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: University C/D
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 - Full Day
Room: Parlour Room 629
Floor: Floor 6

For far too long, World War II has remained on the margins of South Asian historiography and public memory. Independence and the partition of the subcontinent in 1947 have dominated both the popular imagination and the historiography, repressing the historical significance of the war years. Yet, during World War II, India functioned as a military, industrial, and logistical base for Allied operations. The British government mobilized India’s resources to pay for the war effort, and the Indian army expanded dramatically with Indian troops fighting around the world. Despite its relative neglect in the scholarship, the war’s impact on South Asia in terms of law, economics, and technologies, was significant and long lasting. This symposium analyzes the influence of World War II in South Asia from a multi-disciplinary perspective. Presentations will consider the economic repercussions of the war, as well as the war’s influence on legal, medical, scientific, and pedagogical discourses. We will also analyze literary, cinematic, and journalistic representations of this conflict in a range of South Asian languages. While the focus is on South Asia, many presenters also consider the global impact of South Asians’ involvement in the war, including the Indian National Army (INA) trials in Singapore, as well as the global opium trade. Drawing together media studies’ scholars, literary scholars, anthropologists, and historians of South Asia, the symposium not only challenges Euro-centric understandings of World War II, but also unsettles political assumptions about the 1940s in South Asia.

Session: Symposium - Full Day
Room: Parlour Room 638
Floor: Floor 6

The American Institute of Pakistan Studies (AIPS) is proposing a Junior Scholars’ Conference intended to mentor junior scholars working on Pakistan. This one-day conference will showcase the research being done by junior scholars in the field of Pakistan Studies. AIPS will hold an open call for applications, which is widely advertised throughout the AIPS member institutions (36 institutions) and beyond. We encourage abstracts from disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, political science, history, literature, religious studies, art history, music, women studies, film and communications studies, etc. AIPS has identified senior scholars who will read the papers, provide feedback, mentorship, and focused discussion. This event will utilize a full day and is therefore larger than a traditional conference panel. This Junior Scholars’ conference will be central in enabling emerging scholars to network with others in their field and be exposed to senior scholars who can act as additional advisors/mentors. Other past conferences held at the Annual Conference have been instrumental in creating a nation-wide dialogue between junior and senior scholars. There have been significant outcomes of the past conferences, including multiple projects started, mentorships forged, articles written, and dissertations revised, edited and completed that have sprung from this intensive one-day conference. Program will be similar to 2016 program (attached). Discussants include: 1) Farhat Haq, Professor, Political Science, Monmouth College 2) Matthew Cook, Professor, Postcolonial & South Asian Studies, North Carolina Central University 3) Frank Korom, Professor, Religion and Anthropology, BU 4) Yasmin Saikia, Hardt-Nickachos Chair in Peace Studies, Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict, Arizona State University 5) Iftikhar Dadi, Associate Professor, History of Art & Visual Studies, Cornell 6) Shahnaz Rouse, Professor, Sociology, Sarah Lawrence College 7) Cabeiri Robinson, Associate Professor, International Studies, Comparative Religions, and South Asian Studies, UW-Seattle 8) Iqbal Sevea Singh, Associate Professor, History, UNC

Session: Symposium - Full Day
Room: Madison College D240 - 1
Floor: Madison College

The Nepal Study Center (NSC) at the University of New Mexico, its members and affiliated scholars request letting us organize the Annual Himalayan Policy Research Conference, the 13th in our series at the symposium of the University of Wisconsin's 47th Annual Conference on South Asia (October 11-14, 2018). We have had grand successes over the years in providing this platform to attract scholars from all over the world. The purpose of the event continues to be to promote scholarly interactions among the scholars with policy research interest on the Himalayan region and the countries in South Asia. We have had highly successful conferences in the past --2006 through 2017 -- at your venue where scholars came to participate from several countries such as the US, Canada, Europe, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal, and Japan. We even did a live internet broadcast of the event in 2010.

