, and mainstream theologies. By analyzing dramatic dialogues with the dead in Tamil invitation ceremonies to call departed relatives back into the world as pūvāṭaikkāri, the first paper argues that the dead’s insistence on tongue-piercings, crematory ash, and alcohol offerings signals a deliberate resistance to broader sweetening trends in contemporary ritual contexts. The second paper brings ontological approaches to its examination of Māriyamman’s transformations and changing moods at a temple in Eastern Sri Lanka, which illustrate a complex interplay between her fiercer and softer characteristics and trajectories of intensification and sweetening. Through a discussion of the rainy season pilgrimage of Himalayan deities to their childhood home at Jhakar Sem, a journey which mirrors those married women make to their natal homes, the third paper demonstrates how male divinities who are otherwise known as formidable figures are experienced as playful, childlike, and feminized. The final paper focuses on the physical confrontation between two Himalayan deities on Makar Saṇkrānti 2020 in order to assess whether this conflict signals the continuing ascendance of Kaṇḍār Devtā over Hari Mahārāj and his evolution from a rural territorial figure among many to an urban, Sanskritized deity, “sweetened” and domesticated for and in an environment of mass tourism and development.

Session: Session 5: Saturday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Parlour Room 634
Floor: Floor 6

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Session: Session 5: Saturday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Parlour Room 638
Floor: Floor 6

The Subaltern Studies Group has been criticized for simplifying the distinction between elite and subaltern domains of consciousness. Although recent engagements have examined how subaltern resistance is imbricated with hegemonic ideology, including the operations of the state, they often take for granted a subaltern that resists domination. In contrast, this paper questions how different classes and groups become constituted into subalternity by examining one of Pakistan’s largest peasant movements that took place in its northwestern province over 1968–1978. I draw on oral histories, government records, and an original documentary archive of the radical Mazdoor Kisan Party (Workers’ Peasants’ Party) that led the movement, to reconstruct a narrative of how different rural classes converged to fight “semi-feudal” landlords. The tenants and landless labourers who constituted the peasant movement were themselves riven by contradictions; indeed, the movement incorporated leaders who were richer tenants, direct employees of the landlords, and/or agents of the state. I demonstrate that the defection of these agents from their support of elite domination was crucial in producing the line between elite and subaltern. I further stress the importance of party radicals and local leaders in stitching together the fragmented elements and groups of proletarians and peasants to a unified project. However, the very success of the movement also led to increasing class differentiation among the peasants, and the domination of rich peasants became more salient in village life. Class differentiation not only made the line between elites and subalterns difficult to place, but also contributed to the fragmentation of the Mazdoor Kisan Party and its radical project. Thus, I argue that subalternity is best understood as a contingent convergence of agents with dynamic and contradictory interests, that is, as the outcome rather than the premise of political (class) struggle—stitched together and always liable to unravelling.

Session: Session 6: Saturday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Assembly Room
Floor: Floor 1

This panel considers the complex entanglement of caste, indigeneity, region, and settler/colonialisms under Hindutva rule in Modi’s India. That is, pushing upon the the urgent question of how social and political belonging has been radically constricted to equate to Hindu identity, this panel interrogates how caste crucially distinguishes Hindutva rule as an upper-caste project, how prior identity formations in region variably shape the fallout of Hindutva ideology, and how ongoing projects of settler/colonialism and contested claims around indigeneity have been intensified and even co-opted under the banner of Modi’s India. Towards this end, the panel specifically explores the role of media narratives, post-2016 legislation, and the fraught semantics of indigeneity that remain bound to the religious communalism of Partition and regional claims of continued coloniality. Khatija Khader’s paper brings to light the exacerbated plight of the Kashmiri journalist, at once heavily surveilled under settler colonial governance and strategically navigating the same towards accurate reportage, including that of resistance to lockdown. Dheepa Sundaram’s paper considers the co-opting of the language of decolonization for the ethno-nationalist project of the BJP, through multi-media strategies that further marginalize vulnerable communities even as it erases historically key differences. And in looking at a region described via the umbrella term “Northeast,” my paper examines the volatile category and convergence of indigeneity/claims with the Citizenship Amendment Bill and the National Register of Citizens, both of which elicited mass response in Assam. Together, these papers constitute the panel’s objective of offering a multi-perspectival and place-sensitive take on timely and high-stakes questions of caste, indigeneity, and settler/colonialism under the current Indian regime.

