Annual Conference on South Asia

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

“Fixing” has various definitions associated with curing, repairing, treating, making steady, and maintaining, among others. How might we approach relationships between a diverse set of actors that lead to or involve “a fix?” Changes to infrastructure, bodies, and policies are often framed in terms of development, improvement, and innovation. In this symposium, participants work through “the fix” as a means of interrupting grand and teleological notions of development in order to consider what might occur between the poles of failure and progress, brokenness and wholeness, cure and disability, and decay and generation. “The fix” includes both pragmatic and creative modes of engagement as diverse actors attempt to make do, maintain and adjust. We intend “the fix” to function in multiple registers involving different kinds of valuation; “the fix” can also be nefarious at the same time that it is ingenious. “The fix” is good enough or sometimes not enough; the concept of “jugaad” serves as an example of this ambivalence in the ways that it is both scorned and embraced as a value and mode of living. “The fix” is also a play on questions of mobility and immobility in that while the state and corporate actors attempt to fix bodies and capital in place (and yet keep them flexible as their needs require), we look at different forms of unfixing that happen. “The fix” has temporal aspects as well: there can be short-term, mid-range, and long-term fixes, each with its own stakes. “Fixing” can also create new side narratives that chip away, stain, or otherwise compromise grander narratives.

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

Urdu has developed a rich and evolving terminology in parallel with its long tradition of literary criticism. The 2018 Urdu Symposium seeks to continue and expand upon the 2017 Preconference, “How (Not) to Write the History of Urdu Literature,” by examining a set of key terms central to literary production and critical reception. By tracing changes in the signification and cultural associations of these key terms, participants aim to emulate the example of Raymond Williams’ influential Keywords (1976) in order to establish a shared framework for future studies of Urdu literary history. Questions that the papers may address include How do Urdu literary terms and critical approaches mediate authority in specific historical, cultural, and geographic settings? In what hierarchical ways do aesthetic, institutional, and critical terms mark boundaries or bridge connections among authors, critics, and audiences? What does the adaptation of Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit, English, and other terminologies in the Urdu critical tradition reveal about the limits of translation? What’s at stake when Urdu sources are analyzed in English, Persian, etc.? What are the primary sources through which the genealogies of specific terms might be established? How might we expand this list to include other media and the contributions of underrepresented communities? How might one conduct research on language and concepts without reifying the very categories that are being described? Can Urdu’s plurality and complicated interactions with other literatures be recognized while maintaining shared intelligibility? Symposium participants will be required to precirculate draft entries so that we may devote the daylong event to giving brief (approximately 5-minute) presentations followed by more substantial discussions of methods and sources. Participants will have the option of publishing their work immediately as part of Professor Frances Pritchett’s website or other future collaborations (e.g., through an edited volume or special issue of a journal).

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

For the 5th annual symposium of the Regional Bhakti Scholars Network (RSBN), we propose to focus on ethnographic approaches to the study of bhakti. The aim is to balance the textual and broadly historical emphases of previous RSBN symposia. We anticipate that ethnographic perspectives will suggest approaches and raise questions for those who work on textual and archeological materials pertaining to bhakti. We also expect to address ethical issues arising from fieldwork with living communities. This symposium encourages presenters to share new or ongoing fieldwork that contributes to our understanding of living bhakti and its multiple expressions in the contemporary world of South Asia. This includes both communities grounded on medieval bhakti traditions and new forms of devotional expression and community arising in colonial and post-colonial South Asia. How do today’s communities offer strategies for living in the fast-changing nations of southern Asia? In what ways does participation in a bhakti community offer ways of reframing citizenship and the relationship of individual and society? How do modern phenomena of mobility and national (and international) media affect questions of regionality and vernacularism in contemporary bhakti? In what ways are devotional performative traditions changing in contemporary settings? Are there changes in aesthetic understandings of bhakti arts? The symposium theme also acknowledges the challenges that scholars working with contemporary bhakti communities encounter with respect to questions of authority, power, and ethics. We encourage discussion on a range of ethical issues and real-time concerns that affect research with people whose practices and ideals have repercussions on bhakti research. What ethical concerns arise when the field researcher establishes trust and is given access to data whose publication could bring harm to the informant or community?

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

Ethnic cleansing in Myanmar prompts a massive displacement of 700,000 Rohingya refugees into Bangladesh, radically re-configuring demography, ecology, and politics along the border. China’s One-Belt-One-Road program prompts massive new infrastructure projects linking South Western China and Southeast Asia to Bangladesh and to India through the sensitive Northeast. The imperatives of preparing for climate change reconfigure the Sundarbans region, highlighting the disastrous consequences of imagining the forest as neatly divided by a border. Realities and perceptions of migration from Bangladesh into Assam lead to waves of violence and a resurgence of ethno-nationalist politics. Calls for self-governance in Darjeeling and a redrawing of the internal boundaries of West Bengal prompt state blockades and media blackouts. As these examples suggest, Eastern South Asia’s borders—internal and external—are in a moment of tremendous flux. How do these separate issues articulate with one another? What kind of new connections, flows, and politics emerge through and around them? How do these headline grabbing issues mask other, more everyday strategies of border navigation? In what ways do these shifts interact with longstanding cultural, religious, and ethnic practices and linkages across borders? And what are the longer histories that animate contemporary challenges to these comparatively recent border configurations? The symposium seeks to bring together scholars working across social science, humanities, and policy arenas to raise new questions about the current moment and to link it to longer trajectories and processes of making and unmaking borders in Eastern South Asia. By bringing together scholars working in India’s Northeast, Bangladesh, and West Bengal, we hope to contextualize these contemporary crises as part of a broader regional transformation. In doing so, we seek to connect past to present in a critical region where the future hangs in the balance.

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

We propose to organize the third annual “Science, Technology, and Medicine (STM) in South Asia Symposium,” around the theme “Medicine and Memory: Temporal Aspirations, Continuities, Ruptures and the Now Across Medical Traditions.” This symposium will engage issues of temporality, periodization and engagements with the past and future, from historiographic, ethnographic and philological perspectives. We envision bringing together scholars working across South Asian medical traditions, including biomedicine, Naturopathy, Ayurveda, Unani, Siddha, and Sowa Rigpa medicines. We also plan to include an equal number of graduate students and faculty members to stimulate creative discussion, encourage mentorship, and facilitate future collaborations. Invited scholars work across time periods in a range of fields including anthropology, history, philology, feminist and gender studies, science studies, post-colonial theory, media studies, and literary studies in Sanskrit, Malayalam, Urdu, Persian, Arabic, Bengali and other languages. The stakes of authority, authenticity, and efficacy in medical traditions often rely upon claims made upon the past, in the form of treatises, historical or imagined personages, and narratives of continuity or rupture. In this symposium we are particularly interested in considering temporal engagements reflected in the often-intersecting and interacting medical traditions that we study. This is particularly urgent in a moment of rising ethnocentric nationalisms across the region. With attention to the coexistence of plural medical systems, this symposium is underpinned by an interest in the hybrid modes of historical sensibility through which medical practices transform. Ranging from pre-colonial narratives of cosmic and mythic time to more recent manifestations that celebrate developmental progress as essential modalities of the nation-state, this symposium seeks to examine how South Asian medical traditions are not static and unchanging, but transform alongside their associated temporal imaginations.

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

This one-day symposium offers a comparative thematic investigation of textual traditions, rituals, architecture forms, and lived practices associated with tombs, shrines, samadhis, relics and related built environments in South Asian religions. Central questions for the symposium include: What theological and ritual precepts inform the practice of burial around holy figures, saints and gurus? Can we identify cross-regional or cross-communal patterns for such practice while remaining sensitive to the development of local, vernacular and sectarian articulations? How have samadhis, tombs and dargahs been used to expand and perpetuate the presence/control of religious institutions within (or across) regions? What has been the role of devotional and other initiatory movements (sampradays) in propagating the cult of deceased leaders? Conversely, how has the spread of built memorials helped in the emplacement and sacralization of new territory? Finally, how do people today interact with, live around, transform or engage such built environments across the subcontinent? Through these questions, this symposium will facilitate productive give-and-take between the particular and the general, the local and the trans-local, the bounded and unbounded play of community formation and lived religious practice in South and Southeast Asia. The panel organizers share disciplinary training in religious studies, with particular regional engagements in western, northern and eastern South Asia. With this symposium they aim to promote cross-disciplinary and cross-regional conversation around the spatial and historical manifestations of various tradition-based responses to death, interment, memorialization, pilgrimage and architecture. Participants in the symposium thus include specialists in archaeology, art history, religious studies and history and employ related methods for interrogating a range of spatial practices, ritual environments, gender roles, and aesthetic traditions. Our goal is to foster not only in-depth study of particular sites, ritual complexes and built structures but also comparison around the role of these elements throughout South Asian history.

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

This symposium will bring together seventeen scholars from a variety of ranks, disciplines and countries doing groundbreaking work on the subject of impersonation/guising/embodiment in modern and early modern South Asia. The expected outcome of the symposium is an edited volume on Impersonation in South Asia, which will be the first scholarly source to examine impersonation both in contemporary performative and quotidian contexts across South Asia. We understand impersonation as the temporary assumption of an identity or guise of a group that is not one’s own in social and aesthetic performative contexts, including the same as expressed in literature. Our broad reading of this term allows us to investigate ways in which people have sought to affectively perform/assume different identities across a representative selection of media and cultural forms in South Asia. Subjects explored range from the impersonation of real people (cultural icons) and fantasy beings (comic book characters) to more diffuse and overdetermined forms of impersonation entangled with issues of race, gender, social station, the supernatural and the divine. An important contribution of this symposium is that it will reflect on the material conditions under which these identities are socially constructed, and interrogate sites of hegemonic control relating to gender, sexuality, white race capital, and the North-South divide, taking into account entrenched social inequities, globalization, neoliberalism, and postcolonialism. Our collective work will expand on the term ‘impersonation’ by positing vernacular categories and examples from South Asia, ones that encapsulate and expand upon our understanding of guising which has so far been mostly situated in Euro-American contexts. This symposium will also work to break down the presumed innate dichotomy between social performance of the everyday and aesthetic performance on stage. Our project requires sustained collaboration and discussion especially on the theoretical framework for the volume, thus a full-day symposium is warranted.

