Annual Conference on South Asia

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

This full-day symposium will bring together a diverse group of scholars of South Asian religions and cultures to present new research and engage in focused discussion about the historical development and enduring significance of mantras (sacred syllables or utterances used in ritual and meditation) in South Asian traditions. Comprised of scholars at different career stages, with an array of disciplinary approaches and methodological backgrounds that complement each other, the symposium is intended to generate new insights in the religious and social significance of mantras in various regions and time periods. We will consider mantra systems from several leading religions of South Asia, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, and Islam. Particular attention will be paid to the multiformity of mantras, which manifest not only in the sound of chanting and the silence of meditation, but also in writing, music, religious art, and other media.

Session: Symposium - Full Day
Room: Senate Room B
Floor: Floor 1

The ascendance of Hindu nationalist politics in India on a platform of “development nationalism” -- with continuing appeals to “India shining” and a “more prosperous Kashmir” -- illustrates how deeply linked conceptions of “culture” and “economics” have become in India, with each term signifying the other. If the ideal Indian citizen is upper-caste Hindu, the ideal Hindu is also a disciplined economic subject, who feeds rather than impedes national development and prosperity. Such notions have wide reach beyond the politics of Hindutva: from schools of management to urban planning, from animal husbandry to population control. This symposium will explore the diverse figurations of “economics” and “culture” in Hindu politics. Drawing on Ritu Birla’s work, we point in particular to the ways a colonial legal regime of “market governance” helped to produce the appearance of an enduring distinction between economy and culture that mirrored and reinforced a posited distinction between public and private. Yet bodily concerns about pure subjects were tied to consuming or avoiding particular market products, and re/producing particular kinds of bodies. We are interested in how culture has been constructed not only in “spiritual,” but also in biopolitical terms. We aim to facilitate a conversation on these issues with scholars from disciplinary perspectives whose work touches on the economic histories of Hindu politics in diverse settings from IITs and cow protection to sannyasi celebrity and birth control. This symposium offers deep historical insight into contemporary Hindu nationalist developmentalism, tracing its late nineteenth century, early-, mid- and late- twentieth century genealogies, and its sectarian, gendered, and caste dimensions. A full-day symposium format will facilitate sustained discussion among this international group of scholars, as the first step toward publication of an edited volume. We will accommodate some international participants through zoom.

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

In South Asian studies, Sheldon Pollock’s book, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men (2006), marked a watershed moment in the field. Pollock’s study divided the history of literary production in South and Southeast Asia into two distinct periods: the first millennium, characterized by the exclusive use of Sanskrit, through which ruling elites expressed political power in their courts; and the second millennium, which witnessed the rise of vernacular languages in courtly settings. A decade and a half after Language of the Gods, our proposed symposium brings together leading junior scholars working on literature and language in South Asia in order to consider new directions in scholarship on the vernacular millennium with a focus on how vernacular literatures draw on Sanskrit tradition and innovate new poetic frameworks. In particular, the papers in this symposium focus on themes of meter, prose, and/or aesthetics in literature produced in the vernacular millennium. Our symposium participants include junior scholars whose work focuses on literature in Manipravalam, Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada, and vernacular Sanskrit in South Asia and Southeast Asia. Our participants are affiliated with a range of institutions in India, Israel, Germany, and the United States. Our participants integrate the all-conference theme of tradition and innovation in their papers, focusing on how vernacular literatures are sites for expanding tradition and expressing innovation. While the symposium highlights the work of junior scholars in the field, we will invite senior scholars working in both Sanskrit and the vernacular to participate in a concluding roundtable. We organized an exploratory version of this symposium at the 2021 Annual Conference on South Asia, and through this avenue, we hope to build a network of junior scholars working in the field of vernacular literatures, with the ultimate goal of a special issue of a peer-reviewed journal.

Session: Symposium - Full Day
Room: Conference Room 5
Floor: Floor 2

Sanskrit hymns of praise (stotras, stutis, stavas) have been popular and influential within many religious traditions for thousands of years. They remain significant for countless Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains today, and new stotras continue to be composed and recited around the world. The academic study of these hymns has made notable progress in recent decades as scholars have paid increasing attention to these compositions, which were often marginalized or ignored in earlier scholarship. This symposium on “studying stotras across traditions” brings together a range of scholars for perhaps the first such academic event in North America focused on the diversity of the stotra genre. It includes senior and established scholars with major publications on stotras as well as emerging scholars in the field. Participants focus on stotras within Jain, Buddhist, and Hindu traditions, including Śākta, Śaiva, and Vaiṣṇava contexts. The symposium’s twelve presentations focus on new research that reflects on theoretical, methodological, and comparative issues. Shared research topics include the pedagogical nature of stotra literature and recitation, their liturgical performances, their poetic and theological experimentations, and their role in polemics and politics. Overall, the symposium brings together scholars working on diverse materials for a sustained investigation into the current state and future directions of stotra studies.

Session: Symposium - Full Day
Room: University C/D
Floor: Floor 2

The study of caste in the premodern period has historically proceeded from the perspective of Sanskrit legal digests (dharmaśāstra) composed by Hindu Brahmins. But Brahmins never had a monopoly on defining caste. And Brahminical articulations of caste often proved difficult to put into practice. Philosophers contested the ontology of social classes, religious reformers challenged the boundaries of caste, and even Hindu Brahmins themselves came to question the practicality of strict social and religious boundaries. This symposium aims to “provincialize Brahmins” by exploring premodern constructions of caste from the perspective of texts, languages, and religions that have been neglected by the study of Hindu Sanskrit dharmaśāstra. This symposium brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars whose research establishes a new program in the study of premodern caste. Each of our panelists examines how either an individual caste or the caste system as a whole was constructed, contested, or represented outside of Sanskrit, Brahmanical religions, and legal texts. In displacing the perspective of Hindu Brahmins, this panel explores new perspectives on the understanding of personhood, agency, and subjectivity in premodern South Asia.

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

This symposium aims to bring together the many worlds embedded in South Asian histories, texts, and traditions. At this day-long session, we want to open up new ways of studying South Asia, and through our scholarship gesture towards what South Asian texts can teach us about the world and vice versa, as opposed to simply confining our objects of analysis to local contexts. How do texts rooted in their local contexts in South Asia reveal global, trans-local and alternative modes of self-identification? How do various indices- books, legal documents, genres, visual media, authors, translators, performers, aesthetic theories- respond to and negotiate with these shifting geographies of self and collective identifications? Can such alternate self-historicization complicate the disciplinary logic of Area Studies? We hope that conversations around global textual crosscurrents will lead into fruitful discussions on how South Asia is produced as a disciplinary object of study, and will provide important nuance to our understanding of its academic and socio-political construction as a cohesive “area”. Such an approach at the intersection of the global and local can introduce important debates within our understanding of historical currents, geographical contiguities, and generic resonances when it comes to scholarship about South Asia. We offer a vast array of presentation topics in this symposium. Our confirmed participants will speak on a variety of themes which use the rubric of vaster migrancy and local situatedness in their analysis of South Asia. These include circulation of magazines, world poetry, cinema and the modern world, the travelling histories of music, partition narratives from across the world, the evolving vocabularies of the Global South, and the time-travelling echoes of religious imaginaries. We expect that together they will provide an enriching conversation about the diverse ways in which South Asia and the world are embedded in one another.

