Annual Conference on South Asia

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

The American Institute of Pakistan Studies (AIPS) is applying to host a symposium at the 54th Annual Conference on South Asia on Wednesday, October 28. This full-day symposium aims to mentor emerging scholars working on Pakistan-related research. If selected, the event will be the fifth such event at the Annual Conference on South Asia. The symposium will showcase new research by approximately eight US-based emerging scholars (both recent PhDs and graduate students with ABD status) whose research addresses Pakistan Studies. AIPS will hold an open call for applications, which it will widely advertise through its 40+ member institutions and its social media sites. It encourages abstracts from (but not restricted to) disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, political science, history, literature, religious studies, art history, music, women studies, film, and communications studies, etc. AIPS has identified established scholars to read the accepted papers and provide feedback, mentorship, and focused discussion following participants' presentations. Because presenters get selected in advance, coupled with an in-depth question/answer/discussion period, the event will fully utilize a full-day and is inappropriate for the traditional conference panel format. AIPS’s emerging scholar symposiums enable emerging scholars to network with others in their field and expose them to established scholars who can act as additional advisors/mentors. The past AIPS Emerging Scholar Symposia held at the Annual Conference on South Asia have been instrumental in creating a nationwide dialogue between emerging and established Pakistan Studies scholars. Significant outcomes of past symposiums include published books, forged mentorships, written articles, and revised dissertations. Past symposium participants are also now successfully in tenure-track positions in academic institutions in the US.

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

Diasporic formations are increasingly shaped by the intensification of global media flows, especially in moments of crisis. As communities move across borders—whether through forced displacement, labor migration, or climate driven mobility—their media practices become essential infrastructures for sustaining identity, memory, and belonging. Crisis amplifies this dynamic: ruptures such as political repression, economic precarity, or environmental disaster not only precipitate migration but also reconfigure how diasporic subjects produce, circulate, and interpret media. These mediated circulations—ranging from social media storytelling and community radio to independent film and digital archives—forge transnational publics and challenge dominant narratives while enabling migrants to navigate uncertainty, question normative power hierarchies, and imagine progressive cross-racial bonds of solidarity. At the same time, media flows can intensify vulnerabilities, as misinformation, surveillance, and platform inequalities shape how crisis is represented and experienced. Thinking through diaspora at the intersection of media and crisis thus reveals how mobile communities continually negotiate the tension between fragmentation and connection, loss and reinvention, as they craft new forms of cultural expression and political presence across borders. This panel asks: What aesthetic strategies do diasporic artists and filmmakers employ to represent crisis, displacement, and the affective landscapes of migration? How do crisis-driven media practices reveal inequalities in global information flows and platform infrastructures? What can South Asian media exchanges within and beyond the nation-state tell us about the ways communities co opt, work around, and reimagine political subjectivities? Where does cultural labor fit within these dynamics, and how might examining the conditions and contingencies of such labor sharpen our understanding of diasporic media-making as both survival strategy and world-building practice?

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

This symposium brings South Asia studies research across disciplines into conversation with the anthropology of labor and the study of religion by asking: What happens when “religion” and “work” are placed within the same analytical frame? How do “religion” and questions of labor illuminate each other? Thinking with, as well as against, Weberian formulations of work as beruf—calling, discipline, and ascetic accumulation—we examine how religious practice and capitalist formations are co-constituted. Participants variously interrogate the many meanings, practices, and relationships that emerge from the co-constitution of religion and work in South Asia and its diasporas, past and present. Drawing from works-in-progress, participants ask a range of questions, including: How are work formations and processes of capitalist accumulation structured by religious practice (and vice versa), and what might this mean for the variegated ways in which capitalism morphs itself into newer avatars? Is the term “religion” even useful when thinking about, say, the alliance of capitalism with caste and kinship? What are some of the emergent formations of “work” and “religion” in contemporary South Asia? How might these newer assemblages of religion and work help us both understand and move beyond the naturalization of older legacies and frameworks through which “religious work and labor” has come to be understood, whether it is the Weberian assumptions that frame “work” in terms of virtue and economic productivity or even the liberatory claims associated with the laboring subject? What becomes visible when we attend not only to work, but to its “others” such as non-work, play, recreation, and refusal? Situating these questions in South Asia and its diasporas, the symposium rethinks the entanglements of religion and capitalism as well as the fundamental categories such as “religion”, “work”, and “labor” that are the conditions of possibility of these entanglements.

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

The embodiment of divinities in South Asian traditions has received much scholarly attention (Holdrege 2015; 2016; Holdrege and Pechilis 2016; Waghorne et al. 1985). For instance, scholars such as Pechilis (2000) have argued for shifting the terminology of bhakti from 'devotion' to 'participation,' highlighting that bhakti requires active engagement in worship and emphasizes the physical embodiment necessary for the practitioner to fulfill their religious obligations. Novetzke underlines that "the publics of bhakti in South Asia require 'embodiment,' the human as medium”(Novetzke 2007). For this symposium, we invite scholars to contribute papers that examine the conceptualization of embodiment, veneration, and presences of human figures of veneration in bhakti publics. The veneration of human presences need not be confined to a living, flesh‑and‑blood human body. Such presences may be embodied in multiple registers: as living practitioners, as deceased figures whose presence continues to be made real, or as non‑historical beings whose reality is affirmed through ritual and material practices. Such embodiment is made perceptible through the adornment, veneration, and circulation of their images, icons, literary invocations, hagiographies, material tracaes, and so forth. In this sense, the human figures and their presence are rendered real, tangible, and efficacious through the sensory and material practices. Through this symposium, we aim to explore the diverse ways in which the bodies of such human figures of veneration are imagined, theorized, enacted, and brought into relation with other embodied presences across South Asian traditions. We particularly welcome studies that investigate the sites and modes of such embodiment through a wide range of sources, including material and visual culture, textual traditions, performative practices, and ethnographic accounts. Given the cross-traditional scope of this inquiry, a symposium format is essential to accommodate more speakers and deeper dialogue. This extended time will facilitate the collaborative groundwork for a future edited volume.

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

Our inaugural symposium “Deccan as Method” was immensely successful and highlighted Deccan’s importance in South Asian scholarship. Our second convening continues to explore Deccan as a mobile frontier, and a regional formation but with an intensive focus on longue duree social and cultural histories. The current preconference moves from justifying the region’s importance, to specifying its historical and conceptual boundaries. What methodological approaches, and diverse multilingual archives allow us to frame the region in its specific complexities? Participants at the 2025 meeting collectively raised questions on the physical, historical and social contours of Deccan, and what is made possible by thinking from the dual perspectives of Deccan as “region,” and as “frontier,” or borderland. We raised questions about the methodological valence of the term, and focused on the regional histories shaped by environment, economy, and politics that traverse the constraints of boundaries established by the formation of modern linguistic states. We reasserted that a focus across Deccan, indeed, offer some provocations for seeing the region anew. Keeping this in mind, our 2026 symposium will sharpen the focus and frame a distinctive vision for collaborative research on the region, drawing on existing scholarship while framing a future research agenda. To elaborate: The 2026 symposium moves away from the chronological limitations of the previous iteration to expand the temporal and environmental scope of studies on Deccan. Second, it frames literary, visual and material culture, that is, art history, archaeology, histories of science, and of literary cultures into conversation with social history and anthropology. Third, drawing on written reflections which articulate a collaborative approach to the studying Deccan, we plan to discuss establishing a scholarly network with plans for publication, a seminar in Bengaluru in December 2026, and elaborating a set of 3-4 short seminars with a focus on graduate student engagement.

Session: Symposium - Full Day
Room: Wisconsin Ballroom
Floor: Floor 2

The July 2024 mass uprising in Bangladesh marked a distinct political rupture whose consequences continue to unfold across state and non-state institutions, social lives, and political imaginaries. Emerging from student-led protests and rapidly expanding into a nationwide insurgent movement, the uprising exposed deep fractures in the country’s moral economy, governance structures, and regimes of legitimacy. This symposium brings together transdisciplinary scholarship to examine the uprising not as a singular event but as an ongoing process whose afterlives are reshaping Bangladesh’s political, social, and epistemic futures. The first panel, titled “Moral Economies and Political Imaginaries of Uprising,” situates the uprising within its structural and ideological conditions, examining how economic crisis, elite corruption, and competing political imaginaries converged (or did not converge) to destabilize authoritarian rule. The second panel, titled “Bodies, Affects, and the Social Life of the Uprising,” turns to the embodied and affective dimensions of the upheaval, analyzing how state violence against marked bodies intensified insurgent momentum while also reshaping gendered power, minoritization, and broader patterns of social complacency. The third panel, titled “Reckoning after the Uprising: Wages, Justice, and Digital Power,” addresses the terrain of reckoning after regime change, focusing on labor precarity, demands for transitional justice, cycles of reparation and retribution, and the expanding role of digital media in mediating political power. The final panel, titled “Institutions, Knowledge, and Post-Uprising Futures,” looks forward to institutional and epistemic futures, interrogating struggles over knowledge production, constitutional redesign, and the uncertain prospects of democratic renewal amid risks of backsliding. Taken together, these interventions span political economy, anthropology, sociology, law, and gender studies. The breadth of materials and the need to trace the uprising across multiple registers necessitate a full symposium rather than a single or double panel, enabling transdisciplinary dialogues on the uprising’s complex and still-unfolding afterlives within Bangladesh and beyond.

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

In the last two decades, South Asian cities have not only become important subjects and sites for global urban scholarship but also, in necessitating attention to caste, coloniality, embodiment, informality, and everyday practice, have reshaped key theories of the urban. Meanwhile as flooding, heat, drought, air pollution, and other climate catastrophes unfold, questions of vulnerability and survival in the city have gained immediacy not only for research and planning, but in everyday life, learning, and labor. In this context, the South Asian Urban Climates symposium will ask how building knowledge, teaching, and fighting for and from the South Asian city are necessarily interconnected. It will bring scholars, teachers, artists, activists, and cultural producers to workshop pedagogies for collective futures that are grounded in places, practices, and ecologies across the region. To do this, we will build from ongoing dialogue in the South Asian Urban Climates community and think with experimental, community-centered, and climate-justice pedagogies that refuse the coloniality of disciplines, borders, and social categories. The conversation will be grounded in, and examine ways to mobilize, new and ongoing research on aqueous pasts, landscapes of disease, ecologies of brick-making, and ways of knowing food, water, air, and land in Lahore, ​​Janakpurdham, Palghar, and beyond. This work will position the city not only as the site of climate’s colonial returns, but also, through empirically informed pedagogies, as the path out of them. Asking how we might bridge classrooms, creative practices, and grounded political action — especially in mahauls of austerity and authoritarianism — the symposium will curate interdisciplinary perspectives and curricula that address changing climates in the region.

