Annual Conference on South Asia

Session: Symposium - Full Day
Room: Off-Site
Floor: Off-Site

The development of archaeology as an academic discipline during the 18-1900s was closely linked to explorations and documentation of the monuments, epigraphy and ancient sites of ancient South Asia. Many distinctive methodologies were developed in South Asia for surveying and excavating sites, for analysis of the artifacts, and for conservation of remains that were located in diverse environments. Today, archaeologists in South Asia continue to use some of these time-tested approaches but have also developed innovative new approaches to studying the past and how it relates to the present. This symposium will bring together 19 junior and senior scholars, women and men, from large universities and smaller colleges, as well as state museums and archaeology departments. Six papers focus on methodological issues used by different multinational teams related to surveys or excavation projects in Pakistan and India. One of the papers also focuses on developing new approaches in Pakistan to facilitate religious tourism associated with ancient Buddhist sites in Gandhara. Six papers will present new methods of artifact documentation and analysis, with special focus on seals, shell objects and pottery. Three papers present new approaches to the study of botanical and faunal remains to understand how cities were provisioned and how food commodities were traded overland as well as by sea. Two paper focus on innovative approaches to museums in order to connect with less served communities. One paper will present new approaches to understanding trade carried out by the Indus communities and adjacent regions, suggesting the presence of early “global” models of economic exchange. Another paper will present new approaches to the study of human interactions as revealed through genetic patterns of teeth. These multifaceted and complementary approaches provide new insights into the diverse and complex history of ancient and contemporary South Asia.

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

Vedanta, a knowledge system of hermeneutic theology, is often characterized in both popular imagination and in scholarship as the central unifying philosophy of Hinduism. Yet textual and documentary evidence demonstrates that Vedanta only rose to significance as a major interlocutor for rival knowledge systems and as an established set of social institutions from the beginning of the second millennium and especially during the thirteenth through seventeenth centuries. Our collaborative research project seeks to chart the rise of Vedanta: the intellectual, social, and political causes for its historical emergence as well as its rapid growth during the early modern period. What explains the rise of Vedanta as a historical phenomenon? Vedanta in all its forms was more closely linked to broad-based popular religious movements and religious institutions, more deeply implicated in the formation of social identity, and often more closely (or at least more documentably) tied to the patronage of specific political formations than the disciplines that had earlier dominated philosophical discourse. It appears clear that the social and institutional underpinnings of this vast intellectual movement are bound up closely with the transregional spread of the late-medieval Vijayanagara Empire and, without being noticeably diminished, were certainly reshaped in important ways by its collapse. One of our preliminary hypotheses is that particular conditions for Sanskrit knowledge production at Vijayanagara impacted the subsequent history of Vedanta, including, for example, extensive patronage of religious institutions of knowledge; expansive, state-sponsored projects of textual commentary from the empire's inception to its collapse, etc. Our researchers explore this question through careful reading of thousands of pages of Sanskrit sources combined with the study of epigraphy, material culture, and other documentary evidence.

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

This symposium aims to generate interdisciplinary conversations about the importance of contemporary scholarly study of Maithil society, culture and language. How has the study of Maithili-speaking peoples shaped humanistic inquiries and intellectual discourses locally and globally? From Alphabetum Brammhanicum (1771) to George Abraham Grierson (1851–1941) to Radhakrishna Choudhary (1921–1985), how has the study of Maithili cultures been framed by localized discourses about the region, its language(s) and people(s)? In turn, how has the academic study of Mithila outside of the region received, interpreted and framed these narratives? In light of its disciplinary past, can we envision new research agenda and methods for challenging hegemonies within the academy and in the wider society? Although colonial-era missionaries and Orientalists took a keen interest in Maithili language, art and culture, the study of Maithili has not maintained the same academic focus in modern universities. Nevertheless, a variety of scholars from a range of disciplines have engaged in the study of Maithili and Mithila into the present. The field as it exists today is dominated by upper-caste, male scholars and littérateurs, who have privileged certain forms of historical knowledge production. Their engagement with Hindu philosophies and what they construed as “high-culture” has—in effect—marginalized contributions by Maithil women, lower-caste communities and religious minorities. Against this backdrop, our symposium brings together an eclectic group of scholars, who reflect critically on the history, politics and future of Maithili Studies. This symposium is—to the best of our knowledge—the first ever attempt in the history of modern universities to evaluate the status, significance and prospects of Maithili Studies. We anticipate the publication of symposium papers as a peer-reviewed volume. Our symposium—both in framing its research agenda and in selecting its participants—remains steadfastly committed to the ethics of diversity, equity and inclusion.