Session: Symposium - Half Day, Morning
Room: Parlour Room 629
Floor: Floor 6

What does it mean to decolonize science, technology, and medicine in South Asia? Our half-day STM symposium will gather an interdisciplinary group of scholars from North America, the subcontinent, and beyond for two discussions on this topic. These discussions will address the intensifying appropriation of a “decolonizing science” discourse by right-wing nationalists, especially but not exclusively in India, as well as the role of caste and caste-based hierarchies in science. We will also proceed with our discussions while mindful of our presence as uninvited guests in a North American settler colonial context. This symposium will enable a small, diverse group of scholars to build community and discuss key issues in the social study of science across STS, history of science, medical anthropology, etc. Fields like STS and the history of science remain Eurocentric. We hope to further our understanding of the specificities of studying science in South Asia while grounding our discussions in the political implications of our work. Participants will read and discuss pre-selected scholarship on two topics: Science, Religion, Nation and the Geographies and Chronologies of Science. This selection of topics draws on many conversations hosted by the virtual working group Science Across Regions in Asia (SARA), at the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine. While those discussions ranged across South Asia, East Asia, and the Middle East, our symposium gives us a chance to focus on the former. An important part of decolonization is recognizing what land we are on and acknowledging its history by responding to local ethical considerations. However, we as organizers also acknowledge the advantages of being located in well-resourced institutions and would like to support connections between science studies scholars across regions. We hope this symposium may play a small role in supporting critical studies of science in South Asia.

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

Green politics is making inroads into Pakistani politics, owing to the country's vulnerability to a variety of climate-related calamities. According to the German watchdog's Global Climate Risk Index 2021, Pakistan has seen 173 climate-related catastrophes over the last two decades, placing the nation among the top ten countries most susceptible to climate change. Recognizing this dilemma, Pakistan's major parties have steadily elevated the battle against climate change to the top of their political agendas. Beginning with the Green Growth Agenda (GGA), which was launched in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province in 2014, the Pakistan Tehrik-i-Insaf government expanded its green initiatives after assuming power in 2018, including launching the historic 'Billion Tree Tsunami' programme and reviving water and forest policies to protect the country's draining water resources, which could potentially offset the newfound challenges posed by climate change. Politically, the leadership is more sympathetic to the concepts of green politics and peacebuilding. While the political leadership began shifting away from a traditional definition of security in 2014 with the launch of a consensus-based National Action Plan (NAP), the recent launch of Pakistan's first ever National Security Policy (NSP-2022) demonstrates its unique focus on the entire society for the first time by incorporating green policy as one of the central security parameters of national security policy, alongside ecological peace-building, which is relevant to the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Experts and the government are also focusing more on protecting natural resources such as forests, natural habitats, and scarce water resources, as well as encouraging plantations. This is because climate-related disasters are becoming more common. There has been a lot more emphasis on green policies in the manifestos of almost every political party in Pakistan. This means that green policies could be a big issue when the country votes in the next election.

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

Recent scholarship in the history and anthropology of South Asia has emphasized the unruly and agentic qualities of the region’s rivers, monsoon rains, subterranean aquifers, and urban water supplies (Amrith 2018, Anand 2017, Bhattacharyya 2018, Cederlöf 2013, Lahiri-Dutt and Samanta 2013, Saikia 2019). This work has underscored the complexities of knowing and managing water(s), as well as the lasting social and environmental effects of colonial and postcolonial attempts to control water and its flows. Extending these conversations, the presenters in this Round Table will consider how people have encountered, understood and engaged with lively waters across time and space in South Asia. The Round Table takes an expansive view on the lively qualities of water, incorporating materiality as well as the immaterial and spiritual qualities of water as envisioned in many South Asian cosmologies and religious traditions. In this way, the presenters will consider the vitality and animacy of water as reflected in regional epistemologies and ontologies, as well as situated ethical and political relations with water that have emerged and transformed over time. Beyond this, presenters will bring scholarship on water into regional perspective in two main ways. First, the presenters’ will consider how South Asian categories of personhood, caste, and gender can prompt new theory-making on water. Second, presenters will reflect on how a focus on water and its lively agencies can help scholars rethink South Asia as a region in flux. Specifically, presentations will focus on: environment, health, and labor in Madras; the making of modern cities and fluid spaces in South Asia; the immaterial, divine, and spiritual agencies of water in the Sundarbans delta; shifting materiality, environment, and work on the Tamil Coromandel coast; and erosion, sedimentation, affective ecologies, and multispecies ethnography in Upper Assam/Arunachal Pradesh.

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

Sri Lanka’s civil war (1983-2009) gave rise to a new wave of literary and visual economy that positions the country as fragmented at home yet connected transnationally. Writers, filmmakers, and visual artists decenter the heteronormativity of postcolonial nationalism by imaginatively rebuilding decimated Tamil cultural landscapes and question neoliberal underpinnings of the war. Central to such work is what R. Radhakrishnan calls a “double duty” with “accountability both here and there.” Set against this backdrop, this panel brings together four papers that investigate the contours of trauma foundational to transnational Sri Lankan aesthetic efforts that reimagine “deviant” bodies and testimonies. The panel opens with “‘Make the body no one”: V. V. Ganeshananthan’s Love Marriage and its Queer Medical Case History of the Betrayals of War and Love.” Speaker 1 posits that Ganeshananthan’s novel queers the complicity of essentialist and exclusionary narratives of love and war. Paper 2, “Cinematic Language and the Violence of Silence in the Films of Pradeepan Raveendran,” charts how Shadows of Silence and Soundless Dance highlight the exiled subject’s lack of voice and agency. Continuing on this thread, Paper 3, “Cumulative Trauma, Memory, and Displacement in Sharon Bala’s The Boat People and Anuk Arudpragasam’s A Passage North,” examines the intersections of ethnicity, class, violence, and postwar survival through a comparative study of the two novels. Finally, Paper 4, “M.I.A.’s Empires of Trauma: Promise and Limits of Postmemory in Transnational Sri Lankan Pop Music,” investigates postmemorial implications of the Sri Lankan British rapper’s music and the limitations of such trauma-animated aesthetics. The panel concludes with the deliberations by the discussant/organizer. By highlighting how transnational Sri Lankan writers and artists innovate new spaces of belonging and becoming exterior to heteropatriarchal narratives of postcolonial/postwar Sri Lanka, this panel contributes to the 2022 conference theme.

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

A plethora of recent scholarship has discussed the history of Persian as a language of politics and culture in South Asia, used in bureaucratic, religious, and literary contexts by Muslims and others throughout the last millennium. Persianate Hindustan is thus understood to be a discrete and enduring cultural sphere located within and alongside broader religious, political, and linguistic geographic imaginaries. Focusing on the literary dimensions of this formation, our panel asks what it meant to be an “Indo-Persian” poet, and how poets proficient in numerous languages understood and articulated their own position in Hindustan within the Persianate world. Accordingly, the papers constituting this panel explore the relationship between poetics and identity in Persianate South Asia from the 13th to the 20th centuries. Organized chronologically, the first paper investigates the active linking of literary style to regional identity in the prose works of two poet-secretaries, Amīr Khusraw (d.1325), and his early-modern admirer, Munīr Lāhorī (d.1644). The second paper considers the ways in which two Mughal-era poets, Fayḍī (d.1595) and Masīḥ (d. after 1617), adapted Sanskrit stories into Persian narrative poetry, fashioning a distinctive Indo-Persian identity in the process. The third paper explores the status and function of Arabic within the “Persianate” through the writings of Ghulām ʿAlī “Āzād” Bilgrāmī (d. 1786) and other 18th-century Arabophone poets. The final paper asks how the Persian poetry of Muḥammad Iqbāl (d.1938), one of South Asia’s last major Persian poets, can be understood from within the Indo-Persian tradition, rather than from the political and religious perspectives through which it is usually interpreted. The range of these papers and the resonances between the poets and their work will contextualize contingent and enduring projects of Indo-Persian identity formation.

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

The decades from 1917-1947 marked the rise of leftist politics across South Asia and in its diaspora. Whether officially linked to the Soviet Comintern or in broad support of revolutionary anti-imperialism, leftist ideas, organizations, and agitations flourished in the subcontinent, and continue to inform the politics of several states in the region. This panel explores how thinkers, writers, activists, and everyday people in South Asia have understood the power of religion to engender, justify, interpret, challenge, and reimagine these political movements. Apart from work on the emergence of socialist thought among North Indian Muslims, and the role of Buddhism in Dalit political resistance, there is limited scholarly engagement with the history of religion in leftist politics in South Asia. Decades of right-wing mobilization have also associated religion invariably with reactionary politics. This panel, by contrast, provides multiple imaginings of religion and politics in modern South Asia, including Hindu communism, Buddhist socialism, and mystical Marxism. Each paper also contributes to the study of vernacular politics, both in the sense of regional language and in the sense of the quotidian or the everyday. Panelists work with a diversity of methodologies, from intellectual history to anthropological fieldwork, as well as in several regions of South Asia, from South Punjab to Sarnath.