Session: Symposium - Full Day
Room: Madison College Meeting Room 1
Floor: Madison College

This symposium seeks to untangle the complementary logics of the right to kill and the right to maim in multiple zones of occupation and abandonment in South Asia. By paying attention to cultural production, we ask what forms of life, modes of death and capacities for survival and endurance are engendered in such exceptional zones where the right to kill and the right to maim shadow and complement each other? What constitutes “life” and “living” and what falls into the realm of “nonlife” or lack of animacy in militarized locales? We want to explore the nature of relation that emerges between the citizens and the regimes through the optics of maiming. What forms of ability, disability and debility do we encounter if we take such issues into consideration? Besides the exploration of necropolitical topographies, we are also interested in probing temporal experiences—how are conjunctions between “sudden” and “slow” scales of death manifested in such zones of occupation and/or abandonment, for instance? We welcome presentations from all disciplines in the social sciences and humanities to build up a broad dialogue about life, living and dying in such exceptionalized spaces. The endeavor of this symposium is to build new solidarities across networks of scholars working in different regions of South Asia.

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

This half-day symposium showcases projects and conversations by media scholars doing work about South Asia and the South Asian diaspora. Anthony Moretti, Robert Morris University, will facilitate two roundtable discussions featuring emerging and established scholars whose focus is on the theory and practice of communication, journalism and media in and about South Asia. Scholars from all disciplines are welcome to attend and collaborate and engage in dialogue about a) building a communication and media studies research agenda through a South Asian lens, b) examining how to raise the profile of South Asia studies, regardless of discipline, and c) sharing success stories in gaining a tenure-track position within a U.S. college or university.

Session: Symposium - Half Day, Morning
Room: Conference Room 4
Floor: Floor 2

While national labels continue to be common in the language of funding opportunities and job offerings, environmental and social processes such as glacial melt and human mobility routinely transcend international, political limits. This symposium brings together scholars whose research in the Himalayas transcends boundaries. Although recent scholarship (e.g. special issues on South Asia’s borders in Political Geography 2013 and Journal of South Asia 2017) and research units (e.g. Asian Borderlands Research Network and ERC Highland Asia grant) both advance and demonstrate the need for wider transborder research, scholars face many institutional, bureaucratic, and funding challenges for conducting fieldwork and analysis across Himalayan spaces. In order to better organize and galvanize regional research agendas, this symposium will create a productive space for researchers at multiple career levels to share experiences working with and across various geographies, languages, and governmental regulations. In addition to offering participants the opportunity to showcase their research, the symposium has invited experts from institutions at multiple Himalayan universities, research centers, and government offices to provide practical information on available resources and strategies for transborder researchers. Senior scholars will also offer information about their own struggles and successes in working across borders in diverse academic disciplines and lead break-out focus groups with thematic foci in both regional and disciplinary contexts. Over the course of the symposium, the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies will also seek to actively expand the Association’s support for trans-Himalayan researchers and work towards more effective responses to the challenges voiced by scholars working across the region. We anticipate that a key outcome of the event will be the development of new services for ANHS members in Nepal as well as India, Bhutan, Pakistan, and Tibet/China.

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

The preoccupation with authenticity that has characterized social science research since the turn of the century has inevitably led to giving ever more attention to the boundaries defining insider/outsider status in a number of categories. Thus, issues of identity in reference to generational, gender-specific, socio-economic, ethno-racial, regional, religious, ideological, and intellectual membership have increasingly become the focus of both analysis and debate. But the effort at avoiding "othering" any particular group has concealed the value inherent in exploring the differences between insider and outsider perspectives on any issues for which membership defines identity. The 2018 SAMSA Symposium invites contributions addressing the tension between insider and outsider interpretations in South Asian Muslim history, politics, and intellectual/ideological expressions of all kinds. Contrasting and comparing various approaches to one issue, or focusing instead on the process by which boundaries emerge, or one particular perspective gets privileged, are all equally valuable, and are welcome. These can include such issues as modernity and tradition, including the conflict between colonial modernity and tradition, the concept of the singular nation-state in India that seeks to place Muslims as a national minority, the clash between rival interpretations of Islamic law and practice, the role of women in the family and society, the debate among educationists over curriculum, Middle Eastern and South Asian concepts of religious practice, electoral and political behavior, and regional variations in social and religious practices. List of speakers: Laura Dudley, Jenkins, Yasmin Saikia, Roger D. Long, M. Raisur Rahman, Taj Hashmi, Sana Haroon, Mehr Farooqi, Usha Sanyal, Sanaa Riaz, Jenniferr Dubrow Justification:: The richness of the subject of the "other" in South Asian Muslim history means that a number of scholars will be able to share their research with their colleagues. Preliminary schedule: 2 morning panels, 2 afternoon panels, and a Symposium Dinner with invited speaker.