Session: Symposium - Full Day
Room: Parlour Room 627
Floor: Floor 6

Detachment from worldly desires has long constituted one of the core values of South Asian religions. The scholarly conversation around this ideal continues to evolve, as is evidenced, for instance, by recent ethnographic interventions that point toward alternative models of ascetic indifference that do not conform to classical frameworks of renunciation articulated in, e.g., the Dharmaśāstras and related Sanskrit literature. Nevertheless, much of the intellectual, literary, and social history of dispassion (Skt. vairāgya) remains uncharted. Indeed, one can argue that even the semantic range of this concept has not been historically mapped. This is especially true of the past eight hundred years or so, a period that witnessed the crystallization of enduring conceptions and practices of religious austerity that persist in shaping religious life on the subcontinent and among the global diaspora. The sheer diversity of expressions of dispassion as, at the very least, a prerequisite for journeys of salvation, in this period invites an approach that intentionally transgresses regional, linguistic, religious, and temporal boundaries. Consequently, participants in this symposium explore what dispassion means across a range of different contexts, examining textual materials composed from the twelfth century to the twentieth, in languages as varied as Braj Bhāṣā, English, Kannada, Sanskrit, Tamil, and Telugu. In what ways do notions of dispassion engage with prevailing social, political, and institutional configurations? To what extent do considerations of aesthetics and gender mediate the production of particular formulations of ascesis? How do specific Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava devotional traditions, in dialogue with philosophical knowledge-systems such as Vedānta and Yoga, interpret the significance of worldly detachment? How is the concept factored into ideas of the ethical life? By addressing these questions, the symposium will open up dispassion as a multifaceted, mutable, and contested phenomenon of vital importance to the religious cultures of second-millennium South Asia.

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

The seals, seal impressions, and other inscribed objects found at sites of and connected with the Indus Civilization (2600-1900 BCE) are among the most enigmatic elements of its material culture. In addition to being one of the primary supports for the still-undeciphered Indus script, seals and other inscribed objects also represent some of the best material examples of administrative behaviors, technology, mobility, art, ideology, and exchange. Multifaceted studies of seals and writing are useful for identifying meaningful patterns that reflect broader cultural activities and trends. Current research on these issues brings together international scholars who are applying diverse methods, approaches, and interpretations. This panel aims to both highlight current research on Indus inscribed objects and to make this fascinating field more accessible to students and scholars who may not have been previously exposed to it. Contributors to this panel, who are based at institutions throughout the world, have been investigating the inscribed materials of the Indus with the goal of doing everything from deciphering the script to understanding production methodologies, investigating changes in seal production, style, and iconography over time, defining the visual culture of the Indus, exploring the administrative technologies of the Harappan people, and highlighting the connections between Indus texts and the supports on which they are found. Collectively, this research highlights the dynamic nature of current scholarship on Indus seals and writing and the value of using multifaceted approaches to study and share it.

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

Since the 2022 release of ChatGPT, consumer-facing GenAI platforms have rapidly transformed key sectors of the global cultural landscape, including certain aspects of South Asian religions. Scholarship, meanwhile, remains woefully behind in mapping these shifts. Taking its cue from Lawrence Babb and Susan Wadley’s influential 1995 edited volume Media and the Transformations of Religion in South Asia, this roundtable offers an exploratory and emphatically incomplete effort in that regard. It highlights Jain and Hindu uses of AI across text-based pedagogic apps (Jain GPT, Bhagavad Gita GPT) and visual media (darshanic Hindu and Jain commemorative images). To develop a more fulsome picture of GenAI usage across the full range of South Asian religions, the roundtable also has a highly distinctive format. A series of panelist “speed presentations” will be followed by a tightly regulated “lightning round” of maximum one-minute AI descriptions from audience members. Speaker 1 examines JainGPT, developed by the Jain eLibrary for devotional pedagogy. Speaker 2 turns to Bhagavad Gita GPT, designed in 2023 by a young engineer in an act of “dharma maxxing.” Speaker 3 examines Studio Ghibli-style commemorations of Jain sadhus and sadhvis killed in vehicular accidents. Speakers 4 and 5 will co-present, trying to develop a typology of AI aesthetics of the darshanic image and asking how AI images make a bid for darshanic status that often fails.

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

ad hoc panel

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

The South Indian state of Kerala is known for its history of migration and the Kerala model of development. Since the 1970s, the labor migration regime in the Middle East has drawn on Kerala's surplus labor pool. However, in the last decade, the dynamics of Kerala migration have undergone significant changes. There have been new dimensions of migration- internal migration to Kerala, new waves of international student migration to the Global North, and the changing nature of fishermen migration in the context of climate change. Kerala provides an interesting case for migration scholars because it has become both an origin and a destination of migration. It is an origin for transnational labor and student migration, and also a destination for internal migrants from the North and Eastern states of India. These new migratory regimes are transforming the economy, demographics, politics, education, culture, and linguistic imaginaries of Kerala society. This panel is an attempt to broaden the horizon of scholarship on Kerala migration by attending to new and varied forms of migration and to the more-than-human dimensions of migration. By examining how nature, infrastructure, and imaginaries shape and facilitate migration, the panel calls for a rethinking of the Kerala model of development from these new migration frontiers. The first paper uses a political ecology framework to look at the changing nature of fish migration in the Arabian Sea and how it shapes the migration patterns of fisherfolk in Kerala. The second paper examines the role of rental infrastructure and discourses around it in migrant placemaking in Kerala. The third paper explores the schooling experiences of migrant children in Kerala and how migrant identities and linguistic differences shape their learning outcomes. The fourth paper examines the mobility aspirations of educated unemployed youth and how international student migration becomes a solution for them.

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

India’s regional cinemas organize a wide spectrum of media forms across both mainstream and independent works. Attention to its regional centers forces a consideration of how different constituencies can have new and unprecedented conversations with each other. Methodologically, our panel extends the scope of the term intersectionality to encompass emerging production and viewing practices across India. By expanding intersectionality to accommodate India’s double partition: a politics of “unbelonging,” we ask how the refugee, the dancer, the film censor, author, star, and performer intervene in and reshape our understanding of Region across language, age, gender, religion, and caste. How do censorship policies regulate media production in competing regional constituencies? Do mainstream and art cinema approach inter-regional transit, of actors, traditional performers, technicians, and industry personnel in the same way? What can India’s many cinemas reveal about dubbing and subtitling practices that make Region more fluid and porous as films cross state borders quickly and easily? We foreground local, cultural, technological, and geographical forces that dynamize regional circuits of production and distribution. Speaker 1 traces the long history of North-South, and East-West regional collaboration in India, from the early sound era, to the 1980s. Speaker 2 draws attention to a decades-long history of inter-regional female performance that traverses Bombay, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. Speaker 3 shows how the modalities of censorship can split across the State of Tamil Nadu and the Central Government. Speaker 4’s work on Miss Shefali reveals multiple paths pointing to and away from Bombay: from East Pakistan to Calcutta, mainstream to art house cinema, and costumed, staged dance performance to visceral, candid cinematic presentation. Together all four papers trace seismic changes in the spread of locally rooted—as well as uprooted film and media to ask who they exclude, and who they benefit.

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

I am proposing an author meets critics roundtable panel on Professor SherAli Tareen’s new book Shah Waliyullah Dihlavi: Aspirations and Tensions of Islamic Cosmopolitanism (Oneworld Publications, 2026). Aspirations and Tensions, published in the prestigious Makers of the Muslim World Series, presents a comprehensive and detailed yet accessible analysis of the life and key Arabic and Persian texts of arguably the most influential and prolific early modern South Asian Muslim scholar Shah Waliyullah Dihlavi (d. 1762). In addition to examining the complexities and ambiguities of Waliyullah’s thought in a range of disciplines including Islamic law, politics, Qur’an translation and commentary, and Sufism, the book also considers his contested legacy in modern South Asia and in Arab contexts beyond South Asia. The central argument of this book is that Shah Waliyullah’s intellectual life and thought was defined by the aspiration and tensions of Islamic cosmopolitanism. At the core of Shah Waliyullah’s religious thought was the promise of offer¬ing a reading of Islam that synthesized its core disciplines of knowl¬edge, elaborated the relations between them, and encouraged an understanding of them that was decisively cosmopolitan. For Waliyullah, during his eighteenth-century present of tremen¬dous political flux and instability, preserving and fortifying the intel¬lectual and moral infrastructure of Islam required an approach towards its knowledge resources and traditions that was intellectually dynamic rather than doctrinaire, and hermeneutically cosmopolitan rather than constrained. But yet, Tareen shows and argues, it is precisely in his attempt at articulating and detailing such a cosmopolitan vision of Islam that some of the most striking ambiguities and tensions of Waliyullah’s religious thought and career are also most visible. This gender inclusive roundtable brings together four discussants from varied institutions, career stages, and disciplinary backgrounds to engage and examine the contribution of Tareen’s book to South Asian historiography, especially eighteenth century studies.

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

This panel brings together scholarship on marginalized positionalities in Pakistan. The five speakers, at different stages of their careers, ranging from graduate students to visiting scholars and full-time faculty members, explore the lives and struggles of various marginalized groups across Pakistan and put them in perspective with dominant majority nationalism. Speaker 1 examines the Catholic community in Mariamabad, Lahore, to explore the context and history of their identity amid marginalization and persecution and seek a path to flourish through interreligious dialogue and relationships. Speaker 2 examines the ongoing genocidal violence against the Baloch nation and highlights how the Pakistani state has weaponized Islamic doctrine to construct a vision of a homogenized, “purer, more Islamic state” that excludes and marginalizes those deemed incompatible with its vision of purity. Speaker 3 provides a comparative analysis of literary texts: Imagining Argentina by Lawrence Thornton and The Shadow of the Crescent Moon by Fatima Bhutto to show how these works stage literature as ethical labor through gendered affect, specifically highlighting how women’s voices are constrained by intersecting regimes of patriarchy and surveillance in militarized spaces like Pakistan and Argentina. Speaker 4 examines a select body of contemporary anglophone literature, especially novels by Nadeem Aslam and Kamila Shamsie, and Pashto literature in translation to foreground the perpetuation and mutation of the grammar of necropolitics in the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier that discursively produces Pashtun’s militarized identity through British-era colonial framing. Speaker 5 explores Punjabi nationalism as a form of banal yet dominant majority nationalism that operates through institutional control, ideological normalization, and everyday practices rather than overt ethnic mobilization. Together, these five speakers bring fresh perspectives on how religious, ethnic, and gender-marginalized groups interrogate and negotiate the various discursive practices that relegate, integrate, and in some cases, elevate their positionalities in Pakistan.