Session: Symposium - Full Day
Room: Madison College D240 - 2
Floor: Madison College

The place of the agrarian has been a persistent question for the social sciences going back to the late-nineteenth century. The emergence of modern social scientific disciplines itself was concurrent with intensified commodification and the locking into place of a new global structural hierarchy. The ‘agrarian question’ was a real problem of economic policy as it was one at the heart of the provenance, chronology and possibilities of capitalism as objects of enquiry through to the mid-twentieth century. Scholars of South Asia have paid particular attention to the agrarian for most of the twentieth century. As scholarly interest came to focus on urban spaces, global networks and elite and subaltern cultural production, the agrarian question receded to the background in an era when metropolitan globalization appeared to be the inescapable reality. Even as the agrarian receded as the object of study, it continued to form the bedrock of enquiries amongst students of South Asia through, for example, a renewed focus on law in its normative aspects, as well as a more fluid socio-economic history of legal forms and the politics of Dalit and lower-caste labor. How do we make sense of the patterns of accumulation and forms of distributional conflict that characterize South Asia’s political economy in the present? In what ways do debates over spatial transformation, environmental degradation, and caste and gender hierarchies challenge our understanding of the current intersections between economic inequality, democratic crisis, and an emergent politics surrounding climate change? This interdisciplinary panel brings together emerging and senior researchers to reflect upon the ways in which these issues have returned scholars to the sources that used to form the subject of an older tradition of agrarian history in an attempt to bring questions of materiality and economy to bear on the urgent political changes of our time.

Session: Symposium - Half Day, Morning
Room: Conference Room 1
Floor: Floor 2

Important and far-reaching debates on current issues in Islamic law are taking place in Muslim traditionalist circles in South Asia. In India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, traditionally educated Muslim scholars (known as the 'ulama') of varying ideological stripes are participating in public debates on highly charged and divisive matters. For instances, issues such as blasphemy, women’s rights, defining rape, the normative status of modern technology in the shari‘a etc. are vigorously argued by ‘ulama’ in South Asia. These are significant internal debates that do not make it to morning headlines of newspapers. However, grasping the internal logics and aspirations of such debates is critical to developing a richer and more nuanced narrative of the Islamic legal tradition in South Asia. This symposium attempts this task. It explores the competing ways in which South Asian ‘ulama’ put the canonical tradition of Islamic law to work in modern contexts. The central question this symposium addresses is this: how do Muslim religious thinkers in modern South Asia deal with the historical legacy of norms and values in encounters with new conditions? The short answer is: eagerly, unevenly, and in a messy manner. For some, the virtues, predispositions, and models of the good as elaborated in their instruction manuals and as articulated by the ancient authorities remain the ideal. For others, the entire system of norms and virtues has to be rethought and overhauled. And then, there is a spectrum of scholars who find themselves in between these two polarities. The objective of this symposium is to illumine the varieties of interpretive norms, temperaments, and aesthetics that populate the Muslim legal tradition in South Asia. It does so by presenting specific illustrations of the multiple and often conflicting ways in which the limits of law and tradition are contested by contemporary South Asian ‘ulama.’

Session: Symposium - Half Day, Morning
Room: Conference Room 5
Floor: Floor 2

From the sensoriums of streets to the production of fine arts to the tracing of ephemera that circulated spaces, aesthetic production in South Asia has historically formed and framed the modes through which the subcontinent is imagined and experienced. Beginning in the colonial legacies of Indian and English aesthetic production and tracing these legacies into the present, this symposium aims to engage with the role aesthetics play in constructions of political and political economic power in South Asia. We seek to interrogate artistic practices through their role in transnational relations, industrial and urban development, governmentality, and political subject formation. As such, we will address a diverse range of aesthetic categories, from photography, reproductive prints and film to textiles, architecture, mapping, and urban space in the shaping of modern South Asia’s political economy. The one day symposium aims to closely interrogate, through interdisciplinary engagements in architecture, art history, and anthropology (among others), the powerful role aesthetics has played and continues to play in the subcontinent. Together we hope to debate the historical transformations and genealogies of aesthetics in India, think through their socio-cultural importance, and envision the role they might play in contemporary and future South Asian societies.

Session: Symposium - Half Day, Afternoon
Room: Conference Room 1
Floor: Floor 2

This past summer, a months-long standoff between India and China once again brought to the world stage the disputed borders between the world’s two most populous countries. While political commentators were quick to point to nationalist sabre-rattling as a prime factor, a growing number of scholars have begun to explore the deeper histories of South Asia’s numerous disputed borders; Willem van Schendel’s categorization of the legacies of Radcliffean, McMahonian, and Kashmirian “border issues” being among the more recent (2013). At the heart of these analyses lies the emergence of new conceptions of sovereignty, territoriality, and legitimacy in the modern world, that came to be positioned against older ways of organizing national life. Examining this complex and temporally uneven process in turn raises a series of questions that this symposium seeks to answer: How do changes and continuities in conceptions of sovereignties (both multi-layered and absolute) reflect the transition to postcolonial nation-states? To what extent are the cartographic anxieties of today’s nation-states inheritances of the ideologies and technologies of governance deployed by erstwhile colonial states? And how can historians divided by area studies boundaries, such as East, Central, and South Asia, collectively imagine innovative ways of understanding problems that traverse national borders? Finally, how can we move beyond statist frameworks to explore how the peoples of Asia have creatively accommodated cultural, political, religious, and environmental difference?

Session: Symposium - Half Day, Afternoon
Room: Conference Room 3
Floor: Floor 2

The aim of this symposium is to facilitate a dialogue between the fields of South Asian Studies and Performance Studies, by bringing together scholars and artists who work at the intersection of these two disciplines. In so doing, it addresses two major lacunae: The under-representation of performance as a tool and an object of analysis in the study of South Asia; and the dominant Euro-American-centrism of the discourse of Performance Studies. Performance Studies’ origins as a field can be found in works such as Richard Schechner’s and Victor Turner’s, which combined anthropology and performance in order to examine cultural ritual in India. This symposium will give a new generation of scholars the chance to build on and update the relationship between South Asia and Performance Studies, insisting on a decolonial lens that honors the work emerging from South Asia as critical to investigating what Performance Studies has to offer as a relatively new discipline. This year, we will focus on how performative analysis might generate new understandings of subjects as diverse as the neoliberal Indian city or the staging of Sanskrit epics. The performance pre-conference in 2017 hosted presentations on a range of topics, including diasporic audiobook performance, meditative practices in Sri Lanka, clubs in colonial Calcutta, and contemporary Tamil Dance championships. We look forward to continuing the discussions that started there, as well as developing the papers we receive this year for an edited volume, the first of its kind to use a Performance Studies methodology, as opposed to a theatre or dance-oriented approach, to explore the rich cultures of South Asia. Our speakers will include both established and emerging scholars and artists of South Asian theatre, dance, and ritual. We aim to include voices who blur disciplinary boundaries by using performance as a lens to study the world.

Session: Symposium - Half Day, Afternoon
Room: Conference Room 5
Floor: Floor 2

For Amilcar Cabral, national liberation and anti-colonial praxis remain hollow “unless they can be translated into a real improvement of living conditions.” Despite the emergence of supposedly postcolonial societies, the relentless drive of neoliberal capital coopts modes of domination left behind by colonialism, continuously reshaping these to suit the present. Yet, these forces are confronted by people organized along the lines of religion, region, language, class, caste, gender, race, and—most often—at the intersections of these identities. This symposium will examine the constitution of the aesthetic politics of such resistant bodies and groups. We will explore how struggles in the field of cultural production do not simply mirror, but rather actively shape civil society. Given the multiplicity of resistance, the range of our questions is similarly diverse: how are Dalit and Muslim activists continuing their fight for representation and acceptance in an increasingly upper-caste, Hindutva-izing society? How do criminal tribes resist their stigmatization through theatrical performance? How are South Asian women and non-binary activists responding to the persistence of sexist, classist, and caste-ist forms of domination, and what is the role of student activism and global socio-cultural movements such as #MeToo in this struggle? How are farmers and indigenous peoples dealing with neoliberal expropriation? In what ways are the urban poor resisting the massive gentrification and urbanization projects in cities like Mumbai? Finally: how are resistant communities, situated antagonistically in relation to the neocolonial state, challenging its ideological and repressive apparatuses? Overall, this panel addresses questions that challenge normative interpretations of postcolonial South Asia. We will focus on how diverse struggles are waged, tracing the historical development of current forms of resistance to explore the continuing importance of culture in these unfinished contestations for liberation.

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

These papers explore the interplay of landscapes and monuments through specific sites located in present day Pakistan, India, and Sri Lanka. Made of brick and stone, rather than the ephemeral materials of quotidian spaces, monuments were enduring objects that transformed the physical terrain into which they were embedded for generations. From rulers and guilds to courtesans and religious specialists, investing in architectural monuments was a practice that cut across social hierarchies and gender boundaries in premodern South Asia. Studies of South Asian monuments, however, have tended to valorize originary moments of construction, focusing upon how historical actors invested in architectural programs. Recent scholarship makes marked progress toward situating architectural practices within particular historical and social contexts, but the intentions and motivations that underpin such practices have not yet been fully explored. This panel considers why donors and artisans constructed social spaces with monuments. By exploring how monuments were designed to evoke or provoke a response from the people who encountered them, this panel demonstrates how objects were imbued with layers of significance that were continuously transformed by their human interlocutors. The three papers discuss the engagement of built structures with existing physical topography to materialize particular aims and aspirations. Elizabeth Cecil shows how the Gupta rulers of North India mobilized the ritual efficacy of columns by adapting them as sites for political inscriptions. Divya Kumar-Dumas reads the 7th- to 13th-century ‘graffiti’ at Sigiriya as a visitor record, which employed aesthetic strategies conventional to the experience of Buddhist constructed landscapes. Fatima Quraishi approaches the Makli necropolis in Sindh through epigraphy, examining how inscriptions stimulated movement and contemplation through a ritualized act of reading. In so doing, this panel considers what histories can be recovered through examinations of encounter, reception, and aleatory effects of monuments.

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

The word avatara is best rendered into English by the word descent, commonly associated with the god Vishnu. We contend that this word can also function as a term for understanding a range of cultural, literary, and religious phenomena in premodern South Asia. On the one hand, the concept of avatara functions as a channel through which heaven and earth are connected. On the other hand, these stories of descent also connect various pan-Indian traditions and geographies with regional ones. Within local settings, the concept of avatara is a productive framework for understanding cultural networks and their function. We thus present this term as a type of vocabulary through which various groups and communities could articulate new ideas about place, social hierarchies, politics, gender, and religion. llanit Loewy Shacham examines Vishnu’s ten descents (dasavataras) within the context of second-millennium Telugu poetry and its connection to various bhakti and literary traditions. She demonstrates how dasavataras are used to highlight the ways in which gender changes the path of devotion for both deity and devotee. Sivan Goren Arzony takes on Parasurama, Vishnu’s sixth avatara, and the connection of the Pan-Indian to the local, southern geography of Kerala, through sixteenth-century Maṇipravāḷam literature. Focusing on Kerala politics and religion, she explores the different meanings that Parasurama gains when projected onto a local setting. Sarah Pierce Taylor discusses Krishnite stories as a site of intersectarian conflict in Jain literature and, in particular, the story of Vasudeva’s many marriages. While the Vaishnava impact on Jainism has been read as evidence of interreligious dialogue, Taylor argues that Krishna mythology was also served as a site to negotiate internal disputes. Taken together, these papers outline a web of connections in which the vertical links associated with the term avatara expand horizontally, permeating throughout south India.

