Annual Conference on South Asia

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

The Harappan or Indus Valley script has been a topic of archaeological inquiry since its discovery and publication in the mid to late 19th century. The nature of the script, representing an unknown language with unknown meaning, has perpetuated scholarly interest in the writing system, particularly for would-be decipherers. However, decipherment attempts to date cannot be conclusively accepted or rejected due to the paucity of evidence resulting from lack of bilingual texts, brevity of inscriptions and indeterminate nature of the language being represented. Rather than treading the well worn decipherment route, an alternate approach has the potential to lead to new discoveries. Several scholars have reiterated that consideration of contexts and the media of Harappan inscriptions is a requisite for studies into the script. Such approaches have the potential to shed additional light on the nature of the script that has not been feasible in script-based studies alone. Like all material culture, the Indus inscriptions were situated within a wider sociocultural context which imbued them with meaning through interaction with manufacturers and users. Critical examination of the contexts in which these inscriptions were found will enable links between inscribed artefacts, their use and relationships with other aspects of Harappan material culture to be identified and explored. This is the basis of my doctoral study, which involves detailed study of inscribed Indus objects and published excavation reports from key Harappan sites, including Harappa, Mohenjo-daro and smaller settlements. Quantitative analysis of spatial distribution and relationships between inscribed and uninscribed artefacts, considering variables including material, object type, and iconography, will elucidate patterns that facilitate further insights into the quandary of the Indus script.

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

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 15th in our series at the pre-conference venue of the University of Wisconsin's 49th Annual Conference on South Asia (October 15-20, 2020). 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 2019 - 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. The abstracts, proceedings, feedback from participants, and photos from our previous conferences are available at the following website: http://nepalstudycenter.unm.edu/SeminarsWorkshopsConferences/HPRC_Conferences/HPRC_C onferecesMainHomePage.html The main theme of the Himalayan Policy Research Conference (HPRC) draws from the fields of development, democracy, governance, and environment. We consider these fields broadly as encompassing socio-economic growth (aggregate or sectoral), political transition, institutional development, governance and administrative reform, poverty and income distribution, education and health, regional development, gender and ethnicity, trade and remittances, aid and foreign direct investment, resource and environmental management, public-private partnership in technology and investment, child labor, and many other issues. The papers are expected to have important implications for public policy in one or more countries of the Himalayan region and South Asia.

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

We are writing to propose a nine hour practical workshop on South Asian translation to take place in three hour sessions over three days. The aim of this workshop is for participants and attendees to collaborate on translating and discussing South Asian literature, texts and culture. The workshop will follow the format of Princeton’s South Asia Translation Workshop, which has become a thriving forum for practicing translation from South Asian languages. Each workshop session will focus on a pre-circulated 20th century text, the first in Hindi, the second in Urdu and the third in Bengali. Five roundtable participants will circulate their translations in advance of each session for distribution to other participants and members of the audience. On the day of each workshop, one participant will introduce the selected text for 10 minutes. After this, each member of the roundtable will read their translation and provide a short comment for 10 minutes. Then the floor will be opened for an hour of discussion with the audience. In the final hour of each workshop, audience members will be distributed into five breakout rooms, facilitated by roundtable participants. Audience members will share their own translations with one another in a dynamic translation exercise. Aliya Ram and Meher Ali, PhD candidates in, respectively, Comparative Literature and History at Princeton University, and co-founders of the South Asia Translation Workshop at Princeton, will lead the sessions on Hindi and Urdu. Pinaki Bhattacharya, a translator from Bengali and a human rights activist, will be invited to lead the third workshop on Bengali. Matt Reeck, award-winning translator from Urdu and French, and Robert Phillips, translator and lecturer in Hindi and Urdu at Princeton University, will also form part of the roundtable panel.

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

Our symposium seeks to situate emergent comparative and connected methods of worlding modern South Asian histories. South Asia has long been the site of scholarly efforts to resist both the reductive presumptions of global history and the naturalization of the nation-state as the primary container of historical knowledge. Postcolonial methods have taught us to distrust the universality of frameworks constructed with Europe as the archetypal referent; while at the same time insisting that South Asian cases might provide the templates for new types of global knowledge. We see in recent scholarship an opportunity to engage this tradition of both refusing and reinscribing the “global” by putting into conversation histories of South Asia that take comparative, connected, and transnational methods as their points of departure. Drawing from the work of the political theorist Adom Getachew, we invoke the decolonial framework of “worldmaking” as a possible way of reimagining how South Asian histories construct global historical scales, inform situated comparisons, and define disciplinary formations of globally-aspirant concepts. Worldmaking provides a way of holding together the agentive labor of historical actors in shaping world scales, without valorizing a type of agency removed from history, structure, and hegemonic ideas. We seek to build from the approaches outlined by Indian Ocean and Borderlands history, while also pairing the fundamentally geographic and post-nationalist frameworks of these fields with approaches that take comparison and transnationality to different ends. Our goal is to uncover the unlikely archives, cosmopolitan itineraries, and liminal historical subjects that have brought into being real, imagined, and no longer present South Asian worlds.

