Annual Conference on South Asia

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

In the last decade South Asian studies has seen a proliferating interest in questions of media of all sorts. Some of this excitement can be witnessed in the increased number of film and media panels and pre-conferences at the annual Madison meetings. This effervescence raises significant methodological and intellectual questions about the divergent approaches to South Asian media and their varying stakes. Is it possible to characterize this scholarly churning as a cohesive field of enquiry, called “film and media studies”? In this symposium we survey and deliberate on the varied intellectual traditions that feed scholarship on South Asian media. Rather than reiterate disciplinary boundaries, we invite film and media scholars to reflect on what is to be gained from theoretical and methodological encounters between film studies, anthropology, art history, science and technology studies, performance studies, communication studies, ethnomusicology, literature, or architecture. With presentations from junior and senior scholars who actively think with media in South Asia and explore new empirical sources, we aim to identify emerging interdisciplinary concepts and methods that are revitalizing the study of film and media in South Asia today. The symposium will include presentations by key scholars in the field, all highly regarded for their conceptual and empirical contributions to the field of South Asian film and media studies. The presentations draw from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives and geographic locations (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, South Asian diasporas). By inviting scholars at various career stages, ranging from senior faculty to graduate students, and representing a range of institutional affiliations, the symposium aims to generate a vibrant discussion on the state of the field of South Asian film and media studies today.

Session: Symposium - Full Day
Room: Conference Room 3
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 14th in our series at the pre-conference venue of the University of Wisconsin's 48th Annual Conference on South Asia (October 17-20, 2019). 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 2018 -- 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_ConferecesMainHomePage.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 5
Floor: Floor 2

Much of Sri Lanka’s historiography has been dominated by questions of identity, ethnicity and indigeneity. Fueled by the ethnic conflicts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in academic and public spheres alike, debate has been largely constrained to “primordialist” versus “constructivist” viewpoints on Lankan identities and their continuity. After the civil war formally ended in 2009, academics have increasingly begun to move away from an ethnicity-dominated discourse to focus on other elements of the island’s history, and return to themes which had long been of interest to Sri Lankan and international scholars alike. Resulting from a diversification of source materials, several studies have attempted to reconsider the position and relation of Sri Lanka’s past to the present and connect its history to larger narratives and trends. These new scholarly and historiographic paradigms have replaced static identities and categorization with questions of connectedness, institutionalization, (dis)continuity, chronology and translocality. This symposium picks up these discussions by continuing the dialogue on the role that historians and other academics should play in the writing of Sri Lanka’s history. We consider how to write histories of Sri Lanka using these frameworks without imposing the present on the past. Our central focus will be to engage (dis)continuities in the history and historiography of institutions in Sri Lanka, with papers and topics ranging from the medieval period to the mid-twentieth century. Bringing together an international, multidisciplinary group of scholars at various stages in their careers, we analyze relationships between institutions (colonial, religious, monastic, economic, educational, and legal) and ongoing projects of identification. Jointly, we aspire to probe how diverse questions about Sri Lanka’s past originate from our contemporary present, and how scholars working on Sri Lanka’s past, present and future should engage with this heritage.

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

The American Institute of Indian Studies holds an annual dissertation-to-book workshop at the Madison South Asia Conference, co-sponsored in 2019 by the American Institute of Pakistan Studies and the American Institute of Bangladesh Studies. The workshop aims to help a select number of recent PhDs re-vision their doctoral dissertations as books. The interdisciplinary workshop will begin at 7 pm Wednesday evening, October 16th, and conclude with a group dinner on Thursday, October 17th. Author participants will submit a sample chapter and draft book proposal in advance. During the day-long Thursday sessions, each group of approximately 8 authors and 2-3 mentors will work intensively together discussing each project. In 2019, senior faculty participants will include Jason Cons (Anthropology, UT-Austin), Naveeda Khan (Anthropology, Johns Hopkins), Sarah Lamb (Anthropology, Brandeis), Diane Mines (Anthropology, Appalachian State), Leela Prasad (Religious Studies, Duke), Bhrigupati Singh (Anthropology, Brown), Harleen Singh (Literature and Gender Studies, Brandeis), and Anand Yang (History, Washington).

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

What can we bring to queer epistemologies and methodologies when we move across physical, geopolitical and conceptual boundaries? In this symposium, we would like to draw attention to the journeys of queer, trans, hijra, khwaja sira and gender nonconforming subjects and scholars to and from less-frequented settings in and around South Asia––with particular attention to places like Pakistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka––which in their marginality are rendered as “elsewhere” in queer scholarship. Centering performative and narrative modes of reflexivity in the literary, visual and performing arts, we explore what meanings adhere to queerness in its travels, and what happens when it takes on life in underrepresented or under-considered historical, geopolitical, conceptual and cultural locations (Amin 2017:183). We ask: What does it mean to respond from a “here” to queer discourses and practices “elsewhere”? What possibilities emerge when we engage fields and temporalities that count as not-here/not-yet-here, and what are the sensorial and affective dimensions, ethical issues and methodological limits of such travels? What makes up “queer” in a particular place and time? And, in particular, how might we disrupt Queer Studies’ analytical habits––or recontour the term itself––as we vision, revision, and generate scholarships from unlikely, imaginal, or even otherworldly elsewheres? Heeding the call for non-Euro-American epistemes to address the political intersections of queer and area studies (Arondekar and Patel 2016), we further consider the role that our respective fields of academic and artistic practices play in mapping the institutional terrain of queer epistemic power?

Session: Symposium - Full Day
Room: Parlour Room 634
Floor: Floor 6

This symposium brings together a diverse group of ethnographers of South Asian religions and cultures to present short papers and engage in focused discussion about shifts in ethnographic methods over the past four decades. Comprised of scholars at different career stages, this symposium is intended to generate insights about the changing nature of ethnographic research in a rapidly developing South Asia. Particular attention will be paid to how different disciplinary emphases inform approaches to the “field;” the challenges posed by relocating to new fieldsites; the demands of defining, constructing, and representing one’s identity/identities in varied contexts; and the benefits and detriments of the increasing presence of technology (including computers, email, phones, and apps), which mediate fieldwork situations, relationships, and reflections in and on the field. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in diverse settings in India, Nepal and transnational contexts, presenters will raise questions about positionality and the construction of a self-in-relation as shaped by gender, race, ethnicity, economic privilege, and other forms of difference. Others will address the ethical demands produced by interpenetrations of “home” and “the field,” analyzing how increasingly porous boundaries create both new opportunities and challenges. Multiple papers will reflect on how technology both expands and constrains access to, and the production of, ethnographic knowledge in its embodied and written forms. Central to these discussions will be the role of new media in shaping objects of study (such as pilgrimage sites, religious communities, and textual traditions), catalyzing innovative field methodologies, and opening up possibilities for new ethnographic “texts,” such as virtual villages and real-time, collaborative, and open-access projects. Finally, in assessing shifts in the “technologies of reflection” from our fieldwork contexts, some participants will contemplate the implications of these sources for ways of knowing ourselves and others, and the lessons they hold for our teaching and mentoring practices.

Session: Symposium - Full Day
Room: PDR
Floor: Floor 1

We propose to organize the fourth annual “Science, Technology, and Medicine (STM) in South Asia Symposium,” around the theme “Body Horizons: Expressive, Sensorial and Material Negotiations Across South Asian Scientific and Medical Traditions.” With a focus on the body as a material, sensory, and expressive resource, this symposium aims to foreground dimensions of boundary-making and pluralities in South Asian traditions. Rather than framing the body as a universal biological base upon which culture plays its infinite variety, we recognize it as a product of specific social, cultural, and historical contexts. By highlighting the body’s active role in mediating reflection and action, this symposium traces the extent of its centrality in South Asian therapeutic, epistemological, and expressive practices. This attention to the body provides a basis to question spatial assumptions implicit in many fundamental concepts, such as “community,” “tradition,” and “culture.” This builds upon discussions from the 2018 STM symposium, which examined issues of temporality and periodization. We envision that a focus on bodies will amplify three core themes raised in the 2018 symposium:1) the role of scientific and medical traditions in expressing boundaries between communities, persons, and other living-beings; 2) the role of the senses as well as non-human devices and technologies in the enactment of science and medicine; 3) the need to provide more effective representations of plurality and and difference across systems of knowledge and practice in South Asia. The proposed symposium will bring together scholars working across South Asian medical and scientific traditions. We plan to include an equal number of graduate students and faculty members to stimulate creative discussion and facilitate future collaborations. Invited scholars are from diverse fields, working across traditions and time periods, including anthropology, history, philology, feminist and gender studies, science studies, post-colonial theory, and literary studies.

Session: Symposium - Half Day, Morning
Room: Senate Room A
Floor: Floor 1

In his introduction to “The Cambridge Companion to the Graphic Novel” (2017), Stephen E. Tabachnick writes: “The graphic novel [...] able to tackle complex and sophisticated issues using all of the tools available to the best artists and writers - is the newest literary/artistic genre and one of the most exciting areas of humanistic study today.” Consequently, graphic narratives from Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” to Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis” have become popular in college curricula across the world and literary conferences dedicate entire panels to studying the genre. Yet, graphic narratives remain largely neglected in South Asian Studies, despite their rich artistry and thoughtful engagement with socio-political issues in the region and beyond. This symposium seeks to redress this critical gap by exploring the extraordinary new artistic energies in graphic narratives that are about South Asian and South Asian American experiences. Discussing a rich and varied archive-from the mass popular archive of “Amar Chitra Katha” comics series to newer aesthetically experimental graphic novels like Amruta Patil’s “Kari” and Malik Sajad’s “Munnu”-this symposium explores the art of the South Asian graphic narrative in the 20th and 21st centuries. Its diverse papers showcase new research on the powerful aesthetic and political interventions, and the cultural life of graphic narratives in/ about South Asia and South Asian America. Speakers discuss how these comics aesthetically link indigenous art, popular print culture, and modern media, to offer trenchant political critiques of gender-based violence, caste oppression, neoliberalism, and ecological crises. Dealing with a range of issues such as sexual and ethnic minority experiences, colonialism, Kashmir, and being Muslim in America, this symposium invites us to explore the rich hybridity and political aesthetic of the South Asian graphic narrative, in an attempt to highlight its importance within South Asian Studies.