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

Did the modern era mark a meaningful rupture in scientific beliefs about humans’ role as a force of nature? Recent archaeological scholarship has pushed back on the historical novelty of the human species acting as a biological and geological force, even if it acknowledges the scalar change of human impact in the fossil fuel era. This panel questions the modern “watershed” framework of the anthropocene from an equally crucial angle: the history of knowledge. It brings together scholars exploring how the human-cosmos scale relation was theorized across heterogeneous scientific fields in nineteenth- and twentieth-century South Asia. Our special–but not exclusive–focus on the astral sciences aims to historicize and defamiliarize modern ways of viewing human influence on natural processes. We challenge the assumption that scientific modernization marked a clean break within philosophical debates or empirical studies about “the human,” causality, and deep time. We further contend that systematic researches in astrology, antiquity, and mythology were neither merely reactionary developments to so-called colonial knowledge, nor vestigial survivals from the past; instead, they were braided intellectual formations that addressed social and scientific problems of their moment. If one major insight of the anthropocene is that human activities–in aggregate–impact natural phenomena, astrology has sometimes restricted human agency by calculating the influences of cosmological forces upon earthly events. Still, both astrological and anthropocene cosmologies rely on structurally similar ways of relating the self to the world on extra-human scales; equally, both challenge foundational humanistic assumptions about the modern individual. Together, we will debate the ways in which accounts of European industrialization as a watershed in the history of knowledge have obscured crucial continuities and diversities in the ways scientists have represented, studied, and interacted with “the human” in relation to nature and the cosmos.

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

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

The papers in this panel present new research on lesser-known forms of otherwise familiar South Asian deities from an interdisciplinary perspective. They shed new light on these manifestations using textual, art historical, anthropological and religious studies approaches. The first paper examines aspects of Bhairava as a living deity, focusing on his role as a benevolent protector and regent of the sacred city of Varanasi. As the panelist shows, this form of the deity is still connected to the widely-known transgressive form of Bhairava. The presentation is based on the interpretation of ethnographic and material evidence. The second panelist focuses on lesser-known forms of Hanuman that also function as protectors. The paper discusses representations of the divinity in Newar Buddhist monasteries (vihara) in the Kathmandu Valley. Of special interest are the aniconic representations, which include triangular openings on the façades of viharas, explained as passages through which Hanuman travels. The paper will also address Hanuman’s role in Newar Buddhism and legends narrating the divinity’s conversion to Buddhism. The third paper studies a lesser-known form of the goddess Tara in Indian Buddhism who functions as an embodied mantra. The panelist traces the development of the goddess on the basis of a passage from the Manjusriyamulakalpa, an early tantric Buddhist ritual manual, which she brings into conversation with representations of the goddess at Kanheri caves 67 and 90. The paper challenges prior identifications of Tara’s earliest visual manifestations as a “consort” of Avalokitesvara which are often found in scholarly literature. The discussant is a senior professor of Religious Studies who has published extensively on goddess worship in South Asia.

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

In the different genres of the novel, short story, and memoir, four Bengali women writers explore the subject of the modern Bengali identity and analyze the notion of home and belonging in their work. Presenter 1's short story collection A New Race of Men from Heaven follows characters who struggle to live in the world on their own terms. Their quest to find a home mirrors the unrest of the world they inhabit but cannot call their own. Presenter 2’s short story collection Two Women explores the experience of the Bangladeshi diaspora, describing the collision of people with war, immigration, and poverty, often centering the effects of these disparate forces on women’s lives. Presenter 3’s memoir of a girl growing up in Bangladesh in the 1970s recreates her home city of Dhaka as a space of secularism and tolerance. Presenter 4’s novel, Everything Here Belongs to You, is about the coming of age of two young girls in Kolkata, raised together, one in privilege and the other in repression, caught in the web of traditions and love triangles. These four women writers write out of an unresolved tension of what it means to be Bengali. Their collective work explores the quest for identity and belonging in Bengali literature in English, examining the construction of home and the imaginary space of the Bengali diaspora.

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

This panel explores the negotiations between so-called “elite” and “vernacular” registers of performance traditions, texts, and sounds. By exploring the semiotics of prayer books, pop music, dance, and temple acoustics, these papers show how such media and spaces become sites of cultural production. The first paper considers how the acoustics of Hoysala-era temples in Karnataka facilitate devotees’ auditory experience during the performance of large-scale pūjās, arguing that auditory aspects of ritual performance are central to the logic of these temples’ design. The second analyzes the sound valencies Laxmi Dubey, a prominent Hindu nationalist pop artist, uses to construct and reinforce a militaristic meaning of the ḍhol-tasha. The third paper explores how Krishna’s prominence in post-independence Kathak dance troupes indexes the modern Sanskritization of Indian arts, consciously connecting vernacular bhakti performance traditions with Sanskrit aesthetics. The final paper focuses on representations of the goddess in Assamese prayer books, arguing that they represent a non-canonical feminist vernacular Hinduism that directly contends with Sanskritic goddess narratives. Taken together each of these papers spotlights cultural production through community-building mechanisms. Broadly, these essays speak to how the popular sacred in India remains culturally dynamic, intertwined with elite traditions while seeking to redefine itself in the face of a modernity shaped by global social, economic, political, and cultural forces.

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

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

This panel investigates the diverse processes of constructing sexuality and genders in Islamicate South Asia. The panel consists of four presenters; each analyzes the intercultural cross-pollination of ideas around sexuality. The panelists deploy a collaborative longue durée perspective from the fifteenth to the twenty-first century as its speakers study diverse themes of Indo-Islamicate medicine, literature, religion, and metaphysics. The imbrication of gender and sexuality across these themes enables the panelists to highlight alternate modalities of perceiving a body and assembling its habitus. The first paper highlights a fifteenth-century negotiation of epistemic boundaries, reflected by appropriations and omissions in translating medical texts on reproductive health from Ayurveda into Tibb. The second paper analyzes an eighteenth-century cross-pollination of sexual profiles in "eroto-medical" texts to delineate feminine sexual behaviors. The third paper presents a nineteenth-century alternative paradigm of conceptualizing a vernacular science of sex rooted in Greco-Islamicate metaphysics and medicine through an analysis of respectable yet passionate intimacy. Finally, the fourth paper presents a modern perspective of individualism and the formation of sexuality as its identity using alternative modalities of desire and intimacy in traditionalist Islam. Through this process, the panel aims to open up conversations about intertextuality, biopolitics, and plurality in South Asian Islamicate societies, especially on topics of sexual ethics and gendered esthetics.

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

How did Muslim legal professionals—qazis (judges, magistrates) and muftis (juris-consultants)—respond to the advent of British colonial rule in South Asia and the formation of an Anglo-Indian legal regime? And how did their adaptations and accommodations reshape the legal lives of ordinary South Asian Muslims up to the present? These are the questions that animate Elizabeth Lhost’s forthcoming monograph, Everyday Islamic Law and the Making of Modern South Asia (UNC Press, 2022). Utilizing a novel and expansive archive of overlooked sources in Persian, Urdu, and English, Lhost brings together a sweeping array of case studies from across British India and the wider Indian Ocean world to chart how qazis and mutfis redefined their offices and responsibilities in reaction to colonial state formation—and, in so doing, reconfigured the legal paths and possibilities that defined the lived experience of Islamic law for Muslims in colonial and post-colonial South Asia. Moving beyond paradigms of “jural colonization” and “revival and reform,” Lhost’s work raises profound questions about how ordinary Muslims experienced the momentous religious and legal changes of the colonial era, and about the multiple meanings of secularism and legal pluralism in contemporary South Asia. Reflecting the book’s far-reaching scope, this roundtable discussion brings together an interdisciplinary group of historians, anthropologists, and religious studies scholars specializing in colonial and post-colonial South Asian history, law, and Islam to respond to Lhost’s work. Chairing the panel, Speaker 1 (Law) specializes in the legal history and culture of modern South Asia. Speaker 2 (History) examines state formation and legal institution building in early colonial Bengal. Speakers 3 and 4 (Religious Studies) explore the interplay between Muslim scholars, religious polemics, and democratic politics in modern South Asia. Speaker 5 (Anthropology) writes on secularism and Islamic legal practice in contemporary India.