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

This panel ethnographically explores the various ways in which technological objects come into being, transform, are broken down, and modified in various contemporary settings. We contend that these technological objects emerge at the confluence of plural yet sustained material and knowledge practices and expertise. By foregrounding techniques by which technological objects come into being alongside the vibrant materiality of these objects, the panel looks into the conjunctures and spaces where recurrent, prolonged, often mundane practices and engagements weave together, disentangle, or metamorphose these technological objects. We ask, how do these practices construct technological objects? What are the epistemic and material histories that have congealed in these practices? What are the meanings that these objects acquire through these processes? How do these meanings direct the efficacy of these objects in the world? Where do these objects circulate and under what conditions are they consumed, used, dispersed? What worlds do these objects make possible and for whom? These questions point both toward the complex interactions of meaning making, material processes, and knowledge practices as well as how these interactions form the basis for and inflect competing claims around questions of livability, risk and sustainability as issues seen as increasingly amenable to technological articulation and management. In pursuit of these questions, papers will explore the engineering of time in the production of genetically modified cotton seeds, expertise of dissasembly in producing scrap from vehicles as technologically complex objects, and the standardisation of quality as input to the manufacture of cigarettes.

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

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

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

Violent conflict in Low and Middle Income Countries (LMICs), such as Sri Lanka, generates large numbers of persons with physical and psychological disabilities who will be trapped in extreme poverty and social exclusion long after the war is over. Their rights and needs are frequently ignored in post-war reconstruction and development because they lack political voice, economic power, and social status. One way to begin correcting such neglect is to provide these people with the confidence, knowledge, and skills to demand socio-economic rights and service delivery from governments and other actors (such as donors and transnational corporations). This panel on empowering people with conflict-related disabilities in Sri Lanka is especially timely. First, the country ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in February 2016. The Convention obligates Sri Lanka to provide rights awareness, equal access to justice, and livelihood opportunities to persons with disabilities. Second, Sri Lanka joined the Mine Ban Treaty in December 2017 and has pledged to make the country “mine free” by 2020. Third, Sri Lankans are currently debating how to provide reparations for those affected by the civil war and state violence. Finally, the 2015 UN Sustainable Development Goals promote inclusion and access to justice. This inter-disciplinary panel (with scholars from dance, law, and politics) examines several efforts to empower people with disabilities in northern and eastern Sri Lanka through information, dance, and law. It asks whether these efforts have been effective and, if so, how and why. The panel is based on qualitative fieldwork conducted in 2017 and 2018.

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

This panel investigates how the Cold War impacted literary and cultural imagining of the world from South Asian perspective. South Asia was drawn into the Cold War as India elected the path of non-alignment and Pakistan joined US sponsored treaty regimes. By 1971 India signed a no-war pact with the Soviet Union while US-backed Pakistan in a civil war with its eastern wing and thus India-Pakistan conflict was subsumed within the larger logic of the Cold War. Yet as the Cold War propaganda reached South Asia, South Asian writers and cultural activists imagined an alternative form of global solidarity through the experience of decolonization in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Poets and novelists experimented with literary forms and themes that ranged from realism to modernism and critical irrealism. Feminist writers critiqued social inequities based on gender and fashioned an imagination of world that transcended the ravages of patriarchy in addition to those of race and class. The supposed binaries of Cold War and nation state rivalries paved the way for creative engagement with alternative imaginings of the solidarities from the perspective of global south. By drawing on Bengali literature in 1950s and 60s this panel posits a fragment of this alternative view of the world and creative imagining of human solidarities.

