Annual Conference on South Asia

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

For most of the twentieth century, North American scholarship on Sri Lanka has been confined to the field of Area Studies. Concurrently, scholarship emerging from Sri Lanka was inclined towards theories of the Nation. While moving beyond these frameworks is not a novelty to many disciplines and regions across Asia Studies, Sri Lankan literary scholarship is yet to see a collective shift beyond these dominant frames. The proposed symposium questions the restricting disciplinary structures of Area Studies and the Nation and asks how literary critical methodology functions as a critique of twentieth and twenty-first century North American and Sri Lankan disciplinary boundaries. The proposed symposium explores Sri Lanka’s “location” within academic disciplines in the humanities and the impact its various types of regionalization, globally and within Asian Studies, might shape the reception and significance of the scholarship on it. The presenters draw on a range of theoretical approaches from the environmental humanities, affect studies, and secularism studies to recast writers, texts, and motifs of the Nation which for long have been read within the confines of Area Studies. We begin our symposium by interrogating the significance of literary voices from Sri Lanka in an attempt to imagine the humanities as a global transnational sphere of knowledge production. How might specific writers, thinkers, cultural contexts, approached through literary critical frameworks, be situated within Sri Lanka and transnational scholarship? How might such scholarship position the uses of literary analysis within the broader frameworks of the humanities and social sciences? The symposium will be organized around six papers with a focus on Sri Lanka, covering mainly the twentieth century. The papers will be circulated in advance with registered participants. Each paper will be introduced by a discussant whose scholarship is currently shaping the trajectories of the disciplinary focus of the relevant paper.

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

Driven by powerful new economic vectors, including the globalization of migrant labor and the garments industry, counterintuitive development markers, a globally assertive diaspora, and a challenge to Indian hegemony within South Asian studies, Bangladesh Studies has moved in exciting new directions in the last decade in terms of research agendas and methodologies. The growing coherence of the field has been made possible by the growth of a university network in Bangladesh, increased collaborations between scholars and activists inside and outside Bangladesh, the growing prominence of the Journal of Bangladesh Studies, and the establishment of a Center for Bangladesh Studies at University of California, Berkeley. The speakers at this symposium, representing a range of disciplines and institutional ranks and affiliations, are engaged in scholarship about Bangladesh that pushes beyond the longstanding preoccupations with development and security and beyond the boundedness of present-day national borders and national history. These scholars are decolonizing and reanimating Bangladesh studies by defining the field of Bangladesh studies as expansively, generously, and inclusively as possible, by challenging the hierarchies in development studies, literary studies, gender studies, South Asian Studies, and Islamic studies that have long cast East Bengal, East Pakistan, and Bangladesh and those who live there on the periphery of these fields—and as recipients, not producers, of knowledge. Three of the four symposium sessions will highlight new interdisciplinary approaches to a wide range of topics: the occlusion of the peasant in postcolonial knowledge production, the challenges posed by the climate crisis for different groups, and relations of friendship and control within and across generations of women. The fourth session will be a larger discussion led by the authors of recent English-language monographs on Bangladesh and the editor of the Journal of Bangladesh Studies about academic publishing about Bangladesh both within Bangladesh and the United States.

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

The 9th annual Regional Bhakti Scholars Network symposium, titled “Transgression,” seeks to uncover the latent principles that engender both the positive and negative analytics that the term deploys. First, the term transgression is often used with a positive valence in bhakti scholarship, wherein it includes a latent value judgment suggesting that transgressions of traditional Hindu caste and gender hierarchies in pursuit of greater equality are - and should be - viewed in a positive light. In the case in many scholarly works on bhakti, most particularly those focused on caste and gender, bhakti poets, gurus, temples, and traditions are often unreflexively celebrated for their transgressive contestations and refusals of “traditional” structures of Hindu hierarchy and exclusion. Second, in the negative valence, the term transgression tends to be used in relation to the behaviors of bhaktas that are deemed either non-Brahmanical (meat eating, alcohol drinking, caste violations, sexual practices, and so on) or criminal (murder, rape, fraud, tax evasion, immigration violations, prostitution, embezzlement, and so on). These transgressions are often marked by criminality and as such are also, by definition, socially and historically constructed and the result of political processes defined by those with social influence and juridical power. This symposium provides an arena in which to think critically about the term “transgression” and the broader lexicon in which it is embedded. It seeks to locate and interrogate latent exercises in cultural evaluation, and to question when such value judgments can be deployed with intention, awareness, care, and critical self-reflexivity. In hosting this pre-conference event, the co-coordinators aim to unearth the latent and historically-contingent ideologies that inform both the positive and negative valences of the notion of “transgression,” and in so doing reveal the ways that scholars unwittingly reassert Brahmanical dominance as idealized tradition and Anglo-European liberalism as the ethical norm.

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

Recent studies of religion in modern South Asia have taken one of two approaches: either they have argued against the secularization thesis by pointing towards the continuing presence of religion (Bandyopadhyay and Sen, eds, Religion and Modernity in India, 2017) or they have traced the “reforms” within religious formations (Fuchs and Dalmia, eds, Religious Interactions in Modern India, 2019). Absent from these efforts is an attempt to link these two approaches by focussing on the political work of the sacred. Connecting both strands of the study of modern religion would emphasize thisworldly consequences of otherworldly conceptions in ways that put the ordinary and the metaphysical within the same experiential and historical frame. This full-day symposium will highlight the quotidian work of the sacred by examining the entanglements of the political and the spiritual (Marshall, Political Spiritualities, 2009). We will explore the historical contexts and political meanings of prayer, worship, and congregations in modern South Asia. In doing so, we will join the conversation with works such as C.S. Adcock’s The Limits of Tolerance (2014) and Milinda Banerjee’s The Mortal God (2019) to disentangle the historical braids of the worldly and the otherworldly beyond unwieldy categories of religion, secularism, and modernity. "Quotidian Sacreds: Religion, History, and Performance in South Asia" analyzes the work of faith and worship as discourse and performance, across cultural and historical contexts of colonial and postcolonial modernity. We are not primarily interested in posing the category of religion in opposition to modernity: we neither aim to reformulate or refute the secularization thesis in postcolonial contexts nor do we wish to trace transformations within genre conventions of discourses and practices of worship. Instead, we are seeking to understand the ordinary work of the metaphysical: to see what the act of prayer does to the congregations.

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

A transnational scholars’ collective in the field of South Asian dance are co-organizing the first ACSA Symposium on Dance and South Asia. The primary aim of this symposium is to showcase new directions in scholarship on dance and South Asia and decenter dominant discourses and voices. Shifting focus away from hegemonic narratives about neo-classical Indian dance, this symposium features scholars and artists who work on a range of dance practices and performance traditions from South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the diaspora. The roundtables of this symposium feature 5-7 minute provocations rather than formal papers that cover four themes: 1) De-centering “Dance”; 2) Dancing Diasporas, Embodying (Trans)nationalisms; 3) Pleasure, Desire, and Dance; and 4) Dance, Race, and Ethnicity. The first roundtable, which features artists based in India, questions the very formation of the field of Indian dance studies and questions what gets counted as “dance.” The second roundtable examines the circulation of dance and performance in South Asia and its Caribbean, Southeast Asian, and European diasporas. The third roundtable centers pleasure, desire, and sexuality in dance practices from India, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. The final roundtable bridges the gap between scholarship on race and dance by examining discursive formations of race in relation to dance in Northeast India, jazz and blackface minstrelsy, contemporary fusion, rituals, and sexuality and visual cultures in the South Asian diaspora. All four roundtables contend with questions of caste in keeping with the symposium’s intentions to dismantle hegemonic discourses in South Asian dance. The presenters are from a range of academic ranks (graduate students, assistant professors, associate professors, and full professors) and also artists based in South Asia, UK, or North America. The twenty presenters focus on a range of geographies on dance in South Asia including: Bangladesh, India, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, and the Indo-Caribbean context.

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

This symposium wishes to probe the making and unmaking of caste in the longue duree in the subcontinent by centering the formation and maintenance of different types of households at the center of contests over claims of belonging and exclusion, of respectability and disprivilege. For this reason, we seek to bring together a wide range of scholars whose work spans different chronologies, regions, and religious boundaries so that they can help us examine how institutional structures helped to solidify or dissolve inherited statuses. Drawing on the growing scholarly evidence of the persistence of caste status across diverse religious communities into the modern period, we wish to trace the ways in which legal, imperial, and regional understandings of lineage and household inscribed caste into practices of everyday life not commonly examined by scholarship. Using a wide array of primary sources from legal works, instructional books, regional courts, political decrees, classical and later medieval story literature, as well as vernacular poetry, panelists will trace how notions of lineage and caste could mutually shape each other, and in turn be shaped by new institutions and practices. We wish to examine claims to material resources, changing notions and practices of kinship, friendships and affiliation as well as their intersection with social and geographical mobilities in the subcontinent.