Session: Symposium - Full Day
Room: Conference Room 4
Floor: Floor 2

Over the past decade South Asia has been hurtling from crisis to crisis. Changing geopolitics of the region; the autocratic revocation of Article 370 of the Indian constitution in Kashmir; the 2020-2021 farmers’ protest; and the recent nationwide NRC-CAA protests in India, are a few examples. The global COVID 19 pandemic has further aggravated human and policy crisis in South Asia. As fundamental to these moments of conflict has been the question of belonging and citizenship as has been their mediation - censored and uncensored, formal and informal - through new and old sites and networks, shaping a whole range of experiences and forming new cultures of visuality. There has been a rapid proliferation of images through mass media such as television and cinema; ephemeral, techno fragments of YouTube, Facebook and low-cost technologies of mechanical and digital reproduction; hybrid, vernacular idioms of calendar art and graphic novels; and the material infrastructures of gigantic iconic statues and dams. Such new visual morphologies, materialities and narratives of conflict and responses demand an urgent attention. Bringing together an international group of scholars from fields of Art History, Film and Media Studies, Literature, Performance studies, Women and Gender studies, Anthropology and Visual Studies, this full day symposium seeks to explore the iterations in South Asian visual culture, historically and theoretically, to various conflicts and crisis. Ranging from symbolism and sounds of CAA-NRC protests to cinematic and ecological cartographies of caste violence and “outbreak narratives” in contemporary India, the papers collectively tease out historically situated, intermedial modalities of representation, resistance and intervention that have emerged in response to the shifting imaginaries, nature and politics of the postcolonial Indian nation state.

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

What would South Asian Studies look like if India were not the master signifier or presumptive center? What does it mean, for example, for India to exist without explanation? And, importantly, what if we forgot India, and learned to pay attention to sovereignty movements that help us understand the limitations of South Asian Studies as it is currently constituted? Here, we understand India not simply as the nation-state, but an unmarked universal that mediates any discussion about South Asia. Even in critiques of Hindutva, “secular liberal” interventions continue to presuppose Indian territorial and Indic civilizational discourses as given. Therefore, we have to couple denaturalizing India with a critique of the secular liberal impulses and tendencies that frame South Asian Studies. Robust analyses of the Indian frame and the secular have emerged within Sikh Studies, Critical Kashmir Studies, and the Study of Islam in South Asia. These fields force us to contend with an essential question: Why does the encounter with South Asian Studies reproduce epistemological dissonance when one is a subject of the Indian empire rather than its putative citizen? This symposium is premised on a fundamental gambit: South Asian Studies, once divested of India, may finally offer a vantage unto ‘difference’ so valorized by the field. Sikh and Kashmiri/Muslim sovereignty struggles are two of the most robust and most misunderstood movements, and we bring them into focus by thinking thorough temporality and territoriality, critiques of secular epistemelogical frameworks, and cross-movement connection together. Therefore, we bring together scholars from these fields in order to interrogate the naturalization of India, and rethink South Asian Studies by asking India for an explanation and, in its failure, forgetting India.

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

Urdu has developed a rich and evolving terminology in parallel with its long tradition of literary criticism which is constantly reworked in digital spaces, popular culture, and subcultures. The 2022 Urdu Symposium seeks to continue and expand upon the 2018 Urdu Symposium and 2017 Preconference, “Urdu Keywords,” by expanding on a set of poetic key terms central to literary production and critical reception. Recent scholarly efforts have drawn upon Williams’ original method of preparing a “record of an inquiry into a vocabulary” to not just update his original project but also apply it to further debates within different disciplinary practices (Williams 1976). It is with a timely emphasis on accessing “ideas through words” instead of the other way round that we call for a scholarly reflection on a set of vocabulary that is crucial for understanding Urdu literary practices in the digital age (Cuddy-Keane et al. 2014). Our interest also lies in exploring whether digital literary cultures pose a shift in the usage of certain words that have a longstanding tradition of rigorous scholarly reflection in poetic and formal structures across Indian languages. Contributors will be invited to give brief (approximately 5-minute) presentations followed by more substantial discussions of methods and sources, at the upcoming 2022 Urdu Symposium. Presenters will precirculate their entries to enable discussion and review. Full-length contributions will be anthologized as an open-access intermedial digital critical guide to Urdu poetics. The symposium roundtable discussions will also engage with how to channel the affordances of digital technologies to engage a generation of poetry readers and performers within academia and beyond.

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

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

Session: Symposium - Half Day, Morning
Room: Off-Site
Floor: Off-Site

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Directed by Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh, the documentary, ‘Writing with Fire’ is about a rural newspaper ‘Khabar Lahariya’ (KL), run by women belonging to the marginal caste groups of India. It was nominated for the Academy Award and Oscar in the category of best documentary film. But recently, KL issued a public statement accusing the documentary of selectively representing their journalism. The roundtable will engage in debates around the gaze, hero-building, and misrepresentation of social actors in the documentary. We will ponder on questions like how much agency a filmmaker can exercise on the representation of their subjects in the name of creative liberty. It’s equally important to raise concerns about the responsibility of ethical representation that privileged filmmakers owe to their marginal subjects. Additionally, the agency of how subjects want themselves to be represented is central to the act of documentary making or not. How the heroic nature of the documentary doesn't always translate into the work that these women journalists do on ground. Lastly, the power to represent lies in whose hands. In this roundtable, Speaker 1 will open the discussion by situating ‘Khabar Lahariya’ in the documentary and their misrepresentation. Speaker 2 will unpack the historical location of women and journalism in Dalit identity politics. Speaker 3 will focus on the complex role of education in Dalit’s caste-based discrimination and how the documentary has dealt with this complexity. Speaker 4 will talk about how the documentary succeeded in critiquing the Hindu hyper nationalist politics in Uttar Pradesh. But how this bold take by the filmmakers will in reality put the KL team at extreme risk. Speaker 5 will talk about the unrealistic hero-building of the actors in the documentary. Finally, Speaker 6 will ponder on the politics of gaze and power imbalance in the documentary.