Session: Symposium - Half Day, Morning
Room: Parlour Room 627
Floor: Floor 6

jo aashnaa the bahut ajnabii se lagte the vo ajnabii thaa magar aashnaa saa lagtaa thaa -Imtiyaz Saghar What does it mean to be a native speaker of Urdu? We shall explore the impact of work in and on this language by those who are often considered its “others.” How are lineage, age, proficiency, accent, ethnicity, first language status, location, race, caste, religion, gender, sexual orientation used as exclusionary or inclusionary factors? How might the contributions of non-native speakers of Urdu, including native speakers of other South Asian and European languages, be understood as part of a broader, more inclusive history of Urdu as a language and literature? These are the questions that motivate the third annual Urdu Symposium. The poet and critic Inshāʾallāh Ḳhāṅ ‘Inshā’ (1756-1817) hyperbolically claimed that there were, apart from the Red Fort, only two locations within Shahjahanabad (Old Delhi) where residents could be found who spoke Urdu with sufficient eloquence to merit his consideration. Historical evidence, however, suggests that forms of what we might today identify as proto-Urdu have been employed across the South Asian subcontinent since at least the fifteenth century. Furthermore, what qualifies figures like Inshā to act as qualifiers? What role was/is played by some of the factors listed above, in addition to eloquence? As academics who represent intersections of several factors, what is our own positionality with regard to Urdu? This reflection may help us to better understand how languages provide homes for strangers, even as they grow strange in their homes. ham keh Thahre ajnabii itnii mudaaraato.n ke ba.ad phir bane.nge aashnaa kitnii mulaaqaato.n ke ba.ad -Faiz Ahmed Faiz

Session: Symposium - Half Day, Afternoon
Room: Caucus Room
Floor: Floor 1

A significant trend in the 2010s in the American R1 universities has been varied degrees of institutional investment in the digital humanities. In addition to separate centers for digital humanities that have been created in the last decade, various units such as university libraries, and departments of Linguistics and Computer Science have begun to develop research clusters and pedagogical strategies that are truly interdisciplinary in nature. Their aim is to train a new generation of humanities scholars who would be conversant in programming, ‘data analytics’ and ‘text mining’ and a generation of computer scientists who can expand their skillsets to enrich the curation and analysis of literature and media in our increasingly digital world. Digital Humanities and South Asian Studies brings together scholars and students of South Asia who are either actively engaged in or are interested in incorporating digital methods and tools in their research and teaching. Besides our group of presenters/discussants, we will invite participants on various aspects of digital humanities: from data analysis, visualization, and mapping to machine learning and beyond. Our daylong symposium will be divided into four panels, each dedicated to a group of presentations organized around one subject area. Tentative subject areas are Citiscapes, Cinema & Media, Mapping Literature, and Literature/Culture+Computer Science. These areas may be reconfigured once we formulate a final list of presentations.

Session: Symposium - Half Day, Afternoon
Room: University C/D
Floor: Floor 2

The last 30 years have seen tremendous change in Bangladesh. It has witnessed the return of democracy emerging out of over a decade of military rule to the rise of development models such as microfinance; the emergence of new militancy within the state; the rise of climate change as an existential threat; refugee crisis; and more. This symposium invites scholars to reflect on the above transformations in the social, cultural, political, environmental, and economic landscapes of the country. Our theme and interest here is tracing and historicizing contemporary Bangladesh by interrogating the ways that challenges around questions of democracy, development, and refugees are shaped by the country’s recent and more distant pasts. We choose this 30 year timeframe not only because it has been a period of tumultuous change. It has also been a period during which the American Institute of Bangladesh Studies has been involved in collaborative, scholarly investigations of Bangladeshi culture, politics, economy, and society. We see this 30 year anniversary as an opportunity to reflect not only on what AIBS’s accomplishments have been and what has happened in Bangladesh in its recent past, but also as an opportunity to think through and chart a future of scholarly engagement with this rapidly changing country. As such, this symposium will showcase cutting edge work on Bangladesh’s history, culture, society, economy, and environment, exploring and contextualizing both where the country has been and where it is going. There will be several events including standard panels and presentations in the morning followed by a concluding roundtable with former grantees of AIBS as part of the afternoon symposium. The proposed symposium will set a new agenda for scholarship on Bangladesh in the coming years, commemorate AIBS’s past achievements, and it's future planning, programming, and areas to focus.

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

The shadows of some events are cast long and far, coloring how we see, and compelling us to move differently in their light. This panel is interested in seeing how the shudder of such events—namely WWII, Operation Blue Star, 9/11 and the subsequent ‘Global War on Terror,’ and #RhodesMustFall—entail realignments and reconceptulizations in their wake. Tracing moves across text, space, institutions, and the visual, this panel examines how various actors across the world craft memory, history, identity, and community in light of the new political imperatives of these ‘Afters’. Ad hoc 14

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

Ad hoc 20, Politics, Caste

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

Since the fourteenth century, proponents of Mādhva Vedānta –– a popular religious movement that developed around its eponymous founder Madhva Ācārya –– have made significant contributions to the theological and scholastic debates of South Asia. As advocates of a broadly “dualist” (dvaita) exegetical program, proponents of Mādhva Vedānta have incited controversy and exerted influence in equal measure. Despite the scope of its influence, Mādhva Vedānta has attracted relatively little scholarly attention. This panel brings together a group of scholars, whose collective research spans over three centuries, in order to analyze the intersection of knowledge-production, social movements, and institutions of political and religious power in Mādhva Vedānta. In doing so, this panel not only makes an important contribution to understanding Mādhva intellectuals and their historical contexts, it also contributes to ongoing methodological conversations on how to engage religious, literary, and scholastic texts with a view to social history.

Session: Session 1: Friday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Conference Room 3
Floor: Floor 2

This panel brings together four papers that analyze connections between explorations, travel to different parts of the empire and beyond during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and constructions of the ‘self’ in this process. By examining professional map-making and surveying, constructions of different kinds of colonized masculinities and worldview of members of the Indian diaspora as imperial citizens, these papers reveal the ‘artistry’ and ‘skill’ of these creators in undertaking both the real and imaginative explorations through their writing. In doing so, these papers reveal different dimensions of the effects of colonial rule on the bodies of colonial subjects in the social and political worlds that British colonialism created in South Asia and in the Empire, and the myriad ways in which colonial subjects attempted to negotiate the constraints of imperial power and rethink their role and place in the larger globalizing world. Tapsi Mathur’s paper on ‘Natives and Trans-frontier Exploration in Colonial India’ focuses on geographical knowledge made available by native explorers as an exercise in ‘artistry’ where they transgressed the expectations of being mere collectors of information. Rajashree Mazumder’s and Subho Basu’s papers analyze diverse strands of Bengali children’s adventure literature written in the early part of the twentieth century to understand different conceptions of masculinity as constructed by these authors and how that would contribute to the project of nation-building and simultaneously, anti-imperial internationalism. Emma Alexander’s paper investigates the youth culture of protest in the Indian community in South Africa against the dominion government’s decision to ban ‘Asiatic’ Immigration and demands to maintain their resident status as subjects of the British crown.

Session: Session 1: Friday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Conference Room 5
Floor: Floor 2

This panel takes up the theme of epistemology broadly construed in the tradition that has developed around the Bengali saint Śrī Chaitanya (1486-1533). It does so in order to scrutinize the intellectual resourcefulness of Chaitanya theologians in how they have engaged with various disciplines of Sanskrit learning, have responded to claims of scientific universalism, or could be informative for contemporary humanistic research into the study of religious experiences. The panel brings together scholars who work on different periods of Chaitanya intellectual history, from the early 16th century direct students of Chaitanya, namely Rūpa and Jīva Gosvāmins, to modernity and Kedarnath Bhaktivinoda (1838-1914), and focus on diverse fields of enquiry: classical Indian philosophy and aesthetics, colonial studies, and the intersection of philology with the psychological sciences. The papers, specifically, examine: innovations in the rasa theory of aesthetic pleasure as it concerns the experience of devotional sentiment; engagement with theories about the nature of perception in a project of framing religious epistemology and hermeneutics; the role of scriptural study and devotional practices in the perceptual experience of Kṛṣṇa in the light of contemporary research on religious experiences and psychological scientific researches into consciousness, cognition, and perception; and an indigenous philosophy of science constituting a critical response to Eurocentric scientific universalism, understood as a key factor in justifying western domination of non-Western peoples.

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

Something like Zeno’s paradox of movement in the case of the flying arrow which appears to be ‘motionless’ and ‘at rest’ when it hits its target, heteronormative masculinities appear to be stable and hegemonic (Connell & Messerschmidt) but ‘unmarked’ (Reeser 2010) and invisible at the same time. Masculinity studies in the context of South Asia is currently at a nascent stage with few ethnographic accounts but largely lacking in a critical, theoretical framework. In a bid to respond to the exigency of this theoretical absence, this panel is a timely intervention into the field of South Asian Masculinity Studies.This panel critically examines heteronormative masculine performances by interrogating its connection to postcolonial, neoliberal practices. References to ‘neoliberalism’ and the ‘postcolonial’ in this panel do not simply suggest an examination of contemporary and historical moments that have shaped power-networks, but refer to the specific political, economic, socio-cultural transactions which influence gender relationships at the level of everyday practice and representation. Two major aspects of postcolonial South Asian masculinity/ies are examined here: its relationship to regional-national politics and, more recently, its relationship to globalization, cultural capitalism, and neoliberalism. To this end, this panel will present works by four emerging scholars. Examining a variety of media (visual, digital, literary) and ethnographic accounts, all four papers unpack heteronormative masculine iterations in South Asia (specifically India, Sri Lanka) paving the way for crucial interrogations, necessary in the current socio-political climate. By foregrounding the specific nature of habitus (Bourdieu, 1996), these papers aim to theorize the “structuring structure” which leads to the production of different variants of heteronormative masculinities. The first three papers focus on masculine performances in postcolonial India while the fourth paper foregrounds an ethnographic examination of rickshaw drivers in Jaffna, Sri Lanka.

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

The hackneyed observation that money begets more money has enchanted theorists of the “dismal science” for over two centuries. In half that time, psychoanalysts have likewise capitalized on the enchantments of capital, appearing as early as Freud’s observations on the “economic model” of libidinal energy and the symbolic equivalence of money and excrement. Drawing on these enchanted traditions, this panel investigates money’s capacity to vicariously create or prompt vicarious creations in colonial and postcolonial India. We are especially interested in two kinds of “sublimation” with respect to economic activity: (1) the classic idea of monetary exchange as a sublimated form of creative activity — i.e., how does money actually produce social values that cannot be generated otherwise? (2) money as the ground for sublimated activity—in other words, when money is scarce how are its promises of universal value equivalency canalized into other forms, ideas, and activities? We approach these questions as anthropologists of India working in the wake of both national demonetization and the increasing financialization of everyday life. Yet we also approach them as South Asianists who share a conviction that money’s power to sublimate or be sublimated has alternative genealogies unaccounted for in economic annals—whether this be in the ways “demonetized” Muslims in Delhi draw on an Indo-Persian poetics of the “bazar” to craft new political theologies of pluralism (Anand Taneja), the ways indigenous peasant communities in Upper Assam extract graft from state-led oil industries toward ends of honor, identity, and status (Tanmoy Sharma), how a counter-conceptual history of sovereignty from the colonial era finds its symbol not in the ash-smeared chapati but in buried treasure troves of gold (Aarti Sethi), or how the recent monetization of sorcery services in Central Assam has inverted gender roles by establishing a figurative equivalence between blood and money (Sean Dowdy).