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

ad hoc panel

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

The presence of jinns is ubiquitous across South Asian folklore, literature, and spaces. Jinns’ interactions with human beings have predominantly been studied through the lens of “possession” and “madness.” Yet jinns also formulate various kinds of intimacies—romantic, spiritual, intellectual, and experiential—with humans. Offering an alternative to the model of the sovereign human subject, this panel approaches jinns as agentive beings who choose to make their presence felt, communicate, and establish romantic and reproductive unions with humans. By reconsidering jinns’ positionality through sacred spaces, historical and literary spheres, and in popular culture, this panel investigates how ajeeb (strange and marvelous) intimacies between humans and jinns open up possibilities for interspecies cohabitation and collaboration. Speaker 1 examines these intimate encounters through the concept of invisible bodies at gravesites near the medieval Sufi shrine of Saint Qutbuddin Kaki in Mehrauli. Speaker 2 asks how unexplainable human-jinn encounters in Qazi Abdul Gaffar’s 1930’s anthology Ajeeb enrich the experience of inhabiting the world of colonial modernity. Speaker 3 ponders how fictional stories of human-jinn romance from the 1980’s Urdu women’s magazines subvert the patriarchal order and empower Muslim women readers. Lastly, Speaker 4 utilizes the concept of hauntology to analyze instances of malevolence enacted upon women’s bodies as a result of human-jinn copulation leading to demonic pregnancies and births in the Bollywood horror movie, Pari (2018). Drawing on various disciplinary perspectives, all four papers take the possibilities of ajeeb intimacies with jinns seriously and make room for the agentive capacities of these non-human beings.

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

This panel explores these opportunities to trace everyday life and urban hustles from the ancient city of MohenjoDaro. Instead of the global and glamorous narratives such as trade, migrations, economy, or administration, the papers in this panel delve into more local and possibly mundane matters of housing patterns and neighborhoods, use of spaces within the houses, and the daily lives of the inhabitants of these urban spaces. The panel has been organized as a multi-scalar approach to ancient urban studies, starting with an overview of the ancient city, how urban design decisions provide evidence for socio-political infrastructure, while providing new aerial data based on non-invasive photogrammetry allowing the development of a new map of the city. Ancient neighborhoods can be considered as a collection of multiple domestic units at many other sites, in MohenjoDaro, one of the key distinctions is the blurring of lines between individual households and the spatial allocation of a neighborhood. Papers in this panel will investigate the archaeological data to better gain a sense of the ways a neighborhood might be defined, and how to conduct comparative studies of different neighborhoods in the city. These studies are based on legacy excavations and are significant in reconstructing what was happening in a day to day sense in the city. Important also is a consideration of population. The panel will present studies done on population calculations -- how many people were actually living within this urban space and what sorts of methodologies are present that allow us to calculate those possible numbers. And finally, based on research on seals and sealings, the panel presents work on how we might reconstruct ancient behavior and architectural change. Each of these approaches allows us to gain a deeper sensibility about the everyday experiences in the third millennium BCE, MohenjoDaro.

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

The late Marcus Banks (1960–2020) was a pioneering scholar in Jain studies and the anthropological study of religion. In the 1990s, he moved into the emerging field of visual anthropology, playing a major role in its development at Oxford and in the discipline more broadly. His initial research addressed Jain social organization in Leicester and Jamnagar, India, resulting in Organizing Jainism in India and England (1992), the first anthropological monograph on the Jains and an early example of multi-site fieldwork, fitting well with the 2026 conference theme of transcending borders. This period also produced Ethnicity: Anthropological Constructions (1996), an important contribution to the study of identity within a global context. Banks's engagement with religious authenticity, community boundaries, and globalization feels increasingly prescient. His work on how Jain communities negotiate identity anticipated contemporary debates about digital religion, transnational religious networks, and tradition in a hyperconnected world, inviting reflection on methodologies for studying communities simultaneously across multiple sites and modes of belonging. His scholarship, better known in the UK, deserves a larger audience in North America. His essays on visual anthropology are being edited in two volumes by David Zeitlyn and Chihab El Khachab; the first, Understanding Social Images: Essays on Visual Methods and Teaching Anthropology, appeared in 2025. A forthcoming volume, Jainism as Social and Visual Practice (Primus 2026), edited by John E. Cort, Zeitlyn, and El Khachab, addresses his scholarly legacy on Jain society and visual and material culture. Together, these publications occasion this proposed roundtable. Three participants in religious studies and anthropology will address Banks's contributions to the anthropology of migration and diaspora. Two art historians will address his visual anthropology scholarship. The roundtable participants’ contributions will reflect on the productive convergence of art history and anthropology through the lens of visual culture across disciplinary and geographic borders.

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

This panel considers the changing dynamics of U.S. foreign policy towards South Asia in case of a second term for President Trump. These changes include aspects of strategic rivalry, alignment choices, and policy trade-offs. The first paper reviews the increasingly robust alliance between the United States and India as one of the key elements of the US strategy of balancing rising China in the Indo-Pacific region, emphasizing military collaboration and the promotion of multilateral cooperation such as the Quad initiative. The second paper discusses the dilemma of engagement versus isolation in the policy of the U.S. towards Taliban. In the process, it describes Washington's decision to pursue an approach based on conditional and informal engagement in light of its counterterrorism imperatives and humanitarian concerns. The third paper considers the relationship between the US and Pakistan in the broader context of “Too Big to Fail” strategy and the great power competition in the Indo-Pacific region. In doing so, it demonstrates the transition of the US approach from coercive actions to pragmatic handling of the Pakistan crisis. Finally, the fourth paper examines the transactional nature of the US-Pakistan relationship and how short-term cooperation can bring about long-term instability and domestic costs.

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

This panel brings together interdisciplinary perspectives to examine how South Asia’s shared ecological vulnerabilities and expanding digital interconnectivity are reshaping the meaning of borders, sovereignty, and cooperation. The panel foregrounds the concept of a regional climate commons, where environmental risks such as air pollution, ecological degradation, and climate-induced insecurities disregard political boundaries while necessitating collaborative responses. The first paper explores how inherited narrative traditions and cultural ecologies in South Asia inform contemporary climate praxis, offering alternative epistemologies rooted in shared histories. The second paper interrogates transboundary air pollution through the lens of India–Pakistan smog diplomacy, demonstrating how environmental crises simultaneously intensify tensions and create openings for cooperation beyond sovereignty. The third paper shifts focus to the digital domain, analyzing how artificial intelligence, social media, and emerging technologies are reconfiguring cross-border engagement and knowledge production in South Asia. The fourth paper examines digital youth networks as sites of transnational climate action, highlighting how student-led collaborations are fostering new forms of regional solidarity that transcend geopolitical divides. The fifth paper synthesizes these themes by theorizing environmental peacebuilding in South Asia, conceptualizing governance as an entangled process of conflict and collaboration shaped by ecological interdependence and socio-political realities. The panel argues that South Asia’s future lies in recognizing and institutionalizing these intersecting ecological and digital commons. By bridging environmental governance with technological and societal transformations, the panel offers a nuanced framework for understanding how regional cooperation can emerge despite enduring political rivalries, contributing to both scholarly debates and policy-oriented discussions on climate resilience and peacebuilding.

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

This panel examines the grammar of South Asian feelings in literary and cinematic productions of the subcontinent. As the works of scholars such as Sara Ahmed, Sneja Gunew, Deepika Bahri, Ulka Anjaria, and Neetu Khanna have shown, attending to how we express and understand emotions is crucial for not only decolonizing Eurocentric taxonomies and philosophies of experience but also uncovering the multiple ways emotions both reinforce and disrupt hegemonic power structures in the global South. Accordingly, this panel aims to think through the problematics of emotional legibility and illegibility, with an emphasis on the challenges of articulating minoritarian feelings amid the ongoing socio-political conflicts and contestations in postcolonial South Asia and its diaspora. Speaker 1 examines Indian American writer Ved Mehta’s employment of indifference as an affective strategy to counter the alienation caused by the othering discourses of racism and ableism. Speaker 2 interrogates the affective syntax of postsecular Hindi films, exemplified by Kai Po Che! and Raanjhanaa, to offer a new understanding of minoritarian opacity and repression in a Hindu majoritarian India. Speaker 3 explores the figure of the gay South Asian brown man to show how racial dynamics inform desire, desirability, and sexual intimacy, thus illuminating the affective implications of sexual racism. Speaker 4 reads Neel Mukherjee’s novel The Lives of Others to analyze the affective economy of empathy that undergirded divergent responses to structural and revolutionary violence during the Naxalite movement in 1960s India. As this brief overview suggests, the panel benefits from the juxtaposition of diverse foci and methods of analysis. In addition to constellating different historical contexts and theoretical frameworks, the papers bring together various mediums—cinema, memoir, and novel—to illuminate the range of aesthetic strategies South Asian writers and artists utilize for commenting on the politics of emotions and envisioning new modalities of feeling.

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

This roundtable will discuss a new book, ‘The Selfie Machine: Selfies, Platforms and Digital Image Culture in India’ (Rutgers University Press, Forthcoming October 2026). Speakers—a mix of senior and early-career scholars in the field of media studies—will address the theoretical framing, methodological premises and stakes of the book as well as its contribution to the study of media and digital studies. ‘The Selfie Machine’ examines the selfie as a mode of meaning making and self-presentation that includes not just still images, but also short videos, hashtag practices and economies of liking and following. Combining insights from digital studies, media studies and visual studies, it advances a theory of the selfie at the intersections of neoliberalism, platform capitalism, techno-aesthetics, and cultural politics. Thus, it offers a roadmap for how researchers may ask more fundamental questions about fast-changing digital systems. In taking India as the starting point of this analysis, the book inverts the “West-then-the-rest” model of understanding global digital media practices. It considers selfie culture’s impact on personal and public digital forms and practices, ranging from cellphone markets, to influencer entrepreneurship and microcelebrity, to the conduct of electoral politics, activism and protest. Speaker 1 will focus on the book’s discussion of social media and participatory culture. Speaker 2 will focus on the book’s discussion of caste, class and power. Speaker 3 will discuss how the book contributes to a study of media aesthetics and technology. Speaker 4 will discuss how the book remediates cinematic and televisual culture in the context of digital participation. Speaker 5 will speak about the book’s genesis and main arguments, and respond to questions from the other speakers and the audience.