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

Writings on Bangladesh present it as a naturalized entity, a nation state whose arrival was inevitable within the historical processes of the region. Its emergence out of a bloody war marks these writings with a wounded quality. Its diagnosed state of underdevelopment further necessitates it play the impossible game of catch up. To these various arcs and horizons has recently been added the encroachment of climate change from the future. We propose the notion of the untimely to stay these inevitabilities. The untimely, as we understand it, is not moved by urgency, arrives at a scene belatedly, sounds anachronistic and emphasizes unlikely lateral relations or relations to the transcendental. It may disturb standing reality, hint at subjugated knowledge, posit unlikely agents and allies, yet invariably fail to achieve anything. But it is a certain kind of achievement to stop, or at least stall, well-worn narratives and representations of Bangladesh to create the possibility for newness. Our papers traverse different historical periods and political presents claimed for Bangladesh, each of which is informed by a certain urgency, in order to draw out the untimely within them. Here presented are storytelling that draws inspiration from actual acts of dreaming within a pre-partition Bengali rural community, Pakistan period tussles between capital and state building in the determination of steamer routes in East Pakistan, ongoing territorial conflicts between businessmen and pirates along the southern coast of contemporary Bangladesh that continually disrupt high modernist development visions, and village gossip in southwest Bangladesh that stay the erasure of local experiences of risk and precarity within climate discourse. The untimely helps illuminate the obduracy of the rural, the riverine and the coastal not just for an environmental account but also a political vantage upon Bangladesh.

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

India’s hegemonic position in South Asia is presently being challenged by China. The Sino-Indian relationship is complex. While economic cooperation is increasing, the countries also have a history of conflict and disagreement. In recent years tensions have surfaced with regard to border disputes, increased Chinese investments in India’s neighboring countries as well as with regard to China’s gigantic Belt and Road Initiative. This panel addresses how China’s growth influences Indian strategic thinking. Two aspects pertaining to the Sino-Indian relationship stand out as particularly important. The first aspect is concerned with how China’s expansion influences India’s relations with its immediate neighbors. Relevant cases include how Indian strategic thinking responds to the China-Pakistan axis and how India approaches its neighbors to the north and east: Nepal, Bangladesh and Myanmar. The second aspect looks beyond the region of South Asia insofar as the panel addresses how India seeks to balance the expansion of China by entering strategic partnerships with countries outside the South Asian region, most prominently with Japan and the US. The latter aspect also has to be understood within the framework of India’s so-called Act East strategy. This strategy emphasizes stronger cooperation with countries in South East Asia and East Asia, both economically and strategically.

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

Today wage-labor relations seem to be not only universal but also self-evident. The scholarship to date has provided many valuable perspectives on contemporary political economic processes. Yet what labor is and what it does often seem to be left implicit. Rather, the focus tends to be on the ways that surplus value is extracted from working bodies, minds, groups of people. This panel complicates existing approaches by taking labor itself as a category of action and self/perception that is produced, negotiated, and contested in diverse workplaces across South Asia. At stake are different notions of what labor actions mean and what effects they may have in the world and on the selves of workers. We attend to the ways in which workers frame experiences of labor both discursively and materially. Taking these issues seriously means attending to the terms—is it “work,” “labor,” or “toil”—but also to the ways in which work is remunerated and the social relations it creates, maintains, or destroys. Farm labor in Bihar is shaped by ideological framings of agricultural work as variously positioned workers negotiate the vital but also “dirty” tasks it entails. Canal revenue accountants in Pakistan’s Punjab province navigate the consequences of the devaluation of bureaucratic work into diharii (daily labor). Construction workers in Delhi attempt to avoid similar devaluations by distancing themselves from mere “labor work.” In Lahore’s waste infrastructure productivity emerges out of the conjunction between relations of trade and those of work, such that money, materials, and value can circulate within an informal economy. Approaching work as a constantly negotiated and shifting category, the papers on this panel rethink key questions in the study of labor in South Asia around the politics of dignity and remuneration, informality, corruption – of bodies and selves, and the transformation of personhood.

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

Mobility is a highly gendered process in which the politics of access and equitable use manifest as uneven landscapes embedded in socio-cultural norms in variegated multi-contextual spaces. In many South Asian cities endemic sexual harassment on crowded public transport has contributed to the recent growth in women using scooters creating their own safer “mobility-scapes” leading to a sense of independence and empowerment. Yet the politics of the state reifies its patriarchal control passing laws limiting women’s mobility. For example, in Nepal the state has imposed a ban on women under thirty traveling abroad for work, there are rumors of a dress code for women driving scooters, and the new constitution still denies women equal citizenship transferal rights. This panel seeks to explore contemporary gendered South Asian mobilities within trans-disciplinary fields. We will focus on lived “mobility-scapes” as continuously evolving processes that both inhabit and construct social landscapes nested in contested geo-political, political economic, multi-cultural, and imaginary landscapes. Using heterogeneous lens across disciplines this panel aspires to expand and articulate unfolding discussions concerning the intersection of gender and mobility in South Asia.

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

Narcotics and other pharmaceutical substances have long been central to experiences and ideas of governance, subjectivity, and health in South Asia. Opium linked the subcontinent to East and Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean arena, and in time, Europe and the United States, and structured the work and lives of smugglers, sovereigns, and subalterns, well beyond the poppy heartland of the Malwa plateau. Today, Indian opium has found new lives in the international pharmacopeia and in new illicit economies, while the rise of new multinational pharmaceutical concerns has transformed India’s landscape of production, use, and abuse. This panel brings together anthropologists and historians to consider the changing terrain of narcotics, addiction, and pharmaceutical work in South and Southeast Asia. It attends to the work of colonial chemists situating opium comparatively against other “vices,” links Indian opium to drug wars in Southeast Asia during the Second World War, and examines the economic interplay between Indian and Turkish opium production for American and European pharmaceutical markets. The panel will also focus on regulatory regimes and anxieties that constrain the provision of opioid pain medication for end-stage cancer patients in Pakistan as well as the biomediatization of the opioid epidemic in the border districts of Indian Punjab. Carefully considering opioids and their antagonists via recent developments in anthropology and STS—namely attunements to chemosociality and toxic methodologies—this panel will contribute to the ongoing efforts by ethnographers and historians to think chemically in ways that reckon with the long histories, promises, and perils of the chemical prosthetic (Shapiro and Kirksey 2017). Together, this panel offers new directions for the study of narcotic pasts, presents, and futures on the Indian subcontinent.

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

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

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Session: Session 1: Friday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Madison College D240 - 1
Floor: Madison College

This round table considers the foundational work of multi-person blog and forum Sepia Mutiny (SM, 2004-2012) in the formation of South Asian America as a popular coalitional identity intended to circumvent divisions subcontinental and domestic. SM acted as a center of digital gravity for a national and transnational community that did not exist until it came together via the site. Its posts on politics and popular culture fueled substantive discussions among its 60+ mutineers (bloggers) and 15,000 daily readers, across 5,300 posts and 250,000 comments. This timely session will address a recent turn toward a more politicized popular discourse around and by South Asian Americans. Although raising awareness, this newer movement centers a narrow range of voices. Examining the politics and labor of maintaining SM as a radically coalitional space, we ask what lessons the site holds for current activism and advocacy. Ethnomusicologist and mutineer Nilanjana Bhattacharjya will address the critical role SM played building community in the post-9/11 years for many South Asian Americans outside metropolitan areas, and the legacies of collaboration and connection that SM has engendered among a particular generation of South Asian Americans. Literature scholar and mutineer Amardeep Singh will argue that debates over the mainstreaming of South Asian American identity hashed out in the niche space of SM were precursors to the more recent work of comedians such as Ansari, Minhaj, and Nancherla. The contours of those earlier debates suggest where the mainstream debate may be headed. Media scholar Lia Wolock will place SM in conversation with the literature on publics and counterpublics to argue that SM can best be understood as a polyvocal public, a public that cannot exist except as many-voiced and aware of its own impossibility. Novelist and mutineer V. V. Ganeshananthan will chair the round table.

Session: Session 1: Friday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Madison College Meeting Room 1
Floor: Madison College

This is the story of Bapsi Sidhwa, the eminent Zoroastrian writer who overcame a lonely and painful childhood scarred with illness to become an internationally acclaimed novelist. One of the first women writers to write in English from the Indian subcontinent, Bapsi’s life takes us across thousands of miles, between continents and cultures from South Asia to the United States -- and touches us personally. Her story also lifts a curtain on the almost extinct and hidden community, the Zoroastrians. Bapsi Sidhwa’s writing, work, and life story will delight and inspire. Her works have been translated into Russian, French, German and Italian and taught at universities in the US and in Canada. You must be aware of the fact that Bapsi has received numerous awards internationally including the key to Houston. The renowned film maker Deepa Mehta has produced the famous trilogy based on Bapsi's writings; Earth 1947, Water and Fire. Explore Their Stories Inc. is a 501 (C) 3 our nonprofit mission is to discover, document, preserve and share via compelling films, the extraordinary in our everyday lives. To celebrate diversity, educate and inspire our audiences, to give a voice to the other and leave behind these inclusive narratives for our next generations. For details and our team please view www.exploretheirstories.org . We are also on Facebook: Explore Their Stories | Instagram: @bapsifilm and @exploretheirstories Trailer BAPSI https://vimeo.com/243342535

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

This panel interrogates the interaction and intersection of religion, affect, and emotion as reflected in the genre of the sermon (khutbah/waʿz/majlis) in modern South Asian Islam. More specifically, it addresses the following overarching question: what is the relationship between oral sermons, reformist texts, and the promise and desire of curating particular visions of a moral public? Phrased differently, how are listening, writing, and moral formation entwined? While engaging this broader question, this panel also takes up questions of the following sort: What are the major registers of ethical and affective sensibilities anticipated and generated by the medium of the sermon? How was Muslim public speech encountered and appropriated by specific audiences? How did the medium of the sermon negotiate and navigate technologies of print in colonial modernity? And finally, what function did the sermon play in the assemblage of the religious authority of prominent South Asian Muslim scholars? The panelists explore these questions through the intellectual careers and sermons of certain towering Muslim scholars (‘ulama’) in early nineteenth, late-nineteenth, and in mid and late twentieth century Northern India. Other than its expansive temporal coverage, this panel also considers scholars of remarkably varied sectarian and doctrinal persuasions including Shiʿite, Sunni Traditionalist/Hanafi, and non-traditionalist scholars. Moreover, while bound by the common theme of religious sermons and their emotive and affective work, the specific genres of sermons explored in this panel range from sermons dealing with the celebration of the Prophet’s birthday (mawlid), the commemoration of Muharram, and those aimed at the moral reform of the public. Collectively, this panel argues for the centrality of the sermon to the discursive tradition of modern South Asian Islam. It also makes a conceptual plea for taking seriously the critical significance of the affective exercise of listening to South Asian Muslim intellectual and reformist thought.