Session: Session 1: Friday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Parlour Room 627
Floor: Floor 6

Three days after V. S. Naipaul’s death, on 14th August 2018, the website Global Research, the digital platform of the Montreal-based Centre for Research on Globalization, published an article by Edward Curtin, a lecturer in sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. The way he begins is typical of the responses his death elicited: “V. S. Naipaul, the Nobel winning author who just died, was, like so many people, an enigma, at least in his writing. Lauded for his prose style and exquisite way with words, he was seriously criticized for his demeaning of Islam, women, Africans, and others in post-colonial countries, including the Caribbean from whence he came. Such criticism was amply justified.” On this panel we examine the ways in which these responses were elicited by Naipaul’s use and manipulation of figurative language in his work. The Caribbeanness of this predilection is emphasised by comparing Naipaul’s usage with that of contemporary Trinidadian film makers and younger writers. The texts we explore include A Way in the World, Guerrillas, The Return of Eva Peron with the Killings in Trinidad, The Mimic Men, A House for Mr Biswas and the films The Mystic Masseur, Inward Hunger and Earl Lovelace: A Writer in His Place. Metaphors of place are compared to those of ways in order to demonstrate the ideological burdens of metaphoric usage in the Caribbean text.

Session: Session 1: Friday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Parlour Room 634
Floor: Floor 6

In the Author-meet-Critics roundtable, presenters engage with Richa Nagar’s book Hungry Translations: Relearning the World Through Radical Vulnerability (forthcoming, 2019) written in journeys with Sangtin Kisan Mazdoor Sangathan and Parakh Theatre. The book invites us to reconsider questions of expertise and knowledge production in the academy and social movements as sites of transformative learning and collaborative knowledge creation, and ways to bridge the two disparate and contradictory worlds. In the book, Richa Nagar reflects upon her journeys with many co-travelers through three interrelated spheres of learning. The first is the Sangtin movement of 8000 small farmers and laborers, ninety-nine percent of them Dalit and more than half of them women, working in Sitapur District of Uttar Pradesh. The second sphere involves collective interrogation of Hindu Brahmanical patriarchy, casteism, hunger, and death with twenty amateur and professional actors of Parakh Theatre who have migrated to Mumbai from six other states. The third sphere pedagogically reworks these interlayered journeys of knowing and being with students in a large public university in the USA in a course titled, ‘Stories, Bodies, Movements.’ The course grapples with possibilities and impossibilities of embodied unlearning and relearning of the global, the local, and the intimate by reimagining the borders of the classroom through theater. Nagar’s book reworks academic knowledge making by embodying a new approach to the search for poetic and social justice. It explores the edges and substance of solidarity by grappling with the separations among people across life circumstances, and the possibilities of situated solidarities offered by an ethical search for justice in the face of such separations. In this Author-meet-Critics roundtable, speakers will reflect on Nagar’s work in conversations with their own academic and political work, engaging in discussions around doing research and activism, teaching, and building solidarities across disciplines, geographies and politics.

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

In the history of liberal political thought, the curious coexistence of seemingly contradictory commitments to domestic liberty and foreign despotism has been a matter of much interpretative labor. Over the last couple of decades, scholars of empire—from disciplines such as history, political theory, and international law—have shed new light on the global constitution of modern liberalism. The intellectual history of colonial India has been at the forefront of empire and liberalism scholarship. This recent body of work has underscored, at once, the formative role of the colonies in the making of European liberalism and the unexpected, and often paradoxical, career that liberalism had assumed in the colonial world (Mehta, Pitts, Bayly, Sartori, among others). This panel, from within the archive of nineteenth- and twentieth-century South Asian political thought, will reconsider old questions in empire and liberalism studies and raise new ones. It will inquire if the normative and conceptual contents of liberalism went through any transformation in its colonial iteration. Was the colonial world a mere laboratory of British liberalism, or did colonial thinkers succeed in fashioning a liberalism of their own? Taking into account the development of liberalism through an aspirational enterprise of limited (and non-popular) representation in colonial India, the panel will further consider the ways in which nineteenth-century Indian liberalism negotiated with the problem of absent colonial sovereignty. Relatedly, the panel will reflect on the apparent obsolescence of liberalism in colonial India after the rise of mass anticolonialism. Bringing together historians, political theorists, and legal scholars, this panel will ultimately bear on the contested legacies of imperial and anti-imperial liberalisms.

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

On October 2nd, 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India launched the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM, or “Clean India Mission”), promising that India would be “clean” by October 2nd, 2019. He promised that wastewater would be disposed of safely, that manual scavenging (the practice by which human beings handle the excreta of other human beings) would be eliminated, and that open defecation would be eradicated. Over four years after this announcement, sanitation has undergone significant changes: approximately 90 million toilets have been built, there has been renewed political will around the issue, and billions of dollars have been spent on advertising campaigns. Conversely, the way in which SBM and the current government have dominated conversations around sanitation has concealed problematic processes and unchanging institutional configurations. “Sanitation” here is defined as the safe management of human fecal waste. India’s sanitation problems are massive. According to the WHO and UNICEF, as of 2015, only about 31% of human waste was safely managed, which significantly impacts the economy and human health. Sanitation in India is entwined with gender (O’Reilly et al 2017), caste (Omvedt 2006; Lynch 1969; Vaid 2014; Shahid 2015), colonial legacies (Arnold 1993; Prashad 2001), and Hindu notions of pollution and purity (Douglas 1966; Dumont 1981; Alley 2002). Sanitation also generates infrastructural innovations and requires new institutional organizations and forms of governance (Alley, Barr, and Mehta 2018). Emerging scholarship has only begun to examine the different ways in which sanitation informs and is entangled with different social, cultural, governmental, and economic arrangements. SBM seems to be an especially pernicious way to reframe the long-standing contradictions of caste society to fit 21st century global aspirations. This panel grapples with sanitation and cleanliness in the context of the making of a “Swachh Bharat,” examining power, caste, cultural change, and governance.

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

For over a thousand years, the South Indian languages of Kannada and Telugu have shared not only the same script, but also parallel literary histories, poetic artistries, and metrical conventions. Despite the longstanding relationship across Kannada and Telugu, no scholarship to date seriously considers the synchronicity across the literary development of these two major South Indian languages. Filling this lacuna, this panel is the first among many future collaborations of scholars working closely in Kannada and Telugu literatures. Focusing on poetic works spanning from the tenth century to the fifteenth centuries, the papers in this panel rest on the artistry of prosody, with particular attention to vernacular meters, including vacana, ragaḷe, dvipada, and campū kāvya. Gil Ben-Herut traces the inward-moving trajectory of Kannada literature from non-metered vacanas to works with simple local meters (ragaḷe in Kannada and dvipada in Telugu) that influenced later Telugu writings. Picking up on this thread, Jamal Jones focuses on the multiple uses of dvipada (“two-footed” meter) in classical Telugu, spanning from the works of the thirteenth-century poet Palkuriki Somanatha to Gaurana and Madiki Singana, two courtly brahmins of the fifteenth century. Sarah Pierce Taylor examines metrical and narratological components that were central to the widespread success of campū kāvya (mixed prose and verse) in Old Kannada. Finally, Harshita Mruthinti Kamath considers the significance of Kavijanāśrayamu, a tenth-century text that engages both Telugu and Kannada rules on prosody and poetics to stand as the first work of classical Telugu literature. The four presenters, junior scholars from a range of institutions in the United States and Canada, represent the emerging fields of classical Kannada and Telugu studies. Srilata Raman, a senior scholar of Tamil and Sanskrit intellectual formations, will serve as the chair/discussant and contribute to the broader discussion of literary production across South Indian languages.

Session: Session 2: Friday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Conference Room 3
Floor: Floor 2

Ad hoc 7, Environment

Session: Session 2: Friday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Conference Room 5
Floor: Floor 2

This panel brings together a series of dynamic papers that set Indian food cultures and their itinerant ideologies in motion, as the papers work together to reveal the ways in which food history can be deployed to ask deep questions about the working of politics, the boundaries of community, and the construction of personal and collective subjectivities. And yet, the practices of eating, preparing, distributing and even regulating food also reveal an intimacy and singularity of experience that complicates a simply political reading of food in its historical context. The papers together reveal the complexity of balancing these experiences with food cultures in South Asia and its diaspora, where the inclination to think critically of the politics involved in the deployment of food as discursive tool are marked by the particularities of eating, and where, conversely, the seeming universality of a food culture is illuminated by those subjects it excludes. Jo Sharma draws on her work with the City Foods Project to examine the trends, tropes and traditions around Indian street food and the people who sell it in India and around the world. Siobhan Lambert-Hurley & Sanchia de Souza both explore the pragmatics of beef-eating and its alternatives in different contexts; Lambert-Hurley uses this mode of division, beef-eating and beef-abstaining, to think about how food marks identity in the practices of food preparation and consumption in South Asian communities and their diasporas; de Souza explores the spatial politics of vegetarianism in colonial India, contrasting nationalist ethics vested in abstention from beef-eating with the pragmatics of a vibrant cattle economy. Rachel Berger explores the genealogy of vanaspati ghee to think about the reliance on authenticity in discussions of food, which occludes more revealing conversations about difference as a historic food product gives way to a new one.

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

Historically, education for women and girls in India has been the subject of extensive debate. In this panel, we will explore the discussions that determine how women access education, as well as the content that is deemed appropriate for women to learn. Based on extensive fieldwork and archival research, our papers will engage with questions of caste, class, and mobility; suggesting that these are all important factors that mediate(d) how Indian women participate(d) in institutions of higher education. Using an interdisciplinary array of methods, we will examine the transnational movements of capital, knowledge, and women students that continue to reshape the contours of how Indian women accessed education both in India and elsewhere in the world. By focusing on women students, we will demonstrate that gender plays a major role in defining the course of study (for example, the humanities are seen as more suitable than STEM subjects for women to study). This gender-based characterization of fields of study also has implications for nation-building and policy-making. Historically, women have been steered towards more ‘nurturing’ fields of study, encouraged by the state to participate in professions that would help empower less privileged Indian women (for example, policymaking in maternal and child welfare; and obstetrics and gynecology). While our analysis is strongly rooted in this history, we note that these trends have changed in recent times as a result of shifting caste and class dynamics in India and the Indian diaspora, and the resulting social mobility afforded by higher education for women. This panel will capture the context and circumstances of that change.