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

This panel considers the relationship between caste and performance in India, from a range of historical, sociopolitical, and disciplinary perspectives. In India, performance has historically been caste-based practice – many “folk” forms have largely been performed and sustained by Dalit-Bahujan-Adivasi artists, while “classical” traditions have been the purview of upper-caste performers and patrons. The ways in which diverse performance forms are categorized, regulated and practiced in India today reflect, and reinforce, long histories of caste-based structural inequality. Yet, the question of caste – and the attendant forces of oppression and resistance – remain relatively underrepresented in existing scholarly accounts of theatre, music, and dance in the region. The papers in this panel illustrate how caste operates as an essential conceptual category, ordering various kinds of cultural discourses: such as the telling and retelling of epics, the forms and genres of political protest, reading cultures and the paradigms of dramatic adaptation, state censorship, surveillance, and social reform. Together, they illuminate how processes of appropriation and subversion are enacted, and how cultural hegemony is entrenched and destabilized. By invoking performance as both an object and method of analysis, this panel seeks to generate new understandings of the articulations of caste, and its intersections with region, class, gender, and sexuality in modern South Asia.

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

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

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

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

Session: Session 1: Thursday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Parlour Room 638
Floor: Floor 6

This round table revisits the legacy of the recently deceased Marxist literary critic Aijaz Ahmad (1941-2022) with the aim of demonstrating his relevance to contemporary social and political theory. Ahmad’s work touches on a wide variety of topics, including Urdu literature, postcolonial theory and American imperialism. This round table, however, focuses on a specific aspect of Ahmad’s work, namely his nuanced vision of imperialism and anti-imperialist struggles. Contemporary academia has been caught between the antinomy of a vehement, but often unreflective anti-imperialism and an equally simplistic modernization theory. Contemporary leftist discourse has often embraced one of these two poles, but neither is capable of making sense of our present moment. Postcolonial theory affirms some version of the anti-imperialist, decolonial position, while certain strands of Marxism affirm a version of modernization theory. Ahmad’s often overlooked contribution is to create a path that avoids these two extremes and outlines a political project that both affirms the importance of anti-imperialist movements, while realizing to use Moishe Postone’s words, that “anti-imperialism is not a politics.” Each of the speakers in this round table engages with Ahmad’s work to interrogate his conception of anti-imperialism and its potential relationship to various political projects.

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

What happens when we take Pakistani dramas seriously? What does a typology of Pakistani TV serials look like? This panel makes the argument that the TV serial is the dominant mode of fictional storytelling in Pakistan, and our papers attend to different examples of thematic and formal experimentation within the genre of the “drama serial.” The panel engages dramas from both the state-sponsored Pakistan Television (PTV) and post-liberalisation eras to theorise questions of gender, sexuality, religion, national identities, domesticities, and consumption in the context of institutional, political, economic, and textual trajectories of Pakistani dramas. We bring anthropological, narratological, historical and critical visual perspectives to bear on dramas ranging from Ankahi (1982) to Sinf-e-Aahan (2022). The panel is closely attentive to televisuality, emphasizing visual and affective aspects of dramas and audience viewing practices across the papers. We are invested in reframing common assumptions about how the shift in the television industry has become gendered, how the shift from public and private channels has been the primary mode of periodising industry changes, how “tradition and modernity” are deployed in hackneyed fashion within and around dramas, how Islam isn’t or is relevant to the genre, and how new platforms complicate sender-receiver models of audiences. Our focus is on close readings, on media technologies as both “digital” and “domestic”, and on how military patronage furthers and complicates existing notions about the industry. From Sacred Games (2018) to Squid Game (2021), Asian television has been booming in the post-network era (Kumar 2021); our panel places Pakistani dramas as part of this boom, situating traditional and contemporary contours of a dominant culture industry in South Asia and beyond.