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

Recent studies on archaeological materials from the Indus Civilization have introduced new frameworks providing deeper insights into the technologies and their complex production trajectories. These frameworks were achieved by incorporating refined approaches and techniques like ceramic petrography, imagery analysis using art history methodologies, experimental analysis, point-counting technique elliptical fourier function analysis, LA-ICP-MS, and others. The papers presented in this panel focus on how new approaches and comparative analyses of Indus material records can help establish a framework for interpreting Indus Traditions. The panel has presenters from the United States, Pakistan, and India. Three of the panelists will present in person and the fourth panelist will be giving a virtual presentation. The first paper in the panel focuses on the use of new comparative techniques to obtain typologies and record production processes of Harappan pottery from the Ravi and Kot Diji phases. In the second paper, Indus seal production technology is studied through the lens of methodologies adopted from art history, hence adding a new set of tools to interpret the functionality of seals. The third paper presents recent developments in the study of Indus faience technology production, by comparing methodologies used in Indus and other contemporaneous civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt. The last paper presents the results of different scientific methods used to analyze the provenience of Indus-style carnelian beads found in Bet Dagan, Israel.

Session: Session 3: Thursday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Senate Room B
Floor: Floor 1

This roundtable will bring together scholars on gender and sexuality working on contemporary India to explore the social and political lineages that inform organizing and outcomes, in the name of women’s rights, sexual rights and men’s rights. It will offer new ways to consider how the politics of gender and sexuality might both disrupt and stabilize our claims to social change. The conversation will take, as its starting point, the forthcoming book, Changing the Subject (2022), which maps a rapidly transforming terrain of feminist and queer politics in neoliberal India. The book shows how activist and NGO mobilizations in the name of women’s and queer rights have a range of outcomes. The roundtable will probe several provocations of this book, in placing it in conversation with related research (including two new books, At Risk and Accidental Feminism). This includes how transnational funding, HIV/AIDS and Covid-19 provide an opening for the unexpected politicization of “at risk” groups, like sex workers and LGBT populations, and even for contesting and reimagining the established legacies of Indian feminism. The discussion will also engage sites that are less amenable to feminism or are explicitly anti-feminist, such as gender fair elite organizations and a growing Indian men’s rights movement. Panellists include: Speaker 1, a socio-legal scholar at the University of California, Irvine, will draw on her book, Accidental Feminism. Speaker 2, professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Kentucky, will speak on the men’s movement in India. Speaker 3, a doctoral candidate at York University, will address queer feminisms in India. Speaker 4, associate professor of sociology at Wits University, South Africa, will speak to her book, Changing the Subject. Speaker 5, assistant professor of sociology at Brandies will draw on her book on HIV/AIDS, At Risk.

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

Events such as floods, droughts, cyclones, earthquakes and landslides occur regularly in South Asian Region and they are a matter of great concern, especially given their impact on lives and livelihoods. While they may not all be completely preventable, there is scope to put certain mechanisms in place in order to create a robust disaster management system, which can help reduce risk and loss of life to a large extent. These mechanisms need to be adapted to various situations that arise during disaster relief. There is a dire need to fill the gap in the establishment and implementation of a sound disaster risk management system to complement the resilience capabilities of the effected communities of the South Asia. The group evaluates the disaster risk reduction (DRR) mechanism and strategy by the South Asian States and underscores that emerging situation necessitates close coordination and cooperation and can leverage the SAARC Comprehensive Framework on Disaster Management to influence the disaster risk management (DRM) in a meaningful way. The group also highlights the role of emerging technology trends on the disaster management in South Asia by analyzing the emerging technologies (ETs) impact on improving performance in disaster management (DM) processes. Lastly, the group explores the impact of social media on disaster management cycle in South Asia by highlighting the use of social media functions in providing better communication approach during disaster management cycle in South Asia. The group maintains that the Technology has the potential to transform disaster management, especially if one can successfully integrate emerging technologies (ETs) with existing infrastructure.

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

What is the relationship between religious innovation, ethical action, and imagining a “good life” in Sri Lanka? There, various forms of religiosity -- Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim and Christian, as well as a variety of New Religious Movements – all support orthodox accounts of what a good life should be. But the practical path to achieving any particular telos, whether imagined as dhamma, dharma, grace, or submission, has always run through the rough landscape of Lankas complex history. Contemporary Sri Lanka’s ethnically plural and multi-religious landscape is, and has long been, the scene of considerable religious innovation. That is, historically, religious innovation has long been a way of adjusting local action and agency to comprehend outside challenges. This panel argues that religious innovations which include not just changes in the structure and activities of religious institutions (Buddhist, Hindu, Christian and Muslim) but also alternations in ritual practices that reach deep into the daily lives and intimate relations of homes, communities, and individuals, have also altered how people go about making ethical judgements; and do so partly by reconfiguring (in small or large ways, epistemologically and ontologically) what constitutes a good life.

Session: Session 3: Thursday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Capitol Ballroom A
Floor: Floor 2

In the edited volume, Media as Politics in South Asia (2017), Sahana Udupa argues that recent incidents of viral videos of violence against Muslim bodies in Myanmar that are circulated on social media outlets such as Whatsapp have been factors leading to riots. She notes, “...internet media and mobile messaging have begun to intersect with religious politics to create a climate of intrigue, excitement, and fear” (Udupa 191; emphasis added). Given the recent controversies surrounding the circulation of controversial videos in South Asia, including the lynching of rapists, the violence against Muslims, and the Covid-19 pandemic, our panel problematizes how the “new” media has refashioned cultural productions from the region, its representations and circulation/dissemination within the sub-continent, but also in the diaspora. Our panel deploys a postcolonial feminist theoretical framework to interrogate the impact of new technology in the understanding of modernity in South Asia through papers on inter-caste marriages, ageism in Bollywood, viral videos, and transformative performances.

Session: Session 3: Thursday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Wisconsin Ballroom
Floor: Floor 2

Caste is a system which discriminates against people based on their birth. Caste-based discrimination and exploitation is prevalent within the South Asian diaspora, including in the US. A recent report found that one in three lower caste or “Dalit” students in the US report being discriminated against on the basis of their caste during their education and two out of three Dalits report being treated unfairly at their workplace. There is no federal law in the US to protect against caste-based discrimination. This has led to various anti-caste groups to organize to demand anti-caste policies and legislative protections at the state and local levels. US universities, where there are over 200,000 students from South Asia, are emerging as a key site for the formal recognition of caste-based discrimination in a global context. At UW-Madison, WISAJ, a group of students, staff, and faculty is working to highlight social justice issues pertaining to South Asia, including furthering the movement against caste apartheid in academic spaces. In March 2022, we organized a well-recieved virtual panel discussion entitled Caste in the US: Voices from the Frontlines, in collaboration with the School of Human Ecology Anti-racist Action Group, featuring Thenmozhi Soundararajan and Raj Sampath. We want to propose a roundtable on the topic of caste discrimination in the US. In this discussion, we will hear from activists working on the ground to mobilize and effect change in university policy, including from successful campaigns at other US universities. The speakers will share their strategies for engaging with the academic community and administration on issues of caste discrimination, and reflect on the future of global anti-caste organizing in and beyond the academy.