Session: Session 2: Friday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: University A/B
Floor: Floor 2

This panel explores the production of scientific knowledge and changing understandings of science in South Asian languages, by focusing on the individuals and institutions that translated “western” sciences in modern South Asia. Within the history of science in South Asia, such indigenous intellectual projects have been conceptualized either as instances of “popularization” of western disciplinary knowledges, or of their “vernacularization” – that is, the translation and creative adaptation of established bodies of knowledge and their practices in a colonial context. This panel engages with this historiography to raise new questions concerning the global circulations of scientific knowledge from the perspective of South Asia and the regional embeddedness of the processes by which knowledge travels: Specifically, what did it mean to be a popularizer of science in colonial India, when the language order of the subcontinent, its educational structures, and epistemic communities were being transformed? In turn, how did allegedly universal concepts and bodies of knowledge – ‘society’, ‘political economy’, ‘science’ itself – emerge within the local projects of indigenous actors in South Asia? Our papers focus on engagements with the sciences in the Urdu and Hindi concept-worlds in colonial north India and postcolonial Pakistan. Sarah Qidwai provides an account of the Scientific Society founded by Sayyid Ahmed Khan and interrogates the concept of ‘science popularization’ in the colony. Osama Siddiqui examines the first Urdu translation (1869) of John Stuart Mill’s "Principles of Political Economy" (1848) to follow Indian participation in the global transformation of liberal ideas. Charu Singh investigates the production of Hindi as a language of science with its own technical terminology as a step towards creating a science-literate national public. Finally, Andrew Amstutz explores how long-standing projects of Urdu science education were reconfigured for Pakistan. Each paper examines the production of specific vernacular scientific texts in South Asia.

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

In 2009 the Mahinda Rajapaksa government ended the thirty-year civil war in Sri Lanka with a military victory against the Tamil Tigers. Rajapaksa won a second term in 2010 promising good governance and prosperity. But he failed. In 2015 the voters elected a new government led by President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe that promised “Good Governance.” Today they also stand accused of corruption and deceit. This raises a fundamental issue about sustainability of liberal democracy in Sri Lanka. Why do democracies in some countries fail to produce a set of reasonably honest and competent set of rulers capable of delivering what they promise? Why do voters tolerate such large credibility gaps? Is it because society is too fragmented in the Foucaultian sense and there is no “truth” in the positivist sense? Or is it because there are multiple socio-economic and political structures that generate equally credible alternative positive truths that compete with each other? The four papers on this panel use these competing hypotheses to analyze Sri Lanka’s current political and economic reality and the future prospects for its liberal democracy. The first paper assesses how far the 2015 government has delivered on promises it made with reference to the core areas of constitutional and political reforms. The second describes and analyses how Sri Lankan politicians regularly make promises to bring ethnic harmony that they have no intention to keep and how and why people tolerate such deception. The third attempts to explain the gap that exists between promises made by politicians and actual performance in economic growth and social welfare. The fourth examines how and why working class groups that are marginalized by globalization resort to illegal or deceptive practices to protect their interests.

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

Ad hoc 15, Art, Music

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

For India’s diplomatic community 1947 represented, more than anything else a sense of continuity, rather than rupture. Decision makers of India’s international relations during the late 1940s and 1950s often actively chose to retain and consolidate upon linkages with the international personality of the government of India before the transfer of power, rather than to discard their colonial inheritance. In this panel, we will piece together some of the influences on the process of shaping India’s international relations in the twentieth century, and analyse the degree to which they could also be representive of alternative formulations of of South Asia's territoriality, and sovereignty, than those which are held today. The individual papers—on the different ways in which the geopolitical significance of the Indian ocean was analyzed (Rechards, B); on attempts to increase India’s international standing as a moral actor in the international arena through its responses to the humanitarean crists in Malaysia, Indonesia and Korea (Framke, M); on attempts to use the moment of decolonization to consolidate its influence in the South East Asian region (Bhardwaj, S.); and in the analysis of the negotiations between the governments of India and Pakistan during the 1950s on the making of the Minorities Pact (Raghavan, P) will offer insights into the influence of continuing of historical connections across the Asian region on the one hand, and the extent to which this was curtailed by the fashioning of nationalistic identities, on the other. The panel will thus present arguments about the need for a more historicised, and longer-term perspective on the factors that influence India's international relations, and examine how questions about India's 'emerging power' status should also be more firmly contextualized within the 1940s, rather than the 1990s.

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

By 1947, approximately 3.5 million people in India were classified as ‘criminal tribes’ under the Criminal Tribes Act (1871). Scholars have predominantly framed the experiences of these criminalised communities within histories of colonial law and knowledge. Conversely, these papers view the Act and its postcolonial aftermath from several under-examined vantage points, which collectively bring out the rooted, everyday experiences of those subject to the CTA: gender and family histories; labour history; postcolonial constitutional rights; and subaltern cartographies. The panel brings together historical and anthropological approaches, and papers that span from the 1870s to the present, to complicate the methodological and temporal boundaries of existing scholarship. Jessica Hinchy suggests that centering gender, sexuality and family in histories of the ‘criminal tribes’ reveals new aspects of colonial and middle-class Indian projects and extends our understanding of the gender history of low-caste communities. William Gould shifts our attention to labour history, showing that notions of criminality, as well as grassroots concepts of rights, were constructed through negotiations over work cultures, migration patterns and family units. His analysis opens up connections to wider histories of labour migration. Sarah Gandee examines the postcolonial afterlife of the CTA in the form of habitual offender legislation, which was an uneasy compromise between the constitutional right of equality and the continued criminalisation of ‘Denotified Tribes.’ She asks, was the state’s rights language performative? Moving beyond reading the archive against the grain, he asks challenging questions about subaltern knowledge forms. Throughout, the papers explore the ways in which studies of the ‘criminal tribes’ offer new perspectives to ideas of criminality and identity, and how these were central to the workings of colonial and postcolonial governance.

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

Human communities build and reproduce a social memory of their collective journey through time. In South Asia generative frames of memory have permitted many socially vital histories to co-exist. They were to be found among the high literati of the courts, the guardians of pan-continental religious centers, dominant rural gentry or the humble custodians of local shrines. They were read to kings, narrated to judges or sung by pilgrims treading dusty paths to remote shrines. And they did not have to agree with each other. That began to change with colonization and nationalism. Through the nineteenth and twentieth century, these narratives were increasingly controlled by state educational institutions and the handful of professional historians. But alternative and parallel histories continued. This panel will consider histories and memoryscapes outside the formal academy viewed as types of collective memory. The papers in this panel each address this from different angles. Sumit Guha considers how socio-political settings that required the statement and proof of local memory have shaped the practices of collective memory across South Asia. Richard Davis seeks to explain why some religious practices succeeded in forming recitative communities that left a textual memory of themselves, while others did not. Samira Sheikh looks at several texts to discern the shaping of a memoryscape around the Nawab of Bharuch, ousted by the English in 1772. Purnima Dhavan takes a fresh look at one example of the class of collective biography (tazkirah) in Persian and Urdu, seeing it as an effort at making durable webs of memory, shaped by emotion and not merely by knowledge. Collectively, the papers in this panel provide fresh innovative ways of considering the many ways of shaping collective memory.

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

What has defined interspecies relations between human and elephant in South Asia’s long history? What have been the attitudes toward, interactions with, and regulations regarding elephants? How have humans negotiated themselves, their religions, and their power in relation to elephants? How did historical human-animal conflicts concerning the elephant differ from the present day situation, and how did the two species manage to coexist? In light of the recent boom of studies on elephantology, often focused on contemporary topics, our panel examines historical aspects of human-elephant relations, highlighting points of conflict, conflicting interests, and coexistence between this non-human animal and the human animal. Our papers present a number of themes, starting with a scrutiny of the material and textual records of early India that reveal complex patterns of conflict and coexistence. Investigation of Buddhist material problematizes the Buddha’s “persona” and his descendance from the elephant. An examination of modes of elephant-human communication focuses on the medieval training of royal elephants in order to explore elephant language and the implications of humans training this animal. Finally, a longue durée study of policies regarding the hunting and killing of elephants in South Asia sheds light on the Asian elephant’s relative success as a species historically speaking, while providing the key to understanding the decline of the elephant in the last two centuries. Overall, our work advances current research on South Asian environmental history, animal language, the human- animal boundary, and animal studies.

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

This panel explores socio-cultural, political, and technological aspects of household energy transitions in India and shows how domestic energy consumption is entangled with a set of discursive binaries: rural and urban, tradition and modernity, clean and dirty, expert and user, household and nation-state. These binaries pervade nationalist projects of development as well as global efforts related to sustainability and climate mitigation. Expanding energy access consists of providing new energy services to families and facilitating an ‘energy transition’ to new technologies and fuels. These efforts are driven by a confluence of environmental, health and gender equity concerns. In the realm of cooking energy, Meena Khandelwal focuses on the history of one particular stove experiment grounded in feminist ideas of technology development and suggests some lessons it might teach us about cookstove/chulha improvement. Taking a broader perspective on cooking, Deepti Chatti untangles the traditional/modern teleological assumptions that undergird many energy access projects in India today, including the recent Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana. Jerry Anthony shifts our focus from rural to urban. He describes the enormous energy demands of home building and energy-intensive lifestyles associated with rapid urbanization and asks what policies might offer solutions. Thinking of the state, Nandita Badami focuses on solar energy to understand broader governance and moral logics behind the rapid and large scale roll out of renewable energy transitions in India. By expanding the discussion of energy in India to non-technical matters, and grounding current analyses in history on the one hand and aspirations for a better life on the other, this panel illustrates the ways in which energy projects are socially, culturally and politically embedded.

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

Organized around a new book on migration, marriage, and belonging, this round table focuses on artistry in and as marriage practices across South Asia. The themes come out of Sidharthan Maunaguru’s book Marrying for a Future: Transnational Sri Lankan Tamil Marriages in the Shadow of War. Maunaguru focuses on marriage among Tamil refugees, showing how they carve out a life and belonging in a world made uncertain by civil war. Looking at “in-between spaces and the figures, documents, spaces, and places within such zones [as] important sites…for an examination of how communities affected by violence strive to re-inhabit the world”, Maunaguru rethinks the status of life in refuge as being in limbo or suspended between past and present. This round table initiates conversation among scholars whose work touches on marriage, kinship, and intimacy through migration, borders, surveillance, legal documents, politics, and violence in contemporary South Asia. If marriage is where uncertainty and certainty, hope and despair emerge together, what does this tell us about their entangled nature in how life is made and sustained? How do notions of the in-between, temporary moments, and transit places/spaces come into play in remaking life and inhabiting a place, even if momentarily? How do the temporalities and rhythms of life, documents, and material possessions come to reconstitute, reconfigure, unmake, and remake life in sites beyond marriage, such as migration, borders, law, politics, and policing? Discussants include Veena Das, Jonathan Spencer, Sharika Thiranagama, Farhana Ibrahim, Megha Sehdev, Sahana Ghosh, and Ammara Maqsood. Their work straddles multiple ‘borders’ across South Asia, variously interrogating belonging, mobility, and social and legal policing. Their engagement with Maunaguru’s themes on temporality, the in-between, documents, and remaking of life will help expand how we see kin-making, friendship, and intimacy as critical sites of belonging and inhabiting place in South Asia.