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

Agrarian relations in India present a complex and contrasting story. While the agrarian political economy offers well-documented evidence that shows Indian agriculture has been in grips of a crisis for close to two decades, regional states have registered high agricultural growth during the period and rural rich have been constituting more than 40 percent of India’s rich. Recent Indian Customer Economy (ICE) 360 survey (2014) reveals that rural India contributes over half of India’s income (55.4%), has a share of 56.1% of consumption expenditure, and its 179.5 million households have a share of 52.3% of the country’s surplus income. To understand the story, attention to regional and local variations in terms of caste and class constellations, institutional structures, government policies are crucial. In the three decades since India and South Asia, more generally, took the neoliberal turn, institutions of the state, market and civil society have arguably been restructuring agrarian structures of class, caste and gender. The papers come together to re-examine these relations between institutions and social identities, thereby revealing a more layered process of agrarian change. This Round Table proposes that, agrarian relations and institutions have undergone significant restructuring under the influence of corporate agrarian capital, ecological constraints and political shifts. This is generating simultaneously elements of crisis and pathways to agrarian accumulation. Specific political realignments and social identities, on the other hand, determine the fate of particular social groups. The present agrarian sector is more internally differentiated yet polarised. Sejuti will draw attention to state and market interaction with the agrarian sector, Ishita focuses on state, Shreya on market and Taneesha on civil society and market with agrarian sector. Together they examine the case of India and Bangladesh.

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

A sequence is an arrangement of symbols, producing temporal unity and coherent meaning. When people envision alternate renderings of the past and future, they break sequence and fall out of character, conjuring new social actors into existence that demand rhythms and sequences of their own. The seeming solidity of bodies and archives is splintered, projecting contradictory meanings and multiple potential futures. How does a slight shift in a sequence unravel an entire temporal plane, producing a material consequence that reaches far beyond its immediate temporal surround? The papers on this panel offer thick ethnographic descriptions of how social actors splinter the materials of the past, present, and future by reshaping time itself as material. Naisgari Dave explores the notion of “the inevitable” in animal rights discourse: how do we reconcile ahimsa and surrender through that which has been rendered “inevitable”? Shakthi Nataraj explores how debates about tirunankai identity in Tamil Nadu rearrange categories of kinship, marriage, and social reproduction, reimagining what manhood and womanhood might be. Maura Finkelstein engages the archive as an ethnographic methodology for unearthing stories previously buried and overlooked by seemingly seamless historical narratives. What does the city look like when the lives and labor of currently employed Mumbai textile workers collide with the city’s contemporary post-industrial identity? These papers offer diverse examples of how social actors across several Indian cities bring disparate historical traces into temporal, and therefore material, alignment.

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

Feminist postcolonial methodology emphasizes the decentering of epistemic hierarchies institutionalized through gender and imperialist hegemonies. Collaborative research, where individuals and communities are participants in the production of knowledge, has been central to both feminist and postcolonial methodological perspectives. Drawing on individual research projects, which apply feminist research methods to questions of everyday lives, this panel explores the social complexities of collaborative research. Negotiating their insider-outsider positionality, the researchers on the panel explore the use of local cultural tools and practices in collaborative methodology, and argue that these instances further illustrate the situatedness of knowledge production. How do we, as researchers, balance the normative principles of collaborative methodology with the realities of power differentials on the ground? Sayoni Bose explores how recruiting her father allows her into the masculine domains that still remain inaccessible to her on account of her gender, despite her class and educational status. Anindita Sengupta’s paper, meanwhile, critically considers her positionality, which grants her access to doctors as well as surrogates, which otherwise would not have been possible. Adopting the informal adda approach allows her insights into the lives of women that would not have been possible through formal interview methods. But how do we represent these lives, when the politics of social relations is rooted in deeply personal experiences that are shared with the researchers? Varsha Chitnis examines some ethical questions about representation in collaborative research. If multiple, often contradictory, subjectivities are reflected in the interviews, what does it mean to do justice to the lives and voices of these participants? Taken together, these papers contemplate on the politics of feminist postcolonial research praxis.

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

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

Fear, anxiety, and paranoia are powerful political catalysts. Audrey Truschke builds on her award-winning Aurangzeb: The Life and Legacy of India’s Most Controversial King (Stanford 2017), with new research about Sanskrit histories of Indo-Islamic incursions and rule. She examines how India’s traditional learned elite viewed the Muslim Other. Chandra Mallampalli uses examples from A Muslim Conspiracy in British India? Politics and Paranoia in the Early Nineteenth-Century Deccan (Cambridge 2017) (from which we drew our panel theme) to engage with even more recent scholarship on paranoia, paralysis and fear as driving forces in Indian colonial history. Mujeeb Ahmad builds on his articles on the Barelwis’ historical roles and organizations to examine the recent rise of the Tehrik-i-Labaik Ya Rasullah political party in Pakistan. Inspiring outrage against their political opponents by by accusing them of threatening Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, this party orchestrated massive street protests in 2017, prompting the resignation of the Law Minister and creating widespread fear of discussing religious or blasphemy law. Laura Dudley Jenkins a chapter from her forthcoming book Leaps of Faith (Penn Press 2019) beyond India to Sri Lanka to examine online rumors of Muslims forcibly converting Buddhists and threatening Buddhist sites. These rumors contributed to violent attacks on Muslims and their property in 2017, while the Sri Lankan government attempted to block Facebook and WhatsApp. Ranging from Truschke, lauded in a book review for “engaging with (and demolishing) WhatsApp history” about a premodern king, to Jenkins’ critique of WhatsApp-based techniques of violent mobilization, these papers shed light on paranoia as a historically recurring feature of narratives about varied Muslim groups. Discussant Dennis McGilvray, author of several articles on the anti-Muslim problem in Sri Lanka, and concerned with these issues throughout South Asia, will bring an anthropologist’s eye to our historical and political science research.

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

The role of printed texts in the success of social reform movements is well-documented. The genre that best captures the project of reform is the novel. Often composed by men, the didactic novel was an important tool for instructing and educating respectable women. Male reformers used the literary space of the novel to imagine the ideal woman. From the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, countless Urdu and Hindi novels brought to life protagonists who were pious, wise, and chaste women from respectable families. The three papers in this panel complicate the profile of the sharif woman by drawing attention to heroines who subverted the script of reform by reinterpreting and de-centering the social world of the didactic novel. Dubrow traces the contours of the new sharif (respectable) woman in the late-nineteenth century novel, Fasana-e Azad (1878–1883), to argue that its protagonist Husn Ara cultivated a mode of respectability that was poised to subvert the very reformist discourse that upheld her as the ideal woman. Khan’s paper argues that Rashid ul Khairi’s lesser-known novel Bint ul Waqt (1918), in which a Westernized sharif woman is caricatured as a patient of hysteria, betrays the reformist anxiety about the dangers of educating and empowering elite women. Sreenivasan examines the Hindi novel, Goli (1950), a rare text whose protagonist is Champa, a female slave in an elite Rajput household. Champa’s discussion of Rajput debauchery has received attention from scholars, but Sreenivasan turns the lens on the novelist to argue that Champa’s critique of the Rajput household reveals the influence of Arya Samaj on Acharya Chatursen’s presuppositions about normative class and gender relations. By turning the spotlight on to resistant heroines, this panel will demonstrate the fragile underpinnings of a reformist discourse that was always susceptible to contestations.

Session: Session 2: Friday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Parlour Room 629
Floor: Floor 6

Art often reflects a society’s underlying structures. Ideas about gender, sexuality, ethics, and economics are some of the cornerstones of those structures. Through the narrow lens of an individual art form, Mithila art, this panel demonstrates what folk art can reveal about many such inter-related contemporary issues. Mithila art, also known as Madhubani painting, was once made exclusively by women in rural Bihar (and Nepal) to impermanently adorn the interior mud walls of domestic spaces for rituals and religious rites of passage. In the late 1960s, in response to an economic crisis in the region, the Indian central government supported an initiative to help women in the region make these paintings on paper. This transformed the art form itself and offered new opportunities for the artists who make it, guiding Mithila art into the commercial marketplace. Today, the art form and the industry are thriving. This diverse set of papers reveals a range of ideas that serve to expand our understanding of what folk art can tell us and what is at stake for the artists and those who collect and promote it. In their piece, Professor Susan S. Wadley and artist Shalinee Jha give an account of Mithila art as a medium for self-expression providing opportunity for social commentary. In a related way, Professor Coralynn V. Davis presents a project grounded in Mithila’s oral tales, with communal reflections about gender roles in expressive arts. PhD student Katie Lazarowicz’s paper explores folk art as livelihood, exposing barriers to economic progress in Madhubani. Finally, John H. Bowles, a curator working with indigenous arts for thirty years, invites us to consider the ethical and aesthetic dilemmas for curators and collectors who investing in folk arts, using his current role in an exhibition of Mithila art as an example.