Session: Session 3: Thursday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: University C/D
Floor: Floor 2

What if we read contemporary political transition and cultures of resistance across South Asia as shaped by longue durée aesthetic forms of political affiliation? While the memes and melodramas of the resurgent right in South Asia have received significant attention, ‘forms of the left’ and their enduring political and theoretical resonances are less familiar. Can 20th-century histories of left-wing aesthetic forms from the subcontinent become archives for contemporary political work – for activists, artists, academics? What forms and agency do such left-wing aesthetic archives take? And what methods are appropriate to their study? Exploring these questions allows us to conceptualise the left’s aesthetic forms as political formations, scattered across marginal 20th-century sites and actors and feeding into contemporary forums as diverse as social media platforms and art biennales. Coinciding with the publication of Forms of the Left in Postcolonial South Asia (Bloomsbury, 2022), this roundtable invites discussion about histories and futures of the South Asian left as an aesthetic formation capable of orienting, galvanising, and enticing new political practices. The roundtable brings together scholars working across South Asia within various disciplines to intervene in conceptualising left-wing aesthetic forms as archives for contemporary political, historiographical and theoretical work. We will address popular forms in neorealist cinema in 1950s South Asia (Speaker 1/Art History); Leftist engagements with art and culture in postcolonial Sri Lanka (Speaker 2/Literature); socialist cultural praxis in the cine-ecology of 1940s Bombay (Speaker 3/Film Studies); left-wing aesthetics as part of subaltern joy and the prefigurative politics of Islamic socialism (Speaker 4/History); solidarities between South Asian/diasporic and analogous marginal voices from elsewhere (Speaker 5/History); transnational aesthetic potentialities of decolonial socialisms (Speaker 6/Art History); and the caste and spatial networks of rural libraries and the making of “progressive selves” in Kerala (Speaker 7/Anthropology).

Session: Session 3: Thursday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Parlour Room 629
Floor: Floor 6

This panel analyzes institutions and geographies of Muslim scientific knowledge production and debate in the context and wake of British colonial authority in South Asia. It considers the degree to which geographies of Muslim scientific knowledge were necessarily responsive to imperial structures and borders. At the same time, the papers demonstrate that Muslim debates about science, technology, and medicine reached beyond imperial and European claims on the scientific. We center stories of translation and mobility that reveal how Muslims created new scientific publics and debates that exceeded the boundaries placed on knowledge production by the colonial regime and its post-colonial successors. The panel builds on Dhruv Raina and S. Irfan Habib’s argument that Indian engagement with science “subvert[ed], contaminate[d] and reorganize[d] the ideology of science as introduced by Europe.” What role, it asks, did Islam and Muslims play in these varied projects of subversion, contamination, and reorganization? Equally, how did South Asian Muslim define their own “ideologies of science,” and how did they imagine Muslim publics for these scientific ideologies and projects in the context of colonial South Asia? In answering these questions, each paper attends to social relations and intra-religious debates that shaped contested understandings of science and technology. Speaker 1 paper studies manuals translated by Sayyid Ahmad Khan, arguing that he can be labeled as a popularizer of science in his historical setting. Speaker 2 analyzes elite Indian Muslim assertions of technological pasts for Muslim artisans. Speaker 3 examines the diasporic community of interwar Germany, where Indo-Afghan scientists gathered to develop post-colonial institutions in South Asia. Speaker 4 addresses the role of medicine and small-scale technologies in the compilation of exemplary letters of trade for Urdu-medium education in early Pakistan. Together, the four papers suggest new directions in the study of science, religion, and empire.

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

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

When Stella Kramrisch wrote of “the dynamic urge of stone” in reference to Indian sculpture, it became abundantly clear to art historians that materials in South Asian visual culture mattered. While scholarship has accorded much needed attention to the fruitful relationships born out of cultural, linguistic, religious, socio-political, and visual exchanges that emerged from South Asia’s encounter with Persianate and Indian Ocean world aesthetics in the medieval and early modern periods (ca. 700–1900), questions of materiality open up research on the circulation of art to a broader nexus of methodological approaches with interdisciplinary implications. The papers in this panel reflect on the thematic pillars of “tradition” and “innovation” by foregrounding the prominence of material in the medieval and early modern periods. Inquiries on materiality are indisputably fundamental to art and architecture in any period. However, resonances of tradition and innovation are particularly discernible in the medieval and early modern periods, when the citation of regional aesthetics from the ancient period, on the one hand, and the antecedental globality of modernity, on the other hand, were equally prevalent. Broadly, this panel considers the ways in which the physical substance of a work of art contributes to its efficacy or otherwise functions to ground it within these overlapping temporal and geographic domains. The intermediacy of South Asia as the geographic junction of Persianate and Indian Ocean worlds during the medieval and early modern periods, we suggest, may be most readily intelligible through analyses of visual culture that underscores the function of material, including but not limited to its physical, metaphysical, social, cultural, religious, economic, alchemical, talismanic, and medicinal properties.

Session: Session 5: Friday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Senate Room A
Floor: Floor 1

This interdisciplinary roundtable will critically assess Vinayak Chaturvedi’s Hindutva and Violence: V.D. Savarkar and the Politics of History (SUNY Press, 2022). The book examines the political thought of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883–1966), the most controversial Indian political thinker of the twentieth century and a key architect of Hindutva and Hindu nationalism. Examining Savarkar’s central claim that “Hindutva is not a word but a history,” Chaturvedi argues that, for Savarkar, the purpose of this history was to approximate Hindutva by recovering the thoughts and actions of key historical actors who participated in warfare against invaders and imperialists of India, thus creating the Hindu nation through violence and permanent war. His political writings ranged widely, from studies of antiquity to contemporary social theory and world history, from analyses of Nazism, Zionism, and Communism to philosophical writings on ontology and epistemology. And his intellectual vision provided the vital counterpoint to Gandhi, Nehru, Ambedkar, and Jinnah and other key actors in the anticolonial movement on the subcontinent. Hindtuva and Violence illuminates the philosophical underpinnings of Hindu nationalism, crucial to understanding its trajectory from independence in 1947 to its resonance in the present. The proposed roundtable brings together scholars with expertise in multiple fields to assess Savarkar’s understanding of colonialism, religion and the politics of violence; how these relate to the ideas of Gandhi, Ambedkar and other interlocutors/contemporaries; and broader methodological questions of comparative political theory and intellectual history. Each speaker will provide critiques of the book on a number of topics: Speaker 1 on the histories of sexuality and political histories of terror; Speaker 2 on caste, “untouchability,” and the intellectual history of Ambedkar; Speaker 3 on the political thought of Gandhi and Ambedkar; and Speaker 4 on histories of the Partition, communalism and religion. Speaker 5 will formally respond to the critiques in his presentation.

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

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Session: Session 5: Friday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Conference Room 3
Floor: Floor 2

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

The focus of our panel is on the roles performance and performativity play in the constitution of subjective and social realities. These realities include gender, sexuality, nation, and community. It seeks to showcase performance or cultural enactments in relation to the subjectivity of the audience/viewer/reader, the receiver’s own acts of the euphoric, somatic, or traumatic during or post-performance, and the effects of such acts upon the original performance or society at large. The aim of this panel is to elucidate the under-represented field of performance—hitherto dominated by Euro-American discourse—and its function as a tool and object of analysis in South Asia. For this purpose, the panel approaches the term performance through an interdisciplinary lens and explores performance through a social, epistemological, material, and political prism. Our panel includes presentations from a range of disciplinary positions—ethnomusicology, literature, social history, and art history—and spans temporally from the early modern to the modern period. The four scholars showcase performances across paper-based, analog, and digital media alongside physical recitations and dance dramas. Collectively, these papers address not only the main theme but elucidate other under-explored subjects within the field of South Asia. Ultimately, this constellation of presentations aims to present fresh ways of interpreting performance and reception within a South Asian context.