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

Since the consolidation of state and national archives in post-colonial South Asia, scholars have made significant efforts to read against the grain to understand histories rendered marginal by the imperatives of British colonial governance. However, the present-day view of the centralized government repository has obscured the multiple other locations and agencies of record that functioned under pre-colonial regimes, and continued to remain active during and after colonial rule. With paper rapidly becoming the dominant inscriptional medium by the middle of the second millennium CE, institutions ranging from imperial and sub-imperial chancelleries and libraries to the daftar-khanas of scribal, mercantile, and land-holding families to Hindu sectarian mathas and Sufi khanqahs amassed not only literary, performative, and devotional manuscripts, but also more everyday documentation of material transactions, entitlements, and obligations. With special attention to the household as a locus of record, this panel will present a nuanced inventory of archival practices extending from pre-colonial to post-colonial South Asia. Collectively, the papers explore the arts of recording, validating, copying and circulating documents in different scripts and languages (Arabic, Persian, Marathi, Rajasthani and Tamil) and clarify the social and institutional matrices within which these documents made sense. Based on research related to four different regions of South Asia, including the Indian Ocean, one key aim here is to present methodological attempts to reimagine and reconstruct scattered and reshaped archives. The suggestion here is that alternative narratives become possible when one is able to undertake such archival re-construction substantively, with the necessary combination of labour-intensive fieldwork and linguistic ability.

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

In recent decades, Sri Lanka has been the site of many upheavals, including war-related dislocation and dispossession, the ravages of the 2004 tsunami, burgeoning labor migration, and commercial expansion. The bucolic image of “temple, tank, and paddy field” falls woefully short of characterizing present-day rural life. In this panel, we examine at close hand how long-standing reciprocal obligations of kin and community are being challenged and re-made as Sri Lankan families encounter the exigencies, choices, and opportunities afforded by these upheavals. International labor migration—notably to the Gulf States, but also to Malaysia, South Korea, and southern Europe—has become indispensable to both the national economy and the economy of many households. Roughly one out of nine households has an adult member working abroad; many of these workers remain overseas for decades. Three panelists explore how such sojourns re-configure gendered and generational relations. Vidyamali Samarasinghe asks how relations of power between spouses are affected when a wife—the breadwinner while away—returns home. Michele Gamburd explores how labor migration (whether local or international) re-shapes but does not abrogate long-standing expectations and norms regarding care for children and elders. Bambi Chapin, employing the analytical tools afforded by psychodynamic theory, focuses closely on a mother-daughter pair, describing the daughter’s agentive re-configuring of family in the face of the mother’s decades-long absence. Cynthia Caron turns attention to northern and eastern Sri Lanka where families are engaged in re-establishing home and community in the aftermath of the prolonged displacement resulting from civil war and the 2004 tsunami. The discussant, Asha Abeyasekera, offers a contrastive perspective to the focus on rural families by examining the compulsory re-housing of the urban poor in name of “beautification” and the transformation of Colombo into a “world-class city.”

Session: Session 3: Friday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Parlour Room 634
Floor: Floor 6

Our roundtable will discuss University of Hawaii’s Kennedy Mainstage theatre production - A Midsummer Night’s Bollywood Dream (co-directed by Paul Mitri and Sai Bhatawadekar), which opened February 1, 2019. This production was a unique educational collaboration among three different programs: Western Theatre, Asian Theatre, and Dance: we kept Shakespeare’s text mostly intact and trained with Shakespearean techniques (required by the Western Theatre program) while setting it not in a real place but in the “Bollywood” genre itself, being self-referential to the iconic moments of Hindi cinema, from Sholay to Dilwale, from Padosan to Padukone. For the script, Bhatawadekar wrote original songs, translated Shakespeare’s verse into Hindi poems, and transformed some text into Hindi-English bilingual lyrics and dialogues that aligned with Shakespeare’s rhyme and meter. For music, Webster blended western and Indian classical, folk, and other genres together and spun entirely new songs around iconic musical phrases from Hindi cinema. For choreography, Bhatawadekar drew upon Indian folk dance traditions and Bollywood’s interpretive movement vocabulary. Visually, Speetjens and the design team created a unique landscape that transcended the boundaries of specific region, yet stayed true to the epic and robust style of Bollywood. Our roundtable will discuss the triumphs and tribulations of creative fusions of east and west, the classics and the contemporary, canonical and popular art, tradition and innovation. Directors, designers, and actor-dancers at this roundtable will raise topics of blatant and subtle negotiations in the process, of conscientiously letting our aesthetic, feminist, philosophical, and cross-cultural convictions guide our choices of concepts and characters. We will also raise important questions about place-based learning and creativity, how the population and logistics of a place dictate artistic choices. Together we will open up the discussion on cross-cultural creative endeavors in all their nuances - dominant, subversive, dialogic, frustrating, joyous, self-reflexive, transformative.

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

New trends in global labor history have focused on history of work outside of factory floors in the global South or the North. Themes such as everyday practices, cultural worlds, convict labor, labor mobility and migration, intra-Asiatic comparative plantation labor have featured prominently in these works. South Asian historians have made important contribution towards this trend especially through substantial histories of Indian seamen. However, historiography of South Asian labor remains underdeveloped in terms of studies on non-traditional workers and bringing the eighteenth and early nineteenth century within the realm of labor history. Building on the new trends in global labor history, this panel put into dialogue scholars working on histories of South Asian labor- state relations from the eighteenth into the early twentieth century. Though the South Asian colonial experience – the early company state and the British Raj – forms the primary context of these studies, the papers bring to fore the relevance of these histories to multiple contexts, such as inter-empire transfer of knowledge in labor management in the late eighteenth century, and global history of unfree labor in the early nineteenth century. Zach Sell’s paper studies land-labor relation as initiated by Permanent Settlement in Bengal of 1793 in comparison to land-labor relations in settler colonial United States. Titas Chakraborty’s and Vidhya Raveendranathan’s papers look at infrastructural labor – indigenous boatmen, and European sailors– in examining multiple forms of labor-company conflicts in relation to regulatory regimes of labor management in early company state of eighteenth and nineteenth century. Parthapratim Shil’s paper on security labor market demonstrates how labor market segmentation reproduced caste relations within the colonial state apparatus of nineteenth century Eastern India. Together, through considerations of infrastructure, agrarian relations, and caste and labor markets this panel provides new perspectives on South Asian Labor history.

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

The archaeological record of South Asia continues to be the focus of many different types of research and each year short term and long term studies provide important new insights into the prehistoric, Early Historic and Historical Periods of cultural development. The southern Indus Valley region of Sindh has been the focus of many excavations as well as archaeological surveys, beginning as early as the 1850s. However, many remote areas of Sindh were overlooked due to various factors. Z. A. Kalhoro will present the summary of his long-term and extensive survey of Megalithic sites in Sindh, which reveals that many ancient monuments continue to be redefined by modern communities. Rajesh S. V. presents the results of the most important recent excavations of an Early Harappan Period cemetery on the island of Kachchh, which lies just to the east of the Indus River Delta. This is one of only a few cemeteries dating to the period prior to the Harappan urban period and sheds new light on burial practices in this part of Gujarat. In the fourth paper, B. Hoffman presents a summary of his long-term research on the development of copper metallurgy at the site of Harappa and shows how copper ores from northwestern India were used in the Indus region as well as in Mesopotamia and Oman. Together, these papers demonstrate the importance of rigorous methodologies and well-developed interpretive models for understanding the complex record of human adaptations South Asia.

Session: Session 4: Friday, 3:45 pm - 5:30 pm
Room: Conference Room 1
Floor: Floor 2

This panel inquires into how medieval Indian intellectuals grappled with the ethical implications of the Mahābhārata’s distinctly artistic features. We take our cue from Emily Hudson, Lawrence McCrea, and other leading scholars, whose recent work has called for careful considerations of the relationship between the Mahābhārata’s aesthetic dimensions - of narrative structure, pacing, and so forth - and its didactic telos. Simply put, how the Mahābhārata depicts phenomena to the reader is inseparable from what the Mahābhārata attempts to teach the reader. The papers on our panel add to this project by exploring the relationship between aesthetics and ideas in relation to two artistic phenomena in the Mahābhārata: ekphrasis (the literary description of a work of art) and rhetoric. Christopher Fleming draws on Nīlakantha Caturdhara’s commentarial oeuvre to situate Mayāsura’s palace at Indraprasthā against the backdrop of Sanskrit architectural theory and to explore the possibility that Maya, a captive whose home was destroyed by the Pāndavas, intended certain architectural features - such as illusory lakes - to sow conflict between the Pāndavas and the Kauravas. Timothy Lorndale takes up Old Kannada retellings of the ‘Night Raid,’ wherein descriptions of Aśhvatthāman’s brutal slaughter of the sleeping Pāndavas - rivers of congealed blood and mountains of glistening entrails - elicit a change of moral alignment for Duryodhana, the epic’s main antagonist. Sohini Pillai and Vishal Sharma plumb the ethical and theological implications of two superlative displays of rhetoric: Draupadī’s prayer to Krishna and Śhiśhupāla’s insult of Krishna. Pillai compares the devotional effects of Draupadī’s supplication to the deity during her attempted disrobing in Hindi and Tamil retellings of the Mahābhārata. Sharma uses medieval commentary to explore problems related to the fact that Śhiśhupāla’s intricate insults actually - and ironically - engender a more intimate relationship between Śhiśhupāla and Krishna.

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

After the abolition of slavery, more than one million Indian workers left India to labor on countless plantations across the British Empire. The ‘new system of slavery’ paradigm has dominated indentured labor studies by emphasizing how workers’ lived experiences were similar to those of slaves. Recent scholarship has challenged this view by underlining migrant workers’ complex practices in deciding their destinations and the role of returnee migrants in inciting new migrants’ journeys. This panel examines the agency and creative actions of various historical actors within coolie and former coolie populations of the Indian Ocean (Malaya, South Africa and Mauritius). Crispin Bates examines how colonial governments sought to normalize intimate and affective relations of migrant workers through legal regulations and the limits to these attempts at social control. Migrants’ social and affective relations illustrate an important degree of creativity in escaping the speciousness of colonial rule in the Malayan peninsula and other parts of the Indian Ocean. Arunima Datta suggests how Indian coolie women’s agency was not restricted to the colonial plantation complexes of Malaya. Rather, coolie women creatively appropriated the structural residues of the plantation system and joined Subash Chandra Bose’s Rani Jhansi Regiment to fight British imperialism during World War II. Julia Jong Haines uses the historical archeology study of Bras d’Eau National Park, formerly a nineteenth-century sugar estate in Mauritius to consider how indentured laborers developed material and consumptive creative practices to appropriate the landscape of the plantation site and navigate the demands of the colonial production system. Yoshina Hurgobin’s paper examines how coolie children and orphans occasionally deployed creative approaches to interact with overbearing and overregulating colonial governments in Natal (South Africa) and Mauritius.