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

Our symposium explores how printing technologies and printed objects transformed religious communities in South Asia. We approach “print” as an all-encompassing category of replication technologies—from xylography to movable type to digital modeling. Book objects are not only repositories of historical evidence but also sites that shaped public consciousness. Therefore, our project will focus on how practices and tools used in the production of book objects may be governed by or influence politics, ideologies, and cultures. In unraveling the nexus between the history of print and South Asian religions, this symposium seeks to address a variety of critical and intellectual concerns. First, it will interrogate the impact of material cultures associated with printing technologies on the religious views, practices and identities of South Asian peoples. Second, it will deliberate upon the critical idioms and analytical tools, which are effective in appraising the dynamic relationship between print cultures and religious communities in South Asia. Furthermore, we will examine how indigenous terms and ideas were excluded from critical vocabularies of the history of the book in modern times through neglect, erasure, or censorship. By historicizing book objects in colonial and capitalist contexts, our project seeks to expand the critical vocabularies used in the history of the book to be more incisive through being more inclusive. Finally, building on specific case studies about printing technologies, printmakers, and printed objects, the symposium will reflect upon the advantages and challenges of exploring South Asian religions from the vantage point of the history of print. We have invited primarily early-career scholars whose research papers promise to make critical interventions in the study of material cultures. This symposium is part of our long-term intellectual investment in an upcoming generation of scholars, with an eye to building a community around the history of the book in South Asia.

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

This symposium brings together scholars from the fields of literature, philosophy, anthropology, ritual studies, and art history, to share and inspire research that focuses specifically on the Vaisnava sensorium in eastern India. Some scholars have already been working directly on the sensorium in the context of Gauṛīya Vaiṣṇavism, while the research of many others engages the subject indirectly. This symposium seeks to bring these scholars into conversation with each other around the central focus of the Vaiṣṇava sensorium as it is understood in Gauṛīya Vaiṣṇava philosophy, poetry, drama, aesthetics, and practices of ritual and interiority. In this endeavor, we intend to bring together research on eastern India—erstwhile Mithila, Assam, greater Bengal, and Orissa—in the early modern, colonial, and modern (and contemporary) periods. The aim is to look at both the roots of the Vaiṣṇava sensorium as it was understood in the Gauṛīya Vaiṣṇava canon but also to consider the ripple effects of this doctrine in the ways in which groups inspired by ideas seeded by the Gauṛīyas moved their understandings in new directions. Ultimately, the aim is to articulate a new poetics of perception and experience of the divine, among the Gauṛīyas and beyond. Questions we would like to consider, which are simply indicative, include: What does Vaiṣṇava doctrine say about the senses and the role they play in the phenomenology of experience, in the production of bhāva and mahābhāva, and the concomitant generation of psycho-physiological effects? How do yogic bodily regimens and/or tantric practices of interiority impact Vaiṣṇava understandings and affects? What are the precise experiences of meditation and bodily rituals among different kinds of Vaiṣṇavas? How do reading practices of canonical texts constitute Vaiṣṇava affective subjectivities? What is the role of ritual performance, temple architecture, and pilgrimage in activating the senses?

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

This symposium explores the ways Hindu nationalists are devising strategies to anticipate and undermine opposition by Dalits, Muslims, women, and LGBTQ communities to the current political dispensation. Which groups are they seeking to incorporate or exclude through legal, cultural, and political means? And how have subaltern groups resisted the erosion of their rights and put forward alternative understandings of secularism, citizenship and nationalism? How is dissidence expressed within and outside electoral venues, through film, poetry, songs, and public protest? What has been the impact of the rescinding of Article 370 and Kashmiri autonomy on alternative understandings of citizenship and secularism? How did the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act and National Register of Citizen (2019-2020) challenge the legal and political imaginary of Hindutva? The symposium will include scholars from a variety of disciplinary perspective to provide an interdisciplinary understanding of the dialectics of Hindu nationalist domination and resistance.

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

Francis Robinson has argued that "the boundaries of modern nation-states and the view of area studies scholarship have tended to obscure both important areas of shared experience and significant systems of connection…" (1997). The aim of this panel is to examine early modern histories of devotion–religious communities, sacred spaces, textual and visual archives –beyond both the constraints of modern nation-states and the barriers of regional and cosmopolitan linguistic divisions. In particular, these papers consider the cultural and religious networks and exchanges that took place across empires and regions in premodern India and address some of the challenges that exist for scholars in studying in post-partition South Asia. Speaker 1 investigates the literary, religious, and historical connections between two North Indian martialized communities: the Khalsa Sikhs of Punjab and the Dadupanthi Nagas of Rajasthan. Through close textual analysis of martial vocabulary, they will consider the intertextual ties between the communities. Speaker 2 explores two of the most important Nath Yogi settlements in early modern Hindustan: Gor Khatari and Tilla Jogian. These monasteries, located on trade routes that crossed Asia were not only patronized by Mughal rulers but archival evidence suggests that they provided environments for a paradoxical multiplicity of religious bonds. Speaker 3 will present how Waris Shah's eighteenth-century text Hīr represented the, at times, paradoxical character of the Nath Jogi. In particular, Speaker 3 examines how Ranjha’s conversion to a Jogi allows for simultaneously comedic and serious consideration of the merits of sensuality and the body, exploring locations of transgression across religious and regional boundaries. Speaker 4 examines the challenges of accessing and studying drawings of eighteenth-century Muslim saints that are currently divided between Pakistani Punjab and Indian Punjab and speculates on the origins of these illustrations.

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

This panel focuses on culture and representations of sovereignty in the Deccan Sultanates: dynamic Indo-Islamic polities that were simultaneously characterized by Persianate cosmopolitanism and Deccani regionalism. Taken as a whole, traditional historiography of the Deccan Sultanates—the Bahmani, ‘Adil Shahi, Nizam Shahi, and Qutb Shahi dynasties—has chiefly been concerned with their political power and the fragmentary nature of their states rather than with their cultural and scholarly production. Unlike the hitherto more extensively studied Mughal Empire, these smaller southern polities had limited expansionist ambitions, yet they saw a proliferation of cultural and scholarly production in Dakani, Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit, and Telugu between the fourteenth and the seventeenth centuries. Scholars and sovereigns in the Deccan incorporated conventions shared with the broader Islamic and Persianate worlds while drawing on themes and motifs from the regional landscape of the Deccan. The papers in this panel discuss representations of sovereignty in dynastic histories, praise poetry, art, and architecture from the Deccan Sultanates. While scholars have emphasized the fragmentary nature of cultural production in the region, as poets were rarely associated with a specific sovereign or court, the figure of the sovereign was taken up as a topic of interest to many Dakani and Persian writers. We investigate which cultural forms patrons appealed to in order to establish their authority, and alternatively, how sovereigns were perceived in the broader court culture of the Deccan. Speaker 1 discusses the idea of aesthetic kingship in texts dedicated to Ibrahim ‘Adil Shah II of Bijapur. Speaker 2 delves into motifs of gender and sovereignty in narratives and visual depictions of the warrior queen Chand Bibi Sultan. Speaker 3 explores the inherent challenges of Persianate chroniclers in their depiction of Deccani kingship. Speaker 4 examines expressions of sovereignty in the architectural landscape of the royal tombs in Khuldabad.

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

This panel explores the construction of ideologies of belonging/unbelonging through spatial politics in a variety of Sri Lankan and diasporic contexts. Tracing across communal, material, symbolic and psycho-social practices, we bring together four papers that interrogate the various scales through which state, non-state organizations and individuals participate in national and non-national forms of place-making. Speaker 1 examines Jaffna-Tamil diasporic identity formation in early 20th century colonial Malaya. Drawing on the practices of community organizations in ethnic neighborhoods, this paper explores Jaffna-Tamils’ contradictory positionalities in the political landscape of South and Southeast Asia, the legacy of which is seen through historical and contemporary functions of caste dynamics, class, education and employment. Also focusing on Jaffna identities, Speaker 2 examines how the presence of Palmyra trees and production activity relating to them have been the object of intervention by various political projects over the 20th century, and considers the way that Palmyra has spatially configured stratified ideas of belonging. Positioning the verandah as both a material structure, and an affective space, Speaker 3, argues that the 19th century verandahs of Pettah, reflects larger questions about the relationship between the production of space and the politics of home and place-making in the colonial city. Finally, Speaker 4 analyzes a local state-based mental health program in a predominantly Sinhala-speaking district of the Central Province to consider how the provision of state social services reinforce ideas of civic belonging whilst reproducing exclusion along the lines of class, ethnicity and language. Our goal in this panel is to discuss commonalities and divergences across different temporal and spatial paradigms, debating the construction and contestation of ideas of un/belonging through a range of socio-spatial formations connected to Sri Lanka and beyond.