Session: Session 6: Saturday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Senate Room A
Floor: Floor 1

In this panel that is part two of two, we focus on bovine politics in India. Since the coming to power of Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government, India has witnessed renewed emphasis on the divisive politics of the cow. The violence and disruptions carried out by Hindutva forces over alleged trespassing of ever-stricter cow protection legislations has attracted international attention. Among its many detrimental consequences, bovine politics in Modi’s India has had an especially hard impact on a key aspect of rural livelihoods: the cattle economy. Indeed, while cattle has historically been crucial in sustaining many rural households, raising, keeping and selling livestock is becoming increasingly precarious and outright dangerous in contemporary India. This has repercussions across agrarian systems of production and reproduction. Beyond the occasional journalistic report that has accompanied the rise in cow vigilantism, however, we still know little about the resulting patterns of agrarian change that are unfolding in rural India. How do smallholder farmers react to the incursions of violent Hindutva politics? How is the cattle economy transforming under the impact of such aggression at different levels of scale? Against this backdrop, this panel seeks an empirically grounded understanding of the evolving relationships between bovine politics and agrarian change in contemporary India. The papers focus on the consequences for one or more “phases” in the process of raising, keeping and selling livestock, and are grounded in in-depth field research.

Session: Session 6: Saturday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Conference Room 1
Floor: Floor 2

2021 marks the fiftieth year of the 1971 Liberation War of Bangladesh. The twentieth century witnessed several major political transitions in the history of the eastern part of Bengal, beginning with the first Partition of Bengal by the colonial state in 1905. From East Bengal to East Pakistan and then on to Bangladesh, the social, political and legal identities of this region have been in constant flux. This panel seeks to trace Bengali Muslim subjectivities in East and West Bengal by exploring constitutional, legal and linguistic ruptures and continuities across the colonial and postcolonial states. The panelists will address these questions: First, how were East and West Pakistan united on the question of giving voice and representation to Muslims in South Asia, but divergent on fundamental issues such as state policy and land reform? Second, how did cultural particularities increasingly lead to great differences between East and West Pakistan in terms of configuration of land, language and culture? How did law and policy absorb or exacerbate these divides? The papers also reflect on the curious fact that the Partition of 1947 changed Bengali nationalist political figures into Pakistani parliamentarians. This new political class had allegiances across Hindu and Muslim civil societies in undivided Bengal, and their earlier experiences informed their subjectivity as East Pakistani citizens. How did they negotiate their Bengali and Pakistani identities? Third, who were the drafters of the Constitution of independent Bangladesh and what kind of nationalism did linguistic and economic liberty ultimately give rise to? Finally, what happened to the large number of Bengali Muslims who opted to remain in Bengal, Assam and Tripura after Partition—what political subjectivity can they claim in the Hindu majoritarian Indian polity today?

Session: Session 6: Saturday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Conference Room 4
Floor: Floor 2

This panel explores media, modernity and sexual cultures in India by locating the intersection between technological interfaces and mediated sexual publics. While media forms facilitate both representational and infrastructural possibilities of inscribing sexual mores and practices, the broader canvas within which sexual imaginaries and technological possibilities have been forged in media platforms demand sustained enquiry. By focusing on the varying dimensions of desire encoded in and through bodies, this panel explores the porosity of old and new media forms, including objects such as print advertisements, digital media, sexual manuals and policy documents. Anannya Bohidar’s paper maps questions of female reproductive health and sexuality in early and mid-20th century Tamil print culture through advertisements of Ayurvedic tonics. In doing so, Bohidar interrogates the mutual enfolding of consumer patterns, material bodies and print-mediated imaginations of sexual health and pleasure. Pallavi Rao’s paper focuses on contemporary Tamil TikTok videos and asks how digital media practices echo normative scripts for entrenched social attitudes towards caste, gender and sexual relations. In examining digital gestures, Rao asks how women performers’ impersonations of filmic articulations on TikTok reconstitute caste and gender as embodied practices. Darshana Mini’s paper looks at discourses around gendered cyberbullying in Kerala. Examining both police-issued safety booklets and government advisories on internet safety, Mini locates such initiatives as a form of digital patriarchy that places the burden of safety on women. Anirban Baishya’s paper studies the relationship between the cellphone and India’s libidinal imaginary. Examining condom advertisements and discourses around cellphone pornography, Baishya interrogates how contemporary attitudes towards “safe-sex,” are being renegotiated around the phenomenon of the digital leak. Through an excavation of such diverse forms and practices, this panel interrogates the specific modalities through which South Asian media encode new sexual mores and gender hierarchies within pre-existing matrices of power and desire.