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

The panelists discuss the complexities of a Study Abroad experience for American students in India in different contexts, with a focus on reflexive and critical reflections on ‘positionality’. The panelists have led, and continue to lead short, two-three week Study Abroad programs, each with a different focus, to diverse places in India. Umme al-Wazedi (Augustana College, Rock Island, IL) takes students to study grassroots activism by non-profit organizations, working on HIV-positive children (New Delhi), a shelter for widows in Vrindavan, and a women’s self-help group (Jaipur). The aim for students is to learn from the NGOs, and to implement their learning in the U.S. Lisa Eck’s program (Framingham State University, Framingham, MA) offers her students of Indian contemporary literature a service learning opportunity in Kalimpong (West Bengal), to learn from Himalayan villagers about indigenous environmental knowledge and practices, as well as from their ‘radical hospitality’, even as they too teach. Bonnie Zare (Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA), takes students to Aarti Home in Kadapa (Andhra Pradesh), a permanent home for abandoned girls with a human rights approach to gender justice, and encourages her students to critically question what they themselves learn from the girls, and how they may effectively reciprocate in their service to them. Suchitra Samanta (Virginia Tech, and panel organizer) reflects on whether and how her own particular ‘positionality’ as native-born Indian, with extensive field research experience in Kolkata (West Bengal), thus an “insider/outsider,” facilitated student learning in a Study Abroad program to study religious diversity in that city. We ask: how can student learning be effectively critical, questioning of their own class (perhaps gendered) privilege as Americans? How and what do students really learn from their experiences in a non-Western context?

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

Ad hoc 12, GWS

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

Hyderabad State was India’s largest and wealthiest princely state. By the late nineteenth century, the Asaf Jahi leadership and a variety of the court and state’s nobility were increasingly participating in a variety of local, national, and international networks that wrought profound changes to the city, the state, and its inhabitants. This interdisciplinary panel will explore four case studies of change at this critical moment in colonial South Asia’s history. The first paper uses instances of Ottoman influence on Hyderabadi aesthetics and popular consumption to show how new 19th century technologies facilitated many other kinds of transnational influence and imagination than just the imperial or pan-Islamic. The second paper will explore shifting signifiers of ‘Africanness’ and ‘Arabness’ in claims of belonging on the part of habshis/siddis in Hyderabad from the 19th century up to the present, arguing, ultimately, both for the long afterlives of these 19th c. events, as well as the fact that these shifting globally-inflected meanings need to be located in local and regional histories if we are to better understand their impacts on individuals and communities. The third paper asks how skilled industrial artisans selectively engaged with projects of technical education in the context of late nineteenth-century Hyderabad State. Focusing on state attempts to reform the education of carpenters, blacksmiths, and stonemasons, the paper analyzes artisan responses to changing social structures of technical education. The final paper explores the role of water as a source of recreation and pleasure. Boating, swimming, fishing, and other forms of recreation became more common, and with them new challenges to the hydrosocial cycle. Together, the papers ask how Hyderabadis across differing class, religious, and social backgrounds encountered local permutations of nineteenth-century concepts of modernity and reform.

Session: Session 4: Friday, 3:45 pm - 5:30 pm
Room: Parlour Room 629
Floor: Floor 6

This panel explores previously less examined aspects and trajectories of modern South Asian Islam through the theoretical frame and lens of “Borders and Boundaries.” Each paper in this panel approaches this theme from a different disciplinary perspective including Anthropology, Religious Studies, History, and Literature: fields that are rarely brought together in discussions on South Asian Islam. However, all panelists share a common concern with interrogating simultaneously the borders and limits of “South Asian Islam” as an analytical and lived category, as well as the competing and often conflictual ways in which borders and boundaries, conceptual as well as physical, have informed the intellectual and political history and present of South Asian Islam. Specifically, paper 1 focuses on the border region of Pakistani administered Kashmir and interrogates Qur’anic healing practices in the valley. It argues that the conception of transformative witnessing (shahadat) that animates Qur’anic healing practitioners’ engagement with pain and violence exceeds and subverts the secular logics of recognition informing humanitarian projects of the Pakistani military. Paper 2 conducts a revisionist reading of the famous and fateful early 19th century North Indian Jihad movement against the Sikhs in the Pashtun frontier region. By analyzing previously unexplored Arabic and Persian manuscripts, it sheds new light on the transnational aspirations of this movement that bring into question nationalist and colonial territorial boundaries. Paper 3 turns its gaze to literature and brings into view the interaction of Sufism and Socialism in the Urdu Progressive Writers Movement to demonstrate the intimacy and porosity between religion and literature in South Asian Islam. And paper 4 takes the case of the Kartarpur corridor between India and Pakistan to examine how the ability to both dictate as well as dissolve borders and boundaries signals juridical strength (and weakness) in the ability to declare an exception. 

Session: Session 4: Friday, 3:45 pm - 5:30 pm
Room: Parlour Room 638
Floor: Floor 6

Panel Co-organizers: Niharika Dinkar, Department of Art History, Boise State University AND Megha Sharma Sehdev, Department of Anthropology, McGill University **************** Theories of the gaze in South Asian visual culture have been dominated by scholarship on darshan with its emphasis on frontality and reciprocity. This panel shifts attention away from the contract between viewer and image implied in darshan to consider other ways of seeing. We consider views that confound the eye - shimmering screens, ornamentation, and inscrutable views – as well as peripheral ways of seeing, such as side-glance or the tedi nazar. We ask how the eye makes meaning from these interactions and what kinds of social relations it produces. Moving away from a model in which the gaze is absorbed in its object, and related scopophilic economies, we ask how dynamics of distraction and deception mediate vision. Clothing, gesture, and jewelry - the way such objects shine, move, and conceal - are not simply accessories to the main spectacle but participate in "orders of ornamentation" (Ali 2004). By the same token, the tangential glance or tedi-nazar draws on lesser-explicated but no less significant traditions of optic knowledge. Setting aside dominant frameworks of darshan, we examine how vision emerges from the play of surface and depth, exteriority and interiority, and knowledge and uncertainty. The panel examines alternative ways of seeing drawing on approaches from film studies, religious studies, art history, and anthropology. How do deception and distraction as a form of "seeing" build on, and depart from, normative concepts of aesthetics, intimacy and sociality in South Asia? ************** Works Cited: Ali, Daud. Courtly Culture and Political Life in Early Medieval India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

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

Two areas of South Asia that have a long history of archaeology are the central peninsular region of modern Karnataka and the northwestern Indus Valley region near ancient site of Taxila. Four papers will investigate different aspects of the long term histories of these two regions, beginning in the Prehistoric and Early Historic periods and continuing to the present. One of the important goals of modern archaeological research is to involve local communities and artists in order to gain insight into ancient technologies and artistic traditions. Local community members are also encouraged to become more involved in the conservation and preservation of the archaeological remains. The first paper by N. Sugandhi provides an overview of her long-term research project in the region of Tekkalakota, Karnataka. She has involved local students and community members in her surveys and presents a unique model for engaging in research and local outreach. Her discoveries of iron slag also provide an important link to the second paper by A. Lee, which focuses on the analysis of iron remains from a Early Historic Buddhist site near Taxila. The iron technologies of South India and Northwestern Pakistan may have been closely linked due to long distance trade. The final two papers focus on important artistic crafts of the Gandhara Period in the Taxila region. M. A, Khan presents an important discussion of stone carving traditions in modern Taxila and their links to the ancient carvers of Gandhara. The paper by M. Imitaz focuses on stucco art that also was highly developed in ancient Gandhara. Stucco was used to produce sculpture as well as architectural decoration and utilitarian objects. She includes a discussion of how to involve local modern craftspeople in the revival of stucco art for reproduction, replication as well as modern application.

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

What are the limits to the narrative of resistance in Nepali anthropology? While historically scholarship of Nepal has privileged kinship and village practices, questions regarding bureaucratic authority, formal finance, and global markets have often been viewed as outside forces, impeding on communal agency. Recent scholarship has worked to correct this picture by exploring the increased importance capitalist markets, global labor, and private property to this area of the world. Yet still, too often these forces are framed as an alien imposition, a characterization that belies the life experience of those who must deal with state bureaucracy and private bank loans as often as they do with ritual exchange. What is needed is a renewed focus on the administration of the everyday; that is, on the transactions and procedures that cut freely from state authorities to private banks to domestic life. Rather than seeing such formal bureaucracy as vehicles of Western modernism in contest with “local” practice, we could instead embrace them as an available foundation for creativity, agency, and moral play. Such focus helps to undermine a diffusionist narrative of modernism and globalization, while also bringing us more in-line with the strategies and subjectivities of those who must navigate these systems. Indeed, with a burgeoning financial sector, hydropower projects paying villagers in company shares, earthquake reconstruction premised on formalized land titles, and over one third of the national GDP constituted by remittances sent from abroad, bureaucratic authority and capital markets can no longer been seen as marginal or resisted. In light of this, we offer ethnographic insights into this transformation, focusing on the transactions and procedures themselves, and not the narratives we use to make sense of them.

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

At the heart of this panel is how poets understand their craft and the literary tools at their disposal in the shifting environments of the second millennium in South Asia. Though literary production in the vernacular is often understood through the prism of language, the following papers examine vernacularism from the perspective of craft, in which language is just one of the many tools available in multi-lingual, multi-cultural spaces. Sivan Goren Arzony discusses the Bhāshārāmāyanacampu, a fifteenth-century Manipravālam adaptation of the Rāmāyana which uses Sanskrit verses (wholesale, slightly adapted or translated) inserted into Manipravālam. Rather than plagiarism or inaptitude, she argues that these verses are a new poetic tool which is also deeply connected to performative practices. Ilanit Loewy Shacham engages with sixteenth-century Telugu prabandhas. Focusing on the practice of poetic description (varnana), she argues that within this domain, Telugu poets were carving out new modes of expression and finding ways to meaningfully intertwine various types of past and present. Michal Hasson examines the way seventeenth-century Dakani poets conceptualized the act of composition, specifically, the ways in which these poets combined Persian and Sanskrit poetic conventions as well as elements from different branches of knowledge such as botany and astrology to create a new literary culture in Dakani. Natalia Di Pietrantonio focuses on the eighteenth-century masnavi Sihr-ul Bayan by Mir Hasan. Di Pietrantonio examines various manuscript copies of Sihr-ul Bayan to animate the relationship between miniature painting and the poetic text, speculating that the poet was aware that his text would be illustrated and thereby introducing a non-verbal aspect into his poetry. By focusing on poetic production from four different geo-chronological perspectives, this panel highlights both common and local-specific tools available to second-millennium poets and the ways in which poets re-imagine their poetry as craft within their diverse environments.