Session: Session 2: Friday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Parlour Room 638
Floor: Floor 6

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Session: Session 2: Friday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Madison College D240 - 2
Floor: Madison College

In recent years, there have been new studies on caste; from scholarship examining the intersections of gender and caste, to increased international attention to caste as descent-based discrimination. However, in much of this work, the Hindu-ness of caste is assumed, implied and/or taken-for-granted. Further, caste is often limited geographically to South Asia (India). Papers on this panel complicate the idea that Hindu as the source of caste encompasses the nature of casteism and the question the geopolitical bounded-ness of caste. We seek to not merely to include the experiences of caste in Christianity, caste in Islam, or caste in the diaspora. Rather, papers on this panel explore the “dynamic relationship between the production of ‘caste’ and the production of ‘religion’ (as Hindu)” (Ritty Lukose, Liberalization’s Children, 170), in an effort to fully think through solidarity movements and activism. Each of the panelists draw from ethnographic, historical, and sociological research to both critique dominant modes of understanding caste and to reveal the multiple processes of how caste actually functions. Papers on this panel ask: How may (Hindu) anti-caste activisms unintentionally engender casteism within Christianity? Where do non-ambedkarite Hinduized Dalits and their relationship to Muslims who obscure their caste fit in savarna structures of domination and casteist influence among Ashrafi Muslims? How do we reckon with a deliberately erased history of Pasmanda Muslims by the state and especially by institutions of higher education? How does the silent and invisible workings of caste interact intersectionality with race and class to create racialized religion and hierarchical ordering? By questioning and debating conventional understandings of caste, this panel begins to think through the ways in which interreligious solidarity, anti-caste activism across castes and religions, and new social movements are actualized in global South Asia.

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

On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Edward Said’s "Orientalism," this panel seeks to engage elements of the legacy of Said’s work and its continued influence on how India, Indians, and India’s religious traditions are imagined today. The panelists’ individual contributions put into conversation regions, histories, and academic disciplines that assess the reach of Said’s work in creative ways. The first paper draws on “spiritual-but-not-religious” (SBNR) scholarship by religion scholars to analyze how Art Professionals (i.e. professors, critics, curators, and artists) uncritically deploy the terms “spiritual art” to describe western art and artists allegedly influenced by Indian “spiritual teachings.” One result of these discursive practices is the continued othering of Indian religious traditions as mystical and esoteric, having originated in the “mystic East.” In the second paper, we shift our attention to limits of the applicability of Said’s work for critiquing British Indian Orientalism and Islamophobia, noting crucial differences between the focus of Said’s study (Middle East and North Africa) and British India. Our third paper asks us to reconsider classificatory schemes of Caribbean religion, showing how received categories of religion replicate East-West dichotomies, thereby excluding from discussions of Caribbean religion Hinduism as practiced among Indo-Trinidadian Hindus today. Rounding out our discussion, the fourth paper examines contemporary American yoga, and asks how much the stereotype of the mystic East still applies to the conceptualizing and defining of American yoga. The theme unifying the panelists’ papers is an engagement with Said’s work as it has influenced classification typologies. With each paper, new questions and critiques emerge that add to the broader conversation about "Orientalism" and its legacy.

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

Historically, capitalism has tended to be an under-studied topic in Himalayan studies. While village and religious studies have for long dominated field-based research, the past two decades has seen the emergence of studies related to state-building and wider socio-political conflicts, reflecting the changing geopolitical role of the Himalayas for regional and global powers. The liberation policies of the 1990s coupled with a shift in international development policies towards large-scale infrastructure and joint partnership operations across public and private spheres have changed the orientation and role of states in leveraging funds and propping up efficient bureaucracies. Despite pockets of protected industries remaining, national economic niches across the Himalayan region are increasingly marketed, financed or run by transnational financial conglomerates in fields as wide as energy, agriculture, transportation and service sectors. In crucial ways, then, capitalism is penetrating deeper into Himalayan societies, and it is an opportune moment for research to take stock of how to engage theoretically with the broad and often inchoate economic force of capitalism. For this roundtable, we invite an inter-disciplinary collection of scholars to start a conversation about how increased focus on capitalism might enrich our understanding of the region and connect its study to larger debates in the social sciences. Topics will include (but not be limited by) the following list of general questions: - What accounts for the historical neglect of capitalism in Himalayan studies? - How is post-quake disaster capitalism reshaping Nepal? (and/or other disaster-struck locations?) - How is the emerging political economy of infrastructure development reshaping the region? - How have global neoliberal policies shaped capitalist penetration of Himalayan societies? - In what ways are states recalibrating to accommodate changing economic realities? - How have Himalayan societies sought to adapt to being pulled into world markets?

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

In an influential study of the communicability of language in the social production of hate, Veena Das examines what she terms “the region of rumor.”  This domain of language proliferated as a correlate and counterpoint to the official public sphere of state-controlled media, often leading to deadly consequences.  We now live a radically altered world: if economic liberalization has allowed for rapid increase in officially recognized media producers, the rise of globally networked digital media has given otherwise ordinary utterances and images the power to spread and influence political events on a scale previously inconceivable.  Rumor appears as important as ever, but its manner of circulation and the ease with which it penetrates more mainstream media have changed.  From WhatsApp-enabled caste violence in Tamil Nadu; to state recognition of farmer’s suicides in Vidarbha; to a Chief Justice’s fidelity to the nation in Bangladesh; and onto ‘braidchoppers’ and hartals in Kashmir; this panel explores the perlocutionary force of digitally mediated rumor in a bid to better understand resonances and turbulences that have emerged between networked media and older modalities of circulation. 

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

Philanthropy in India is in a period of rapid change that is remaking the country’s non-profit sector. Not long ago, organized charitable giving was largely the preserve of a handful of industrialists and foreign aid agencies. Today, incomes at the upper end of the income spectrum have ballooned, creating a new class of donors; one foundation estimates that India has added 100 million new givers between 2009 and 2017. Companies, too, have emerged as major sources of charitable funds. Article 135 of India’s 2013 Companies Act has turned companies into developmental actors and aid donors in the name of mandatory corporate social responsibility (CSR). Meanwhile, foreign assistance is under increasingly strict scrutiny and is declining in importance as a source of funding for Indian NGOs and civil society. These changes raise a number of theoretical, empirical, and policy puzzles. How are India’s new philanthropists different from those who came before? Why mandate corporate philanthropy rather than tax companies? What are the implications for civil society and the non-profit sector of the rapid increase in corporate giving and the decline in foreign assistance? This interdisciplinary panel will 1) identify trends in Indian philanthropy based on our fieldwork, 2) theorize these trends and what they reveal about the dynamics between state, markets, and civil society, and 3) indicate further questions that require exploration.

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

While the term “Indian cinema” is often equated with Bollywood, India is home to numerous regional film cultures. Given India’s linguistic organization of states, speaking about Indian regional cinema often means talking about cinematic cultures that are both based in particular states, as well as cinemas that deploy different local languages and cultural traditions. This panel emerges out of the need to account for regional formations as constitutive of the cinematic culture of the country. Swarnavel Pillai’s paper examines the complex, frictional relationships between Dravidian subnationalism and Nehruvian socialism in 1950s Tamil cinema. He locates this ambiguous relationship through a reading of two films, Thirumbbippaar and Irumbuthirai, both starring Sivaji Ganesan. Similarly, Anirban Baishya’s paper takes us back to the period of Assamese subnationalism of the 1980s and interrogates how the filmmakers of the Assamese “New Wave” negotiated social critique and the virulent enthusiasm of the Assam Agitation. In this, Baishya’s paper examines the films as a form of counter-history that can fill-in absences in historical archives. Ganga Rudriah’s paper locates the how the “folk” form of “Kuthu” song-and-dance sequences are commercially incorporated into Tamil film music and examines how diverse musical and performative traditions are subsumed within a reified “Tamil” identity that is produced by the mediation of the film industry. Darshana Mini’s paper looks at the posthumous stardom of the actress Miss Kumari who was popular during the studio era of the 1950s. She interrogates how the complex history of this era combines with Kumari’s appeal to generate her epithet as the “First Female Star” of Malayalam cinema. Collectively, the papers complicate the monolithic category of “national cinema” and suggest that we need to be speaking of Indian cinemas (in the plural) to be able to better account for the polyphony of cinematic cultures within the country.

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

This panel brings together papers on the historical constitution and mobilization of Muslim publics in different regions of the Indian subcontinent. Moving away from familiar signs like ‘separatism’ or ‘syncretism’, we focus on the varied events and idioms that seek to bring Muslims together, or take them apart, at specific historical junctures in certain places. Each paper looks at various moments in modern India in places as varied as Ladakh, Lucknow, Hyderabad, and Bengal. We pay particular attention to the rhetorical strategies, protests, and performances that not only make up a significant part of the practice of identity-formation, but also allow us to analyze it as a process. How is memory made through public events? What role does it play in imagining a social life in the present and through to an unpredictable future? What events and people are commemorated and why? At what points and to what ends are certain aspects of shared or distinct pasts emphasized and others devalued? How do each of these ‘local’ histories relate to the history of a nation, or even nationalist myth-making? And how does all this fit with the modality of electoral processes? These are some of the questions raised by the papers in this panel as we seek ways of understanding Muslim identity in South Asia through particular regional practices of community formation.

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

Texts often talk about themselves. Writers and poets encode information about themselves within their works, and often use their writing projects as exercises in self-fashioning. Taking the writing process to be purposeful and dynamic allows us to assess the underlying logics of self-presentations and their potential to both complement and contest arguments within dominant canons of information. Focusing on self-descriptive moments within South Asian Sanskrit, Persian, and vernacular texts, this panel investigates the rhetorical ways in which writers articulate their individual or collective selfhood, and frame their social, religious, or economic positions by reinforcing existing affiliations or severing them to build new ones. Covering a range of religious and other cultural texts to discuss different categories of self-description, panelists explore productive tensions of identity between self-narratives and perceived or stated popular narratives. They study writers’ strategies of mitigating potential risks of their rhetoric being misinterpreted, and also address how patronage and alternate economies of exchange inform production and subsequent reception of such texts. By drawing together and juxtaposing examples ranging from the fifth century C.E. to the post-colonial era, and from Gujarat to Bengal, the panel interrogates the communicative and creative power of self-descriptive moments in South Asian literary history. It analyzes the ability of self-description, whether expressed in a religious, political, or cultural idiom, to fashion community, authority, and legitimacy through writing focused on self-identification and positionality.

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

Last spring, two prominent social scientists (Richard Shweder and Richard Nisbett) argued that “95%” of social research is “benign” and should be exempted from Institutional Review Board scrutiny. In their eyes, such scrutiny was tantamount to administrators’ meddling and an incursion on academic freedom. Members of this Roundtable, too, have sometimes taken issue with IRBs. We seek, however, to stimulate dialogue that can broaden and deepen the grounds of ethical reflection. IRBs, with their heritage in biomedical research, seek to assure the individual rights of “research subjects” whose participation is narrowly circumscribed in space and time. Furthermore, IRBs often presume that US-centric ethical strictures have universal applicability and salience. Researchers working in locales outside the US and those using ethnographic methods often experience a sharp disconnect with IRBs. In this Roundtable, we take up two broad issues: 1) Ethical quandaries and moral dilemmas about which IRBs are typically silent; and 2) circumstances in which IRB strictures fly in the face of sensibilities, norms, and even moral principles of the settings in which researchers work. The members represent diverse disciplines, and all have long-time experience in Sri Lanka or India. Three are senior researchers who have chaired or sat on university IRBs. Some are engaged in long-term research and have close relationships to the individuals and groups they study. Others are embedded in settings (such as schools, hospitals, CBOs, and social service agencies) and have had to negotiate local ethics, customary practices, and ethical requirements. The session will begin with members offering brief vignettes of ethical challenges. Then we open the discussion for contributions and insights from the audience. The goal of the session is not to “solve” ethical problems, but rather to adduce possible principles and strategies for critical ethical practice.