Session: Session 6: Saturday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Capitol Ballroom A
Floor: Floor 2

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Session: Session 6: Saturday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Wisconsin Ballroom
Floor: Floor 2

South Asian Studies has adeptly engaged in issues of gender, spatiality and temporality. A theme that cuts across these issues is that of surveillance. Gender and surveillance are verifiable phenomena that have premised many feminist and gender scholarships. However, in the dominant discourse, what remains understudied, is how forms of life and lived experiences at margins navigate surveillance and seek pleasure, intimacies and solidarities in various sites, even in temporary moments and spaces. The descent of gendered realities into the everyday, where structures of inequalities operate, demonstrates continuous navigation and subversion of surveillance, control and containment. In doing so, people (re)discover sites, events, moments, occasions to find intimacies, pleasure and are able to forge solidarities, even if temporarily. How do we theorize, read and engage with these moments of possibilities, and the creativity that emerges within as they may not last forever or for long? What do such moments of possibilities, blindspots or temporal possibilities of intimacy, pleasures, desires and imaginations under the radar of surveillance tell us about life under such regimes? How do we re-think about news forms of life or solidarity, the imagination of protest and capacities through those momentary intimacies and pleasures from such space and time? Rather than perceiving these temporal moments, spaces as not being part of the everyday or as a transgression, they need to be highlighted as essential entailments in the everyday that allow people to push through forms of surveillance and controls. Gender identities on the margins relentlessly seek and discover sites and spaces to reclaim themselves, time and liberty to make their everyday worlds possible and livable. The panel here will explore such processes of mapping intimacies, pleasure and solidarities through subversion to patriarchal structures, forms of surveillance in the everyday through concepts of gender, sexuality, spatiality and temporality.

Session: Session 6: Saturday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: University C/D
Floor: Floor 6

In the recent past, we have seen protests emerge across India spearheaded by minority communities who explicitly cite religion and place-making as central to forms of political practice. Protestors almost always cite myriad aspects of the past – events, thinkers, practices, experiences – in articulating their demands or dissent in the present moment. In doing so, they consolidate contiguous political narratives of belonging and making-meaning that are oriented towards place. Importantly, their articulations alert us, as scholars, to the longue durée histories that inform the present. These histories of place-making, belonging and practicing religion are often rendered through care – for each other, community, a place, and diverse minority identities, especially by female participants. These enactments of care offer a challenge to dominant and normative understandings of political practice, compelling us to conceive of ‘practice’ as broadly as possible and across multiple registers. The papers in this panel use recent events as a provocation to think about religion, place, and political practice across various spatio-temporal scales to reflect on the following questions: How do religious minorities use political action to re-define the conceptual limits and material boundaries of place? How do different religious narratives, theological perspectives, and moral justifications inform political praxis? Are the purported tensions between religious narratives and constitutional phraseology resolved by such capacious forms of political praxis? What are the kinds of solidarities and affiliations generated through protests, social justice movements, or even prayer?

Session: Session 6: Saturday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Parlour Room 629
Floor: Floor 6