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

Why do marginalized people so often uphold the very social and cultural forms that exploit or subordinate them? How do they situate themselves in relation to each other and in relation to these exploitative social and cultural forms? This panel proposes recognition (Honneth 1996, Fraser 2000, Taylor 1994) as a unifying analytic category to understand it not merely as an outcome of social position, but as a value that marginalized people actively cultivate, seek, and contest, in themselves and in relation to others. Since the 1980s, the problem of subaltern agency has been central to anthropological and historical scholarship on South Asia and beyond. Much scholarship has tended either to emphasize subaltern actors as strategic agents engaged in everyday practices of resistance (Scott 1990, Guha 1999, Chakrabarty 2000) or to situate their actions within historically sedimented structures of meaning and social relations (Piliavsky 2020; Hickel and Haynes 2018; Robbins 2013; Dumont 1980). Yet both perspectives, leaning too heavily toward either (interest-seeking) agency or (meaning or identity-giving) structure, struggle to fully account for the relationship between personal motivation and social form. The panel proposes to examine how the pursuit of recognition and dignity can motivate the everyday struggles and aspirations of marginalized people, often in ways that cannot be reduced to instrumentalist or structuralist models of social action and value.(Honneth 1996; Graeber 2001; Bourdieu 2013). How do everyday struggles and aspirations for dignity and respect of marginalized people relate to their commitments to and investments in historically specific moral and political projects? With research from diverse locations and standpoints in South Asia, presenters in this panel will examine how experiences of social marginalization and injustice—across the intersections of caste, class, religion, gender, and sexuality—shape and are shaped by personal and collective pursuits of recognition in South Asia and the diaspora.

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

ad hoc panel

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

Rather than treating beauty as simply a matter of appearance or personal preference, this panel interrogates how beauty functions as a category, norm, and practice in conjunction with the “beasts” of gender and morality. Centering the body of the female/feminine subject across South Asian literary, colonial, and contemporary contexts, it asks: What does beauty entail, and how is it produced, lived, contested, and narrated? What implications does this have for understandings of health, law, and consumption? Furthermore, how is beauty implicated in discourses of race, modernity, and nationalism? And is beauty, in fact, the opposite of ugliness, or might we theorize a more complex relationship between the two? Papers in this panel examine how beauty shapes regimes of health and feminine self-making in contemporary India, as in the case of Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS); how, during the colonial period, beauty was projected onto ordinary women and negotiated by them through everyday practices of consumption; how retellings of the Ramayana unsettle boundaries between beautiful, ugly, and mutilated, prompting a rethinking of gendered violence and justice; and how colonial-era print debates about adornment articulated anxieties over authenticity vis-à-vis readymade products and homemade concoctions. Taken together, these papers reposition beauty as a critical analytic for the study of embodiment, gender, and morality in South Asia, and propose a range of methods and approaches for undertaking this study.

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

In this panel the application of both traditional and cutting edge archaeological methodologies will be highlighted to show the how these two complementary approaches are needed to document and better interpret the past. Modern archaeologists also need to develop more effective methods to identify high risk areas before they are destroyed. Focusing on two very different regions of the northwestern subcontinent the four papers provide evidence for the use of a wide range of strategies that can also be applied to other regions of South Asia. Presenter 1 discusses the excavation and digital documentation of a mounded site, Jhukar jo daro, in central Sindh, Pakistan, that is in danger of being destroyed by local landowner who are expanding their fields. Using both traditional excavation and drone image documentation the site limits and features have been documented in detail for the first time. Presenter 2 focuses on the mounded site of Dhamrah jo daro, that includes one or more eroded stupas of the Buddhist period. Here too, the use of traditional excavation and cutting edge digital drone and photographic documentation provide evidence for the overall size of the site and the areas that need to be protected from encroachment. Presenter 3 provides a broad regional perspective of site survey and documentation that uses a Geographical Information Systems (GIS)-based predictive modelling framework for identifying high potential archaeological zones. Combined with computer aided multi-criteria decision analysis and machine learning this approach allows archaeologists to define areas that need urgent survey and excavation to discover and protect potential archaeological sites in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan. Presenter 4 presents the important development of in situ conservation as a strategy to preserve archaeological sites during the course of excavation in order to protect cultural heritage and make it more accessible to the public.

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

Scholarship in Jain Studies has attended to the historical development of Jain traditions and institutions, yet the field has largely treated political power as a pressure to which Jain communities respond rather than a condition through which new norms, identities, and debates are produced. This panel challenges that framing. Spanning the Delhi Sultanate period, the colonial encounter, and contemporary India, the four papers examine moments in which Jain monastic communities, lay leaders, and laypeople engage dominant political formations spanning Sultanate state authority, Christian missionary discourse, the postcolonial biopolitical state, and Hindu nationalist neoliberalism, demonstrating that these engagements do not merely constrain Jain practice but actively generate new configurations of it. The panel argues that the productive entanglement of Jain traditions with political power is not reducible to colonialism or modernity but is a persistent structural feature of Jain history. The first paper establishes this framing, examining Delhi Sultanate-era Digambara monastic debates over wearing clothing in two manuals on monastic conduct. The second paper traces how colonial power produced new forms of Jain identity through a Śvetāmbara monk's responses to Christian missionary critiques. The third shifts from identity to the production of subjects and regulatory regimes, employing Foucault's dispositif to examine controversies over the fast unto death as a heterogeneous set of discourses within a network of biopolitical operations. Where the third paper examines how state apparatuses shape the conditions under which Jain practice becomes contestable, the fourth turns to the transnational production of a consumable Jain spirituality aligned with neoliberal and Hindu nationalist logics. Together, the papers demonstrate that Jain practice, identity, and normativity are constituted at the intersection of Jain institutions and the political formations they inhabit, contributing to broader conversations about how minority religious traditions are produced through, rather than simply against, dominant political orders.

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

In this panel, we constellate our orientations and experiences as cross-border (Kanagasabai, 2023) scholars from India and Nepal in the field of education, and encourage a turn towards ‘(South) Asia as method’ (Chen, 2010). Our panel’s offerings range from the experiences of teacher identities situated in transnational spaces of learning, Mathematics education as a matter of curriculum, the investigation of brahmanical hegemony in knowledge production, the politics of exclusion and belonging within citizenship frameworks, to the necessity of decolonial intervention to move beyond the limitations of postcolonial frameworks. We propose using South Asia “as an imaginary anchoring point” (Chen, 2010, p. xv) that can offer pathways to collective ways of knowing beyond the epistemic inheritances of colonialism and its after. Combined, the panel delineates what it means to engage with South Asia today as a matter of epistemology, given the specters of Orientalism (Dhanda, 2015) that talk back to globalizing neocolonial logics of racialization. Beyond the geographical and the social, we see South Asia as a site of contested, non-linear histories, producing intersections of power matrices across caste, gender, ethnicity, and linguistic identity systems. Our ongoing work shows how we adopt and adapt to novel methodological orientations to problematize the essentialist notion that ‘knowledge’ and its ‘subjects’ are separate entities, foregrounding our collective and idiosyncratic affects, concepts, linguistic repertoires, and researching bodies. As part of this panel, we invite the audience to think with us and co-construct their own pathways to the larger inquiry of: a) How and why must we meaningfully adopt South Asia as epistemology? b) Through the lens of researcher positionality, how can we identify and address essentialist notions we carry into our work? c) What are the ways in which the essentialization of identity-formations can be resisted and disrupted through educational inquiries?

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

We propose a roundtable on the recent OUP monograph The Meeting of Rivers. Translating Religion in Early Modern India. The book deals with Vīraśaivism which, according to conventional wisdom, was a strictly monolingual, vernacular devotional (bhakti) movement, restricted to the Kannada language, born in the twelfth century as a social protest against caste and the retrogressive Sanskrit language. The book challenges all these assumptions, showing that Vīraśaivism’s rejection of caste never entailed the rejection of Sanskrit: rather, its Sanskrit inheritance is pivotal to understanding the tradition’s enduring legacy of anti-caste sentiment. The Meeting of Rivers reconstructs the history of Vīraśaivism from its own voices, drawing on unstudied and unpublished archival sources in several South Indian languages. Simultaneously, the book articulates a new conceptual vocabulary for speaking in comparative theoretical terms about multilingualism and translation. It proposes a horizontal framework of multilingual exchange where religious content and subjectivities emerged through multidirectional flows. As these flows crossed cultural zones, local Vīraśaivisms were “translated” into being, irreducible to a single monolingual movement. This reframing offers a fresh perspective on the origins of Vīraśaivism/Liṅgāyatism and the history of Hindu devotional traditions. This roundtable convenes four discussants and the author. Speakers include an Assistant Professor of Asian Studies at a public university in south-central US specializing in South Asian intellectual history and multilingualism; a Professor of Religious Studies at a public southeastern US university focusing on Kannada literature, bhakti, and translation; an Assistant Professor of History of Religion at a private Midwestern university studying vernacular bhakti and Sanskrit scholarship; a Professor of Hinduism in northern North America with expertise in Tamil and Sanskrit Vaiṣṇava and Śaiva traditions; and the author, Associate Professor at a private research university in the US West Coast, specializing in Śaiva traditions, translation, and Vīraśaiva/Liṅgāyat history.

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

This panel positions Bollywood as a crucial archive for understanding the contested emotional, relational, discursive, political, and material lives of men in contemporary India. In recent Hindi films, masculinity emerges as a mediated and unstable formation shaped by neoliberal transformation and the consolidation of majoritarian politics. On the one hand, these films intensify spectacles of masculine power, producing technologically augmented, mythologized figures aligned with exclusionary national imaginaries. On the other, they configure masculinity as aggrieved. The panel reads these tendences as mutually constitutive: hyper-visible masculine authority is sustained through narratives of injury, resentment, and displacement. Building on this tension, the panel tracks how masculinity is assembled across overlapping registers of mediation. It examines the digitally reconfigured male body as a site where religious iconography, technological enhancement, and majoritarian politics converge. It analyzes the star text’s use of voice and dialogue as performative and affective media through which authority, charisma, and excess are produced and circulated. It explores the narrative and generic logics through which misogynistic grievance and homosocial attachment are normalized. It also considers the star persona as a paratextual construct that mobilizes claims to vernacular authenticity and provincial belonging. Taken together, these approaches foreground masculinity as a contradictory formation, caught between patriarchal residues and emergent cultures of critique. The panel asks what crises masculinity registers in contemporary Hindi cinema, and to what ends these are resolved, displaced, or deferred. How do cinematic forms mediate masculinity’s relationship to nationhood and citizenship under conditions of politico-religious polarization and aspirational neoliberalism? How is masculinity constituted in relation to women and non-hegemonic masculinities? How is the male body an agent of sovereign control and an object of critique and destabilization? And how do these films translate or make legible structures of resentment within an expanded media ecology spanning cinema and digital culture?