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

Democratic politics has been studied typically vis-a-vis electoral competition between contending parties and politicians. Such competition between elites and within elites is believed to follow well-established rules of the game regardless of context. Those who argue for an exceptional character to Indian democracy have pointed to certain unique features of the polity, albeit without questioning the overarching conceptual terrain in which we study democratic politics. These certitudes are increasingly being called into question in an age of “populism,” in which the agency of ordinary men and women is placed at the heart of journalistic and scholarly analyses of democratic politics. It is also becoming apparent that liberal assumptions underlying the study of democratic politics, especially voting and elections, may no longer be tenable. This panel features three papers that respond to a central question: how should we study democratic politics in India today? We use the lenses offered by gender, caste, and religion to answer this question against the backdrop of recent anthropological scholarship on democracy in India and beyond. The papers share a common focus on the everyday practices, discourses, and meanings of democratic politics. Lipika Kamra reframes democracy as a set of gendered norms and practices across households knit together into fluid networks that decisively shape electoral outcomes, and ultimately, who governs. Michael Collins shows how, despite claims of a silent revolution, vernacular practices of caste democracy actually limit the radical claims of Dalit politics and place them in new hierarchies generated by democracy itself. Uday Chandra argues for a new conception of democratic politics that is grounded in popular understandings and experiences of religion in a polytheistic society. Beyond liberal assumptions and conventional analyses of elite politics, therefore, these papers seek to look afresh at democracy in India, and indeed, elsewhere from the inside-out.

Session: Session 3: Friday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Madison College D240 - 2
Floor: Madison College

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

Specialized technologies used to produce ornaments and seals played an important role in the emergence of complex social organization in the greater Indus Valley region of what is now Pakistan and northwestern India. The Indus region was also linked to adjacent regions in peninsular India, Arabia, Iran and Central Asia that where contemporaneous communities were also engaged in similar processes of cultural and technological development. The study of specific types of technologies and the stylistic features of specific objects makes it possible to trace specific links between these different communities. While the local meaning and symbolism of objects may have varied, the sourcing of raw materials can be used to outline shared trade networks, and similarities in technical processes can often reveal shared technological traditions. The four papers in this session will focus on steatite or soapstone, one of the most important raw materials used in the Indus Tradition. The first paper will examine the multiple ways in which this soft stone was modified to produce a wide range of ornamental objects and seals that were essential for reinforcing hierarchy and wealth as well as ideological power. The second paper will focus on the production of Early Indus seals during the initial phase of urban development. The third paper looks that the production of seals during the period of urban expansion when the Indus cities were strongly linked through trade and economics. Comparisons of production technology during this period will shed new light on the links between specific urban centers. The final paper looks at the steatite seals and other types of seals used in regions outside the Indus. These seals provide a window on external linkages and also the potential for external influence on the Indus elites as well.

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

Rasa is a key concept of Indic aesthetics. Numerous South Asian thinkers have theorized rasa, probing its nature, location, modes of generation, experiential and even soteriological dimensions, as well as its relevance for the analysis of various forms of art. Sheldon Pollock’s monumental A Rasa Reader (2016) offers a first panoramic view of these discussions, provides countless exciting discoveries, and allows us to think rasa anew. Taking inspiration from the Reader, our papers make forays into several aspects of rasa that demand further attention. Andrew Ollett, following Pollock’s identification of Dhanika (c. 975) as a pivotal figure in the “readerly” reorientation of rasa, examines the semantic theory underpinning Dhanika’s account of rasa, which allows him to speak of rasa as a “meaning” that the text conveys to a reader. Ajay Rao, in a paper co-authored with H. V. Nagaraja Rao, discusses the related question of whether or not the experience of rasa involves inference. More broadly, the two consider the question of the relationship between aesthetics and epistemology in Sanskrit theory as emerging from Mahimabhatta’s (c. 1025) treatise, the Critical Appraisal of Manifestation. Yigal Bronner’s paper revisits the question of whether rasa can be understood as a figure of speech. More specifically, he argues that, despite the dismissive approach of nearly all Indologists, Dandin’s treatment of rasa as an “ornament” (alankara) in his Mirror of Literature (c. 700) had theoretical strengths that made it far more lasting than ever realized. Finally, the longevity of rasa is the topic of Allison Busch’s paper, which assesses the continued relevance of rasa to classical Hindi authors, Indo-Muslim writers, and Mughal-period courtly and religious culture more broadly, including the domain of painted poetry.

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

Like other Himalayan communities, peoples of the arid, high-alpine region of Ladakh find themselves today on the front-lines of tremendous climactic and environmental change, facing rising temperatures, melting glaciers, shifting precipitation and discharge patterns, and rapidly expanding development. To cope with these wide-ranging impacts, a number of ‘solutions’ have been enacted by stakeholders as wide ranging as governments, NGOs, religious institutions, and community groups. This panel offers a critical reading from multidisciplinary perspectives of several of these contemporary adaptation initiatives to climactic and environmental changes in Ladakh, India. First, Williams-Oerberg explores the ecological destruction wrought by the swift rise in domestic tourism and associated infrastructure around the tourist hub of Leh, while also highlighting the critical role that Tibetan Buddhist organizations have played in pushing for a more sustainable tourism industry in this area of scant resources. Continuing to examine contemporary religious organizations, Yonnetti analyses Buddhist leader Drikung Chetsang Rinpoche’s environmental projects and argues these initiatives both reinforce his traditional role as a mediator between humans and an agentive landscape, and present a ‘modern Buddhism’ that is relevant and capable of responding to contemporary issues. Examining responses to climate-induced water-stress, Gladfelter analyzes NGO attempts to construct ‘artificial glaciers’ in villages facing springtime water scarcity, highlighting how interventions are both tied to older traditions of water harvesting while also appropriating and reframing local knowledge in problematic ways. Finally, Gagné examines local struggles to adapt to climate change through infrastructure development in the politically marginalized region of Zanskar. In doing so, Gagné highlights how such projects require communities to engage with technoscience as a material form of citizenship, albeit within the context of systematic state abandonment. Together, these papers advance our understandings of both the limits and capacities of diverse coping strategies to address environmental and climactic change in Ladakh today.

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

The scholarship on Kashmir-making and Kashmiri subjectivities is historically divided into three broad areas: the Chronicalists, whose focus is the Sanskrit literary tradition of Kashmir, particularly the Rājataraṅgiṇī, the Medievalists, whose conception of Kashmir and Kashmiriness is coeval with the arrival of Shah-i-Hamadan (read Islam) to Kashmir, and the Nationalists, who emerged from the post-1947 euphoria, and imagine Kashmir as the classical arcadia of the modern nation Within this contested terrain between chronicalists, medievalists and nationalists the present realties of Kashmir-making and Kashmiri subjectivities are either scantily discussed, or else left to journalists’ and activists’ reportage. The aim of this panel is to propose a deep philosophical-historical investigation of contemporary Kashmir-making by extending scholarly inquiry to the post-1987 struggles, articulations and construction of Kashmir as a distinct 'place' and 'Kashmiriness’ as a unique subjectivity. Arguing for opening up the alternate philosophical, literary and political resources which have been ignored by conventional Kashmir scholarship, this panel proposes an investigation into contemporary literature on Kashmir preferably written in Urdu and Kashmiri languages, so as to capture the unconventional, local, and marginalised writings on Kashmir. The aim is to facilitate a discussion on the context or the time we are living in. How to grasp the struggles, anxieties, fears and dissent of the present generations of Kashmiris? And, furthermore, thinking if our own selves could also be read through the time and the text. We feel that there is a need to disturb the historical continuity, and expose the heterogeneity of Kashmir-making. The panel argues for developing what could be called the militant epistemologies, questioning conventional modes of thinking and writings on ‘Kashmir-making’. Such an epistemology would try to trace the historical conditions of existence which have shaped radically unique practices of the present-day Kashmir-making.

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

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

For Dalit/bahujan studies, engagements with histories of gender/sexuality, language and slavery have robustly shifted the angles through which the field might begin to imagine collusions, collaborations and conversations within regions of South Asia and beyond. Historians, in particular, have contributed to our understanding of the forces at work in the making of ‘caste’ between the fifteenth and the twentieth centuries. However, such scholarship has minoritized relations of gender and language in the making of such geographies. Our two proposed panels reverse the trend by foregrounding the question: what would regional histories of ‘caste’ look like if interrogated as formulations of gender and language? Eschewing the conventional segregation and/or minoritization of regions as spatialities that provide local historical variation, the panels seek to simultaneously interrogate regional asymmetries of the past of caste, as well as highlight the centrality of gender and language in the making and conceiving of ‘caste’ itself. Staging concrete articulations of these key terms – gender, region, caste – also allows us to ask how we might differently understand global processes of social reproduction, and their relations to processes of historical transmission, narrative, and change. How might an interrogation of gender, language and region shift our understanding of the life-forms, modalities, and vernaculars of caste? And how might these different understandings of caste shape our thinking about the South Asian and global present?

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

Texts often talk about themselves. Writers and poets encode information about themselves within their works, and often use their writing projects as exercises in self-fashioning. Taking the writing process to be purposeful and dynamic allows us to assess the underlying logics of self-presentations and their potential to both complement and contest arguments within dominant canons of information. Focusing on self-descriptive moments within South Asian Sanskrit, Persian, and vernacular texts, this panel investigates the rhetorical ways in which writers articulate their individual or collective selfhood, and frame their social, religious, or economic positions by reinforcing existing affiliations or severing them to build new ones. Covering a range of religious and other cultural texts to discuss different categories of self-description, panelists explore productive tensions of identity between self-narratives and perceived or stated popular narratives. They study writers’ strategies of mitigating potential risks of their rhetoric being misinterpreted, and also address how patronage and alternate economies of exchange inform production and subsequent reception of such texts. By drawing together and juxtaposing examples ranging from the fifth century C.E. to the post-colonial era, and from Gujarat to Bengal, the panel interrogates the communicative and creative power of self-descriptive moments in South Asian literary history. It analyzes the ability of self-description, whether expressed in a religious, political, or cultural idiom, to fashion community, authority, and legitimacy through writing focused on self-identification and positionality.