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

South Asia faces the anthropocene with intensity. This is an era of unprecedented human-induced ecological degradation—via the strengthening of majoritarian political and cultural projects. Such majoritarianism often coheres as a disavowal of multiple realities that foreground the continued exploitation of shared life worlds—the existential realities of caste and patriarchal violence, agricultural crisis, pandemics, climate displacement, and destructions of sacred sites, ancestral groves, and places of worship. Simultaneously, everyday survival for minoritized South Asians entails navigating the gaps and brokenness of late industrial and postcolonial realities, where the politics of sustaining lifeworlds increasingly becomes entangled with cosmological speculation, whether it means charting the afterlives of industrial disaster; archiving historic anti-caste visions and inheritances; decolonizing adivasi temporalities; popular assembles imagined through an Islamic eco-poetics. Distinct from majoritarian visions, such popular projects are both distinctly South Asian and possess a worldly appeal. To quote Dalit artist Thenmozhi Soundararajan, they are acts of “dream[ing] at the end of the world” that entail “socially engaged speculative making”. This panel charts the mundane cosmopolitics minoritized communities forge as they encounter the ecological ends of majoritarian politics in South Asia. Focusing on the toxic uncertainties of waste work in Brahmanical Bengaluru, the aftermath of a flood in militarized Pakistan, a dam project that highlights the “underdevelopment” of eastern India, the symbolic practices that illuminate riverine ecologies in Bangladesh, and the intimate worlds women fashion as they care for and care in Himalayan ecologies, our ethnographies highlight a distinctly South Asian reckoning with the more-than-human and all-too-human. How do interlocutors and ethnographers contend with irreducible ontic differences produced by caste, religious, national, and gendered apartheids? How can experimentations with cosmopolitical realities rework epistemic and ethical limits towards mutuality? How can ethnographies juxtapose broken realities to repair South Asian futures?

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

Writings from places saturated with violence offers an intriguing portrayal of the intersections of memory, trauma, and testimony. These themes, which have always been entangled with the experiences of writers and scholars from marginalized political spaces are given a complex quality by writers who creates a web through their poetics to link memory, forgetting, trauma and various forms of testimonies in a range of contexts .Under the shadow of the state censorship where mere witnessing of an event becomes an act of resistance, the panel investigates the challenges of narrating a traumatic event in poetry or in any testimony. Chrean Rudhramoorthy in his paper he explores the dilemmas of writing mass atrocities and genocide. Anushiya Ramaswamy in her paper reads of Cheran’ s poetry as a counter discourse to the official versions of violent events that transpired in Sri Lanka in the wake of state repression of Tamils and Muslims. Asiya Zahoor in her paper comments on the various literary poetic forms used by Kashmiri writers to deal with trauma and to bear witness of the events as they unfold before them. Geethika’s paper relies on textual and discursive analysis from the testimonies provided by the Muslim victims of violence, village donor and business organizations, leaders, and monks. The larger question that guides her work concerns the relationship of “Buddhists” to “violence.” It examines the conditions of possibilities for the emergence of Buddhist violence located outside of state control yet indebted to post-colonial avowedly secular electoral procedures, claiming premodern precedent for activities supported by a neo-liberal economic order.

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

Ours is the age of platform capitalism, where the individual person gains value as a consumer and a “user.” It is not without reason that “You” was named the person of the year by Time magazine in 2006—the (you)ser after all, is everything. Simultaneously, the individual also becomes the locus of material and immaterial forms of labor, well encapsulated in the term “creator culture.” As Craig and Cunningham (2021) state, creator culture engenders the convergence of traditional media industries with digital and social networking platforms. This panel engages with the emerging terrain of creator culture in India, where digital access has created new opportunities for self-making and work. In her paper on Malegaon’s informal film production cultures, Speaker 1 explores how cine-workers slide between multiple industries and locations, including YouTube, where comedy videos propel some of them into “micro-celebrity” status. Speaker 2 paper examines forms of digital labor around cine-meme culture in Tamil Nadu. Focusing on the intersections between cinema, politics, and memes, Speaker 2 explores how the seemingly leisurely act of meme-making is itself a form of affective political labor. Speaker 3 paper explores the possibilities of queer self-making through selfie practices on platforms such as Instagram. Examining the work of queer artists and performers, his paper interrogates the selfie as a form of queer collectivity sustained by affective labor. Sticking with the theme of selfies, Speaker 4 paper explores how selfies and user-generated content inaugurate new possibilities of entrepreneurship. Focusing on two microcelebrity figures, his paper also explores the role of aspiration, class, and taste in the digital creator economy. Collectively, the papers in this panel ask, if we are in the age of what is being called “Digital India,” what exactly are the parameters of life, work, and leisure in this emerging terrain?