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

How does subjectivity evolve in a poetic tradition? Does the poet’s ‘I’ shift its locus as the world around the poet changes? How do we read the footprints of history, conflict, and identity in poetry? To address such queries, our panel brings together an exploration of Bengali poetic diction across time, focusing on the narratorial self’s engagement with the world. Four presenters will use discrete literary critical methods in their analysis of pre-modern and modern Bengali poetry. Despite the distinct periodization that Bengali literary historiography has maintained, there is enough continuity in the Bengali tradition of poetry-writing to read through time, tracing influences and invocations of literary pasts in each period and milieu. Four discrete sets of poetry will be scrutinized in their contexts in search of marks that the poet’s self-designation or alienation left on the work of art. One set of poetry—the Mangalkavya—will allow us to explore the function of self-sacrifice as a reflection in medieval Bengali religious life. Another set, Rabindranath Tagore’s songs, will be read with an eye on how the nineteenth-century colonial-modern synthesis allowed for the transcendental beloved other to be diffused enough to afford secular translation and near-universal transmission. A different lens would be required for a Bengali woman poet, who had to consciously recast the Tagorean colonial-modern aesthetic to transmit the woman’s own voice, thus engendering a poetic persona at odds with its male counterpart. Finally, a reading of post-Partition poems from India and Bangladesh will be used to guide a discussion on the poetic self’s recuperation with devastating loss.

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

The fact that Sanskrit literature is almost entirely written by and for men — more so, perhaps, than any other major literature — has been felt by scholarly and non-scholarly readers alike to be obvious and, for that very reason, often goes unremarked and unanalyzed. Sanskrit literature was largely untouched by the “gender turn” in scholarship that began several decades ago. The papers in this two-part panel will belatedly take up this problematic by asking some of the following questions. How are authors, characters and readers gendered in Sanskrit literature, and what interpretive consequences does this have? How does male authorship shape and pattern the representation of women in Sanskrit texts? How are they voiced and imagined? How are women narratologically troped? How do these tropes pattern male/female relationships? How are ideals of masculinity articulated in and alongside ideals of femininity? To answer these questions we look at a wide range of Sanskrit texts, from the hyper-canonical (Kālidāsa) to the definitely minor (Rāmacandra), to take up the challenge — posed by scholars including Karla Mallette (2018) and Anjali Arondekar (2018) — to develop a reading practice for Sanskrit that is sensitive to its highly ideological gender dynamics. These papers will show that gender in Sanskrit literature is not just an artifact of the society in which it was produced, but a systematic way of structuring literary forms and meanings

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

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

The past decade in South Asia has witnessed rapid growth in the scale and scope of digital platforms mediating between service providers of various types and customers– they have spread across the region, and in various domains such as e-commerce, hospitality and ride-hailing. Critical to the growth of the platform economy on one hand has been the falling costs of technologies (platforms and broadband mobile connectivity), availability of venture capital, limited employment opportunities and a murky legal environment about employment status. These conditions have allowed platforms to create a business model where an estimated 5 million last-mile delivery workers in India, for instance, are euphemistically termed “entrepreneurs” and denied various employment benefits ranging from minimum wage to social security. The platforms justify the model by arguing that they have created an efficient marketplace which generates jobs in a country where jobs are scarce. They also warn against any regulation that might kill a nascent industry. Others argue that the platform economy is the step in the right direction towards formalising work status. This panel will critique such arguments, contrasting them with the conditions of platform workers on the ground in India and Bangladesh. The papers in the panel will draw on desk research and on interviews conducted with platform workers in India in 2020 and 2021 by the Fairwork India team and in Bangladesh in 2021 by the Fairwork Bangladesh team. The papers will examine different aspects of the conditions of platform workers in these geographies, including what makes them distinctive, the ambiguous legal status of their work relationship, their encounters with varied intermediaries in the course of their work, and nascent efforts at collective action.

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

Every year, new analytical advancements are made that impact the archaeological discipline. These advancements may come in a variety of ways, from morphological analysis, machine learning, GIS, dating techniques and beyond. The papers presented in this panel will focus on how new techniques are enabling us to have deeper insights into the material record of South Asia. These material insights into socio-political phenomenon such as power, trade, and tradition that in turn provide deeper understanding of the larger cultural and archaeological setting of South Asia. This panel will bring together four scholars from the United States, China, and India. Three of the panelists will present in person and the fourth will be a virtual presentation. The first paper of the panel will demonstrate how machine learning can reinforce typologies of a wide range of metal artifacts that give insight into the habitation practices of Buddhist monks in Gandhara during the Early Historic Period. The second presents a methodology that links elemental composition to larger systems of value for Indus Copper-Bronzes. The third paper presents the results of stone bead analysis and LA-ICP-MS analysis on carnelian beads from Tibet and Nepal that can now be sourced to Yunnan, China during the Historic period. The final paper will show how CAT scans are being used to non-destructively study crucibles that were used in the production of the famous wootz crucible steel during the Historic period. The papers bring together traditional approaches to the study of the past, with innovative techniques that help to refine our understanding of ancient and historical South Asia and its global interactions.

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

The concept of “mother tongue” gained importance in South Asia in the mid nineteenth century and has been central to language and education policy, scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, and lay conceptions of language. However, people’s experiences with language are highly nuanced and mediated by context. This panel draws on historical and ethnographic research to explore the multifaceted ways mother tongue has been conceptualized in South Asia, particularly Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and India. We examine how debates about mother tongue were involved in language policy debates in the colonial and postcolonial period. We also examine how various understandings of it—as a language of a mother, a language of identity (related to region, ethnicity, religion, or caste), and a language of communicative competency—emerge in relation to particular historical moments and in relation to particular practices, such as oratorical performances and interviews, where students reflect on its relevance to their sociolinguistic practices and experiences with language. This panel contributes to literature in Asian studies by examining what is significant about the way mother tongue has taken hold in the nations of South Asia, as well as how it mediates language policy, nationalist and counter-nationalist movements, and people’s positionings of themselves in relation to others.

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

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Session: Session 6: Friday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Conference Room 5
Floor: Floor 2

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

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Session: Session 6: Friday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: University A/B
Floor: Floor 2

The fact that Sanskrit literature is almost entirely written by and for men — more so, perhaps, than any other major literature — has been felt by scholarly and non-scholarly readers alike to be obvious and, for that very reason, often goes unremarked and unanalyzed. Sanskrit literature was largely untouched by the “gender turn” in scholarship that began several decades ago. The papers in this two-part panel will belatedly take up this problematic by asking some of the following questions. How are authors, characters and readers gendered in Sanskrit literature, and what interpretive consequences does this have? How does male authorship shape and pattern the representation of women in Sanskrit texts? How are they voiced and imagined? How are women narratologically troped? How do these tropes pattern male/female relationships? How are ideals of masculinity articulated in and alongside ideals of femininity? To answer these questions we look at a wide range of Sanskrit texts, from the hyper-canonical (Kālidāsa) to the definitely minor (Rāmacandra), to take up the challenge — posed by scholars including Karla Mallette (2018) and Anjali Arondekar (2018) — to develop a reading practice for Sanskrit that is sensitive to its highly ideological gender dynamics. These papers will show that gender in Sanskrit literature is not just an artifact of the society in which it was produced, but a systematic way of structuring literary forms and meanings.