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

This panel examines the productive potential of “interpretive ambivalence” in scholarship on religion in South Asia. Rather than adhering to a single interpretive strategy for indigenous claims made in literary texts and ethnographic narratives, we locate and highlight multiple possibilities in the process of interpretation that resist academic inclinations (or expectations) to resolve ambiguity or contradictions. Collectively, these papers raise important questions about what we, as scholars, can gain when we commit to remaining in the sometimes uncomfortable spaces of uncertainty and multiplicity. The first paper explores the moral ambivalence of legitimizing sexual labor as a poor woman’s path for religious deliverance in the story of Nimbiyakka from the 13th century Kannada text of the Śivaśaraṇara Ragaḷegaḷu. The second analyzes the 19th century Tamil text of the Māriyammaṉ Tālāṭṭu, dedicated to the goddess Māriyammaṉ, to consider the interpretive possibilities that emerge from local devotional texts rather than colonial or missionary archives. The third paper examines the ambivalence of interpreting narratives of upwardly mobile men in Rajasthan cooking for their wives during menstruation to maintain ritual purity, but overlaying the practice with emerging middle class sensibilities. The final paper addresses the nuance that emerges from holding together seeming inconsistencies in narratives by examining shifting claims surrounding the life, death, deification, and domestication of Devanayaki, a scheduled caste woman in Tamil Nadu. While each of these papers focus on gender and religion, we emphasize the productive possibilities of multiple interpretive frames – ethical and otherwise – about South Asia more broadly. Indeed, we seek to recover the value of ambivalence as a way of pushing scholars of South Asian religions to new questions, rather than answers, that will allow us to see connections between these features of everyday and narrative life in new ways.

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

This panel explores the identities of armed combatants in South Asia, featuring four papers that try to understand who commits violence, how they join violent movements, and why they sometimes abandon them. The first two papers, by Emmanuel Teitelbaum and Rumela Sen, examine the Maoist insurgency in India. Teitelbaum’s paper examines the effect of migration on ‘sending communities’ rather than ‘receiving communities’ by using survey data to explore how out-migration affects Naxal conflict zones. Sen’s paper uses the Naxalite conflict as a case study to explore the understudied question of how rebels quit armed groups. Using a controlled comparison of north and south India, Sen argues that rebels are more easily able to exit in the south through ‘harmonic’ networks because of a stronger associational life that ties multiple actors together. Kolby Hanson’s paper focuses on rebels but moves the discussion to conflicts in northeast India and Sri Lanka. Hanson shows how ceasefires counterintuitively undermine rebel groups by letting them operate openly, leading to poorer militant screening, and higher dissension and fragmentation. The final paper, by Ajay Verghese and Roberto Foa, examines contemporary Hindu-Muslim riots, which are often described as the outcome of carefully-orchestrated Hindu nationalist provocation. Verghese and Foa use a historical perspective to show that Hindu nationalist groups formed in areas of Mughal-Maratha conflict in the 17th century. Taken together, these papers begin to get at a deeper understanding of the purveyors of violence in South Asia.

Session: Session 4: Friday, 3:45 pm - 5:30 pm
Room: Madison College D240 - 2
Floor: Madison College

The academic study of yoga is perhaps the most dynamic, promising, and diversifying field linked to South Asia Studies that we have seen since the advent of postcolonialism. Not only does it draw in excellent philologists, historians, religionists, anthropologists, sociologists, and now increasingly political scientists, but it reaches outside of area specialization to appeal to those interested in feminism, Marxism, decolonialism, diaspora studies, and beyond. It is also one of the few areas of inquiry associated with South Asia to involve physical scientists who study the effects of yoga on the body and mind. In many ways, the study of yoga is a model for the power of interdisciplinary area studies writ large. As a contribution to this growing interdisciplinary field, this panel specifically examines the confluence of yoga and politics in South Asia and beyond with contributions from the fields of South Asian studies, religious studies, anthropology, and political science. Presenters consider yoga as political theory in South Asian textual history and the implications of this history in the present, several propose interpretations of Narendra Modi’s annual “mass yoga performance” at the International Day of Yoga, while others consider the deployment of various South Asian textual yoga traditions to sanction contemporary yoga practices such as those found in the United States’ carceral system.

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

The relationship between cultural change and technology has always been a central focus of archaeology, and scholars who have studied the Indus Valley Tradition and Gandharan region of Northwestern South Asia. As the Indus Valley Tradition at the ancient city of Harappa transitioned from the Ravi to Kot Diji to the Harappan phases, urbanizing Indus peoples adopted new technologies and opened new trade networks that allowed for social differentiation through material wealth. These cultural changes can be seen in multiple technologies, from ceramics to copper/bronze metallurgy. The first two papers in this session will focus on the Indus period ceramics and copper/bronze metallurgy. Roughly a millennium after the decline of the Indus Valley tradition, the Early Historic period of South Asia began and lasted roughly from the later half of the first millennium BC through the first millennium AD. During this time, the Gandhara region of Northwestern Pakistan was influenced by several multi- regional empires, Achaemenid, Mauryan, Kushana, Gupta etc. Likewise, new religious ideologies, such as Buddhism, affected social structures as can be observed within stucco and stone art pieces within Buddhist stupas and temples. At religious sites like the Bhamala stupa, construction materials, in the form of preserved metallic iron nails and hinges have allowed us insight into a growing local iron-working tradition of this region. The growth of this technological tradition is likewise evidenced by iron-working slag sites along ancient routes at Tehsil Batkhela. Gandhara was being connected to larger trade networks that linked South Asia to a global system spanning from the Mediterranean to Southeast Asia. The last two papers in this panel will discuss iron technology during the Early Historic Period.

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

The Bhagavadgītā is perhaps the most famous of all Hindu texts, but its extensive commentarial traditions remain relatively understudied. This panel draws attention to several lesser-known commentarial streams, representing a range of languages, periods, and sectarian affiliations. It charts the reception history of the Bhagavadgītā, reminding us that it was never a single, standardized text, but emerged in multiple forms through the mediation of its commentators. Tamara Cohen examines the tenth-century Arjunopākhyāna, a subtale of the Mokṣopāya, which is known in its later Advaita Vedānta recension as the Yogavāsiṣṭha. Tamara argues that the Arjunopākhyāna rendered the Bhagavadgītā a unified Advaita text by selecting and commenting on passages that describe absolute nonduality, while leaving out the singularity of Kṛṣṇa’s divinity. Michael Allen investigates the Bhagavadgītā commentary of Śrīdhara, a fourteenth-century Advaita Vedāntin who makes the claim—unprecedented for Śaṅkara’s follower—that devotion alone, rather than knowledge, is the ultimate means to liberation. Charting three significant departures from Śaṅkara’s interpretation of the Bhagavadgītā, Allen argues that Śrīdhara’s commentary raises historical questions about what it means for a thinker to identify as a follower of Śaṅkara. From Advaita Vedānta, we move to Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta. Manasicha Akepiyapornchai traces the soteriological transition from devotion to self-surrender in Vedāntadeśika’s fourteenth-century commentaries on Bhagavadgītā 18.66, found in the Tātpāryacandrikā, the Nikṣeparakṣā, and the Rahasyatrayasāram. Akepiyapornchai argues that the three commentaries recontextualized the whole Bhagavadgītā as the teaching of self-surrender in each of these three different contexts. Finally, Tarinee Awasthi discusses two modern commentaries on the Bhagavadgītā in the colonial context, one by Sri Aurobindo and the other by Lahiri Mahasaya. Awasthi argues that these two commentaries can be used to understand attitudes towards colonial modernity and a spiritual endeavour, and contain the possibility of radically rupturing presumptions of post-Enlightenment modernity by disrupting its conception of knowledge.

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

Recent scholarship has underlined the importance of discarding geographical specificities and considering how colonial legal rule and legalities have formed across time and space, linking seeming disparate territories, thus creating shared and paradoxical practices. This panel examines the confluence and collision between colonial legalities and the mobilities (and immobilities) of peoples in the Indian subcontinent and British Empire. The colonial state in India, as demonstrated in Peter Hynd's paper, used excise laws to impinge on specific mobile groups (labor migrants, mendicants, small traders) to increase its revenues and assert its control. Malarvizi Jayanth's paper assesses the conflict between customary law regimenting the lives of agrarian slaves in Madras Presidency and new British laws governing the transportation for sale of the same slaves. Catherine Warner's paper uses labor migration to tea plantations in Darjeeling to examine how multiple crossings through the India-Nepal borderland reshaped notions of subjecthood as well as the various ways in which migrants shaped legal cultures of the borderland.Yoshina Hurgobin's paper examines how overlapping and diverging legal frameworks in the British Empire (Trinidad, British Guiana and Mauritius) and India shaped the propertied lives and afterlives of Indian immigrants.

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

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

Seeking to expand and challenge the historical and imagined locations of cinema in South Asia, this panel visits unexplored places of Indian film exhibition from the 1960s to the present. It offers new histories of film’s material appearance on screens that have existed after, alongside and in between the colonial film theater and the contemporary multiplex, privileged objects of film exhibition scholarship. Drawing on original interviews, archival documents and ethnographic research, the papers in this panel focus on Delhi’s deluxe theaters of the 1960s, the ramshackle video parlor of 1980s’ Bombay, and the ubiquitous cellphone screen of the 2000s and after. Chatterjee’s paper, using oral narratives and photographic archives, charts the overlaps between the urban production of specific cinematic environments and the Indian State’s aspirations for a ‘public architecture’ in the 1960s and 70s through a close case study of India’s first 70MM theater, Shiela Cinema. Re-reading newspaper and trade reports of violent police raids on video parlors, Nair delineates the challenges posed by the emergent video parlor of the 1980s to the the territorial and monopolistic control of theatrical distributors and exhibitors, and post-colonial state regimes of taxation, censorship, and copyright. Through ethnographic research into the mobilephone technoscape, Tanvir’s paper complicates Western debates about streaming by focusing on film-viewing on cellphones in India, bringing into view a new media culture marked by piracy, poor quality and regularly failing signals that produce the moving image in creative fragments. Together, the papers in this panel track the shifting scales and sites at which the cinematic object and its infrastructural environments have shaped each other and postcolonial public media cultures of the Global South.