The last few decades have seen a global proliferation of independent regulatory and oversight (or ‘fourth branch’) institutions, such as electoral commissions, human rights commissions, and anti-corruption watchdogs. This is indeed the case in South Asia, where such bodies have increasingly emerged as important constitutional actors. For example, the Election Commission of India has been described as ‘a vital force in sustaining the credible operation of [the country’s] electoral process’. In both Sri Lanka and Nepal, fourth branch institutions have evolved as part of political settlements and constitutional reforms aimed at resolving the countries’ internal conflicts. Despite tremendous diversity within the region, and while the design of the fourth branch in each of these states has strong domestic flavours, the intra-regional migration of ideas and common constitutional challenges — for which the fourth branch is commonly presented as a remedy — are also noticeable. This Panel explores South Asia’s fourth branch and, in doing so, seeks to contribute to our understanding of the health of constitutional democracies in the region. The Panel provides a theoretical appraisal of these kinds of institutions, outlining a normative theory to justify their point and purpose that focuses on their role as guarantors of specific constitutional norms, and exploring the dispersal of fourth branch authority in systems of multi-level government. Utilising examples from India, Sri Lanka and Nepal, the Panel draws on the Constituent Assembly debates in India to illustrate what is at stake in how federal constitutions allocate authority over electoral governance; it examines how the constitutional ping-pong that has encircled Sri Lanka’s independent commissions has impacted their capacity to execute their guarantor roles; and, finally, the Panel also considers the relationship between Nepal’s National Human Rights Commission and local government institutions to highlight the salience of the fourth branch to sub-national governance.

Session: Session 6: Saturday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Parlour Room 638
Floor: Floor 6

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Session: Session Special: Saturday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Assembly Room
Floor: Floor 1

Caste has belatedly but gradually emerged as a major analytic in conversations pertaining to South Asia both in academic as well as the popular public sphere. Yet, two issues are noticeable. One, in academic circles, these conversations often happen through a purportedly intersectional framework that accounts for caste but only as “one among many” structural axes of differentiation, thereby potentially decentering and watering down the centrality of caste in understanding various forms of violence. Second, most of these conversations are dominated by savarna academics, which not only minimizes Dalit-Bahujan voices but also has the potential to fetishize caste, thereby rendering it more compatible with savarna conceptions. This panel, which is entirely comprised of Dalit-Bahujan scholars, takes up caste-centered analysis as central to the understanding of different iterations of violence unfolding in India. Using constitutional, legislative, educational, cultural, and media/tized sites as their objects of analysis and employing varied methodologies, the presentations will illuminate how caste continues to be central to understanding various configurations of gendered, religious, and other forms of violence that need our urgent attention. The panel seeks to not only center Dalit-Bahujan voices in conversations around caste but also draws from the works of thinkers from these historically marginalized groups in drawing attention to growing inequities.

Session: Session Special: Saturday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Senate Room A
Floor: Floor 1

In this first part of the panel (of two), we explore the role of “assessments” and “clearances” in processes of land dispossession and environmental destruction in contemporary India. India has an elaborate formal system of impact assessments and clearance mechanisms in place, ostensibly to mediate between the contradictory demands of economic growth, sustainable development, and ecological justice. For example, India’s Environmental Impact Assessment regime entails an in-theory very thorough exercise in estimating the environmental, biological, social and economic impacts of a given project to determine its sustainability – and potentially to stop it from going ahead. Nonetheless, in practice we have seen time and again that the environmental impact assessment regime largely functions as a mechanism that authorizes the transfer of land and environmental resources to the state or private investors, at the expense of local communities. This has, in turn, often led to environmentally destructive dispossession-driven projects in, for example, infrastructure, real estate, industry, mining and solar energy being met with popular protest in many parts of the country. The papers in this panel focus on the politics of assessments and clearances to shed new light on how these are implicated in and authorize processes of land dispossession and environmental destruction. We analyse the formal-legal frameworks that regulate how assessments and clearances are to be carried out, but focus particularly on the politics of assessment and authorizing as it plays out in specific empirical contexts.

Session: Session Special: Saturday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Conference Room 1
Floor: Floor 2