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

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

South Asian-language literatures often rely on translation to reach a global readership. Arunava Sinha's translation of Akhteruzzaman Elias' Khwabnama (2021) has created a stir in South Asian literary and scholarly circles. Similarly, Tomb of Sand, Daisy Rockwell's translation of Geetanjali Sree's Ret Samadhi, has generated new interest in translations of literature in one of many languages of the Indian subcontinent. In fact, translation within South Asia is generously supported by the Sahitya Akademi Translation award. With the recent upsurge of publishing houses dedicated to literature in translation, both within and outside South Asia, this panel inquires how the critical agenda of translation is different from the Anglophone tradition of globally renowned South Asian writers. Subsequently, the four papers in the panel see to articulate South Asian translation's significance in literary studies and beyond. Speaker 1 wonders if the translation of Akhteruzzaman Elias' Khwabnama (2021) will elicit a recasting of the peasants and the Pakistan Movement in the context of Bengal's Partition in 1947. Speaker 2 comparatively studies Chuden Kabimo's novel, Song of the Soil (2022), translated from Nepali into English, and Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss (2006), not only to understand the distinct representations of the many insurgencies in postcolonial South Asia, but also to trouble the categories of the vernacular/regional and the global/anglophone. Speaker 3 illustrates how the translated works of South Asian writers and artists like Amrita Pritam and Qurratulain Hyder register a sharper encounter between postcolonialism, trauma, and ecocriticism. A 19th century Urdu vernacular is the focus on Speaker 4, who explores the influence of Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605) on the Lucknow centric novel Ratan Nath Sarshar's Fasana-e Azad (1881-1883). Therefore, the panelists elicit South Asian translation's significance in literary studies.

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

Bringing together scholars from law, sociology, social work and social anthropology backgrounds, this roundtable seeks to critically examine the “marginal” location of Bangladesh Studies within South Asian Studies. The panel will explore ways in which gender, relationships, aesthetics, and migration are intimately tied to Bangladeshi experiences of place and identity construction. Speaker 1 will share preliminary findings from ethnographic research on why Bangladeshis migrate to Spain, despite unfamiliarity with culture and language, and how the Spanish government and society have responded to this new migrant community. Speaker 2 will examine British Bangladeshi Muslim women’s investment in race relations via performative visibility in everyday spaces (e.g., work, education, shops, streets etc.). Speaker 3 will discuss the experiences of transnational Bangladeshi women in the US to show how race, class, gender, sexuality, citizenship, geographic location, and associated status impact the intimate economies in which they experience inequities related to love, sex, and desire. Speaker 4 will explore the religious aesthetic negotiation by British Bangladeshi Muslim men vis-a-vis lungi, funjabi and the thobe. Speaker 5 will explore diasporic Bengali identity and Bengaliness in Britain, through a transnational, trans-border and intergenerational approach, factoring in the role of nationalisms and caste, class and gender disparities. In doing so, this panel will make visible Bangladeshi experiences of exclusion, erasure, and exploitation as well as the importance and significance of Bangladesh Studies and its place within academia.

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

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

Pakistan has undergone significant social, political, and economic changes in recent years, and technology has played a pivotal role in this transformation. With the ever-increasing popularity of digital devices and the internet, technology has now become an indispensable part of our daily lives. The technological advancement in the field of linguistics has enhanced the effectiveness of communication strategies and impacted the way the narrative is shaped. It has also enabled educators to create a dynamic learning environment for early childhood education. This panel examines the impact of technology in the field of linguistics to improve communication and shape the narrative. The panel also explores the diverse perspectives on structural and spontaneous interventions on the learning outcomes of primary school students in Pakistan. The first presentation highlights the importance of addressing the learning disabilities of primary school students using the collaborative team teaching (CTT) technique. The second presentation discusses the use of technology-based interventions for the continuous professional development of primary school teachers. The third presentation highlights the significance of digital communication in shaping the political narrative by highlighting the use of social media in creating political awareness in Pakistani youth. The final presentation explores the impact of cultural norms on transmodal communication. Thus the panel provides a comprehensive understanding of the impact of technology on education and communication.

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

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

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

The pleasures and perils of the South Asian city have engendered rich scholarship that has nuanced our understanding of how gender intersects with urban configurations. While fear of sexual harassment and the desire for women’s safety have long been presented in academic and popular discourses as the predominant narrative around gender in South Asian cities, more recent work has foregrounded ‘fun’ and pleasure as a crucial conceptual device for unpacking agential practices (Kirmani 2020; Phadke 2020). Yet, happiness and dread are only fragments of a complex emotional mosaic constituting gendered experiences in cities that are rapidly transforming – infrastructurally, socially, and politically. This panel brings together theoretical and empirical contributions that provide a more expansive view of emotional and affective responses to navigating the city for employment, care or leisure, where the urban public may be a site of nostalgia and longing; or hope and desire; or melancholy, jealousy, rage or disgust. Placing gender in conversation with other vectors of identity, such as caste, class, age, religion, sexuality, and disability, this panel sheds light on how urban transport systems and infrastructure, spaces for work and play, and policies and practices, may all generate their own affective modalities. As this panel highlights, (im)mobility, belonging, exclusion, community or solitude, can each provide us insights into how emotion impacts gendered access to the city, and, in turn, how gender shapes affective dimensions of urban life.

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

In the post-independence period in South Asia, prose offers multiple ways of documenting, mediating, and representing the present. While much scholarship has been produced about Anglophone and primarily male-authored fiction, not a lot of attention has been paid to women’s writing beyond the pale of the partition. In this panel we address this lacuna by analyzing post-independence South Asian women’s prose with special attention to how they deploy new understandings of gender and the vernacular to reflect on their intimacies and aspirations. Since in post-independence prose “gender and genre function as intersecting aesthetic nodes” (Preetha Mani), how do a range of genres in women’s writing–novels, short stories, memoirs, speeches, interviews, and critical essays– experiment with the boundaries between structure and spontaneity? The four papers in this panel narrate different stories of gender and vernacular imaginations in post-independence South Asia. Our first speaker reflects on Mappila women’s literary negotiations with tradition and modernity in the context of Nehruvian scientific rationale. Speaker #2 examines communal violence and affective masculinities across Anglophone and Hindi writings by prize-winning women authors in contemporary India. Speaker #3 interrogates the relationship between vernacularity, speech, gender, and disability in Pakistani writing against the backdrop of postcolonial debates about language and the anthropocene. The final speaker analyzes a 1980s Bengali novel that borrows from pulp fiction tropes to pry open the cracks between shifting sexual terrains and gender identities, and offers new literary imaginaries for the future. Through the range of papers in this panel we argue that it is in post-independence women’s prose from South Asia that we can witness what Akshya Saxena has called “an invitation to think language again–not at its limits but in its proliferation with bodies, media, and languages.”

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

This panel explores the ways in which the built environment is studied in the South Asian context. Its twentieth and twenty first century form is seen in the development of capital cities, the pervasiveness of capitalist logics in the non-urban, the construction of roads, and regulations around heritage. Despite the crucial role of built environment its political, social, and economic configuration has been understudied and needs further exploration in colonial and post-colonial South Asia. Scholarship, on South Asia tends to treat the built environment as a relic frozen in time and thereby overlooking the historical palimpsest it carries and the temporal challenges it reckons with. An example of the same are the capital cities which get attributed to their key architects like Lutyens New Delhi, and Ganga Ram’s Lahore. However, this problematic approach extends across all scales and mediums including built spaces such as roads and bridges, commercial and residential buildings, historical monuments, and non-monumental architectural heritage in both urban and non-urban spaces. Therefore, through this panel our aim is to move beyond the static sense of space and look at the various facets of the built environment in transition. The panel brings together papers situated in different socio-cultural contexts such as the national and regional space, city and provinciality, transportation, media imagination and heritage. In doing so, the essays in this panel draw upon and extend the idea of built environment, space, and architectural heritage which has been studied by scholars like Sandria Freitag, David Arnold, A. D. King, Lynn Meskell, Hilal Ahmed, and Priya Jaikumar. The presenters hope that the panel shall be able develop an understanding of South Asia’s built environment and heritage by addressing it as a complex, changing, and transitioning entity.