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

The controversy over Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s recent film Padmaavat highlighted tensions between history and memory in India. This panel moves beyond the Padmaavat debate to explore diverse expressions and representations of the “popular” in the context of the “historical.” Samira Sheikh examines representations of Muslim sultans and treacherous ministers in a range of non-courtly fictional and non-fictional sources, arguing for closer examination of both popular and academic images of such figures. Malavika Kasturi explores the world of Baba Ratannath of Devi Patan in eastern Uttar Pradesh, a site of heterodox and liminal practices by Muslim nathyogis. She explores how following appropriation by the powerful Gorakhnath Math, the heterodox practices of worship associated with the shrine were marginalized. Tanuja Kothiyal explores the intricate networks of goddess temples on the borders of India and Pakistan, dedicated to miraculous women born to Charan families. She argues that while the heterodox nature of these temples is now lost, in the past they represented sites of negotiated authority in the religious and political milieu of the Thar Desert. Aparna Kapadia explores the contested memories of the Mughal conquest of Gujarat in 1591, represented through memorials dedicated to the Mughals as well their Rajput antagonists at the site of the battle of Bhuchar Mori. Together, these papers offer up for discussion the dichotomy between the popular, supposedly democratic, realm of cultural memory, and the historical or academic approach, suggesting that both strands may be constructed through selective appropriation catering to contemporary social concerns.

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

Perhaps even more so than other realms of human activity, the preparation and consumption of food have often been an intricately gendered as well as eroticized affair, in South Asia and elsewhere. While gender and sexuality have received growing attention in the study of South Asian history, literatures, and anthropology, and there is some nascent work on the history of the region’s cuisines and gastronomic cultures, the intersection of these fundamental human concerns in the context of the Indian Subcontinent still largely awaits scholarly consideration. To begin to address this surprising lacuna, this panel will explore textual and narrative engagements with gendered and sexual practices, ideals, and expectations surrounding foodstuffs, cooking, eating, and hospitality in various South Asian languages from the early modern period to the present. By tracing these topics through a variety of genres and time periods, from Persian lifestyle and etiquette manuals to Urdu poetry and short stories and on to Bengali novels and Santhal folk narratives, the various papers will contribute to a more nuanced understanding of both literary and social practices and ideals as well as their evolution. Moreover, they will do so in relation to a set of interconnected fields of human experience and activity – gender, sex, and food – that have frequently been at the center of debates about culture and identity in South Asia, and very much continue to be so at present.

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

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Session: Session 5: Saturday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Madison College D240 - 1
Floor: Madison College

Cities all over South Asia are witnessing a rise in "smart" technologies of governance. While the most prominent “smart” narratives are coming from the postcolonial State’s eager push to wire urban spaces through infrastructure and surveillance projects, other parallel and counter-moves are emerging in conjunction and disjunction. Therefore the city-space is being made “smart” by consumption, communication and mobility practices of those who dwell in urban spaces. With state-citizen relations being mediated by digital technologies, the official rhetoric underlying the adoption of digital solutions by both state and non-state providers is to provide quicker, corruption-free, accessible government services. Citizens, too, "talk back to the state" and, in doing so, interface with and resist forms of digital authority. Outside of the citizen-State relationship, relationships of class, gender, caste, and capital are also being “updated” to find a place for the self in the South Asian Smart city. Recognising this urgent imperative we attempt to attend to the simultaneous apparatuses that (re)produce the space of the South Asian Smart city and the self within it to understand contemporary political life in South Asian societies. Our two-part panel gathers various insights from different social and material contexts, be it the variegated notions of being mobile or manoeuvring proper notions of visibility. We ask several questions through this panel to develop sharper apparatuses to probe the proliferation of material, symbolic, and affective relations, that citizens and states have, to "the technological" and, to understand contemporary political life in South Asian societies. The object of inquiry of this panel emerges from the assemblage of rhetorics, practices, and feelings entangled with the legibility afforded by 'smart technologies' in everyday life. Encompassing a wide variety of empirical contexts, we attempt to conceptualize the "smarting processes of techno-subjectivation" to theorize state power and citizen engagement.

Session: Session 5: Saturday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Madison College Meeting Room 1
Floor: Madison College

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

Whereas Partition is usually framed in terms of memory and trauma in the post-colonial moment, this panel will investigate the broader history leading up to this event beginning with the earlier partition of Bengal in 1905. Our papers examine the different ways in which civil society, aesthetic production, and other ideological formations were harnessed to the cause of the Partition. According to the preeminent historian Gyanendra Pandey, “[t]here was a very short time – a mere seven years – between the first formal articulation of the demand for a separate state for the Muslims of the subcontinent and the establishment of Pakistan.” Despite, or perhaps because of, the short period of time within which these demands had to be articulated and developed, the Partition lives on in both material and subjective histories as one of the most violent events in human history. This violence manifested itself particularly in sexual and gendered forms, locating women as sites of communal property and exerting control over them. While the study of this violence is the central focus of our works, we also want to open the question in an intersectional manner, to think about how various socio-economic communities in India, spanning the spectrum of caste, class, religion, and region, all experienced the rise of the two-state theory, the partition, and its extensions into the future, in different and specific manners. In this context, we ask what the role of official histories and counter-memories is with respect to Partition. How has the discourse of Partition been harnessed by various political and cultural institutions across South Asia for their ends, both sectarian and resistant, and in what ways does it continue to haunt the politics of aesthetics?

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

The three papers for this panel focus on the materiality of religion in both ancient and contemporary contexts. The essays seek to understand the role of material culture, such as temple sculpture, portable images, and ritual paraphernalia on religious traditions as they were expressed in the city of Kanchipuram, South India. While Richard Mann’s and Padma Kaimal’s papers focus on religious imagery carved on a specific temple—the Kailasanatha, royal temple of the Pallava dynasty—Emma Natalya Stein’s paper looks at objects and images that circulated throughout the city and its temples. Each essay takes an in-depth look at the use of images, objects, and other forms of expression established in the Pallava era in order to examine relationships between static and dynamic forms of religiosity. How did the placement of sculptures reveal religious traditions? How did it help construct these traditions? What was the role of commerce in the growing circulation of knowledge? The papers further examine the role played by material culture in expressing certain perceptions of religiosity and how those perceptions have transformed over time.

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

Over the past six decades of its modern history, Nepal has experimented with different political forms oscillating between parliamentary democracy and authoritarianism, while tackling structural inequalities rooted in history and inherited in the forms of caste, class, gender, and ethnic marginalization, which it shares with its South Asian neighbors. This panel aims to explore how the literatures written and produced in different languages in Nepal engage with political exigencies at local, regional, and global levels. We ask: How do writers engage with Nepal’s embattled histories, attend to its present-day discontents, and imagine new political futures? How does literature and cinema as the medium for politics, protest, and activism shape, consolidate, or contest identities in relation to nation, ethnicity, language, and gender? How does literature from Nepal reflect on political crises, violence, and refugee problems in South Asia? The papers in this panel examine the ways in which literary writings function as modes of thinking about democracy and freedom in the context of Nepal, and South Asia at large. Covering a range of literary and cinematic texts in Nepali as well as indigenous languages, the papers address the issue of political representation and activism at various fronts including local politics of indigeneity, critiques of nationalism and gender, international relations, and global politics.

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

In the area of South Asian cinema studies, the women on screen have been a bigger subject of investigation in comparison to their off-screen counterparts. This panel aims to shift the lens towards contemporary women working in the Pakistani and Indian film industries. Using the tools of ethnography and close readings, the papers included in this panel aim to shine a light on the works created by female filmmakers, the challenges they face while working in the industry, and the reception of their work. Working Women analyzes the work of women in order to better provide a feminist critique of the industry itself and to further the representation of women in scholarly and professional discourses. The papers selected show a variety of disciplinary approaches to the question of women in South Asian film beyond actors and characters. With a special interest on consumption, as it relates to film distribution, exhibition, and viewing, these papers look at how factors like transnational mobility, film-critics, and the corporatization of film-making affect films made by and centrally about women.

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

The project to annihilate a hegemonic formation runs the risk of re-centering that very entity. However, the centrality of India to the theoretical, methodological and even temporal contours of South Asia as well as of globalization must be critically examined, and urgently. In this round-table, we build a conversation between scholars working on the margins of India, on the territories occupied by India, on any aspect of non-Indian South Asian nations, regions, and countries, and those working to expose the universalistic claims of India. Our aim is to collaborate on the process and the stakes of de-centering an increasingly hyper-real “India”. India plays an essential, and dominating role in framing the politics and scholarship on South Asia. Simultaneously, “India” anchors the academic discourses of world historical change: from colonial and empire studies to postcolonial theory, cultural studies, subaltern studies, social movements, alternative modernities and transnational feminism, the invocation of “India” has been vital, even indispensable. Meanwhile, figures such as M.K. Gandhi, Arundhati Roy (etc.) are de-contextualised and then re-invoked as Indians who have provided the paradigmatic blue-print for combating the ceaseless plunder of global capitalism. Bollywood and yoga, among other things, are celebrated as iconic symbols of Indian and therefore anti-imperial cultural possibility. Our round table strives to critically examine this recurrent reiteration of “India” by querying why “South Asian studies” has re-inscribed a certain idea of India. How have upper-caste Indian and white academics, across disciplinary and ideological trajectories, propagated this hegemonic idea of India? What exactly is at stake in bringing the “margins” of South Asia together, and that too at the Madison South Asia Conference? Finally, how and why has the North American academy extended the idealistic reach of India beyond its geographic and economic frontiers?

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

As a vibrant, interdisciplinary terrain, South Asian Studies has produced experimental, genre-crossing research and writing. Experimental writing on South Asia has told Dalit and women’s stories, explored working class urban communities, enriched depictions of everyday Islam as well as Muslim courtly life, and expressed the struggles of plantation laborers. Yet in South Asian studies, there has been very little discussion of writing per se: How do we decide upon genre or voice as we craft our accounts? How do the rich and diverse literary traditions of South Asia shape and inform our writing in whichever language it occurs? What is the relationship between projects that are labeled “creative” and more conventional academic practice and accounting; put another way, how do we add creative work to our CVs? What kind of collaborative spaces might need to be opened to allow for more experimentation and play in writing? This session seeks to open the black box of writing-as-craft and provide participants with space to collaborate on answers to these questions and many more. More atelier than panel, each participant will bring a piece of work-in-progress that somehow pushes against traditional genres. We will be as concerned with the emergent form of each piece – its structure, word choice, cadence, and imagery – as with its content. Participants will circulate a description of their project and a short excerpt before the October conference; the roundtable will begin with a “reading” from each participant from their work and then a collective discussion of the individual pieces as well as broader themes. Our goal is to generate ideas for one another’s nascent creative works, create a list of ideas and resources for further writing experimentation, and to brainstorm what it might mean institutionally to write South Asia creatively from within and in-between disciplinary formations.

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

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