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

Our panel explores the ‘social function’ of language as a key axis for the production of caste identities and practices in South Asia (Kaviraj, 2010). The vital scholarship of literary historians has shown how changes in linguistic pedagogies, patronage networks, and print cultures throughout the 19th century turned language into one of the main sites for fashioning new political and social practices in South Asia. Recent scholarship on caste expands on these insights. On the one hand, scholars have examined the role of English as a juridical apparatus, cultural discourse, and political idiom for signifying modernity in South Asia (Pandian 2007; Dhareshwar 1993; Chandra 2012; Deshpande 2013). On the other hand, scholars studying the making of elite authority in vernacular languages have brought forth similar operations that worked to entrench (sanskritic) Brahmanical authority in new South Asian vernaculars (Naregal 2001; Orsini 2002; Maitreya 2022). Thus, language is a key medium through which interlinked processes of secularization and modernization have refashioned caste hierarchies. Against this backdrop, our panel asks: what are the possibilities and limits of projects seeking to challenge existing caste hierarchies by remaking linguistic hierarchies? Spanning historical, regional and linguistic contexts, individual papers examine attempts to inaugurate new modes of speaking, writing, and being against existing caste practices. Drawing on ethnographic, archival and literary methodologies, our panel examines caste as practice (Jaaware 2018), tracing the ways in which it is reproduced through specific operations of language in literature, epistemology, political protest, and everyday sociality. By tracing the imbrications of caste and language across contexts of politics, education, and literary practice, individual papers in this panel offer ways to answer Dhareshwar’s provocation: how do we elaborate an anti-caste politics orientated towards ‘new ways of being, of being together….how do we name this theory?’

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

This roundtable proposes to bring together authors of six recent books on contemporary social and political challenges in India. Following six books tackle these important issues from various vantage points such as- governance, welfare, state-society relations, women’s rights, institutions, and institutional change. "Capable women, Incapable States" (Oxford University Press 2020) shows how India’s criminal justice system governs violence against women and how women navigate the system. "Farewell to Arms" (Oxford University Press 2021) examines how rebels become stakeholders in the very political system which they sought to challenge. "Patching development" (Oxford University Press 2021) critically reflects on innovative ways of governance through which public policies can work for its intended beneficiaries. "Women, Power, and Property" (Cambridge University Press 2020) examines an important question of women quotas and whether they have been able to disrupt the embedded social and political hierarchies. "Indian Sexual Politics and the Global AIDS Crisis" (Stanford University Press 2021) explores the emerging politics of citizenship at a unique intersection between crisis and citizenship ,where, a window of opportunity opened for marginalized communities of sex workers and LGBTIQ to renegotiate citizenship and demand rights from the state. Finally, "Capturing Institutional Change" (Oxford University Press 2020) explains how institutions change in a politically complex and large democracies like India through the lens of explaining the evolution of Right to Information Act 2005.The objective of this roundtable is to have authors critically engage with each other’s scholarship to discuss the learnings; core arguments; identify continuities and departures; and also reflect on future research directions and methodologies.

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

This panel focuses on the varied histories and continued legacies and manifestations of eugenics in India. Topics to be discussed include those colonial eugenic projects, eugenics as a site of contestation between colonialism and nationalism, pro-natalist projects pre-independence, birth control movements in India and their connections to international movements for birth control, the links between eugenics and population control policies, the rhetoric of overpopulation in India and globally, eugenics during the Emergency, and other topics. The panel will also consider contemporary resonances and expressions of eugenics, and will take up matters such as new reproductive technologies, transnational surrogacy, the links between eugenics and Hindu nationalism, eugenics and the climate crisis, the eugenic rhetoric within the current Covid-19 crisis, and other topics.

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

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

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

In the aftermath of what Alexis Sanderson has termed “The Śaiva Age,” communities across southern India creatively reimagined religious traditions centered on the worship of the deity Śiva in ways that decisively shaped contemporary expressions of regional culture. Despite recent advances in scholarship, many questions remain about the precise processes of change and continuity that contributed to these transformations. This panel explores the reconstitution of South Indian Śaivism between the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries within several distinct social, institutional, and theological contexts. Drawing on a rich array of Kannada-, Sanskrit-, and Tamil-language sources, as well as visual and material evidence, the panel examines key textual practices and political strategies through which Śaiva identities came to be (re)defined. Speaker 1 discusses the bounds of human personhood and its relation to material objects in the early (13–14th) centuries of the Vīraśaiva tradition in the Andhra region through the case of the prānalinga or “life-breath linga.” Speaker 2 considers the constitution of early Tamil Advaita Vedānta by focusing on the rationale behind a 15th century translation of the Īśvara Gītā and how this translation contributes to shaping a terminology for Advaita Vedānta in Tamil. Speaker 3 interrogates two cases of rebellion by communities of Viraśaiva-Lingāyatas against the Mysore court in the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries to understand how the identities of minority religious traditions were subject to interpretation and manipulation by political powers who decide their insider or outsider status. Speaker 4 analyzes an early modern Tamil-language polemic against meat consumption, arguing that the current tendency to equate Tamil Śaivism with vegetarianism is historically related to the emergence of new notions of “self” and “other” in this period and a corresponding need to rethink the contour and configuration of community boundaries

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

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

Bringing together papers that each conduct critical histories of different forms of Indian classical dance from within their respective traditions, this panel explores how studies of Indian classical dance engage with and contribute to some of the most pressing critical theoretical traditions of our time, including critical race studies, feminist and queer studies, and studies of class, caste and religion. Analyzing the political, philosophical and cultural implications of the designation ‘classical’ that has served to demarcate the performance traditions that came to be categorized under the banner of ‘Indian classical dance’ in the postcolonial context, panelists pay particular attention to the intersecting formations of gender, race and religion that inform and are shaped by these performance traditions. Moreover, by drawing on a range of methodological approaches in their studies and centering critical histories of Indian classical dance, the papers presented shed light on the different and multiple forms of knowledge that are made possible when focus is given to the dancing body. Drawing on a range of historical material as well as embodied experiences that span multiple geographic and cultural locations, the papers draw further attention to the global dimensions of the history that has produced Indian classical dance, an amalgamation of dance styles that is too often used to construct ideas of a coherent and stable Indian national identity.