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

This interdisciplinary panel brings together methodological approaches from dance studies, ethnomusicology, and film studies to produce a social and cultural history of female performers in Indian cinema from the 1930s to the 1960s. By studying the personal and performing lives of dancer-actresses like T.R. Rajakumari, T. Jyothilakshmi, Azurie, and L. Vijayalakshmi, the panel examines the circuits between traditional dancers, the cinema, and newly emerging classifications of classical, folk, and film dance. These little-studied female pioneers of Tamil, Telugu, and Hindi cinema negotiate categories of the regional and the national, traditional and modern, classical and filmic to alert us to the complex intermediality between dance and cinema, stage and screen. Trained in recently-canonized “classical” dance forms and well-known as well for their erotically-charged cabaret dance sequences, these dancer-actresses make visible the cultural labor of women from communities – whether devadāsī or Eurasian – that were beginning to be concertedly marginalized from the hegemonic national narratives of both dance and cinema. Through ethnographic work with T.D. Kuchalakumari, an actress from the devadāsī community, Hari Krishnan traces the contributions of her family members, T.R. Rajakumari and T. Jyothilakshmi to Tamil cinema. Rumya Putcha employs feminist and decolonial ethnographic methods, using memory as a critical tool to reconstruct the career of the “vamp,” L. Vijayalakshmi. Focusing on Azurie, known as “the Pavlova of India and Pakistan,” Usha Iyer examines the many hyphenated identities embodied by this early “sex symbol” of Bombay cinema. The focus on dance in all the papers emerges from our shared view that film dance, in particular, illuminates persistent tensions around public female performance. The remarkable dancer-actresses that animate this panel demonstrate how women, through their engagement with new dance traditions and the emerging form of the cinema, were central figures in articulating South Asian cultural modernities.

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

In the world of fast paced innovations where societies compete globally with each other to be at the forefront, maintaining age old traditions is complicated. One such tradition in south Asia involves generations of physicians practicing indigenous medicine, otherwise known as Traditional Medicine (TM). Westernization and globalization are not congruent with those who pursue the family trade of treating patients. Individual nations trying to meet international standards are less sympathetic to these indigenous practitioners. For example, the mere invocation of TM itself brings about two dominant but opposing narratives: one that holds that TM is unscientific in nature and thereby primitive while the other narrative regards TM as suffused with ancient wisdom with the capability of providing an effective alternative to bio medicine (especially in treating chronic illnesses without the risk of side effects to one's body and mind). In between lay an array of narratives and claims involving various groups. This panel is set to explore these points of view from the perspective of practitioners. The aim is to assess any changes to the modus operandi of TM practitioners as coping mechanisms and how this influence the TM itself.

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

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

The papers in this panel present recent research on sacred spaces, complex religious rituals and diverse objects of worship of the Buddhist Newars in the Kathmandu Valley of Nepal. Presenters approach the topic from different disciplinary angles and examine textual, ethnographical and art historical sources to shed light on worship practices which have so far received very little scholarly attention. The first panelist examines the transmission and development of the cult of the goddess Vajrayoginī in the Kathmandu Valley and the Himalayan foothills. The paper analyzes narrative literature and local historiography transmitted by Newar Budhist Tantric priests in the town of Sankhu. The insights emerging from this study lead to a new understanding of the origin and transformation of local forms of the goddess and her relationship to other Buddhist goddesses. The second panelist focuses on different representations of the feet of the Bodhisattva Manjuśrī and their significance as objects of worship. The paper examines the sculpted feet (and occasionally foot imprints and sandals) in their architectural setting in the Kathmandu Valley and addresses the question of their antiquity. The third paper explores the worship of sacred books (pustakapūjā) among the Buddhist Newars. In the center of this ritual are usually the Sūtras of Mahāyāna Buddhism, which are considered embodiments of transcendent Buddhas or other divine figures. The paper also investigates the occasions for and the motivations underlying this complex religious ritual. The fourth presenter investigates how an open space in a traditional Newar Buddhist monastery (bahā) can be ritually transformed for religious purposes. The paper presents a case study of the courtyard of Nāg Bahā in the city of Patan and demonstrates how annual ritual events transform its space and enable all members of the community to experience Buddhist ritual and thereby reaffirm their Newar Buddhist identity.