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

The current age is witnessing the passing of generations with palpable or immediately inherited memories of a wider cultural cosmology of pre-Partition South Asia. That is, not just in terms of personal experience, but also in relation to passed down cultural and existential patterns of life, languages and dialects, culinary and sartorial matters, faiths, and ancestral rituals. Extended mental and imaginative geographies beyond the modern geopolitical borders, the profound sense of homelessness and exile, and the refusal to accept a collective Gemütlichkeit dictated by monolingual nationalisms that we see in the fiction of Manto, Pritam, Chugtai, or Rokeya; in the cinema of Ritwik Ghatak; or in the poetry of Faiz or Tagore stand the danger of being eclipsed. Similarly, other ecumenes not bound by the geo-bodies of the nation-state – cultures in Northeast India with ties to Burma, Tibet, Thailand, and Bangladesh – are also imperiled. This is partly due to certain inevitable features of the modernization process within the auspices of the nation state: great displacement of populations, progressive urbanization, industrialization of culture, or loss of community and kinship ties. The wider subcontinental imagination has also been arrested, curtailed, and fixated to jealous national destinying processes by the axiomatic institutions devoted to disciplinary pedagogy, memory and historical consciousness, censorship, standardizations of languages and cultures, and militarism. The long history of cross border or internecine communal and caste conflicts in South Asia have hardened identities, separated greater cultural and linguistic maps into rival geographies, and have introduced new imperatives of absolute belonging, purity, and virtue. The papers in this panel seek to critically explore imperiled subcontinental and cosmopolitan imaginations to understand what exactly is at stake when fierce imperatives of citizenship and peopleness tend to consign all powers of thinking and imagination to the nation-state.

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

The ubiquity of love needs no comment, but its underlying and attendant shenanigans provide a vital entry point towards grounded understandings of the personal as political. In South Asian cities, love is as liberating as it is dangerous: it is deeply rooted in our shared cultural consciousness, revels in the transformative anonymity which urban life facilitates, and is closely tied to the aspirational imagery in whose shadow many of us refashion our identities. Yet, it is just as prone to be policed and curtailed in pursuit of cultural and communal purity and if often a risky site of ideological clash and machination. Centring love in all its myriad manifestations as its thematic pivot, this panel proposes to assess the space and place of love in South Asian cities from multiple disciplinary vantages. How do rurban masculinities find aspirational outlets in Chandigarh, transforming the predetermined grid of Corbusian modernity into an emblem of glocalised Punjabi romance? Is the gendering of friendships and intimacies in Delhi dependent upon the ebb and flow of bodies, minds, and ideas through its circuitous networks of transit and accidental interaction? Does nostalgia anchor friendships for women in Allahabad, where access to the city is often mediated around familial strictures on mobility and companionship? How have the burgeoning millennials of Raipur claimed hitherto sterile public spaces, such as airport greens and expressways, to articulate a newfound agency and freedom to love? With these distinct case studies, the panel will deliberate upon the metamorphoses in self and society being effected by love in contemporary South Asian cities. Correlating the textual with the cartographic, the anecdotal with the spatial, and the architectural with the affective, it will put a motley of methods on the table to lay a richly intersectional framework for understanding love in our cities.

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

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

Indian media theorist Anustup Basu (2021) describes contemporary Hindutva as an “informational Hindutva” that relies less on established forms such as newspapers, universities, temples or shakhas, and is instead a mediatized phenomenon offering an ethereal and spectacular public Hinduness, transcending its factions and contradictions and as “filled with the babel of languages” (Basu 158). Modi’s Hindutva establishes new synergies between Hindu identity and neoliberalism in an affective realm of desires and fears. However, the viral spectacle of his image-building politics contrasts with the reticence and secrecy of a silent leader in times of crisis where loudly clamoring followers and grassroot propaganda fill the space of political speech. The result is a hollowing out of the language of institutions, specialists, and civil society, as well as of historical consciousness and any semblance of social justice (Basu 164). Taking this description as a provocation, this panel approaches Hindutva as a “spectacular majoritarianism” by examining the constituents and form its critique can takes. The four papers explore this in the following ways: 1) explores the articulations of digital media constituents of Hindutva – podcasts – as a form of distributed spectacle where Hindu supremacy is normalized by mocking caricatured “Others,” 2) examines constituents of the right-wing website OpIndia and their counter-fact checking efforts to create dubious knowledge systems by contesting the truth claims of mainstream news and fact checkers. 3) theorizes Hindutva as “spectacular majoritarianism” by juxtaposing Guy Debord’s work on the “spectacle” with Ambedkarite critique of majoritarianism as reflected in Dalit student activist Rohith Vemula’s Facebook life-writing. 4) argues that counter-majoritarian truth telling cannot merely be reduced to revealing lies. It requires both withdrawal to think, and the ability to see democracy’s limits and its possibilities of providing an alternative space through outsider solidarity.

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

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

Our proposal engages with a relatively hidden chapter of South Asian history, British India’s participation during World War 1. The papers build on the partially forgotten history of more than a million Indian soldiers who served in World War 1 (and of those 70,000 soldiers who died). In the past two decades works on the Indian presence in WWI by David Omissi (1999), Shrabani Basu (2015), Santanu Das (2011), Geogre Morton-Jack (2018) and Long and Talbot (2018), amongst others, have enhanced our historical and cultural understanding of the period. Our proposed panel builds on this literature, but also follows a methodology and aesthetics that resembles that of an archaeologist who reconstructs forgotten voices as if assembling a pot from shards and pieces found in a dig. Reflecting a century later, the papers will trace lost voices, images and words related to British India’s involvement in WWI. While one of the papers shares the voices of Indian soldiers in German WWI POW camps another juxtaposes this with a detailed description of the emotional realities of “enemy aliens” who resided in India and were prisoners in internment camps during the same period. A third paper offers a different history of emotions by showing how Indian soldiers were denied treatment for psychological traumas due the colonial classificatory practices of deeming Indian soldiers, especially from the so-called “martial races” less likely to experience traumatic neurosis or schizophrenia compared to their European counterparts. Finally, a paper will present a history of the War through the picture postcard, a visual repository that provides unique cultural insights. Our panel is an interdisciplinary effort that responds to the history of imperial non-remembrance and explores the question of memory and recuperation through a series of interventions.

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

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

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

This roundtable centres ‘the people’ in its exploration of New Indian Politics. It picks up the well-worn phrase - the people of India - in order to probe two related questions. In the first, how do we understand the political landscape of contemporary India? And, secondly, what are the politics of knowledge production around New India and how may we be able to intervene in this always-animated space by offering out an alternative conceptualisation? Working through both the concept of ‘the people’ as well as by discussing very specific types of people/s, this roundtable aims to build up a conversation on multidisciplinary interventions on the question of how we are to build a critical analytical repertoire that is able to contend with the fractitious politics of the present. Speaker 1 will be speaking on the figure of the ‘bhakt’ who has emerged prominently in New India. Speaker 2 will be discussing the concept of ‘the people’ by building on his argument on the Indian constitution as “a people’s constitution.” Speaker 3 will be speaking on B R Ambedkar and the manner in which he has been appropriated and ignored in New Indian politics. Speaker 4 will be speaking on the figure of the kisan who has come centrestage due to the farmers protests, but will locate them within a longer agrarian history Speaker 5 will discuss the personified figure of Sarkar or the state, and how New India is slowly but surely changing the nature of governmental power. Speaker 6 will focus on the politics of AAP (Aam Aadmi Party) and how they are changing what “the people” consider good governance Speaker 7 will be discussing the figure of the peasant and how they figure in political and left imaginations of New India.

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

As a medium defined by the circulation of value, markets constantly invent and transform the definition of tradition. Sometimes hinging close to the enduring idea of authenticity, wherein markets mobilize fixed definitions of tradition , while at other times markets are pushed to redesign, innovate, and “invent traditions” to bolster various value projects. Between these two tendencies, how do we understand the relation between markets and traditions? This panel draws attention to the genres of tradition and innovation that circulate in South Asia’s market society, genres through which projects of “rebuilding economies” are often heralded whether in the context of agriculture, manufacturing, real estate, or finance. Markets are a crucial site to explore the distinctions between contexts where tradition is often (mis)read as informality while on other occasions tradition itself structures the customs of modernity codified as laws and rules. The market as a site, thus, draws attention to the specific laboring bodies that perform this work of rebuilding and innovating, as invention becomes a norm in neoliberal times. We ask, what tools, objects, commodities, people are written off, excluded, laid to rest when traditions become burdensome and the calculus of capital obliterates markets? Yet the market is also a platform where economic projects are contested and reconfigured, sometimes out of political resistance, but often through the hustle and desire to survive and be relevant. In this light, what shape does rebuilding take in a market through the emergent process of circulation? Crucial to that, what forms of investment as manifest in infrastructures, start ups, and capital, are mobilized to consolidate platforms and make circulation feasible? If tradition hinges on a definition to be circulated, identified with a particular community, then markets are also landscapes where discourses, commodities, peoples, are mobilized to make feasible an enduring tie located in tradition.