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

This panel critically examines the current challenges to governance in Bangladesh. It is often argued that economic underdevelopment, violent extremism, ethnic dispute are among the principal problems faced by the country. The panelists examine various dimensions of these challenges. Contrary to the argument that economic growth will pave the way of good governance, it shows that the significant economic growth in the past decade has neither diminished the political instability nor has it helped create an inclusive political system. Recent measures of the government are further limiting the democratic space and creating roadblocks towards political pluralism, as reflected in the restrictive laws about cyberspace. Bangladesh’s brush with violent extremism has drawn international attention while the source of the extremist ideology has been misplaced. The argument that growing violent extremism are associated with Islamic seminaries are tenuous at its best. The ethnic dispute, particularly in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, has remained a source of instability because of the absence of an alignment of actors and interests. Underscoring these four aspects of the governance, the panel intends to engage with dominant discourses and point to their inadequacies.

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

The panel on sacred landscapes of pilgrimage will focus on landscape structure and patterns in four case studies—Mahuli and Pandharpur in Maharashtra, and Ayodhya and Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh—in India. Physical mapping, observations, and interviews revealed patterns in ways in which the cultural landscape is structured and attributed significance as a sacred site. The findings indicate that sacred landscapes emerge from cultural practices centered around natural features such as river confluences, water bodies, and groves. The landscape becomes a center, a place of great significance, holding the possibility of encountering the divine, achieving purity, fulfilling vows, and experiencing transcendence. Mahuli at the confluence of Rivers Krishna and Venna near Satara in Maharashtra is a case study of sangam (confluence) tirtha (ford) where the cultural landscape emerges from cultural practices of pilgrims, alignment of festivals with planetary events, and imprinting of place narratives. Pandharpur is the destination of varkaris (pilgrims) belonging to a regional sect who come from many parts of Maharashtra to see Panduranga, a form of Krishna. Place-making occurs through transferring sanctity by spatially transposing other sites associated with Krishna and re-enactments of ritual practices. The Panchkroshi pilgrimage around Varanasi is undertaken for purifying oneself and fulfilling vows. The landscape is shaped by cultural practices of circumambulating and bathing at five sacred sites whose landscape structure is mapped, revealing a place vocabulary of water bodies, temples, courtyards, and tree shrines. At Ayodhya, birthplace of Lord Ram, pilgrims and residents were interviewed to explore how their cultural practices constitute place-making at the Sarayu Riverfront and at the ancient fort Ramkot where temples have been built on hillocks. The findings are applied towards conservation and management of sacred landscapes at the four pilgrim sites.

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

Ad hoc 3, Cinema, Queer

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

This panel explores the production and reproduction of urban spaces in colonial and postcolonial South Asia. In bringing together literary, historical, and material sources, we analyze policies and everyday practices of meaning-making in what is putatively understood as the urban. The four presentations explore processes of representation, preservation, commemoration, and memorialization both in literary and material forms. We engage a wide range of interdisciplinary scholarship in order to examine the triangulated relationship between urban/civic spaces, their literary and historical representation, and the communities and polities that reside within them. We hope to put critical pressure on the physical and symbolic boundaries of city-spaces and look for what alternative genealogies and geographies can be found in their stead. Ultimately this panel aims to generate a discussion on belonging and dispossession and critical artistic responses to these predicaments. Some questions we will explore are: - How are civic spaces imbricated in larger national and international imaginaries and political frameworks? - What are the multiple histories and temporalities that constitute urban geographies? - What sort of continuities and discontinuities emerge between pre-Partition and post-Partition histories of the city? - How might we theorize cultural practices and their location within the socio-economic context they emerge from, inhabit, or oppose? - How do authors and poets navigate and transcend territorially bounded concepts such as the city and the nation? -How does the conception of a precolonial past impinge on modern understandings of spaces, identities, affiliations?

Session: Session 5: Saturday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Parlour Room 629
Floor: Floor 6

At the moment when Imran Khan’s political party was invited to form a government following the July 2018 elections, even his detractors were enthusiastic about the possibilities for some real change in Pakistan. His central campaign theme had been to move towards greater transparency, eliminate corruption and, by presumption, engage with a rights-based framework. That the military was supportive of the PTI actually lends to its strength to follow through on this platform. The papers on this panel explore different aspects of how a rights-based framework may or may not be emerging and affecting state and society in Pakistan.

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

Mithila painting on paper began in the late 1960s around Madhubani, Bihar. Previously, Brahmin and Kayastha women had long painted the walls of the nuptial chamber with gods, goddesses, and ritual images to create an auspicious space for the new bride and groom. A long drought in the area led to crop failure, prompting the All India Handicraft Board in Delhi to send heavy paper and request that artists paint what had been on walls onto paper to be sold in Delhi, which earned income for artists. With the shift to paper, they developed their own styles within the distinctive Mithila artistic tradition. Their works appeared in national and international, some won awards, and scholars wrote about them in the 1980s and 90s. The next generation of painters has now won acclaim, especially for artwork dealing with contemporary issues such as pollution of air and water, women’s rights, and caste discrimination. Further, painters from jatis that did not paint earlier have now created their own distinctive styles and subject matter. Also, some painters have shifted to other Indian cities so their art reflects new experiences. Four presenters in the panel examine Mithila painting today through four different lenses. Pranjali Sirasao investigates changing inter-generational transmission of Mithila painting techniques and conventions. Paula Richman compares how the early Mithila painters depicted Ramayana incidents and how young artists do so today. David Szanton examines the political factors shaping the paintings, including a new Bihar Government Mithila art school. Lina Vincent explores how Mithila painters participate in the contemporary Indian art world of galleries and exhibitions. Panelist plan plenty of time for discussion and hope that scholars of South Asia who have purchased Mithila paintings over the last 45 years will join the discussion.

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

Over the past two decades historians have come to view the medieval and early modern phases of South Asian history as a period when spatial and material transformations are of heightened interest. In considering new kinds of Islamic spaces or the relationships between power, social memory, and architecture, there is broad agreement amidst historians that changes in the material determinants of South Asian lives are epochally significant. Yet, the historical narratives, concepts and presuppositions that frame the period remain rooted in an enduring primacy of textual historical traces over archaeologies which privilege artifacts, assemblages and landscapes. Over the last forty years archaeological fieldwork in several different parts of South Asia has generated considerable new data and provided analyses of ill-understood sites, regions and polities. Beyond supplementing the epigraphic, art-historical and monumental datasets of these periods, the growing archaeology of the medieval poses new questions to well established historiographic themes. This panel aims to provide a forum to bring historical and archaeological approaches to the medieval into closer conversation. Each paper seeks to engage with historiographical assumptions and presents arguments from archaeological data which offer pause, and occasions for rethinking historical accounts of medieval social organization, historical process, and cultural life. Collectively, the papers in this panel aim to address enduring historical thematics such as: landscapes and the question of society and nature; agrarian expansion and its determinants; cultural conceptions of agrarian value; historical periodization as revisited from the immanence of artifactual temporality; religious orthodoxy and concepts of tradition; transitions to the early medieval and early modern; conversion to Islam and its attendant material processes. The panel discussant (to be finalized), a historian, will respond to these papers with the aim of fostering mutually productive inter-disciplinary conversations between these fields and their potentials for the reinterpretation of the medieval.

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

April 24, 2013 will be known as the day of the deadliest garment factory accident in history. In the aftermath of the tragedy, Western companies invested in two organizations designed to strictly monitor and inspect a portion of Bangladesh’s registered factories. These organizations were not, in fact, a departure from monitoring initiatives of the past. The presenters on this panel argue that this singular emphasis by Western retailers on monitoring and compliance has neglected the larger issues around the entire global supply chain. There has been very little discussion around the indirect sourcing model prevalent in Bangladesh which results in the most compliant factories depending heavily on subcontractors as a part of their regular business practice. By presenting innovative ways of thinking about solutions that go beyond monitoring, this roundtable discussion opens up the possibilities for a focus on direct worker empowerment using technology, the role of community based movements, international labor standards, and a more productive and influential role for factory owners. The presenters argue that in order to prevent horrific tragedies like Rana Plaza from occurring in the future larger flaws in the global chain must be addressed with the hope that this will change the way business is conducted and reduce the incentives of factory owners to take deadly risks in order to meet the demands of their clients.

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

I am proposing an “Authors meet Critics” roundtable panel about two major new monographs on modern South Asian Islam: Brannon Ingram’s Revival from Below: The Deoband Movement and Global Islam (University of California, 2018) and SherAli Tareen’s Defending Muhammad in Modernity (Notre Dame, 2019). Ingram and Tareen build on classic studies of these topics (Metcalf 1982; Sanyal 1996) by bringing Deoband and modern Islam into closer conversation with the “new” intellectual history of South Asia, as well as critical-theoretical scholarship in religious studies. The roundtable takes these two books as a jumping off point for thinking about the bumper crop of recent scholarship on modern South Asian Islam (e.g. Qasmi 2011; Jones 2011; Purohit 2012; Stephens 2018) and modern religion more generally. Taken together, these monographs substantially reframe how we understand the history of Deoband. Ingram’s Revival from Below is the first book to conduct a detailed intellectual history of the most prolific and influential South Asian Muslim reform movement and seminary, the Deoband School, from a transnational perspective. Ingram traces the multiple lives of Deobandi reformist discourses from North India to South Africa, while introducing readers to a range of new texts and actors that have contributed to Deoband’s contemporary global stature. Tareen’s Defending Muhammad in Modernity on the other hand offers the first comprehensive study of what is arguably the most long-running and contentious disagreement in South Asian Islam: the Barelvī-Deobandī polemic. Through the close reading of a range of previously unexplored Arabic, Persian, and Urdu texts, Tareen argues that this polemic was animated by competing political theologies that articulated contrasting visions of the relationship among divine sovereignty, prophetic charisma, and everyday life. Commentators, from multiple disciplinary perspectives, will probe key interventions of these books in the study of South Asia and Islam.