This panel initiates a necessary dialogue between South Asia studies and Indian Ocean studies. Without summarizing its global history here, we can simply say that for South Asia studies in US institutions, humanities/classical languages were supplemented by the social sciences after World War II and then expanded to include new frameworks such as diaspora studies, postcolonial studies or urban studies. Indian Ocean studies’ (re)emergence in the last 15 years has offered approaches for dismantling boundaries between area studies and a way of thinking about the global, pre-colonial/colonial worlds, or transregional movements. Both fields share an inter/multi-disciplinary focus but treatments of spatiality diverge: Simply put, the region, its histories and contemporary realities, offer the centripetal focus for South Asia studies making it, among other things, conceptually land-based and “terrestrial;” the ocean’s geographical limits have provided the analytical contours for Indian Ocean studies resulting in an emphasis on coastal sites, islands or mobilities across the waters. Other area studies have already begun to embrace Indian Ocean studies: this panel is based on the conviction that negotiating the fluxible realms between South Asia and Indian Ocean studies has great epistemic potential--for reimagining history, spatiality, or entanglements; for methods/paradigms that decenter the terrestrial or oceanic; or for affective geographies that offer new forms of relationality. Spanning colonial to contemporary periods, based on historical and ethnographic methods, this panel’s papers focus on Gujarati merchants in Mauritius and India and the significance of “itinerant belonging;” “dry ports” in Delhi that mediate and reassemble relations between the local and the trans-local, sea and land; the contemporary nature of “monsoon temporality and mobility” on India’s west coast that create networked spaces linking dhows, families, festivals, debt together; and the ritual resurgence of “memoryscapes” in today’s Kerala of deceased Africans of forced migrations to South Asia.

Session: Session Special: Saturday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Conference Room 3
Floor: Floor 2

Scholars, saints, and literati thinking and composing in vernacular languages in second-millennium South Asia confronted a daunting but stimulating challenge: how was one to 'do' scholarship in a language that did not yet possess a corpus of scholarly works or even a technical language for intellectual discourse? At the center of this problem was a question of genre: what scholastic genres were already available in the so-called 'cosmopolitan' languages of Sanskrit, Apabhramsha, Persian, and Arabic, and how could their discursive conventions, analytical strategies, and technical lexicons be put into the service of new intellectual, scholastic, and political programs? This panel reconsiders the meaning of the term 'vernacular' in the context of 'vernacular intellectuals,' exploring not only its linguistic dimension but also its connection to localized, quotidian, sometimes elite and sometimes subaltern processes of making and sharing knowledge. The papers in this panel collectively address the following questions across several regions and centuries: How do scholastic genres in the vernacular both draw and diverge from models in Sanskrit, Apabhramsha, and other ‘cosmopolitan’ languages? What kind of intellectual cultures and scholastic practices do these genres reflect? How might the close examination of individual works, scholars' personal canons, and the circulation of works shed light on the interface between these fledgling communities of vernacular intellectuals and established canons of scholarship? The past decade has seen a productive discussion among scholars about the dynamics and social locations of vernacularization in precolonial India; however, this discussion has largely remained focused on literary production (i.e. poetry and poetic theory) at powerful regional and imperial courts. This panel will shift the focus to more neglected but nevertheless important genres of scholarship and to less elite centers of intellectual activity such as monasteries, the ‘courts’ of local lords, and even the homes of powerful merchants.

Session: Session Special: Saturday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Conference Room 5
Floor: Floor 2

Every South Asian religious culture has produced its own unique corpus of devotional narratives. In order to rethink the categories of bhakti (devotion) and narrative, this panel brings together four scholars of religion who draw upon diverse sets of languages, geographic regions, and methodologies. While Sophia Nasti and Sohini Pillai examine narrative poems and ask how narrative functions in a bhakti context and how bhakti functions in a narrative context, Anna Lee White and Priya Kothari focus on two Vaishnava communities and ask how the concepts of bhakti and narrative are transformed in hagiographic and performative contexts. Nasti analyzes how Manikkavacakar creates new possibilities for the expression of Saiva bhakti in his ninth-century Tirukkovaiyar, one of the earliest extant examples of a genre of Tamil narrative poems known as the kovai. Through a close comparison of two Mahabharata retellings in Tamil and Hindi that both claim to be the carita (deeds) of Krishna, Pillai explores what exactly makes a lengthy narrative poem a work of bhakti. White investigates the role of women within the Ramanandi Sampradaya through a detailed study of different hagiographical devotional narratives. Finally, based on literary and ethnographic research in Western India and the USA, Kothari investigates the tension between katha (storytelling) and seva (service) that emerges when the Bhagavata Purana is transmitted and embodied by gurus in the Vallabha Sampradaya today. Archana Venkatesan, whose own work focuses on the intersection of text and performance in South India, will serve as the respondent for the panel.