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

This roundtable will discuss "The Tamil Realist Novel in South and Southeast Asia" forthcoming in August 2026 with Oxford University Press in the Approaches to the Novel series. The book traces the emergence of Tamil literary realism as a transregional formation across India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Singapore from the 1940s to the 1980s. Focusing on a pivotal period when realism was actively redefined, it argues that Tamil writers turned to the novel not simply as a mirror of social life, but as a form for negotiating political struggle, articulating individuality, and reimagining the self within changing postcolonial landscapes. Through readings of Kaa. Naa. Subramanyam, Kalki Krishnamoorthy, C. N. Annadurai, Puthumaipithan, P. Singaram, Poomani, T. M. C. Raghunathan, K. Daniel, and Sundara Ramasamy, the book shows how literary realism (yathārthvāthām) became a self-conscious strategy for articulating Tamil ethnic identity, caste critique, and socialist thought. It also situates the realist novel within a broader media environment of serialized fiction, political oratory, cinema, and popular periodicals, challenging literary histories of modern South Asia that privilege Anglophone, Hindi-Urdu, and Bengali traditions. The roundtable proposes a structured discussion through five invited responses, each focused on a chapter or thematic cluster. Speaker 1 will address the book’s comparative method and its implications for reading Tamil literature across South and Southeast Asia. Speaker 2 will respond to the chapters on Sri Lankan Tamil writing, history, and lived experience from an anthropological perspective. Speaker 3 will comment on the book’s treatment of cinema and the broader media ecology of Tamil realism. Speaker 4 will take up its interventions in debates on realism, form, and literary modernity. Speaker 5 will reflect on the book’s broader implications for regional comparison, vernacular modernism, and South Asian literary history.

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

This panel explores the existence of caste-based discrimination and the demand for caste equity and caste abolition in higher educational institutions. Caste, and its violent effects, materialize across a variety of sites; higher-educational institutions are particularly potent sites of discrimination, regulation, and contestation. Caste-oppressed people are more likely to be gatekept from higher educational spaces, face systemic discrimination, and experience higher rates of exclusion, surveillance, and attrition, along with access to fewer opportunities. Situating our panel within contemporary global political crises and the ongoing erosion of academic freedom, we ask: In what ways does caste materialize in higher educational institutions in forms that are distinct from, or overlapping with, race, class, religion, ethnicity, ancestry, and nationality? How does caste-based discrimination shape admission and retention of scholars, bureaucratic processes, hiring practices, and everyday institutional life? Further, how do movements for caste equity and abolition emerge within and against the university? The first paper traces how caste travels with South Asian migration into Western academic institutions, showing how diaspora networks and informal mentorship economies reproduce caste exclusion under meritocracy. The second paper examines organizing efforts within US academia to establish caste as a protected category and argues that Hindu nationalist backlash against these efforts reveals how dominant caste power rearticulates itself in the current moment of rising fascism. The third paper traces student suicides at the Indian Institutes of Technology in India as structurally produced outcomes of caste discrimination, challenging institutional framings that reduce death to individual failure. The fourth paper deconstructs the Indian judiciary's systematic dismantling of caste protections, from the dilution of the SC/ST Atrocities Act to the 2026 Supreme Court stay on UGC equity regulations, arguing that the legal apparatus has itself become a primary mechanism for reproducing caste hierarchy.

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

This panel seeks to extend the scope of the historical ties between India and the Soviet Union beyond defense strategy and developmental aid to the embodied, aesthetic and epistemic registers through which these relations were understood by Indians and Soviets alike. The first paper examines the circulation of Soviet travelogues, science narratives, children’s books, and literary counter-narratives to understand how competing visions of the Soviet Union as both utopian and dystopian were understood in Malayali public life and in the fashioning of the hybrid technocratic and developmentalist Malayali subject. The second paper examines the midcentury revival of academic Indology in Soviet institutions and its transformation from an abstract intellectual space fairly insulated from Soviet Marxist dogmas (and thus attractive to many independent-minded scholars) to a “dual system” model of both formal and informal institutions in response to tightening ideological controls. The third and fourth papers, stemming from a joint intellectual project, examine the influence of Russian balletic storytelling on Indian classical dance and especially contemporary kathak. The third considers this particularly in relation to Orientalist aesthetics and its incorporation of Hindu mythology as well as the material conditions of classical dance and its dispossession of devadasis and courtesans. The fourth draws upon archival, ethnographic, and performative methods to consider this in relation to the physical embodiment of de/territorialization and un/belonging. Together, these papers are concerned with the imagination of other worlds (both Indian and Soviet, classical and modern) in service of ideological aspirations, contestations of national belonging with regards to both regionality and embodiment, and the politics of friendship and propaganda work.

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

The articulation of queer and trans identities and subject positions in South Asia has involved traversals, translations, and negotiations between many different languages that are positioned unequally within fields of power and circuits of capital, as to be expected for a region of such immense linguistic diversity and socioeconomic inequality. While institutionalized and state- or media-recognized forms of LGBTQ+ activism have typically utilized the transnational lingua franca of English and/or ‘national’ languages, significant bodies of queer/trans discourse have also emerged in so-called ‘vernacular’ languages alongside Anglophone mobilizations or in some cases predating contemporary LGBTQ movements, such as the intra-community languages of trans feminine hijra and kothi communities. In that context, this panel considers the diverse and regionally specific ways in which such linguistic traversals and negotiations inform the articulation of contemporary queer/trans identities and subjectivities in South Asia. The panelists focus on several understudied forms of linguistic traversal, translation, valuation, and knowledge creation, including counter-epistemological knowledge generation through the communication systems of kothi/hijra communities in India and Bangladesh; the (de)valuation of kothi/hijra labor through linguistic hierarchies in India; the construction of trans and nonbinary selfhood across linguistic divides in India; and multilingual dictionaries of gender/sexuality related terminology in Nepal. Together, these presentations trouble any settled or static conception of the ‘vernacular’ and demonstrate how linguistic distinctions and related socioeconomic divides are actively constructed, bridged, and resisted across regions and borders.

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

This roundtable reflects on the modes of knowledge production that unsettle South Asia’s epistemological and methodological boundaries as a region. While the social sciences have been long dependent on building up regions as geopolitical nodes of imperial and postcolonial power, scholars must also acknowledge how this power is also produced through connections beyond the region. In line with the conference theme of nationalism and transcending borders, this roundtable addresses how research and ethnographic practices in South Asia compel necessary reframings of knowledge projects beyond South Asia’s “regional closets” (Alexander 2003). Each participant draws from their lived contexts of doing research amidst settler colonial, plantation, and state-sponsored nationalist and militarized violence. Speaker 1 asks how to craft realities of struggle and lived experience in the production of knowledge across ethnographic film and writing with Naga storytellers facing settler colonial violence in India’s borderlands. Speaker 5 reflects on the formation of racial politics and “risky bodies” (Patel 2016) among Nepali and Adivasi plantation workers enduring generations of nationalist violence in the Eastern Himalayas. Speaker 4 reflects on the ethical challenges of doing research in Sri Lanka’s Northern Province and how former Tamil minority militants navigate enduring toxicities of war, caste oppression, and militarized surveillance in their bodies and home-making practices. Speaker 3 asks how state-sponsored nationalism, securitization, and terror elicit on-going forms of disaster in the Indian Ocean and how “disaster nationalism” (Choi 2025) in the region connects to her witnessing of the ICE occupation in Minneapolis as a teacher-scholar. Finally, Speaker 2 reflects on her work on bacteriology to ask what makes us everyday genocidal subjects in our own bodies and how partaking in moral economies of health and toxicity unwittingly ushers collaborations with and attunements to bacterial genocide.

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

Nepal’s Gen-Z protests in 2025 that delivered the historic election in March 2026 was primarily driven by political stagnancy, entrenched corruption, and economic inequality. But these problems are deeply intertwined with the social hierarchies and exclusionary structures that continue to operate in Nepali society. Over the last century, the dominant vision of the Nepali nation that privileges patriarchal, Hindu-centric, upper-caste, Khas-parbatiya perspective has largely persisted across Nepal’s various autocratic and democratic political transitions. However, since the early 20th century, marginalized groups have persistently challenged the singular, exclusionary myths of nationalism from the perspectives of gender, caste, ethnicity, religion, and language. Nepal’s political transformation in the past year not only signals the failure of established political frameworks to represent the entire nation but also calls for a reckoning with the voices and spaces marginalized by those frameworks. This roundtable will facilitate a reflection on Nepal’s political transition through a discussion of the perspectives of those othered and silenced by nationalism, patriarchy and casteism. The speakers are scholars and activists of Nepal who have engaged with caste, geography, gender, sexuality, language, indigeneity, and ethnicity as sites of both discrimination and internal colonization on the one hand, as well as resistance, resilience and empowerment on the other. They are contributors to the volume The Other Nepal: Alterity in Nepali Literature and Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2026), which addresses the invisibility of marginalized histories, cultures, and voices examining a diverse body of works from various literary cultures within Nepal. The speakers bring a range of disciplinary expertise including Nepali Literature (Speakers 1, 4, 6), Women and Gender Studies (2, 3, 6), Performance studies (7, 8) and Himalayan and Indigenous Studies (2, 5). They will briefly present the argument from their essays and reflect on its significance to the current moment in Nepali politics.

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

This panel explores how shifting landscapes across South Asia, particularly in regions marked by extraction, militarization, and ecological precarity, reconfigure dominant understandings of land, belonging, and sovereignty. Moving away from rooted or territorialized notions of identity, we foreground relational and rhizomatic forms of inhabitation that emerge through movement, encounter, and refusal. The panel is invested in considering how illegibility and non-transparency go beyond a conceptualization of deficits and instead become strategic modes of being within contested terrains. Engaging insights from Critical Border Studies and particularly the concept of borderscapes as articulated by scholars such as Chiara Brambilla and Reece Jones, the panel approaches borders not as fixed lines but as dynamic processes shaped by overlapping regimes of power, resistance, and everyday negotiation. We are especially interested in how borders operate as lived and embodied experiences across “unruly” or improbable landscapes, including the ecologically fragile and politically charged regions of Northeast India. By bringing together work on human and nonhuman entanglements, extractive economies, and insurgent spatial practices, this panel asks: - What forms of belonging emerge in spaces defined by instability and impermanence? - How do communities navigate and resist regimes of legibility imposed by the state and capital? - And how might opacity, refusal, and relationality offer alternative frameworks for understanding place in contexts where land itself is continually shifting? In tracing these questions, the panel seeks to reconceptualize South Asian borderscapes as sites not only of control, but of generative, if precarious, possibilities. This is Part 1 of 2 panels.