Session: Session 9: Saturday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Assembly Room
Floor: Floor 1

Many scholars have argued that earliest colonial rulers kept detail records as a matter of life and death. While some were preserved, some were burned down. Evidence of imperial violence was destroyed as is clear from the works of Ian Cobain. The arc of problematizing the archive is long. Historians like Antoinette Burton has argued that British Library’s India Office was not just a repository of colonial records but whispering galleries of land mines and crime scenes. Nicholas Dirks argued that colonial archive symbolizes everything wrong with state archives, the imbalances, their silences intertwined with their claims of objectivity. On archival practices, Mary Douglas reminds us of “social order operating on individual minds.” In recent years, Dan Hicks and Claire Wintle have articulated the need and methodology for decolonizing museums and archives. A “sustained unlearning” as Priyamvada Gopal puts it is important. Priya Satia has placed responsibility on historians for perpetuating many myths in history. The central aim of this panel is to rethink how the archive can help the discipline of history and take it forward. This panel will explore a variety of perspectives related to knowledge production within the British Indian Empire, which will demonstrate how the British controlled the land, the aspirational outlook, limitations and also their moment of decolonization. Speaker 1 looks at provincial aspirations that are contained in archival records, but are seldom discussed because the ideal is often far removed from reality. Speaker 2 looks at archive as an ideascape for decolonization. She engages with Michel-Ralph Trouillot, Todd Shepard and Laura Ann Stoler, thinking about a methodology that incorporates both reading along and against the grain. Speaker 3 offers ways to rethink limitations in missionaries’ accounts. And Speaker 4 looks at ecological knowledge formation as an overlooked aspect of colonial knowledge formation.

Session: Session 9: Saturday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Senate Room A
Floor: Floor 1

On December 6, 1992, a mob of Hindu militants stormed Ayodhya to destroy a sixteenth-century mosque, the Babri Masjid. 2022 marks the thirtieth anniversary of the successful attempt to raze this early modern mosque. In the thirty years since the demolition of the Babri Masjid, Hindu nationalism has grown significantly both in India and in the diaspora. This roundtable reflects on the pivotal historical moments surrounding the destruction of the Babri Masjid and the increasing embrace of Hindu nationalism by different Indian publics. The participants of this roundtable each discuss various aspects surrounding the destruction of the Babri Masjid and its aftermath. Speaker 1 reprises and reflects on the early aftermath of the mosque’s destruction in both Ayodhya and New York. Speaker 2 will focus on the role that the leaders of the Gorakhpur temple complex played in the years leading up to the destruction of the Babri Masjid and how these yogis have employed ideas of monastic power to gain support for Hindu nationalism. Speaker 3 examines the disparate treatment of Hindu and Muslim communities in the 2019 Supreme Court verdict concerning the land on which the former mosque was built. Speaker 4 argues that the 2019 verdict became possible through the production of a mediatized, transnational, Hindu belief community that takes shape through a virtual/digital network of likes, shares, and hashtags. Speaker 5 discusses the ways that transnational Jains engage with the BJP by ignoring its genocidal aspects and relying on their caste and class privileges to shield themselves from its ineluctable aspects. Speaker 6 will discuss her field research in Lucknow and share how two generations of Muslims make sense of the demolition.

Session: Session 9: Saturday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Conference Room 2
Floor: Floor 2

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Session: Session 9: Saturday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Conference Room 4
Floor: Floor 2

Orientalism’s construct of the other’s ruler as wicked, depraved, bent on power for all the wrong reasons, continues to beset the popular imagination and some scholarly ones too in the 21st century, in both the “East” and the “West”. The construct persists despite compelling scholarship that imagines ancient Indic leadership in other terms. Daud Ali’s insights into praśasti, for example, propose a compelling picture of the pre-colonial South Asian ruler who embodies responsibility to others, tasked with perpetuating the salvific, protective work the deities performed in mythic times. Dipti Khera draws an image of royal pleasure, joy, and delight. This session is an opportunity to further dissolve the twisted projection of the Oriental Despot. Evidence from all disciplines – verbal, visual, material, embodied, ritual – can locate strategies for taking these understandings of ancient leadership beyond the academy and into wider discourses.

Session: Session 9: Saturday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Capitol Ballroom B
Floor: Floor 2

Our panel focuses on the vast body of short, non-narrative poetry from South Asia we wish to gather under the concept of “lyric.” The lyric archive includes some of the most influential and thought-provoking cultural products of South Asia, from love poetry and devotional prayer to royal panegyrics and protests against religious orthodoxy. However, lyrics resist the current critical methods of South Asian literary study, which are largely suited to the analysis of narratives. Reading lyrics from different periods and traditions—classical, medieval, and modern, Sanskrit, Tamil, and Urdu—the papers in our section aim to develop a critical vocabulary adequate to South Asian lyrics, as well as display the insights made possible by a comparative study of the lyric in South Asia. We believe that South Asian genres such as the Tamil tanippāṭal, Urdu ghazal, and Sanskrit muktaka can be usefully theorized together without sacrificing traditional specificity. In organizing this panel around the concept of the lyric, then, our goal is neither to force-fit a universal concept onto some new particulars, nor to reduce all South Asian lyrics to a single model. We propose the lyric as an open-ended conceptual framework that will allow scholars of South Asian literature to make new and useful connections across periods and genres—the kind of concept Jonathan Culler has in mind when he asserts that “a broadly historical and…transnational conception of lyric enhances critical understanding.”

Session: Session 9: Saturday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: University A/B
Floor: Floor 2

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Session: Session 9: Saturday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Parlour Room 634
Floor: Floor 6

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Session: Session 10: Saturday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Senate Room A
Floor: Floor 1

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Session: Session 10: Saturday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Capitol Ballroom B
Floor: Floor 2

A deep curiosity about who or what is on the “other side” underlies much of what we encounter in premodern South Asian narrative literature, where central figures are often defined in relation to charismatic antagonists who embody competing ethical, emotional, and social values. In this way the villain and the vadha—the confrontation unto death—form the backbone of epics, poems, and stories across premodern South Asia, creating structural tensions between protagonist and antagonist that are so foundational we take them for granted. Our panel digs into those foundations. Why do so many composers and readers cross boundaries between protagonist and antagonist, adopting the “other side’s” perspective? Does this speak to broader notions of religious, literary, and linguistic coexistence in which boundaries are meant to be crossed? When, by contrast, do these boundaries hold strong, facilitating cultural self-definition against some irredeemable Other? Our panel approaches these questions through four case studies. Our first paper analyzes South Asia’s archetypal villain, Ravana, as he comes to life in Punam’s Manipravalam Ramayana (the Bhasharamayanachampu, from fifteenth-century Kerala): this Ravana invites the reader’s appreciation and even affection. The second paper shows how, in the Muslim poet Masih Panipati’s Indo-Persian Dastan-i Ram o Sita (ca. 1624), the rakshasi Shurpanakha—Ravana’s sister, and the ultimate Other—sympathetically embodies human possibility. A third paper explores Mpu Panuluh’s Old Javanese Shalyawadha (part of the Bharatayuddha, 1157 CE), which paints the Mahabharata’s Shalya, a Kaurava general, as a romantic lead—but one who must be slain. Our fourth paper brings the past to the present. In the hands of Gujarati-speaking Pushtimarga Vaishnava preachers, the demon Bali—defeated by Vamana (Vishnu) in the Bhagavata Purana—becomes a model devotee and a vehicle for anti-Brahmin critique, while the actions of Vamana himself are said to defy dharma. Who’s the antagonist now?

Session: Session 10: Saturday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: University C/D
Floor: Floor 2

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