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

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

The rise of Hindu fundamentalism, societal collapse, technological advancement, militarization, and pro-capitalist domination create multiple structures of oppression. This panel examines how post-apocalyptic and totalitarian spaces are imagined in South Asian dystopian works–a relatively new genre that explores the human condition, agency, and failure to conceptualize utopic futures. Our panel explores the presence of many voices and many dystopias that exist within the Indian context that often compete with one another through an examination of literature and allied arts. We examine how novelists/poets/playwrights/filmmakers problematize the complexities of representation even as they grapple with the realities of our contemporary dystopian world. We argue that in the reconfiguration of an individual’s agency, these works pose a threat to tyrannical power structures where a future beyond dystopia is often only an imaginary construct. The papers in this panel tap into the collective unease about the modern world and our role in creating and perpetuating a dystopia.

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

This roundtable brings together four leading scholars of modern South Asia to discuss J. Barton Scott’s new book Slandering the Sacred: Blasphemy Law and Religious Affect in Colonial India, published this year by the University of Chicago Press as part of the “Class 200” series. Slandering the Sacred takes the specific case study of Section 295-A of the Indian Penal Code, which prohibits deliberate harm or injury to religious feelings, to raise larger questions about the interaction of law, religion, and secular power in India and beyond. A multifaceted intellectual and cultural analysis of blasphemy law, the book moves between nineteenth-century and contemporary Britain and India to trace a new history for outrage as structure of religious feeling. The four discussants will use the book as a springboard for thinking about questions of wounded sentiments, political affect, and the consolidation of religious identity in various South Asian contexts. Speaker 1, a scholar of secularism and the Arya Samaj, will discuss the book in relation to the genealogies of Hindu nationalism, especially around the affective symbol of the cow. Speaker 2, a historian of colonial law and South Asian Islam, will consider how the politics of wounded feelings have shaped the formation of religious identity both in South Asia and the diaspora. Speaker 3, a historian of Parsi legal cultures and colonial criminology, will situate the book within the field of interdisciplinary legal history. Speaker 4, an anthropologist of Sufism and other contemporary religious forms, will use the book to reflect on twenty-first century formations of Hindu nationalism and Islamophobia, as well as Muslim ethical responses to them.

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

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

This panel will explore the challenges and opportunities associated with 'digital repatriation' in the context of South Asian material cultural heritage. 'Digital Repatriation' refers to the use of digital humanities (DH) tools to create digital assets of heritage items, such as manuscripts and art objects, to provide broader access for stakeholder heritage communities across South Asia. The panel will examine the complexities and unique needs of various repatriation contexts in the digital era, along with the role of digital humanities in addressing the colonial legacies that have influenced South Asian cultural heritage work in the West for nearly three centuries. The panel brings together four papers that discuss innovative approaches to preserving, disseminating, and revitalizing diverse aspects of South Asian cultural heritage. These include Maithili manuscripts in India and Nepal, Gandharan art objects and manuscripts from Afghanistan and Pakistan, and Vedic texts from across the region. Collectively, the papers explore how digital repatriation can promote the decolonization process by empowering local communities to reclaim ownership and control over their heritage items while ensuring equitable access and participation, despite limitations imposed by colonial scholars, institutions, and research practices. By examining various contexts and divergent histories of cultural heritage extraction in different regions and time periods in South Asia, this panel seeks to investigate digital tools and scholarly approaches that can transform the study of South Asian cultural heritage. The goal is to promote cross-cultural, collaborative engagements that challenge colonial power structures and authority. The papers emphasize the need to create sustainable digital projects that empower local heritage communities through open access and pedagogical approaches.

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

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

From living with and caring for one's family members during fieldwork, to doing fieldwork on questions that might unsettle the peace of one's home, the home and field are never entirely distinct entities. By virtue of having a shared history and future with their field sites, researchers in their home countries/communities have to be particularly attentive to questions of rigor, objective distance, and ethics in fieldwork. How do researchers in South Asia grapple with being "home" while conducting fieldwork? To that end, our proposed speakers actively navigate this question through ongoing fieldwork in their home countries/communities. Speaker 1 is a third-generation Singaporean Indian researching on how people of South Asian descent inhabit the racial category of ‘Indian’ in Singapore. Focusing on the convivial and the sensorial, their fieldwork blurs the boundaries between home/field. For Speaker 2’s fieldsite in Maharashtra, the idea of ‘home’ comprises the continued presence of their loved ones. Their fieldwork encourages them to interrogate their positionality as a ‘native’ in their fieldsite. Speaker 3’s research investigates how Bangladeshi women suffer from environmentally induced hysterectomies. Being Bangladeshi themselves, they identify as both an outsider and an outlier to their fieldsite on the southern coast of Bangladesh. Speaker 4’s research focuses on the coastal zone of the Bay of Bengal and their multi-sited fieldwork in India spans courts, legal aid camps and other spaces of everyday legality. Being raised in Kolkata and being trained as a lawyer and anthropologist has meant that home is simultaneously a place, a discipline, and a certain affect. Speaker 5’s fieldsite in Eastern Assam is a small town only 32 miles from their home village. Working in such close proximity, yet distance from their home, they face questions of fulfilling familial observations and objective distance to their fieldsite.

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

The panel explores the development of rhetoric and poetics in South Asia during the seventeenth-century and onward. Based on current research across Persian, Sanskrit, Arabic, and Urdu material, the papers will highlight major interactions and issues in literary theory and practice, gauging continuity and change with a view to key considerations like philology, semantics, translation, interdisciplinarity, sound, socio-intellectual context. Whereas this period of Indian history is known for major intellectual and literary developments, the speakers will shed light on avenues still unexplored, noting the manifestation of change within continuous literary and scholastic frameworks, as well as between them owing to connective activity in Persian, Braj, and Urdu. The paper by Speaker 1 concerns the tenure of courtly patronage of exchange across traditions, especially with reference to the purchase and challenge of encoding the conceptual framework of Sanskrit poetics in its Arabo-Persian counterpart, and also addresses its intermediary backdrop in the Braj-Sanskrit interaction. Speaker 2’s paper deals with the poetics of authorship in Persian devotional retellings of the Ramayana from the late seventeenth century. Speaker 3 explores the place and legacy of Arabic rhetoric (ʿilm al-balāgha) in the region, taking as case study an influential seventeenth-century engagement with the theory of figuration (majāz).​​ Speaker 4 will discuss the development of the notion of faṣāḥat as ‘resonance’ in late Urdu rhetoric as well as underscore, to this end, the assimilation of its Perso-Arabic inheritance.

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

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

The panel provides an account of the diverse trajectories and richness of political and philosophical thoughts in 19th- and 20th century Bengal. Despite their disparate concentrations, the papers are connected by their interlocutors’ concerns with self, freedom, and solidarity, among others. The papers also point towards the importance of Islamicate ideas and concerns about religious solidarity in political and philosophical reflections in the region. Two of the papers engage with Abul Hashim (1905-1974), an important but somewhat forgotten political leader and scholar from Bengal. The first paper presents Hashim’s Islamism as an example of decolonial thought, which seeks to envision the ideological foundations of the postcolonial state that would be able to produce equality, inclusion, progress, and, above all, freedom for its people. The second paper provides an analysis of Hashim’s theory of the ethical self, which advances a critique of liberal individualism by invoking Islamicate concepts of human nature (fitra). The third paper examines the political and ideological positions of Huseyn Suhrawardy (1892-1963), the last prime minister of British Bengal, and M.K. Gandhi in their response to communal division and violence between the Hindus and Muslims. The paper argues that despite Suharwardy’s initial differences with and resistance to Gandhi, he would eventually come to adopt a position similar to the model envisioned by Gandhi during his visit to Noakhali at the height of the communal riots of 1946. The fourth paper engages with the works of Fakir Lalon Shah’s (d. 1890), a philosopher-poet of Bengal, and argues that his philosophical formulations though informed by Vaishnavism, Buddhism, and Sufi Islam, offers his own conditions for the emancipation of the self. Taken together, the papers provide an understanding of the foundations of Bangladeshi political and philosophical thought.