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

The papers in this panel will explore how the literatures written and produced in Nepali and Nepal Bhasha invite us to rethink the nation and reimagine the identities. We aim to look at the questions of language, caste and class, disability and gender, violence and space in their intersections with the identity and the nation. Continuing the debates that we started in the Annual Conference on South Asia in Madison in 2018 and the Himalayan Studies Conference in 2017, this panel adds more to the discussion on the politico-cultural interpretations of the literatures produced in Nepal. We ask how aesthetic imagination makes, unmakes, or remakes the idea of the nation and the forms of belonging. How do writers engage with Nepal’s embattled histories, attend to its present-day discontents, and imagine new political futures? How does literature shape, consolidate, or contest identities? How have the creative writers represented, ac/claimed, and ironized the nation-state and the self? The panel proposes to take the nation and language as a method for unpacking the imagined space and inscribed geography. The topics may include but are not limited to the forms and/or genres of literature; the nation and the self; identity formation; caste, gender, and class; law, violence, and space; disability; literature in translation.

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

The presentations in this panel will discuss the social and cultural critiques found in the texts of several important religious authors from North India and Maharashtra in the early modern period. These authors include the late sixteenth-century Nath Panth author Prithinath; the early seventeenth-century Dadu Panthi poet, story teller, and biographer Jan Gopal; the eighteenth-century Christian missionary Giuseppe Maria da Gargnano; and the eighteenth-century Marathi poets Mahipati Taharabadkar and Moropant Paradkar. The papers of Rohini Shukla and Purushottam Agrawal will focus on the role of women’s role in the religious and social communities of Maharashtra and Rajasthan respectively. The issues include the place of women poets and singers and the legitimacy of child marriage. The paper of Monika Horstmann will discuss the critique by the Nath poet Prithinath of Hathayoga and related religious movements. The paper of David Lorenzen will compare the social critiques embodied in the Bhagavata-purana, in retellings of Bhagavata stories by Jan Gopal (ca. 1620), and a Christian missionary (1751). All the papers demonstrate the vibrancy of social and religious debate among the religious intellectuals of this period.

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

In cinema studies, the spatial turn has taken two forms. Film historians use ethnographic and archival research to situate moving images in material sites and networks of production, exhibition, and circulation. Film theorists draw on models of embodied perception to consider phenomenological and formal imaginaries produced by onscreen images. This panel reconciles and advances these approaches in history and theory by tracking film’s materiality alongside sensory geographies of onscreen spaces. Essaying a “spatial” film historiography, Jaikumar maps the regime of government-issued licenses regulating film stock consumption in post-Independence India. Making explicit the state’s spatial control over an industry, Jaikumar draws out the socialites arising around infrastructural elements to reveal the circumstances under which filmmakers created their spatial aesthetics. Through the scratches, static and errors marking a low-budget Hindi horror film, Nair explores physical infrastructures of film production, regulation, and distribution as they become fleetingly visible in the image. Paying attention to their virtual remains, Nair argues, allows us to dis-embed historical sites of film labor embedded inside fictional spaces. While noting that disciplinary discourses about crime and poverty shape popular cinema’s fascination with urban squatter settlements, Mazumdar argues that the ‘cinematic slum’ in films like 'Gully Boy', 'Kaala' and 'Slumdog Millionaire' challenges these panoptic discourses of power with an affective ‘over-spill’ that insists on embodied experience. Focusing on the figure of the crowd in recent documentaries and fiction films that speculate about the future of India amidst environmental crisis and infrastructural violence, Mukherjee argues that these films summon the crowd as emblematic of energy demand and simultaneously as masses threatened by radioactive exposure from a nuclear apocalypse. Thus unsettling conceptions of cinematic space, this panel charts sites of film control and their affective residues onscreen while unearthing traces of lived bodies and crowds absorbed into spectacular cinematic spaces.

Session: Session 6: Saturday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: University C/D
Floor: Floor 2

Over the last two decades, scholars in the humanities and social sciences have increasingly attended to the emergence of new patterns of social life by studying everyday nonhuman things like urban water supply systems (Bjorkman, 2015), roads and canals (Harvey & Knox, 2015), media technologies (Larkin, 2008), and multispecies entanglements (Govindrajan, 2018) This approach has been instrumental in (re)orienting our attention to the vitality of quotidian things (Bennet, 2010) and their agency in creating new social patterns of living. While some of the new materialist scholarship has been criticized for its lack of theorization of power, other scholars have highlighted the relational agency of nonhuman actors through an assemblage framework (Ranganathan, 2015) and an actor-network framework (Sundberg, 2011). This panel builds on this recent material/posthuman turn in the humanities and social sciences to explore situated studies of nonhuman agency in South Asia and their complicity in creating new urban subjectivities and its contested politics. Building on some of the above work, the panel seeks to think with and through the nonhuman actor to explore how different kinds of socialities are created, constituted and produced. Through case studies exploring the materiality of concrete, sand, daily wage labor, and animals in Delhi, Mumbai, and Chennai, this panel aims to ground and materialize meta-narratives of urbanization and change in South Asia drawing on scholarship from Geography, Anthropology, History, Architecture, and Urban Studies.

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

In India and Pakistan’s military escalation in February 2019, we saw an increase in the Indian state’s intensified reliance on manipulating emotions – an important strategy for erasing Kashmir, the very ground for this purported inter-state war. Similar power struggles over national feeling are at work in the marginalization and erasure of Gilgit-Baltistan and the Tribal Areas of Pakistan. Bringing both these affective militarisms to light, we wish to propose a roundtable that engages with the state of delusion in South Asia. Nosheen Ali, in her recent book Delusional States: Feeling Rule and Development in Pakistan's Northern Frontier examines why delusion as a feature of modern empire is integral to our understanding of states, and demonstrates how within the context of Gilgit-Baltistan, the production of suspicious subjects has limited the capacities for substantive citizenship. These same dynamics are also at work in the Tribal Areas of Pakistan, where conditions of illegibility and suspicion have long enabled the state to solidify itself through a reliance on war. Further, Kashmiris under Indian occupation have long suffered under the imperial bind of visible-invisibility, both through militarized humanitarianism and seemingly “progressive” cultural reforms that have intensified repression. Azad Kashmir, under Pakistan’s administration, remains bound within the dynamics of an intimate stranger, simultaneously desired and threatening. Bringing both India and Pakistan’s bids to national feeling to light, and encircling what delusions structure (and are necessitated by) them, we wish to propose a roundtable that situates war-making as the foundation of state-making practices in South Asia. Taking Nosheen Ali’s book as an opportunity around which to engage these other long-standing conditions of war and occupation, we wish to propose a roundtable that would allow scholars from across the border to question states of war, and begin to approach how affective nationalist politics frames subjugated peoples.

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

A range of perspectives on “artistry” are provided through these presentations: all of them work from postcard evidence of subject matter and processes, then explore dialogic interactions between this unique source and other artistic genres and their related social roles. Taken together, this approach will enable the panel to focus on the contribution of artistic production and consumption – in the process, analyzing change over time – while suggesting the evolving place of artistry in everyday life and as historical artifact. ♦ Aditi Chandra (Art History, UC Merced) proposes a double function of postcards picturing Delhi’s Islamic monuments, simultaneously providing memories for avid travelers while enabling forgetfulness of conflict-ridden experiences at the monuments. Postcards contribute, then, to a “travelers’ archive” encompassing photographs, journals, guidebooks and other material objects to shape tourists’ memories. ♦ Sandria B. Freitag (History, NC State) traces local Indian-run photography studios’ representations of their cities for two markets—European tourists/military consumers (who mailed them) and Indians (who mostly displayed them). Productions of specific studios from four Indian cities are posed in dialogue with other visual media of these urban places, including posters, photographs, and built environments, to capture the ways cities project themselves to both residents and visitors, especially at moments of change. ♦ Omar Khan (independent scholar; his definitive new book on Raj postcards served as panel inspiration) examines the interplay between scenes pictured and accompanying messages to provide access to little-represented viewpoints. He also explores the role of communications platforms, then and now. ♦ Allan Life (Emeritus, UNC-Chapel Hill English/Comparative Lit) explores South Indian dance representations for details of dancers/musicians in performance (and how those are captioned), juxtaposing these against sources such as Chola relief sculptures, implicitly enabling analysis of change over time in the social treatment of dancers.

Session: Session 7: Saturday, 3:45 pm - 5:30 pm
Room: Caucus Room
Floor: Floor 1

Over the past two decades historians have come to view the medieval and early modern phases of South Asian history as a period when spatial and material transformations are of heightened interest. In considering new kinds of Islamic spaces or the relationships between power, social memory, and architecture, there is broad agreement amidst historians that changes in the material determinants of South Asian lives are epochally significant. Yet, the historical narratives, concepts and presuppositions that frame the period remain rooted in an enduring primacy of textual historical traces over archaeologies which privilege artifacts, assemblages and landscapes. Over the last forty years archaeological fieldwork in several different parts of South Asia has generated considerable new data and provided analyses of ill-understood sites, regions and polities. Beyond supplementing the epigraphic, art-historical and monumental datasets of these periods, the growing archaeology of the medieval poses new questions to well established historiographic themes. This panel aims to provide a forum to bring historical and archaeological approaches to the medieval into closer conversation. Each paper seeks to engage with historiographical assumptions and presents arguments from archaeological data which offer pause, and occasions for rethinking historical accounts of medieval social organization, historical process, and cultural life. Collectively, the papers in this panel aim to address enduring historical thematics such as: landscapes and the question of society and nature; agrarian expansion and its determinants; cultural conceptions of agrarian value; historical periodization as revisited from the immanence of artifactual temporality; religious orthodoxy and concepts of tradition; transitions to the early medieval and early modern; conversion to Islam and its attendant material processes. The panel discussant (to be finalized), a historian, will respond to these papers with the aim of fostering mutually productive inter-disciplinary conversations between these fields and their potentials for the reinterpretation of the medieval.

Session: Session 7: Saturday, 3:45 pm - 5:30 pm
Room: Senate Room B
Floor: Floor 1

This panel brings together early career scholars working on the intersection between political and economic development in South Asia. The set of papers addresses the impacts of shifting agricultural technologies on inequality and crime during the Green Revolution, social contestation over the expansion of the colonial-era franchise, the effects of ethno-religious rioting on local financial investments during economic liberalization, and the structure and determinants of politician selection in a post-conflict democracy. Theory and evidence derive from detailed national and subnational studies of India and Nepal. Methodologically, the papers draw on diverse tools to arrive at their conclusions. All papers make use of rich quantitative and qualitative data---much of it newly gathered and collated. The analyses seek to answer questions of broad social scientific interest, while paying close attention to mechanisms as well as problems of causal inference. Taken together, the panel promises to shed light on how South Asian democracy has evolved, both historically and in more recent years, and the struggles that have taken place along the path of its emergence---as the “losers” from economic and political reforms have fought back, and as strategic political actors have responded to the incentives created by these changing landscapes.

Session: Session 7: Saturday, 3:45 pm - 5:30 pm
Room: Conference Room 2
Floor: Floor 2