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

This roundtable will discuss the recently published The Idea of Indian Literature: Gender, Genre, and Comparative Method, with focus on modernism, gender, and the comparative study of multilingual South Asia. Indian literature is not a corpus of texts or literary concepts from India, argues The Idea of Indian Literature, but a provocation that seeks to resolve the relationship between language and literature, written in as well as against English. Examining canonical Hindi and Tamil short stories from the crucial decades surrounding decolonization, the book contends that Indian literature must be understood as indeterminate, propositional, and reflective of changing dynamics between local, regional, national, and global readerships. The speakers will discuss the book’s contributions to the study of modern Indian literatures, with response from the author. Speaker 1, with expertise in gender, nation, sexuality, and literary modernisms in India, has written extensively on key issues for this roundtable, including translation and literary modernism. Speaker 2, with expertise in South Asian literature and film, progressive writing, realism, and the novel genre in India, has worked on questions of language and comparatism central to this discussion. Speaker 3, with expertise in modern and contemporary Hindi literature, especially Dalit and popular literatures, has examined related questions of gender, genre, feminism, and translation. Speaker 4, with expertise in print culture and the history of the book in South Asia, and Hindi and Urdu modernisms, is working on related questions of genre and form in her current project. Speaker 5, with expertise in planetary Anglophone literature, world literature in English and translation, colonialism and postcolonialism, has produced field-defining on which The Idea of Indian Literature builds. Speaker 6 is the author of the work, with expertise in modern Hindi and Tamil literatures, realisms and modernisms, South Asian feminisms, and postcolonial studies.

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

This panel builds on the work done by feminist historians of gender, caste and labor in de-centering histories of Bengali women in the 19th-early 20th centuries. The papers in this panel depart from the preoccupation with narratives of dominant-caste Hindu women and metaphors of ‘cages’ and ‘shackles’ to speak of constraints on women’s mobility. Heroic narratives of emancipation focused on ‘firsts’ do not account for the life and work of women outside the ambit of the dominant caste antahpurs and bhadrata (respectability). The three papers in the panel thus focus on the mobile worlds of women in diverse professions -- spies, informers, hawkers, performers -- and their negotiation with urban spaces. The scholarship around women’s labour, gendered representation of caste and allegations of sexual deviance in late colonial India have been variously explored by Samita Sen (1999), Tanika Sarkar (2001), Charu Gupta (2012; 2016) and Durba Mitra (2020), among others. The three papers in this panel underscore these issues through the overarching themes of ‘mobility’ and ‘waywardness’ that had gendered and caste-based sanctions for women. In doing so, the papers in this panel speak to each other in addressing through print history how mobile women’s worlds are scantily mapped and of the silence of the archives regarding marginalized women. Through the uses of what Saidiya Hartman has called ‘critical fabulation,’ the papers in this panel re-imagine the shared socio-cultural worlds of these mobile women that help us to understand the milieu beyond oft-written historical and literary tropes, and highlight the profound tensions, both class and caste-based, when professional mobile women enter into and traverse those spaces in the colonial city which had been seen as the exclusive purview of men. The panel, therefore, interrogates the nature of self-fashioning and creative/social labor that emerges through narratives of these mobile women.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Set during the early years of Sri Lanka’s thirty-year civil war, and based on sixteen years of research, V.V. Ganeshananthan’s Brotherless Night explores the blurred lines between formal participation in conflict and civilian life. Brotherless Night will be published in 2023 by Random House. Brotherless Night follows Sashi, a sixteen-year-old who dreams of becoming a doctor in her hometown of Jaffna, Sri Lanka. As civil war subsumes her home, her dream takes a different path. Sashi begins working as a medic at a field hospital for militant Tamil Tigers, who are fighting for a separate homeland for Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority. But after the Tigers murder her teacher, and the arrival of Indian peacekeepers brings further atrocities, she turns to one of her professors, a feminist and dissident who invites her to join in a dangerous, secret project of documenting human rights violations as a mode of civil resistance to war. The story captures furious mothers marching to demand news of their disappeared sons; a young student attending the hunger strike of an equally young militant; and a feminist reading group that tries to side with community and justice over any single political belief. The author of Brotherless Night will do a short reading, and then be present to respond to four scholars who will discuss Brotherless Night and explore the relationship between kinship and political struggles for justice in Sri Lanka. Considering the current economic and political crisis in Sri Lanka, and in the aftermath of a future built by deep and enduring violence, especially against minorities, how does one write fiction grounded in an imperative to witness? Should fiction have an ethical imperative and to whom?