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

Multiculturism poses significant challenges and presents key opportunities in modern democracies, primarily through re-imagining the concepts of identity, human rights, and social cohesion. History is evident that democracies help multicultural communities co-exist and thrive in a state marred by historical socio-political constraints. This roundtable fosters a transcending borders dialogue between a diverse range of scholars who aspire to discuss parallel challenges confronted by two very different yet unexpectedly comparable democracies, the United States of America and Pakistan. These two democracies grapple with the weight of colonial history, a diverse population posing a persistent question as to how democratic practice can hold together societies with distinct ethnic, linguistic, racial, and religious plurality. While their political dynamics vary, each has succeeded unevenly on multicultural norms to reinforce democratic stability. The roundtable will focus on the following aspects of multiculturalism and democracy: 1) The formation and extent of democratic resilience via institutions and citizens to negotiate difference; 2) Diasporic identities featuring how wider narratives are shaped publicly about ‘who belongs’ and how these narratives travel among communities; 3) Role of the media in both states with relation to acceptance, opposition, and normalizing the ideals and ethos of multiculturalism; and 4) Whether inclusive democratic spaces can be developed in settings impacted by political polarization by examining civic engagement initiatives and policies in both states. The session will conclude with comparative reflections on institutional framework in the United States and Pakistan, highlighting where the system enables pluralism and where it falls short. This roundtable intends to bring these strands together to show that multiculturalism is not an abstract idea but an organic and gradual process essential for the durability of democracy in both states.

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

What kind of affective, ephemeral, and material conceptions of traffic, trade, memory, and identity are made possible if we turn to infrastructure and its intersections with and interruptions by the state? Our panel explores this through papers that situate infrastructure as the fundamental means of negotiating the power of the state and the agency of its citizens. We foreground how Indian cinema—across languages, genres, and historical moments—accents and refracts the infrastructures that are both visible and clandestine, and through which the state consolidates and contests power. By tracing the intersections of screen cultures with political movements, urban economies, and labor formations, our panelists interrogate cinema’s capacity to render the state’s operations perceptible, to mediate dissent, and to shape identities in moments of crisis and transformation. One explains how cinema stages resistance to the Hindu nationalist project by circulating images that the state seeks to contain; another examines how women filmmakers have documented the gendered realities of internal migration, revealing how cinematic spaces make visible the labor of women largely erased from mainstream Hindi cinema’s narratives; a third panelist turns to the stardom of a working-class Marathi hero as a counterpoint to Bombay’s modernization, charting the decline of labor unions alongside the rise of nativist politics; our final panelist maps a Bombay-Dubai contraband corridor, underscoring discotheques as sensory infrastructures of the cine-crime nexus in which state complicity is both concealed and exposed. Taken together, the papers on this panel argue that cinema mediates between citizens and the state. They demonstrate that film’s capacity to narrativize and visualize these infrastructures makes it a crucial site for understanding how politics, identity formations, and economic networks are contested in India’s past and present.

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

This roundtable considers Dr. Heidi Pauwels and Dr. Purnima Dhavan’s recent book -- Vali Dakhani and the Early Rekhtah Networks: Sharing Poetry’s Pleasures – which complicates and expands the received history of Vali Dakhani and his role in shaping Urdu as a literary language. Breaking from narratives that marginalize Vali’s role as a “father” of an emergent Urdu “classical” tradition, Dhavan and Pauwel’s work highlights the networks of emulation and delight found in oral traditions, performance, and regional reception of Vali’s verse, demonstrating new methodologies for reading across literary and historical sources. Early Rekhtah writers such as Fa’iz, Abru, and Hatim receive long overdue consideration, and previously marginalized literary performers such as Bani Thani come to the fore, highlighting the historical diversity that shaped the intellectual ferment of the latter part of early modern India’s Persianate era. So too, literary production in Dakani, Rajasthani, Punjabi, and other languages demonstrates the diverse ways in which writers throughout the eighteenth century contended with Vali’s new and old literary forms. Thus, just as writers and performers of the past engaged with Vali, this panel shares in the pleasures of their book through emulation, dialogue, and competition. We explore how the book’s analysis can inform our understanding of Rekhta and the relationship of it to Urdu (Speaker 1) and how it allows us to rethink the prehistory of Urdu (Speaker 3); the patterns of emulation and influence among authors the book reveals (Speaker 2); the book’s balance of exposition and analysis (Speaker 4), and Vali’s Gujarat connections (Speaker 5). We also gather to celebrate the value of collaborative work, here by two leading scholars in the field.

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

This roundtable intends to redraw attention to the politics of protests and activism at university campuses across contemporary South Asia. Our intervention here is across two lines. One, while student activism in South Asia has often grasped public and scholarly attention through spectacular protests or mass mobilizations, we ask what potentials do student activist formations hold and how they can be mined or reanimated without necessarily turning them into exemplary or exceptional moments of antagonism? In other words, we are interested in more mundane ways of organizing, protests, and/ or movements within university spaces that take up the difficult (often, ambiguous, contradictory, and unfinished) task of articulating its aspirations and aims, and the residues that are left behind during its encounters with the state, institutions, and other attendant social infrastructures. Our second concern is about timeliness. What does student activism and its ethico-political promises teach us in times of the rise of various contemporary authoritarian and/ or right-wing mobilizations across South Asia? This is of particular importance at times when mass student protests across South Asia continue to be enacted through/ against/ in tandem with regime changes and state-sponsored violence against minoritized bodies. The speakers in this roundtable address a range of topics- from the history of feminist/student-led protests against sexual harassment in higher educational institutions in India, queer student activist efforts as unfinished and contradictory modes of occupying campus space across multiple moments of crisis, study circles in Pakistan’s universities functioning as praxis of politics, the public relevance of educated youth’s experiments with politics from one micro-cohort to the next on Indian campuses that carry the possibility of change, while durably affecting their life trajectories through state repression, including incarceration and academic debarment, to how student-led activism in Bangladesh starts to represent a patron-client hierarchy.

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

In recent years, historians of South Asia have increasingly turned their attention to the postcolonial period, recasting our understandings of the complexities, conflicts, periodization, and scales through which decolonization unfolded across the territories of the former British Empire after 1947. This has produced new studies concerning postcolonial state power, the practices of federalism and state recognition, the symbols and discourses of postcolonial political culture, ideas of development and diplomacy, citizenship and the law, and the crises of democracy and authoritarianism. This rich body of work, however, has tended to focus either on individual country case studies or transnational political actors and institutions, largely bracketing the role of postwar global capitalism and neocolonial geopolitics in shaping the contexts and possibilities of South Asian decolonization. This roundtable presents three new books that foreground postcolonial struggles over sovereignty, capitalism, and alternative worldmaking, pointing to new archives and scholarly themes for pushing the historical study of South Asian decolonization in both new directions and further into the late-twentieth century. Speaker 1’s book takes up these themes by studying groundbreaking postwar Indian computer systems and the pressures these systems faced from trade imbalances and U.S. corporate monopolies. Speaker 2’s book focuses on postcolonial efforts to build a national fossil economy out of the wreckage of colonial capitalism and amid long-term conflicts over land dispossession. Speaker 3’s book foregrounds the possibilities of a feminist internationalism in the 1970s responding to the problems of postcolonial authoritarianism and neocolonial global power. Speakers 4 and 5 will join as discussants to reflect on these new interpretations for the future of the field.

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

This panel is an exploration of how gendered subjectivities are interwoven, produced, and embedded within the work of care. This panel evokes the concept of care through the registers of socio-material infrastructures, subversions of intimacy, disability advocacy, and reproductive labor. Geographically situated in India and Pakistan, the papers in the panel are ethnographic explorations of how care, practices of care-work, and gendered subjectivities are shaped and produced cross-culturally. Speaker 1 explores the tensions between the state’s production of gendered subjectivities and its negation of care in reproductive labor in India, and the material realities of how care-work is made visible through underground markets in such reproductive labor. Speaker 2 reconceptualizes care as a form of disability advocacy, demonstrating how disabled Pakistani women enact advocacy through formal, rights-based mechanisms but also through everyday practices of care. Speaker 3 imagines care as an infrastructure that changes the social and material realities of minorities who suffer religious violence in India. It asks: how do these infrastructures of care rework the political identities of minorities and their ability to make citizenship claims? Speaker 4 explores the unstable category of care by locating it in the space of social movements in India. It examines this shifting concept of care by looking at a traditional kinship setup of marriages within social movement spaces. It asks how conventional networks of care shift and also subvert structures. Overall, the panel raises the questions: How is care mobilized across different contexts, responding to questions of state neglect, rights-based demands for advocacy, and in social movement spaces? How does care transcend political, social, and disciplinary borders, raising questions of nationalism, citizenship, and justice? What are the cultures, practices, and economies of care that emerge in these contestations? How does the practice of care become instrumental in acts of survival?

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

If the modern state is defined by exclusion and discrimination that forces minorities to assimilate or escape its borders, this panel explores how the mobility of bodies and biological agents engender forms of minoritization and/or death against the backdrop of ethno-nationalist violence both in Sri Lanka and in the diaspora. In “Drawing and Re-Drawing Borderlines in the Fiction of Shobasakthi,” Speaker 1 examines the modern migrant as a creation of the modern State. She argues that his trope of the perilous journey of his subjects is a study of the militarization of the Tamil country of North and Eastern Sri Lanka in the 1990’s that architecturally transformed homelands into prisons. In “Convergence of Science, Religion, and Politics in Sri Lanka’s COVID-19 Burial Ban,” Speaker 2 examines a ban Sri Lanka imposed in 2020, prohibiting the burial of those who had died from COVID-19, ostensibly to prevent the virus’ spread. Employing rhetorical theory, I explore the convergences of science and ethnoreligious tension within the ban and the ban’s implications for the Muslim community. In “Interminority Solidarity in Priya Guns’ Your Driver is Waiting and V.T. Nayani’s This Place,” Speaker 3 deploys Vijay Prashad’s “polyculturalism,” and Nitasha Sharma’s “brown” as complementary concepts that provide the basis for an anti-racist, queer, feminist solidarity between diverse “non-White” communities rooted in shared histories of ethno-nationalism in North America and in South Asia. Finally, in “The Migrant Child in Sharon Bala’s The Boat People,” Speaker 4 examines how the “multicultural,” Canadian State racializes the Tamil ‘migrant child’ as requiring reconstruction into a “good” immigrant subject. They argue that echoing indigenous residential schools, Bala depicts the “foster family” as the site of this transformation.