Session: Session 2: Friday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Madison College D240 - 1
Floor: Madison College

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Session: Session 2: Friday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Madison College Meeting Room 1
Floor: Madison College

This panel examines the role of modern media technologies - newspapers, pamphlets, posters, medical journals, vernacular press, radio, cinema, music - in the production of sensate publics in India. We hope to challenge the rational-affective binary that so far has informed dominant debates on the public sphere, wherein publics and “counterpublics” are defined by their distance from techniques of reasoned discourse. We analyze the making of sensate publics from the period following World War I to the 1990s: Sivaramakrishnan examines the history of tobacco and health hazards in post-colonial India and its corporeal consumption, Vaidik focuses on Bhagat Singh’s trial and the momentary revolutionary efflorescence, while Mukherjee and Menon study impassioned filmic tonalities and the role they played in India’s negotiations with modernity and visions of freedom. As the four papers in the panel suggest, print, visual and sound media are neither hegemonic nor homogeneous; they operate in heterogeneous ways and in relation to diverse technologies and artifacts. Specific configurations of publics emerge alongside and through historically specific media practices. Through our focus on emerging media platforms that galvanized public affect in late colonial India, we hope to offer new frameworks for the study of militant nationalism, Hindi “dialogue-delivery,” scientific imaginaries of health and consumption, and linguistic self-definition. Using the lens of ‘sensate’ publics the panel seeks to explore several ruptures and transitions that inform each other: for instance the late 1920s mark a chronological rupture in history of ‘publics’ in South Asian history, and through the 1960s and later the politics of decolonization and developmental modernity shaped visions of the bodies and its risks. These new sensate publics heralded a visual, sonic and audible modernity - spectacular in all its senses.

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 1
Floor: Floor 2

India’s mineral-rich east-central region – encompassing states like Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, and Odisha – saw a growing number of social conflicts in the last three decades. Economic reforms, since the National Mineral Policy of 1993, expanded the extraction of minerals like coal, iron-ore and bauxite from the central Indian forest belt. The rapid liberalization of the mining sector also inflected the formation of Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh states in 2000. Since large mining corporations of east-central India have not adequately passed on economic benefits to the region’s populace, proposed mining projects are met with resistance by indigenous (adivasi) activists and environmentalists. Resistance movements against new mining operations in Chhattisgarh and Odisha also provide the occasion for contemporary articulations of indigenous identities. While indigenous people have joined the labor force in several mining towns, more than 600 tribal villages were forcefully displaced from resource-rich areas of Chhattisgarh between 2005 and 2007, with several incidents of sexual violence. To study the plural effects of the east-central region’s expanding mineral-extraction industry – as a touchstone of India’s socioeconomic progress in the last 25 years – this panel brings together scholarly perspectives across the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, economics, literature, and geography. Our first panelist discusses new socioeconomic inequalities emerging in Santhal communities of Jharkhand that participate in nearby coal-mining operations. The second panelist examines the revitalization of Gond identity in Surguja district of Chhattisgarh in the tribe’s resistance to land-grabs by mining corporations and proselytization by dominant religions. Our third panelist studies depictions of sexual violence against indigenous women in Arundhati Roy’s essay “Walking with Comrades,” reading comparatively with a text set in the Niger Delta oil conflict of Nigeria. The co-panelists of the last presentation investigate the formation of Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh states within the political economy of resource governance in India.