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

This panel explores the recent trends and infrastructural developments in South Asian digital film and television by locating the growth and expansion of OTT platforms in India. Since the entry of Netflix in India in 2016, the OTT mediascape in India has expanded with more than 40 platforms and caters to a subscriber base of 70-80 billion users. The mix of indigenous and international platforms attempting to make inroads into India’s heterogeneous, and linguistically diverse subscriber-base, has given rise to a renewed interest in media content acquisition and distribution. This panel takes the pandemic as a crucial moment to identify specific media forms that were commissioned by selected OTT platforms and the varied modalities used to market and publicize these content. Paper 1 locates the changed infrastructural needs that Indian OTT witnessed with the outset of the pandemic and how it has shaped the range of media produced under the broader rubric of “pandemic entertainment.” Continuing the emphasis on distribution and reception, Paper 2 follows the exhibition of Warner Bros.’ Tom & Jerry: The Movie (2021), which premiered during the pandemic. Paper 3 addresses how the actor Vijay Sethupati configures a new star persona by strategically negotiating between theatrical releases and their virtual extensions through his four consecutive releases on OTT during the pandemic. Paper 4 uses Jai Bhim (2021) to interrogate the role of OTT platforms in enabling a space for social justice through films that render visible hitherto erased people/communities on the fringes. The panel thus attempts to address the changing and often nebulous parameters within which OTT platforms try to expand their content-libraries and subscriber base. Attending to pandemic-era content generation and reception becomes one way of capturing shifts in corporate strategies, aesthetic improvisations, and geopolitical decisions that have marked global releases in specific territories.

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

This panel foregrounds the existence, distinction, and competition of aesthetic practices in South Asia from the vantage point of caste and class. It investigates in tandem the weight of caste and class in giving rise to aesthetics that are recognizable, socially meaningful, and compelling to individuals, as also the importance of aesthetic practices in manifesting, animating, or asserting caste/class identity and difference. One of our aims is to encourage an understanding of aesthetics which is not limited to cultural objects and experiences of cultural engagement already framed as artistic in South Asia (for instance, ‘classical’ performance forms, visual works of art exhibited in museums). We seek to ‘vulgarize’ the use of this term to extend attention and insight to experiences and objects of broad-based, everyday circulation and consumption. Simultaneously, this panel deploys caste and class as a significant form of differentiation with an intention to move past generalized references to these categories, and especially to the overly capacious concept of the 'middle class,' which includes, in the South Asian context, dramatically different aspirations and prospects. This panel’s larger goal is to clarify and better understand how socio-economic difference and stratification give rise, in conjunction with other factors situating individuals in society (such as gender, age, nationality, etc.), to social worlds with distinctive aesthetic practices, orientations, and aspirations. To what kinds of aesthetic practices and what kinds of (in)commensurable aesthetic fields does the co-existence of groups with unequal economic, cultural, and political capital give rise to? And how are these inequities effectively actualized, amplified, or challenged through the creation of discrete aesthetic worlds?

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

Please note: This is the first part of a proposed two-part panel. The ascension of Narendra Modi and the BJP to national power in 2014 and the further consolidation of BJP rule in the 2019 election are widely acknowledged as signaling the onset of a new political era in India. Above all, this era is defined by the sheer dominance of the ruling party - a dominance unparalleled in electoral politics since the heyday of Congress hegemony - and its consequent ability to transform state, society, and economy in substantial ways. This panel aims to probe more deeply into the political economy of this new era, by offering critical conceptual responses to the following questions: • How are accumulation strategies and state-capital relations configured under the Modi regime? Has India witnessed the onset of a new phase of neoliberalization in India since 2014? If so, what are its most significant aspects and dynamics? • How do we understand the changing character of the Indian state? In particular, what - if any - is the relationship between autocratization, the cultural politics of Hindu nationalism, and neoliberal policy regimes under Modi? • How does the Modi regime sustain its hegemony, especially among its plebeian voters, despite its persistently poor ability to deliver on its promises of development and prosperity for all? Specifically, through what modalities does the BJP government seek to reconcile the imperatives of accumulation and legitimation in a deeply unequal society?

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

How can we envision forms of ‘resistance’ in politically fractured borderlands like Northeast India? The panel proposes to rethink the ‘Northeast' as a category within South Asian studies and the Global North by reframing the catalog of resistance in the region. We draw attention to typologies of resistance often excluded in existing discourses and readings of the region. Resistance in this “frontier,” as is often perceived, is variously theorized and hypothesized in the subsuming tone of armed rebellion, ethnic political movements, and contestations. In so doing, the Northeast is gauged as a singular, if not homogeneous space of political struggle and insurgency. This panel renders an assemblage of resistances, which was once illegible and preempted in the macro-political framework and linear imaginations of historical progress in the region. Rooted in the quotidian resistance of various communities in the region, the papers in this panel bring together four different studies from the vantage of gender, bioculturalism, health and medicine, and psycho-social practices. Through these papers, the panel offers innovative insights on the intertwined materialities and immaterialities, the cultural logics, and the politics of larger historical processes in a neoliberal order. Specifically, the panel forefronts and engages forms of resistances at the backdrop of fraught relationships transformed and asserted through various epistemic shifts, historiography, and counter-cultural involvements.