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

This panel brings together four scholars working at the intersection of South Asian and German Studies to interrogate the circulation and contestation of knowledge across languages, disciplines, and imperial formations. Spanning the eighteenth century to the present, the papers examine how language — as a site of missionary encounter, Romantic philology, colonial extraction, and linguistic hegemony — mediated the entangled histories of Germany and South Asia. Presenters' recovery of the Tranquebar Mission's multilingual contact zone before Romantic Indology, analysis of extractivist imaginaries shared across German and Indian literary traditions, and reading of Hindi's internal hierarchies through the lens of German translation together chart a genealogy of German-South Asian literary and linguistic exchange that troubles both Orientalist and nationalist narratives. Additional commentary situates these interventions within the field's emerging shift from German reception of India toward Indian reception of Germany, and from Sanskrit-centered Indology toward the vernacular, the everyday, and the situated. The papers argue that German-South Asian studies must now account not only for the flows of knowledge from East to West, but for the asymmetries, resistances, and transformations that have shaped those flows at every level — from the missionary's dictionary to the postcolonial poem.

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

This panel explores how shifting landscapes across South Asia, particularly in regions marked by extraction, militarization, and ecological precarity, reconfigure dominant understandings of land, belonging, and sovereignty. Moving away from rooted or territorialized notions of identity, we foreground relational and rhizomatic forms of inhabitation that emerge through movement, encounter, and refusal. The panel is invested in considering how illegibility and non-transparency go beyond a conceptualization of deficits and instead become strategic modes of being within contested terrains. Engaging insights from Critical Border Studies and particularly the concept of borderscapes as articulated by scholars such as Chiara Brambilla and Reece Jones, the panel approaches borders not as fixed lines but as dynamic processes shaped by overlapping regimes of power, resistance, and everyday negotiation. We are especially interested in how borders operate as lived and embodied experiences across “unruly” or improbable landscapes, including the ecologically fragile and politically charged regions of Northeast India. By bringing together work on human and nonhuman entanglements, extractive economies, and insurgent spatial practices, this panel asks: - What forms of belonging emerge in spaces defined by instability and impermanence? - How do communities navigate and resist regimes of legibility imposed by the state and capital? - And how might opacity, refusal, and relationality offer alternative frameworks for understanding place in contexts where land itself is continually shifting? In tracing these questions, the panel seeks to reconceptualize South Asian borderscapes as sites not only of control, but of generative, if precarious, possibilities. **This is Part 2 of 2 panels**

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

ad hoc panel

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

In a time of endless war, occupation and authoritarianism, how does one imagine archives of dissent? What happens when we shift our attachments to, and aspirations for dissent from its declarative politics to its wondrous poetics, to carve out worlds of perpetual invention? Our panel mines the dissent-making aesthetics of life-worlds, across histories of colonialism, indenture and authoritarianism through errant archives that evade the demand for literal recuperation and politics. Each panelist brings curious and poignant archival stories from the perspective of unexpected narrators: circus performers, scandalous lovers, absconding laborers and school-teachers. Two clusters of critical attachments are central here: (1) How do we understand dissent delinked from the redemptive heroics of identity forms and geopolitical territory? (2) How do we attend to a poetics of dissent that summons theoretical/vernacular practices and claims that found political subjectivities/ collectivities? To attend to these issues, the panel foregrounds intra-regional engagement and brings together genealogies of dying circus histories in Malabar, the scandals and failure of Hindutva in the central Himachal state of Uttarkand, the poetics of remaindered indenture archives in Mauritius, and the confounding and rousing stories of schoolteachers in conflict-torn regions of Sri Lanka and Southern India. A feminist commons, this panel is an invitation to imagine worlds other/wise.

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

Caste does not simply map onto land; it produces it. Across South Asia, colonial and postcolonial property regimes have generated caste-differentiated geographies that persist and mutate across changing political-economic formations: through canal irrigation and revenue settlement, through land reform and its exemptions, through the urbanization of agrarian villages and the enclosure of common resources. Caste operates as territorial technology, a means through which borders are drawn, property is made, and capital accumulated, producing the spatial grammar of distinct and exclusionary nationalisms. Yet these same geographies have also been sites of sustained Dalit labor and claim-making, through which land, legality, ecology and spirituality are continually produced and reworked. This panel examines how caste territoriality is actively made and contested through struggles over land, water, and urban space in contemporary India. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research across four regional formations in the urbanizing periphery of Delhi, the agrarian landscapes of Maharashtra, the Cauvery Delta in Tamil Nadu, and the cityscapes of Mumbai, the papers ask how shifting property regimes rearticulate caste hierarchies to produce new geographies of violence, dispossession and supremacy, while also generating new conditions for Dalit politics. Taken together, they argue that land functions as both a material stake and a political horizon in Dalit life: a terrain on which dispossession is reproduced and contested, and from which new claims to dignity, presence and belonging emerge. By centering caste as an active force in property-making, ecological transformation, and territorial production rather than a residual social category, this panel contributes to scholarship at the intersection of agrarian studies, feminist political ecology, and critical geography.

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

Research on India and South Asia more broadly have given rise to important historiographical interventions in the study of empire and colonialism and its impact in understanding the post-war and post-imperial global order. The dynamic and rich field of historical scholarship on South Asia in the twentieth century encompassed nationalist and Marxist schools of historiography in the immediate aftermath of independence that challenged the influential Cambridge school in their construction of histories of decolonization in the British Empire. Afterwards in the wake of the Saidian critique of Western representations of the Orient, the Subaltern Studies collective emerged challenging the existing historical scholarship both in terms of theory and practice. Additionally, work on South Asia gave rise to historical anthropological methods stemming from the Anglo-American academy that challenged colonial conceptions of South Asian culture and society to current rethinking of anti colonial nationalism and trying to come to grips with the resurgence of religious nationalism and populism in the region broadly. The dynamic and often turbulent debates over historical method, critical studies of nationalism, colonialism and modernity have led to innovations in method and genre. This roundtable will bring together contributors to a proposed edited volume on South Asian Historiography which aims to bring together a comprehensive and critical assessment of the state of the field.The idea is to bring together new and critical approaches in South Asian historiography in the twenty-first century in the aftermath of the impact of critical colonial and postcolonial studies.

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

The optics of gender and sexuality is an important one for any detailed historical inquiry of South Asia (as of other regions!); it underpins all aspects of historical life, however quotidian. Historians have, however, only recently begun to acknowledge that the subtext of gender and sexuality may latently be present under all discursive formations – across archival genres. The French philosopher, Michel Foucault, has done much, in his 4-volume History of Sexuality, to depict the discursive formations of normative and deviant ( the “monster,” the “abnormal”) ideas of gender and sexuality, especially from the Classical Age to modernity, when the proliferation of discourses around the same multiply exponentially. Taking a cue from such influential works, and other significant studies on South Asia, this panel coalesces around five papers that seek to illumine how intimacies and desires have historically been shaped, contested, and negotiated. Chronologically, Speaker 1 throws light on some aspects of homoerotic love in seventeenth-century India, through a particular episode, in a larger Persianate context. Speaker 2 shows the role of lineage in Hindavi love poetry (Matiram Tripathi’s rasrāj) flourishing within Mughal Persianate court culture during mid-seventeenth century and how it shapes emotional capabilities of women; Speaker 3 shows how Makhfī (Zeb un-Nissa, 1638-1702) uses the Persian ghazal (lyric poetry) to perform gender and desire as fluid, constructed, and concealed. Finally, the last two speakers take us to modern India. Speaker 4 examines two Hindi literary texts that negotiate colonial surveillance of sexuality while simultaneously preserving the semiotics of love and desire. Finally, Speaker 5 situates the Malayalam Periodical Aruna as both a medium and an object of women’s desires in pre-state Kerala.

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

ad hoc panel

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

This panel uses vernacular literary and folkloric traditions from South Asia, to offer a window for historicizing South Asian pasts beyond modern histories of state formations. By engaging with such oral and literary works, the panel attempts to examine the close relationship between memory, historicity and oral traditions. The close examination of storytelling traditions in the oral traditions, folklore and martial poetry of Punjab and Rajasthan reveal the complex interactions between memory making, identity formulations and historicization by disparate yet geographically proximate communities, in a South Asian context. The presentations explore how the spatial and temporal contexts evoked in such forms as qissas, epic poetry, and courtly texts narrate emerging forms of community and caste-based identities, some tied to state formations, but others independent of such contexts.

Session: Session 7: Friday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Conference Room 2
Floor: Floor 2

Since Midnight’s Children, national allegory and the forging of national identity have been essential to understanding the postcolonial novel. Priyamvada Gopal writes, “the narration of nation gave the anglophone novel in India its earliest and most persistent thematic occupation.” Similarly, Neelam Srivastava’s study of some canonical anglophone novels, including Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines, Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy and Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance argues that “they all present an allegoresis of the Indian nation by recuperating different versions of the national past.” Further, the centering of the nation in readings of postcolonial novels was founded on metaphors of bloodlines and familial belonging—of infants exchanged at birth, families sundered by new borders, marriage or romance as the all-encompassing preoccupation against events unfolding in the new nation. Yet, the containment of the nation is only a useful postcolonial fiction that these novels provide. The dominant framework of the narration of a national identity through familial frameworks for understanding post-Independence literary and cultural production has obscured the more internationalist, globalized, multilingual, and regional imaginaries that furnish the political vocabulary in much South Asian cultural production. This panel assembles three papers that open up the South Asian Anglophone novel and regional texts to longer global histories of the post-9/11 world, the peripheralized history of plantation labor and indentured migration in colonial Assam, and the subaltern histories of colonial military conscription. Together these papers ask, if the novel has overwhelmingly been read as “national allegory,” then how does literary form reflect the imagining of alternate global histories? How do minor forms, such as the short story, prison memoirs, or popular film, interface with the novel in South Asia to enable alternative solidarities within and beyond the region? And what alternate visions of postcolonial temporality become visible in centering these histories?