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

The international community welcomed the end of Sri Lanka’s (SL) 30-year civil war in 2009 and promised support to rebuild the nation. But the country has not fulfilled these expectations. The reasons are partly domestic and partly external but the two intertwined. The three papers on this panel discuss the external dimension of the continuing political and economic instability in SL in the context of its location in South Asia, Sino-Indian competition in the region, and broader changes that are taking place in global poltical economy, security and diplomacy. Darren J. Lim and Rohan Mukherjee (Panelist) in their paper “Secondary States and Major-Power Competition in the Indo-Pacific” present a “theory of secondary state strategic choice” drawing on the behavior of Asian secondary states such as SL in the midst of Sino-Indian competition. The authors argue that “hedging” — or, the deliberate creation of ambiguity surrounding alignment decisions — emerges as one among a range of strategies that secondary states might adopt. Sri Lanka, that has close relations with both India and China, is an ideal example. Neil DeVotta in his paper “Sri Lanka’s Intermestic Quandary: Negotiating Multipolarity Amidst Sinhalese Buddhist Supremacy” notes that systems theorists argue that the international structure determines a country’s foreign policy. DeVotta argues that in the Sri Lankan case it works in the reverse direction. Sinhalese Buddhist majortarianism and ethnic disharmony dominate SL’s domestic politics. This causes the country to manipulate opportunities that regional rivalries such as India vs. China create to its own advantage. Stanley W. Samarasinghe in his paper “Sri Lanka’s Economic Dependency: The 21st Century Version” argues that the only viable path to economic prosperity for Sri Lanka is an export-led economy. But inward looking policies of the country and unresolved issues in external economic relations block that path.

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

This panel proposes to examine: what engenders redistribution and citizen well being in India? The panel explores how a diverse liberal democracy develops the capacity to serve citizens. In this light it investigates the relationship between state capacity and the process of development. State capacity is an outcome of both ideas within the techno-bureaucratic elite and political will that produce a moral purpose of the Indian state. Rationalities within the strong arm of the state – its bureaucracies – depend to a large extent on the motivational ideologies that engender a moral purpose. These rationalities have a powerful impact on policy paradigms. The social and political sciences and the humanities need to pay greater attention to the moral purpose of the state embedded in these paradigms. The existing literature on state capacity has portrayed the Indian state as lacking capacity. The substantial literature on clientelism in Indian politics suggests the reasons why the Indian state lacks the capacity grow rapidly and promote welfare. This literature has substantially explained the bottlenecks to economic development and citizen well -being in India. It is now well known that the Indian state has entered an era of rapid economic growth. Undoubtedly, politics of redistribution is riddled with many challenges , however, the rights based approach initiated in 2004 has yielded results. The rights based approach that provides citizens the right to basic amenities such as work, education, forest resources, food, etc., like the economic reforms of 1991, constituted a watershed in the economic history of India. At this juncture it is pertinent to think deeply about how a weak state has persisted with governance. Exploring state capacity in India can throw significant light on how a post-colonial liberal democracy could successfully pursue the project of development.

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

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

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

Although mantras have been central to South Asian traditions from the Vedas down to the present day, modern scholarship has not always given them the attention they deserve. By addressing mantras in different media, religious contexts, and time periods, this panel explores the breadth of mantras as a category in South Asia. Engaging a wide array of material—Tamil Śaiva texts, early Indic epigraphy and iconography, and North American yoga culture—the three papers employ contrasting approaches, from the philological to the art historical to the ethnographic. In an effort to understand how mantras shape ritual, theology, soteriology, iconography, and identity, these papers are united by a common aim of critically reflecting on these syllables of power and praise. The first paper engages the neglected visual history of the sacred syllable “OM,” contributing a survey of this mantra’s diachronic and regional development in South Asian visual culture, and then offering a case study of an unpublished OM painting from early modern manuscript culture. The next paper addresses the pañcākṣara mantra in Tamil bhakti, furnishing a close analysis of Śiva's five-syllable formula as an interpretive key to the cosmological and soteriological stance of a collection of devotional hymns in a medieval Śaiva Siddhānta milieu. The last paper takes on the reinvention of the orthodox gāyatrī mantra in the modern era, exploring its innovative reception in North American yoga circles, and seeking to account for the mantra’s persistent appeal across the boundaries of time and space. With a discussant who has published widely on these topics, this panel should provide a rigorous yet wide-ranging conversation on mantras in South Asian religions.