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

The Indian state has undergone profound transformations in the last few decades, including but not limited to liberalization. Our understanding of the state continues to be dominated by macro analyses and metrics like budgets and laws. While these approaches are important, they often overlook more processual and dynamic interactions that various actors have in the state. Ethnography, with its emphasis on observations and interviews, allows us to take a different view: one that collapses the macro, meso, and micro in the experiences and interactions that individuals have. What can ethnography tell us about India's public sector? Through studies of women community health workers in Punjab, students at a public university in Delhi, accountability reforms in Bihar, and private sector professionals promoting financial inclusion, this panel will discuss the everyday socialities engendered by and in the name of the public sector in India, as well as the methodological and theoretical value of ethnographic approaches to understanding the Indian state. In keeping with Laura Bear and Nayanika Mathur’s (2015) call to investigate the public good as part of a broader conduct of life, the panel will map diverse conflicts and collaborations involved in the pursuit of public goods in public institutions and beyond, thus following “policies into their complex social entanglements.”

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

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

As an institution that travelled to South Asia from western Islamic lands, the madrasah has undoubtedly played an important role in Muslim education over several centuries. Paradoxically though, in the South Asian context, madrasahs or Islamic seminaries where traditionalist Muslim scholars (the ‘ulama) are educated, assumed the normative status of bastions of ‘traditional Islam’ concurrent with and in imitation of the establishment of ‘modern’ colonial institutions of learning in the region. In the contemporary context, with the perceived alarm over political Islam and Muslim ‘militancy’, especially in the context of the rise and more recent reincarnation of the Taliban, madrasahs have come into particularly sharp focus in journalistic discourse and policy circles. But these dominant popular discourses on madrasahs, that often seep into scholarship as well, perhaps obfuscate and render further arcane, instead of clarifying and adding substantive analytical density to, our understanding of the precise educational functions and socio-political significance of madrasahs today and in history, within South Asia and in South Asian diasporic communities around the world. This panel addresses some of these lacunae from multiple disciplinary perspectives by considering the rich and complex heritage, as well as the contemporary salience, of madrasah traditions of knowledge in South Asia, among South Asian diasporic communities, and on virtual spaces. This is a gender inclusive panel that includes scholars based in South Asia and the US at different career stages.

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

The last several years have seen—on the part of the Modi administration and its regional allies—the construction and heralding of “corridors” (so called in both English and Hindi) designed to link sacred centers and sacred rivers in major religious cities across north India: Ujjain, Banaras, Vindhyachal (2021-), and soon, apparently, Vrindavan. What is the power of the “corridor aesthetic” that unites them? In this panel we investigate the vectors of protection, destruction, and reconstruction that have shaped—and sometimes resisted—this phenomenon. Speaker 1 takes us to the most famous act of right-wing Hindu destruction, the demolition of the Babri Mosque, and shows how a new sense of physical horizons developed in Bombay in consequence—a string of “Muslim Mohallas” sought to be isolated as “problem areas.” Speaker 2 takes us to Ekta Nagar, the “City of Unity” created as the cultural and physical context for the Sardar Sarovar Dam in the valley of the Narmada River. It emerges as a textbook example of “chronophagy,” the anaesthetization and disavowal of the past through the constitutive violence of the state. Speaker 3 shows how the eminent domain claimed by the state in the creation of such corridors has sometimes been opposed by an equal and opposite force—deities whose place-based powers are called upon to enliven and protect communities the state sees as “encroachers.” The architecture is hardly uniform. Speaker 4 focuses on the “main line” of Corridors now extending from Gujarat to Banaras, showing how they are designed to project youth and development (vikas) on the one hand and a determination to rescue—and articulate—an endangered ancient Hinduness (jirnoddhar) on the other. Often the institution of the museum, suitably modernized, is employed as internal commentary on what a corridor should mean.

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

In The Idea of Indian Literature, Preetha Mani argues that the modernist short story in Hindi and Tamil, "cites" specific character types as a means to create both connections to a certain historical canon, and conversely, to elaborate a new context in which those citations are enacted. Taking this argument as a point of departure, this panel asks how citation and citationary practices contest, conventionalize or contextualize canons and counter-canons across the expressive landscape of South Asia. While citation or the mention/use of pre-existing or pre-articulated ideas, thought, style or form, is a major part of scholarly work, less attention has been directed towards its theoretical applications in understanding and exploring South Asian expressive traditions, including but not limited to art, literature and performance. Exploring how citation both plays with tradition and locates a work in certain discursive genealogies, this panel aims to generate fresh dialogue about the nature of canon formation and its contexts in South Asia. For this purpose, the panel adopts an interdisciplinary approach, centering the concept of citation as a keyword, and negotiating the many manifestations of this concept as it applies across temporal, spatial and cultural geographies. The panel includes presentations from a range of disciplinary perspectives— literary and performance studies, religious studies, art history, reception studies, and emergent conversations in race and gender studies, that not only explore canonical structures, but also the deviations, divergences, convergences, and conditions that allow for their contestation, adding to the study of South Asia in dialogue with the major themes of the Annual Conference itself.

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

This panel is Part 1 of 2 of the multi-series session ‘Of the Body Politic, For the Body Politic.’ Addressing embodiment through technologies of defining the body, such as certification, census, data, face recognition, this panel highlights the ways that statistics, definitions, and procedures that are often thought of as scientific come to shape bodily experience. The four speakers on this panel bring in multidisciplinary work from anthropology, the history of science, sociology and demography, drawing upon examples from clinical trials, disability data, public safety, and childbirth to discuss the ways in which numbers and definitions imbricate people and their physical and emotional needs in networks of citizenship, labor, and violence. The panel elucidates how science - particularly data and/when seen as science - creates new modes of exclusion, extraction, and surveillance which collide with and exacerbate existing hierarchies of race, class, caste, gender, and ability. It raises and responds to questions around who - and what - comes to be counted as data, asking: how does the body become data across differing sets of circumstances, and what might we learn as we put these examples in conversation? Which specific kinds of bodily experiences are seen as worth counting, and which others are ignored?

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

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

In this panel, women writers, translators, and scholars explore structures within established literature as set by the Western canon and spontaneity as improvisation which requires action. Action in the present moment itself is predicated on the past and it is our pasts within our specific cultural and literary contexts that we draw on to allow for new potentials in the future of literature. Panelists will discuss how non-Western literary practices inform their work. Their perspectives on literary traditions from around the world address how contemporary literature has long been informed by non-anglophone traditions, which have largely been erased, ignored or relegated to the “periphery.” Their conversation of the present nearness of these traditions raises questions about prolonged global inequities both on and off the page, perpetuated by the gatekeepers of narrative in the academic, media, and literary arts industries. The panel participants will offer perspectives concerning the literary forms, themes, and practices from South Asia (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan) that are ignored, erased, or pushed to a “periphery” within literature and creative writing programs as well as in literary production. Panelists include scholars, critics, and active producers of English literature. These panelists speak from within and outside of the academy and find themselves grappling with dominant Western narratives no matter where they are situated. The diversity of experience among the panelists offers a well-rounded perspective of anglophone literary production in the West while troubling that normative structure using non-Eurocentric literary practices toward a more equitable global literature.

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

In the past four decades, a number of scholarly discussions have centered around the body of the female temple and/or hereditary, and courtesan dancer in the context of South Asia and the classical dances of India. These discussions take into consideration the caste locations, colonial oppressions, gender, and performance cultures of the artists. However, most of the academic studies have been centered in the context of the female temple performers of the South of India (Kersenboom, O’Shea, Soneji, Ramberg, Thakore, Meduri, et all.). This panel presents scholars who bring to light perspectives of other regional courtesan, hereditary, and temple dancer communities in less researched areas such as Delhi, Maharashtra and Odisha. In doing so, it aims to present a heterogeneous picture and showcase a multiplicity of voices of the female performing communities in the context of the Indian subcontinent. It brings to light the multiple discourses surrounding the figure of the courtesan, hereditary, and temple dancers in late colonial and postcolonial India, ranging from the viewpoints of colonial to nationalist officials to classical dancers, and problematizes scholarly approaches in which the voices of the dancers remain largely absent. The discussion methodologically relies on the depictions of these artists in the colonial and postcolonial archives (18th, 19th and mid-20th century). It also includes a diversity of oral perspectives from across the Indian performing cultures. This roundtable includes researchers working on histories of female courtesans, temple, and/or hereditary dancers from across India, who will bring an applied perspective to the discussion. The roundtable presentations allocating 5-7 minutes for each speaker aims to bring to light a multiplicity of archival representations and ethnographic perspectives of female temple/ hereditary dancers, from across Southern, Northern, Western and Eastern India.