Session: Session 7: Friday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Conference Room 4
Floor: Floor 2

ad hoc panel

Session: Session 7: Friday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Capitol Ballroom A
Floor: Floor 2

White actors and characters have been a constitutive feature of Hindi cinema since its earliest days. Scholars have pointed to the centrality of Anglo-Indian and Eurasian women in the early Hindi cinema (Niazi 2018, Sachdeva Jha 2009) and to the ambivalent, yet shifting roles assigned to white women in early-2000s Bollywood (Gehlawat 2015). Even as the on-screen social and moral connotations of whiteness have changed, and even as the Bollywood culture industry has expanded its scope, “whiteness” - as it both aligns with and disambiguates from white bodies - continues to be crucial to defining “Indianness.” The papers on this panel combine analysis of filmic texts and music with ethnographic studies of Bollywood cultural production to examine the ambivalent and contradictory relationships between “whiteness” and “Indianness” in the present moment. Speaker 1 discusses the disappearance of interracial relationships between white women and Indian men from Bollywood films as a result of rising Hindu nationalism over the past decade. Speaker 2 discusses how musical intertextuality works to confirm the “Indian” sentimentality of an otherwise white protagonist in the American film A Nice Indian Boy (2024). Speaker 3 ethnographically examines white actors working in Bollywood, contrasting their on-screen representations and everyday lived experiences to offer insight into postcolonial masculine privilege. Finally, Speaker 4 focuses on the increasing demand for white female performers at Bollywoodized weddings, investigating these performers as a locus for a post-colonial desire that is simultaneously sexual, economic, and geopolitical. Cumulatively, these papers examine whiteness on and beyond the Bollywood screen to yield insight into the racial and gendered post-colonial economies of contemporary India.

Session: Session 7: Friday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: University C/D
Floor: Floor 2

This panel brings together historians, ethnographers, and geographers to chart the making of a global South Indian indenture diaspora. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, workers from Madras Presidency were transported to plantations across the Indian and Atlantic oceans as indentured laborers or “coolies.” Tracing connections between Madras, Malaya, South Africa, the Mascarene, the Caribbean, North America, and Sri Lanka, this panel analyzes labor, caste, music, and religion from a migrant “Madras elsewhere.” The first paper examines how coercive caste conditions—drought, debt, punitive taxation, and landlessness—shaped indentured migration from Madras to Malaya’s rubber plantations and how these same circuits became networks for anti-caste struggles and Periyar E.V. Ramasamy’s Self-Respect movement. The second paper shows how plantations in southern Africa and Southeast Asia became sites of creolization for theater and ritual drumming associated with Dalit laborer-performers from Madras. It argues that plantation performances were foundational to anti-caste politics in the indenture diaspora, pushing histories of South Indian music beyond cultural nationalism. The third paper maps the duality of the term “Madrasi” in the Indo-Caribbean diasporas of Guyana and North America. Originally a port-based designation for workers shipped from Madras, the term accrued racial and caste connotations on the sugar plantations of the Caribbean and eventually became a slur. A group of drummers and healers has since reclaimed the term for their community (“the Madrasis”) and their religious practices (“the Madrasi religion”). The final paper follows Malaiyaka (“Hill Country”) Tamils’ search for water, land, and livelihood in postwar Sri Lanka. In the face of debt and displacement, the migration of Malaiyaka Tamils to Sri Lanka’s Northern Province reveals forms of place-making that decenter the agroeconomies of the plantation. Together, these papers theorize the historical, aesthetic, religious, and political stakes of becoming Madrasi elsewhere.

Session: Session 7: Friday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Parlour Room 629
Floor: Floor 6

This panel brings literary studies and anthropology into conversation to examine how South Asian histories in Southeast Asia are mediated across textual, archival, and embodied forms.Moving across Anglophone, Hindi, and Tamil materials, it asks how labor, migration, war, and devotion are remembered beyond official archives and nationalist historiography. In doing so, it foregrounds South Asians not as peripheral to Southeast Asian history, but as central to colonial and postcolonial worlds shaped by plantation capital, imperial conflict, displacement, and regional mobility. Bringing together four papers on fiction, oral testimony, and ethnography from Singapore, Malaysia, and Burma, the panel traces how histories of labor, loss, and belonging persist in vernacular memory, lived practice, and cultural form. Together, the papers show how empire endures not only as historical event, but as an afterlife registered in narrative, speech, and embodied movement across South and Southeast Asia.

Session: Session 8: Friday, 3:45 pm - 5:30 pm
Room: Parlour Room 634
Floor: Floor 6

ad hoc panel

Session: Session 9: Saturday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Caucus Room
Floor: Floor 1

ad hoc panel

Session: Session 9: Saturday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Senate Room B
Floor: Floor 1

Inspired in part and arguably exemplified by Edward Said’s 1983 monograph on the work of the literary critic, the concept of “worldliness”—along with its cognates like “world-ing” and “worldmaking”—has gained an astonishingly wide currency in contemporary humanistic scholarship. Despite Said’s pointed use of the term to reflect upon the modernity of the novel and its unique situatedness in the world, the idea has acquired a life of its own, percolating into the study of different cultural contexts and seemingly disparate disciplines like political theory, art history, and queer studies. Yet, worldliness’ terminological resonance has not resulted in renewed attempts to theorize it. This panel brings together four historians of precolonial India—each of whom has made distinctly generative use of the concept in their work—to offer a possible recalibration. The first presenter attends to the workings of “saṁsāra” in Jain Digambara literature from the tenth to twelfth centuries through evocative tropes and metaphors that complicate, in lieu of validating, the illusory ontological character of the world. The second presenter examines a little-known text on world-renunciation by Vallabhācārya, pioneer of the Puṣṭimārga sampradāya, that emphasizes saṃnyāsa’s unnecessariness whilst also presenting it as the natural outcome of a lovesick devotee’s efforts to navigate a world where Kṛṣṇa is both present and absent. The third presenter illustrates the ways in which multi-genre, multilingual lexicographical texts performed the critical labor of bringing the precarious heterogeneity of medical plants found “in the world” under the jurisdiction of the written word. Finally, the fourth presenter marshals artisanal conceptualizations from early medieval pratiṣṭhā texts to correct anachronic appraisals of the Indic temple’s idealized self-containment from worldly particularities. The chair-discussant, an intellectual historian of premodern South Asia, will knit the four presentations together into a statement on the conceptual promise of “worldliness” for the study of the region.

Session: Session 9: Saturday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Conference Room 2
Floor: Floor 2

This panel is part 1 of a two-part panel that will trace various iterations of the “popular” in literature, cinema, and performance. The resurgence of nationalism has meant a shift away from the anti-colonial spirit of the early- to mid-twentieth century in South Asia. The popular is co-opted to majoritarian impulses on the one hand yet remains open to subversive possibilities on the other. The first panel connects contemporary debates on nationalism and popular culture with earlier postcolonial texts and contexts. Presenter 1 illustrates how “chess” becomes a metaphor for ideological struggles over nationhood. Chess in South Asian art forms is an unstable narrative symbol of agon and a metaphor for the nation. Presenter 2 examines feminist bio-fiction and cinema to complicate colonial and postcolonial iconic femininity. This paper will frame Mahasweta Devi’s bio-fiction The Queen of Jhansi (1956, trans. 2010) with the 2019 Bollywood film Manikarnika. Presenter 3 demonstrates how popular piety informs anti-border poetics in India and Pakistan. This paper illustrates how poetic engagements with saints, Sufism, bhakti through popular forms like qawwali and folksongs challenge both the internal boundaries of gender, caste, and class, as well as the external borders of the two nation-states. The final paper draws attention to the vernacular jatra or popular theater as a counter-archives of history. Situating Jatra within the longue durée of South Asian popular culture, it argues that the form’s affective and performative capacities have historically enabled the circulation of political emotion—from bhakti and prem to deshbhakti among mass audiences beyond elite cultural spheres.

Session: Session 9: Saturday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Conference Room 4
Floor: Floor 2

Images in the South Asian context have long been held to have a life of their own— generated, infused, and invigorated by their making, viewing, and worshipping publics. In the Hindu context, these images may take the form of idols, murals, or portrait sculpture— located in situ at various temples and sacred sites. Similarly, calligraphic and decorative imagery used in Islamic art and architecture, carry a distinctive place in South Asian history and memory. Noting these “lives of [South Asian] images” as constitutive elements of expressive culture in the region, this panel dwells on the afterlives and other lives of the image (broadly construed) in South Asia. In his germinal work on Hindu images (1997), Richard Davis demonstrates how Indian images may be “fundamentally social beings whose identities are not fixed once and for all at the moment of fabrication, but are repeatedly made and remade through interactions with humans.”(Davis 8) This panel extends this line of thinking to consider how images can be fabricated, altered, ruined, recreated, copied, abstracted, complicated, constructed, and recontextualized in the South Asian context. Papers address questions of how abstracted images may yield new readings of other expressive traditions, the spatial placement of images in alternative contexts, histories of copying and tracing, representational challenges, the relationship between genres and medium, historical continuities and discontinuities, literary transformations of the image, image and performance, ornamentation, and other themes and topics of interest.

Session: Session 9: Saturday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Capitol Ballroom A
Floor: Floor 2

This panel asks how historical, social, and affective figurations of women intersect with the consumption of modern South Asian cultures. It engages taste as both the figurative word for discernment or preference and the more sensory experience of ingesting and incorporating food. Following from a Bourdieusian definition of taste as an entrenchment of social structures that can also hold the potential for testing them, the panel brings together four different explorations of what the processes of taste formation look like when imagined through a range of feminine positions in South Asian societies across the subcontinent and its diasporas. The work in this panel interrogates taste in its manifold dimensions: taste in a study of Māppila Muslim women’s medical advice literature emerges as gendered and religious expertise as well as readerly and authorial configurations of femininity. Elsewhere, taste is foundational to space and voice: the radical female collaborative Yoni ki Baat emerges to accommodate “tasteless” subjects and feminine appetites. Unusual appetites and aversions appear to constitute feminine (re)cognition and corporeality in the provocative memoir Meatless Days. And a study of female diasporic Indian food critics reveals taste-formation as a process where gendered hierarchies get entrenched and intersect with considerations of class and nation, reinforcing key ideas of invisibility versus lionization in the era of digital storytelling. Incorporating a range of media, form, and disciplinary orientations, this panel takes on taste as a mode of disciplinary inquiry and identity formation, and interrogates how taste can be at once a site of radical flux as well as a rallying-point for conservatism in the modern South Asian context. Taking seriously the cultural, sensory, and intellectual possibilities of taste, the panel participates in a conversation at the intersection of periodical studies, media theory, food writing, and literary analysis.

Session: Session 9: Saturday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Madison Ballroom
Floor: Floor 2

ad hoc panel

Session: Session 9: Saturday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: University A/B
Floor: Floor 2

Ad hoc panel