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

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

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

The pandemic mandates new histories of South Asia. Even as racial capitalism and the attendant erosion of social provision escalates global ecological catastrophe, the meteoric rise of religious nationalisms as explicit statecraft re/makes a brave new world. If the current pandemic summons histories of contagion, threat and devaluation, such histories, we argue, are always already sutured to the very idea of South Asia. While the focus of the global pandemic continues to be on the outbreak’s original epicenters, it is the people in the South Asia, we are told, who will suffer even more, more loss, more decimation, of life and livelihood. It is this inevitable invocation of contemporary South Asia, as a perilous, contaminating geography of vulnerability, precarity, suffering, poverty that fuels our meditations here. This roundtable refuses such a continued insistence on South Asia as either a place of historical failure, or the place where theory is implemented. We proffer an alternative conceptual nexus here, that of pandemic histories and “andolan/protest” imaginaries to theorize modes of historiographical thinking that defy narratives of death and detritus. If anything, the containment of the pandemic, in the very geographies of so-called death, has provided more fodder for such ruminations. Histories of South Asia are always pandemic histories, histories of widespread foreign occupation, threatened constantly by inequality and landscapes of loss and dispossession. While such historical orientations have continued to define South Asia, we are keen to animate these habits of reading anew. How can pandemic stories be a place of gathering feminist hope, instead of dispersal and attenuation? We focus on lived modes of life and survival within Dalit, migrant, Muslim and queer collectivities,, not as dire responses to a pandemic, but more as historiographical forms that migrate, contaminate and infuse life precisely at the moment of extinction.

Session: Session 6: Friday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Conference Room 3
Floor: Floor 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This panel examines the formulations and limitations of accomplishing equality and social justice in Muslim South Asia. The modern democratic state presupposes norms of equality in the sense that its citizens are equal in political rights and duties, economic opportunities, and social treatments regardless of wealth, resources, status, and other dimensions of their condition. From Western enlightenment to Islamic tenets, the promise of equality has drawn upon multiple sources. In Muslim societies, particular Quranic verses are repeatedly referenced in support of the strong theological bases for equality. This panel takes up a multipronged approach to understand the theory and practice of equality across India and Pakistan. Afsar Mohammad looks into a Muslim writer and activist’s search for “the new woman” in the post-1940s Hyderabad by projecting women’s agency as a site for attaining gender equality, progressivism, and social justice. By looking into Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s 1947 speech promising equality to all religions, the adoption of Musāwat-i-Muḥammadī by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, and the three constitutions of Pakistan, Mujeeb Ahmad unpacks the understandings, interpretations and violations of the different notions of equality in the state and society of Pakistan. By engaging with the lived experiences of the Dalit Christians of Pakistan through the lens of Orlando Patterson’s notion of “social death,” Yasmin Saikia asks some poignant questions about the respect and dignity for the Dalit Christians in contemporary Pakistan while invoking the country’s foundational ideas and historical contexts. Raisur Rahman explores how the English education in colonial India allowed for the flattening of the curve that the ashraf dominated, but it came with its own limits as the vast majority of the Indian Muslims failed to avail of educational, social, and economic opportunities. The panel represents diverse countries, time periods, academic ranks, and genders.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This panel explores the multiple lives of infrastructure: the unexpected, untold, and rogue journeys of infrastructural objects, technologies, instruments, and sites. Infrastructure studies has opened up “the politics and poetics of infrastructures” in their first incarnations—what they were built for—and at the end of their lives—as the ruins of technical and cultural engineering as well as questions of access. Building on this scholarship, this panel explores the material, social, political-economic, and discursive transformations that reconstitute infrastructures over time, thereby illuminating the latencies and excesses within infrastructures that allow for their multiple lives. What stories are told – or spin out of control – about these transformations are as important as the materiality and political economy of the transformations themselves. The four papers explore the heterogenous entanglements that are produced and relied upon as political actors, environmental conditions, and creative use transform the meaning, technical capacity, and aesthetic force of infrastructural sites and entities across historically and geographically varied contexts in South Asia. These are the careers of infrastructures, or biographies beyond, beneath, and across the surface of things that move us past the oft-commented on dialectics of bounded visibility and invisibility towards the distribution of effects that are social, sensory, political, and perceptible. Varied in scale, from the devices of global financialization and subcultural production to the sites of national development and security, careering infrastructures is the method and object of this panel.

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

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

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

Session: Session 9: Saturday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Conference Room 1
Floor: Floor 2

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Session: Session 9: Saturday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Conference Room 3
Floor: Floor 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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