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

The rising power of the Japanese Empire in the late nineteenth century was viewed with both apprehension and admiration in South Asia, as it represented a symbol of non-Western and anti-Western modernity. This ambivalent attitude towards Japan continued throughout the twentieth century, as Japan's economic and technological prowess grew, and its political influence expanded. The interactions between South Asia and Japan have indeed played a significant role in shaping the history and development of modern South Asia. Unfortunately, these intersections have often been overlooked or understudied by scholars due to various reasons, including language barriers, lack of resources, and a limited focus on nationalist or regional perspectives. However, this panel aims to shed light on the various linkages and connections between (post)colonial India and Japan, exploring their political, intellectual, social, economic, and religious ties over the course of the twentieth century. By adopting a transnational approach, the panelists seek to move beyond the limitations of methodological nationalism in history writing, providing a new lens to understand the complex and multifaceted history of South Asia. Overall, this panel represents an important contribution to the study of South Asian history in relation to Japan, highlighting the significance of transnational linkages and connections in shaping the region's past and present.

Session: Session 6: Friday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Off-Site
Floor: Off-Site

I am proposing an author meets critics roundtable panel on SherAli Tareen’s new monograph Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship after Empire (Columbia University Press, 2023). Friendship—particularly interreligious friendship—offers both promise and peril. After the end of Muslim political sovereignty in South Asia, how did Muslim scholars grapple with the possibilities and dangers of Hindu-Muslim friendship? How did they negotiate the incongruities between foundational texts and attitudes toward non-Muslims that were informed by the premodern context of Muslim empire and the realities of British colonialism, which rendered South Asian Muslims into a political minority? In this groundbreaking book, Tareen explores how leading South Asian Muslim thinkers imagined and contested the boundaries of Hindu-Muslim friendship from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. He argues that often what was at stake in Muslim scholarly discourse and debates on Hindu-Muslim friendship were unresolved tensions and fissures over the place and meaning of Islam in the modern world. Perilous Intimacies considers a range of topics, including Muslim scholarly translations of Hinduism, Hindu-Muslim theological polemics, the question of interreligious friendship in the Qur’an, intra-Muslim debates on cow sacrifice, and debates on emulating Hindu customs and habits. Based on the close reading of an expansive and multifaceted archive of Arabic, Persian, and Urdu sources, this book illuminates the depth, complexity, and profound divisions of the Muslim intellectual traditions of South Asia. Perilous Intimacies also provides timely perspective on the historical roots of present-day Hindu-Muslim relations, considering how to overcome thorny legacies and open new horizons for interreligious friendship. This gender inclusive Roundtable panel brings together both senior and early career scholars, from multiple disciplinary persuasions including History, Anthropology, and Religious Studies, to probe and discuss the intellectual and political implications of this book for South Asian Studies and for contemporary South Asia more broadly.

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

In traditional South Asian thought and beyond, there is sometimes recognized a conflict between norms, which tend to define and restrict, and emancipation, which seeks freedom beyond the constraint of rules. This panel brings together four scholars to explore the dynamic, and often productive, tension between “law and liberation” in ancient and modern South Asian religions. Speaker 1 explores the coalescence in early dharmaśāstra literature between two distinctive ethical strands, one that is differential and based in inherited norms, and the other that is universal and emerging from contemplative renouncer traditions. Speaker 2 examines the conundrum of Yudhiṣṭhira in the Mahābhārata and the text’s different attempts to allow him to fulfill the norms of his worldly duties while pursuing the freedom sought by renouncers. Speaker 3 dives into inscriptions of the late first millennium to demonstrate how endowments to Brahmanical settlements were modeled on the exemptions granted to ascetic communities, and sought materially to put modes of religiosity focused on the fulfillment of norms on par with those that focused on emancipation from the world. Finally, speaker 4 challenges any easy dichotomy between the normative and the liberative by exploring how the rules and discipline of the modern Peace Grove Institute in Nepal afford “a culturally appropriate social framework that protects young women and girls from criticism while freeing them to self-manifest and self-cultivate.” Collectively, these papers contribute to our understanding of the productive tension in South Asian religions between renunciation and life in the world and take us into four places where law and liberation co-exist, sometimes intimately.

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

This panel proposes a scholarly conversation on the distinct historical processes that animated and informed disobedient action and nationalist politics in colonial Bombay in the 1930s. The papers will analyze a collection of documentary photographs compiled in a rare historical album in the Alkazi Collection in New Delhi named Collections of Photographs of Old Congress Party—K.L. Nursey. Comprised of over 200 black and white captioned photographs, the bound album offers a visual account of Civil Disobedience Movement in Bombay from early April 1930 with the commencement of the Salt Satyagraha to Gandhi’s departure for London to attend the Second Round Table Conference on 29 August 1931. The rich and compelling images in this collection portray anticolonial action in the form of protests, processions, and propaganda played out on the cosmopolitan and crowded streets of colonial Bombay. But the historical and visual themes captured in this hitherto under-explored photo-archive go beyond engaging nationalist historiography. Recognizing that civil disobedience in the city was deeply embedded in its urbanized social, cultural, and economic milieu, this panel brings together scholars of urban, gender, consumer, and cinema studies of Bombay/Mumbai to contextualize the diverse histories visualized in the folios of this image-object. Speaker 1 examines forms of colonial masculinity embodied by the cross-racial, baton-wielding Bombay police in direct confrontation with anticolonial women volunteers and explores colonial gender relations. Speaker 2 presents key architectural sites and ‘street furniture’ as a stage to the unfolding disobedient drama. Speaker 3 juxtaposes stills from 1930s Bombay cinema with photographs of the crowd of spectators to explore urban mass politics. Finally, Speaker 4 traces how women-led boycott movement sought to moralize consumption in both Indian markets and European business districts. In doing so, the panelists rethink modes of historical scholarship derived from and driven by visual materials.

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

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

The study of early modern literary and painting production in western India has long been bedeviled by discussions that tend to be framed within a binary distinction between royal, courtly, cosmopolitan or elite production on the one hand, and folk, local, or vernacular on the other. Artistic practice sponsored by courtly patrons partakes in pan-South Asian currents. The writers and artists come from elite status and training. The other is found in the bazaars and villages, and is characterized by regional and local styles. Its contours of practice are often considered untrained and lesser in value. Such classifications and historiographic bias are shared across wider areas of South Asian studies. Recent studies of literature and painting in early modern Rajasthan and Gujarat have problematized this binary model. Many non-courtly authors and artists were well-trained in their traditions; they were not “illiterate folk” performers. Nor were their patrons unsophisticated as they expressed preferences for literature and painting that spoke to the regions and elite worlds they inhabited, even though they may not be members of the inner courtly circles. The papers in this panel address this problem of “neither courtly nor local” with four finely tuned case studies. Two deal with literature patronized and written by members of merchant castes. Two address illustrated manuscripts and elaborate illustrated invitation letters patronized by members of Jain merchant castes and produced by a mix of Jain and non-Jain makers. We wager that looking at artistic traditions in two media in the same time and region will help us see beyond disciplinary boundaries. The respondent, an historian of early modern western India, will help bring into focus larger and new questions about patronage and artistic production, and political and intellectual claims of varied social groups and influential individuals.

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

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

This panel mobilizes the semantic compass of the concept “boundary” to rethink the post/colonial and global histories of sexual science in and from South Asia. Dominant accounts of sexology have concentrated on its origins in the Western, primarily German, context as a distinct “Sexualwissenschaft” or institutionalized science of sex. But sexology was often itself a marginal form of knowledge-making that emerged at the edges of more well-established disciplines like biomedicine, psychiatry, anthropology, and zoology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and itself propelled technologies of endocrinology, population control, and eugenics across the globe. Underfunded, overextended, and barely “respectable,” sexology’s portability across disciplines depended on its apparent liminality as a para-scientific idiom—one which could threaten to become a constitutive principle for the organization of those disciplines. In turn, sexology itself partook in the creation of boundaries between global/local, colonial/national, literature/science, language/vernacular, savage/civilized, science/pornography, normal/deviant, elite/popular, and modernity/premodernity. Recognizing these tensions, recent scholarship like Sexology and Translation (2015) and A Global History of Sexual Science (2018), “Sexology and its Afterlives” (2021), and “The Science of Sex Itself” (2023), as well as more specifically South Asian histories of sexology like “Translating Sex: Locating Sexology in Indian History” (2020), Indian Sex Life (2020) and Sex, Law, and the Politics of Age (2021) have focused on the regional and multi-directional linguistic flows, translations, and networked capacities of sexology. Building on the urgency of this scholarship, this panel brings together papers that leverage the unstable status of sexology as a science in and across South Asia. Panel papers consider the concept-metaphor of boundary through debates about geopolitics, circulation, and translation in terms of centers, peripheries, metropoles, colonies, and alternative circulatory nodes; disciplinary and methodological boundaries between sexology and allied or antagonistic forms of knowledge; and distinctions between expert and popular modes of sexual knowledge production.