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: Senate Room A
Floor: Floor 1

Grand-teacher of the celebrated Ramanuja, and recogized as the second founder of the Srivaisnava tradition, Yamanacharya (fl. ca. 1000?) is one of the pivotal figures in Sanskrit intellectual history. In this panel, we aim to better understand this remarkable figure and his works, both internally as a corpus and as a transformation of the major debates and methods of medieval Indian intellectual life. Aleksandar Uskokov presents Yamuna’s summary and analysis of the Bhagavadgita, the Gitarthasamgraha, as marking a crucial point in the exegetical history of that most foundational work of Sanskrit religious literature. As Uskokov demonstrates, it is only in this work that the division of the Gita into three groups of six chapters is first offered, an interpretation of the text which would be shared by all subsequent commentators regardless of sectarian or doctrinal affiliation, which had discernable consequences in soteriological theory far beyond the Srivaisnava sampradaya. Whitney Cox argues for a reinterpretation of Yamuna’s major surviving complete philosophical text, the Agamapramanyam, suggesting that the work may be understood as centrally invested in the social and political theorization of the Brahmanical estate. Through close examination of the work’s argumentative and rhetorical structure, and through adducing evidence of other, analogous efforts in earlier Sanskrit sastric works and in contemporaneous inscriptional documents, the stakes of Yamuna’s bravura intervention can be reconstructed, and its success measured. Finally, Larry McCrea offers a wide-ranging reading of Yamuna’s entire philosophical corpus. Placing his works in conversation with a host of other early second millennium texts, McCrea argues that Yamuna disrupted the intellectual protocols and disciplinary boundaries of the system of medieval Brahmanical knowledge, and that his real contribution may have been the novel generic and argumentative rearrangement that emerges in his surviving works.

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 3
Floor: Floor 2

This session centers the embodied experiences, narratives, and nomenclatures, of frontier citizens, as practices that both suture and rupture national-identity formation. Miliate explores how debate over nomenclature/ethnonyms is at the center of self-determination debates within the Kuki-Chin-Mizo-Zo(mi) peoples. He examines the role of institutions, organizations, and local leaders in the fraught process of consensus building on a shared ethno-national imaginary. Chawla’s archival evidence likewise questions the limited legitimacy of India’s narrative of “national integration” in Sikkim, examining technologies used by the state to secure the loyalty of its subjects: from the all-too-familiar rewriting of history text books to the publicity apparatus of the Information Services of India. Goswami considers the transnational imaginary invoked in the writings of North-East Indian rebels. She argues these writings produces new geographies of belonging beyond the Indian State which reimagine the region as part of a larger ‘arc of instability’ beginning with the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh and stretching up to the central highlands of Vietnam and neighboring Laos. Gergan and Smith examine how urban spaces of encounter where Himalayan youth experience racialized exclusion, are a key site for building solidarities between hill/mountain peoples and provide youth a new vantage point from which to contemplate the future of their homelands. The panel draws on recent scholarship that has argued that postcolonial India and the PRC were entangled in a process of competitive state building arising both out of a cartographic anxiety over disputed borders, as well as a distrust of itinerant peoples who were “moving targets” for both states (Guyot-Rechard, 2017; Schendel, 2002; Mathur, 2016). Together these papers push against a “methodological nationalism” (Schendel 2013), demonstrating that while the specter of the nation-state haunts frontier subjects, their identities, aspirations and desires, cannot always be read in relation to a physical and epistemic core.