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

Feminist scholars have long been concerned with the question of how to write women’s worlds, yet there are relatively few occasions to discuss articulations of gender and identity across disciplinary and methodological boundaries. Therefore, this panel engages enduring questions about gender, power, and representation in South Asia across disciplines including anthropology, art history, history, literary studies, and religious studies. The papers reflect on the possibilities and limitations of different methodological approaches, including archival research, ethnography, and literary and visual methods. Panelists directly engage the conference theme of “structure and spontaneity” by considering how gender and identity have been articulated by women in relation to broader structures of power, including those of race, class, caste, kinship, religion, and the state. Overall, the papers in this panel develop an appreciation of gendered identities as neither natural nor essential, nor simply imposed. By approaching gender as performance and positioning, the papers recover some of the ways that women have actively situated themselves in diverse contexts – whether as artistic agents at the Mughal courts; as aspiring actresses in the film industry of late colonial Bengal; or as protestors mobilizing the idiom of motherhood during the 2022 uprising in Sri Lanka. At the same time, the papers complicate any straightforward conclusions about the emancipatory possibilities of representing women’s lives and experiences. Rather, as the account of colonial and vernacular representations of the women victims of the 1908 Muzaffarpur bombing attests, scholars must retain an attentiveness to how women and their practices can be interpellated within broader frameworks of exclusion in contemporary South Asia. Through a multi-faceted engagement with the possibilities and limitations of representing women in South Asia, the panel aims to generate new insights into what it means to write about women and their worlds.

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

In this panel, undergraduate students will discuss how they conducted discipline specific research on Human-Elephant Conflict (HEC). As part of a grant funded project, students from the humanities and STEM fields will go to Sri Lanka to conduct research with the Sri Lanka Wildlife Conservation Society (SLWCS) on HEC. They approached the study of HEC from different disciplinary perspectives while also working with mentors and SLWCS researchers. HEC is defined as conflict between humans and elephants, where both are affected negativity. Elephants have cultural and economic importance in Sri Lanka, so their government contributes to their well-being. However, with population and farmland growing, there is less space for elephants and this sharing of space leads to conflicts. Students will present their research and experience as participants in an international research project around Wasgamuwa National Park in Sri Lanka. The natural environment and rural communities around the national park are an assemblage of government sponsored irrigation projects, humans and towns and their agriculture fields, and elephant herds and their grazing land. Working as a group, each student approached the study of HEC from their own disciplinary perspective, while working with on-campus mentors and SLWCS researchers to conduct research on HEC. In this panel, students will discuss their individual research and how their findings contribute to the overall knowledge and solutions surrounding HEC in Sri Lanka.

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

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

This proposal investigates how different theories and practices in Hinduism interact with anthropogenic climate change through four disciplinary lenses (Anthropology, Medicine, Theater/Performance, and Environment). These four papers are rooted in Hindu-centered practices embodied with topophilia, Ayurveda, theater, and divine ecologies. Combining both textual and ethnographic research strategies, they try to better understand the critical ways in which Hinduism can assist, alienate, and undermine conceptualizing responses to climate chaos. From the melting glaciers of the Himalayas in the Kedarnath Valley in northern India to the flooding Sundarbans in eastern India, from medieval medical texts in Ayurveda to the goddess Bhudevi in the sthala purana of a Tamil village and the god Samudra among Tamil women seaweed gatherers in southern India, this panel proposal presents four research papers which set out to question our previous certainties of ecological-friendly understandings embedded within Hinduism. Whether Hindu ecological-friendly understandings can translate into climate-chaos reducing Hindu practices, or whether Ayurvedic medicine gives insights into faulty climate causal awareness, or whether cultural theatrical practices in the Bengali delta contribute to changing behavior whether at the individual or collective levels, or whether the Hindu imagination of the sea among a union of women seaweed gatherers can shift awareness of warming ocean waters, all remains to be seen, but these four papers do ground-breaking work to begin to figure these questions out. These four papers are, indeed, theoretical and ethnographic forays into the seeming structure of what we think of as “Hindu traditions” and yet, their mingled, capacious ability to respond to the changing world around us, not necessarily spontaneously, but with a kind of cultural alertness to deeply shifting currents of our collective well-being, to the work of curbing carbon emissions.

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

In the mid and late 18th century, Asians and Europeans alike experienced India as an arena of considerable uncertainty but often, also, of opportunity. Our panelists focus on actors—merchants, diplomats, bankers, soldiering professionals, translators, princes, and Company officials—who nurtured ambitious visions of transformed political and economic geographies in the subcontinent and across the Indian Ocean. Towards that end, they crafted diplomatic missions, lent and received credit, and leveraged their alliances in order to navigate “entangled empires” in southern India, island Southeast Asia, and North India, making use of administrative instruments developed in both Mughal and post-Mughal contexts as they attempted to forge these futures. Our first speaker asks: What can we learn from a Hyderabadi succession war that attracted a panoply of eager investors, all hoping to position themselves for a future already shifting under their feet? Speaker 2 asks: What were the vocabularies, performances, and practices through which French Company officials gauged the creditworthiness of South Indian courts? Speaker 3 asks: In what ways did the priorities and interests of Asian passengers who set sail on French Company ships between Indian Ocean ports transect with those of Company officials–and in what ways did they not? Speaker 4 asks: How might an Afghan Durrani diplomatic intervention in Mughal politics shed light on the perceived likelihood of a subcontinental future that was not dominated by the British East India Company? Shifting away from teleologies of incipient colonization, our panelists seek to recover a world characterized not just by precarity, but by possibility.

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

In the last two decades, urban studies has emerged as a discipline of critical inquiry and theory-building in and on South Asia (Coelho and Sood, 2022). Inspired by the agenda of subaltern studies collective, urban studies scholars have questioned ‘North’-centric urban theorization and attendant continuities of empire. On one hand, introducing analytical frames such as agrarian urbanism (Gururani, 2020), occupancy urbanism (Benjamin, 2008), subaltern urbanisation (Mukhopadhyay et al., 2020), spatial adhocism (Ray, 2021), and caste-based racialization of urban space (Ranganathan 2022), they offer new conceptual understandings of South Asian urban conditions. On the other, they contribute to wider theoretical framings in partnership with other scholars working on the global South to theorize ‘Asian urbanism’ (Roy and Ong, 2011), ‘Southern urbanism’ (Bhan, 2019; Palat Narayanan, 2021), and the ‘Southeastern’ turn in urban theory (Yiftachel and Mammon, 2023). In the background of these contributions – and by placing ourselves within the confines of scholars working primarily on urban India – we seek to inquire: How do urban studies scholars (re)frame and/or mobilize South Asia? What does a South Asian lens offer to urban studies? What practices emerge from these discussions? What new methodologies do these conceptual reworkings offer? And finally, what dialogues could urban studies strike with other disciplines working on South Asia? This roundtable offers an alternative theorization and methodological framework that is iterative and establishes incompleteness as an important theoretical category to understand South Asian urbanism. It proposes a conversation between a group of early career scholars with exposure to urban praxis across South Asia. The speakers come from diverse backgrounds, genders and experiences. They currently hold positions ranging from assistant professor, lecturer, postdoctoral fellow, to Ph.D. candidates and students. This hybrid event shall predominantly promote in-person participation with two virtual attendees and proposes adding a discussant from ACSA attendees.

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

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

Panel Abstract: This panel discussion will explore different aspects of the challenges faced by the transgender community in Pakistan. Speaker 1 will discuss the discrimination and abuse experienced by the transgender community in various aspects of life, including healthcare, education, and employment. This discussion will highlight the need for the government to take steps to address the underlying social attitudes that perpetuate this discrimination and to provide medical care sensitive to their needs. Speaker 2 will explore the impact of transnational forces on the direction of transgender activism in Pakistan. The discussion will highlight how transgender activists resist ideas that do not resonate with them and negotiate with transnationalizing forces to represent gender nonconforming people in a culturally and religiously appropriate manner. Speaker 3 will discuss the negative and stereotypical portrayal of transgender people in the Pakistani print media. This research highlights the need for accurate and respectful representation of transgender people in Pakistani print media, the responsibility of media organizations to combat transphobia and promote social justice, and increased liaison between print media representatives and the transgender community. Speaker 4 will focus on the social barriers faced by the transgender community in Pakistan and their impact on mental health. This discussion will emphasize the need for special attention to support the education of transgender individuals, provide healthcare facilities without discrimination, and improve legislation and laws for their protection. Finally, Speaker 5 will address the barriers to education for transgender children in Pakistan and suggest solutions to these challenges. The discussion will highlight the need for inclusive policies, teachers' training, and awareness campaigns to promote an environment that is safe and supportive of transgender children's education. Overall, this panel discussion aims to raise awareness and suggest solutions to the issues faced by the transgender community in Pakistan. 

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

This panel brings together papers that examine how state institutions were built in South Asia and examines the role of institutional rules, party strategies and norms in explaining the differences in development and democratization. The papers cover a range of topics, that looks at the role of religious institutions, political selection and behavior, party strategy and societal norms that help us understand democratic deepening in South Asia.

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

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Session: Session 7: Friday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Parlour Room 638
Floor: Floor 6

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

Since 2008 the Indian state has initiated projects of digitalization centred on the Aadhaar unique identity project alongside a host of allied platforms. These aggregations of state and non-state actors delivered a host of neoliberalising tendencies we trace back to the 1980s and the reforms of 1991. Today, this techno-political transition cannot be interpreted without its most recent iteration under Narendra Modi’s BJP after 2014, which operationalizes these technologies as part of a discursive and material project to “Transform India”. We take as our object of study the triad of liberalization, digitalization and Hindutva. The years 1991, 2008, 2014 serve as a minimal genealogy and a shorthand for this broad conjuncture we tentatively title “techno-illiberalism”. Digital infrastructures like Aadhaar and the Unified Payments Interface are both a set of media infrastructures that contribute to very material neoliberal restructurings as well as projections of desirable Hindu nationalist futures. Our framing of Hindutva ties the fulfillment of ethno-nationalism and grassroots communalism to a shifting hegemonic order. The underlying logic of this re-ordering is a replacement of "state, science and technology" with another promise: if big science once provided what Ashish Nandy has called the “reason of the state”, today that role is played by computer engineering, with concomitant shifts in institutions and expertise. The rise of database-based technical systems provides the state with new capabilities to target both undeserving beneficiaries of welfare and underperforming employees as well as migrants and Muslims. This panel attempts to respond to this conjuncture with methodological pluralism that combines an account of shifts in economic systems, class structures, and labour relations; hegemonic ambitions and imaginaries of Modi’s brand of Hindutva; and the techno-material realignments afforded by technical infrastructures.

Session: Session 9: Saturday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Conference Room 1
Floor: Floor 2

This panel showcases new approaches to non-elite figures in early modern South Asia, aiming to highlight how such figures navigated complex systems of coercion and dependence. Recent work on the early modern period has increasingly brought into focus the importance of examining historical actors beyond elites as well as social milieux beyond imperial centers, even as it has emphasized the very real challenges posed by archives that are persistently centered on ruling elites and their closest associates. This panel will build on this prior work in a range of ways, through bringing attention to specific social categories such as enslaved domestic servants, performers, and convict labor, to consider the spectrum of locations and forms of asymmetrical social relations attested to in sources including court chronicles, documents, correspondence, and inscriptions. Papers will explore the representation of these relationships as well as the complex realities of dependency and service, with an eye to how they may have shaped the ability of non-elite figures to navigate and negotiate the worlds in which they lived. In the process, the panel will seek to bring out the differences as well as potential parallels across distinct locations, languages, genres, forms of labor, and historical contexts. Working with both the much-discussed problems of silence and omission of non-elite voices, as well as the limits introduced by elite bias and genre, papers will present specific case studies for thinking through the possibilities and challenges to understanding the social worlds inhabited by non-elite figures, as reflected in archival sources in languages including Sanskrit, Persian and Marathi.

Session: Session 9: Saturday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Conference Room 3
Floor: Floor 2

In 1958, at the height of language-based movements in India, the Times of India described speech as “subtle, elusive, and pervading like the air.” Even as radical linguistic change was often at the core of these political movements, this statement emphasizes the intractability of language itself. Taking this observation as a starting point, this panel examines intersections of language and politics in mid-twentieth century North and Northeast India. Bringing together literary history, caste studies, linguistics, and the history of emotions, individual papers map the changing modes of political and cultural belonging, collectivity, and identity that impinged on the politics of language. The panel deploys diverse disciplinary perspectives to examine how different South Asian languages enable and limit new political and cultural projects throughout the twentieth century. Working with archives in English, Hindi, Urdu, and Manipuri, individual papers ask: What competing vocabularies do Indian languages offer to social movements during rapidly changing political and economic circumstances? How is language mobilized to imagine new political futures in postcolonial South Asia? In what ways do non-elite articulations of linguistic concerns contest elite conceptions? By answering these questions, we examine hitherto unexplored political vocabularies in Indian languages posed by archeologists, intellectuals, poets, journalists, and political figures, and trace the overlapping literary, political, and professional contexts in which they are produced. Through highlighting the unanticipated ways in which these political vocabularies are mobilized by new social movements, this panel indicates the critical role of language as an axis for uncovering new relationships between caste, region, religion, and politics in South Asia.

Session: Session 9: Saturday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Conference Room 5
Floor: Floor 2

This panel explores the manifold ways in which Punjabi women have marshalled themselves through song, shifting rigid temporal, social, and political structures through the spontaneities possible in ephemeral moments of performance. Panelists tease out the tension between public and private in a range of performance geographies through time: from late 19th century Lahore and Amritsar, to various diasporas in mid-twentieth century and contemporary California (Yuba City and Stockton), and from weddings in late twentieth century west Punjab (Faisalabad and Sargodha) and east Punjab (Jalandhar district) to the contemporary digital sphere. In seeking out the porosity between public and private, each paper deconstructs the gendered nature of performance genres in Punjab, by foregrounding moments of spontaneity and transgression, e.g., the exceptionalism of women performing masculinised genres like bhangra and their instruments like the dhol. Such questions also allow us to consider the participatory element of audiences–which can vary from large global constituencies to the formal stage and from familial/ kin-based circles to microcosms of women’s spaces to no audience at all. These peripheries of reception extend to cultures of listenership, reader response, and digital comments. We also examine liminal spaces of female sociality as caught in glimpses, interruptions, and intervals such as siyaapaa (women’s mourning songs), wedding songs, and digital media forms. The panel is especially focussed on the notion of ‘excess’, in terms of excessive female sexualities and excessive affect, and the various contexts and cultures of suppression and reform that mobilize against them, citing/ creating norms of appropriate behaviour in public settings.

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

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

This round table engages with the recent book of Subho Basu on the making of Bangladesh. Departing from the traditional view of seeing the birth of Bangladesh through the prism of India Pakistan war, Subho Basu’s recent book Intimation Revolution: Global Sixties and the making of Bangladesh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) explains the rise of Bengali nationalism in East Pakistan in 1950s and 60s in terms of interaction between global politics and local social and economic developments. It traces how the rise of the military bureaucratic junta in Pakistan politics and their developmental priorities were influenced by modernization dogma among US policymakers and their cold war understandings. Simultaneously, facing internal colonization by the Pakistani military-bureaucratic regime, Bengali Muslims developed their own ideas of a new nation borrowing from decolonization in Asia, Africa, and Latin America in the 1950s and 60s. Powerful students and labour movements in East Pakistan were inspired by anti-colonial movements in the global sixties ranging from the Algerian anti-colonial war, Cuban revolution, Congolese national liberation struggle and peace movements supporting Vietnam. Similarly, the Sino-Soviet rivalry of the sixties deeply impacted student radicals and labour activists. The revolution of 1969, culminating in the national liberation struggle in 1971 was informed and influenced by the global sixties. Thus, the global sixties transformed the political landscape of Pakistan and facilitated the birth of Bangladesh. This round table locates the book in the context of the global sixties and the politics of unified Pakistan and moves beyond the confinement of the book.