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

We propose a full-day symposium to continue the Regional Bhakti Scholars Network’s nurturing of cross-regional and inter-linguistic conversations by investigating the impact of print technology on bhakti traditions during the long 19th century (roughly 1800-1930). The medium of print—both text and image—offered new possibilities for authorship, representation, and dissemination of knowledge. It conveyed information (both traditionally construed and critically formed) about bhakti groups to new configurations of literate audiences. Limited access to presses, especially when run by Christian missionary groups, privileged some voices over others. This critical period in Indian history, with its new inflows of foreign knowledge and power-knowledge disparities under colonialism, transformed in many ways how Indians perceived and talked about their earlier traditions—discussions that were frequently initiated, caught, and pursued in print. In some languages and regions, print not only brought traditional bhakti canons into publication; it contributed to the very process of canon formation itself. Yet, for as much as scholars and devotional communities today rely on printed materials as sources, the complex conditions under which they first came to be published are rarely considered. On a conceptual level, since early 20th-century scholars relied on printed materials as they theorized about bhakti generally, this medium shaped modern ideas about bhakti—including our own understandings. Across diverse languages and regions, there are many distinct and surprising stories to tell, shaped by local politics and personalities. Just as bhakti traditions differ from one another, these stories do not fit a single mold, and some question the boundaries and constitution of bhakti itself. Juxtaposing multiple histories of print and bhakti will deepen our understanding of this complex historical, textual, and discursive terrain.

Session: Symposium - Full Day
Room: Parlour Room 629
Floor: Floor 6

In South Asian studies, Sheldon Pollock’s book, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men (2006), marked a watershed moment in the field. Pollock’s study divided the history of literary production in South and Southeast Asia into two distinct periods: the first millennium, characterized by the exclusive use of Sanskrit, through which ruling elites expressed political power in their courts; and the second millennium, which witnessed the rise of vernacular languages in courtly settings. A decade and a half after Language of the Gods, our proposed symposium brings together leading junior scholars working on literature and language in South Asia in order to consider new directions in scholarship on the vernacular millennium and the framework that Pollock’s pioneering work has established. We envision the symposium as a venue for teasing out common themes and, conversely, points of divergence in practices of local literary production, by taking advantage of a new critical mass of studies conducted on literature in vernacular languages. Our symposium participants include a range of junior scholars whose work focuses on literature in Telugu, Kannada, Tamil, and Manipravalam, as well as vernacular Sanskrit in South Asia and Southeast Asia. Many of our participants integrate the theme of resistance in their papers—whether it is resistance to kingly patronage, religious authority, or the dominance of Sanskrit. While the symposium highlights the work of junior scholars in the field, we will invite senior scholars working in both Sanskrit and the vernacular to attend the session and participate in our concluding discussions. Through this symposium, we hope to begin an ongoing collaboration across junior scholars working in the field of vernacular literatures with the ultimate goal of another symposium followed by a special issue of a journal or edited volume.

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

This symposium brings together scholars of design with those of housing to provide insights into the production of domestic space in India. “Design” is a growing field in India encompassing architecture, product design, fashion, etc. In the neoliberal era, design epitomizes an entrepreneurial ethos which recasts development as innovation (Irani 2019) – but it has deeper histories, central to colonial and nationalist projects (Mathur 2007; McGowan 2019). Those histories engage not just famous designers, but also the laborers who crucially gave ideas material form. For professionals and laborers alike, a central concern since the mid-twentieth century has been the home: its architectural form, material furnishings, and neighborhood context. Designs for homes offered an important proving ground for female architects, textile designers, international consultants, and architectural schools. Builders, plumbers, and others also brought their own ideas to buildings, shaping the results. Acknowledging these diverse contributors, we examine how design has been used to articulate novel ideals of gender, family, and community. We explore the history of housing design not through stories of iconic buildings, but through explorations of social change and market capital. Even as we rethink design history from the lens of capital, we argue for the need to rethink domestic space through materiality. We consider “the domestic” as instantiated in and shaped by material culture, from the cement used in construction to the textiles woven for furnishings. By attending to the production of material culture, we examine the home as a site of investment and profit marked by struggles over gender, labor, and cultural capital. This symposium is organized to foster cross-disciplinary discussions not possible in one panel session. To generate discussion, all papers will be pre-circulated, and discussants will provide framing. The day will end with a round-table discussion of themes, with an eye towards future publications.

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

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Session: Symposium - Half Day, Afternoon
Room: University C/D
Floor: Floor 2

Organizers: Usman Hamid (Hamilton) and Emma Kalb (UChicago). Historically, Mughal historiography has been dominated by accounts centered on the person of the emperor on the one hand, and on Mughal imperial institutions on the other. Recent scholarship has begun to move away from these approaches to explore the importance of non-royal actors and institutions, as well as larger connections between the Mughals and the rest of the world, especially with Central Asia and the Persianate world. At the same time, scholars have also increasingly turned to non-Persian sources to fill the gaps left behind by a traditionally monolingual archive. This symposium builds on these new orientations to studying the Mughal period by exploring questions of both archive and methodology with an eye to writing histories that decenter the emperor. It encourages the use of better-known court chronicles in new ways as well as consideration of lesser-used archives and materials. In particular, it invites investigation into epigraphy, epistolary writing, prosopographia, illustrated manuscripts and paintings, architecture, chancery documents, regional histories, poetry, and religious texts, many of which were generated by either members of the Mughal court and its administration or those who engaged with it in one way or another. In doing so, this symposium aims to break new ground on writing narratives of the Mughal period that do not reproduce the logic of imperium.

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

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

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

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

2021 marks the 50th anniversary of the emergence of Bangladesh as an independent state. Arguably today the nation functions as an empty signifier for the world of development, from early experiments with population control to the current interest in climate adaptation. And yet, Bangladesh is not simply a site of experimentation, bounded by national borders. It is a place of politics, labor, kinship, and activism, all of which have transnational linkages, regional and global. This roundtable seeks to open up conversations around the development regime’s constitutive but shifting role in shaping the idea of Bangladesh, as currently reflected in the field of South Asian Studies, as well as in popular culture. The speakers, representing a range of disciplines and generations, raise urgent questions thrown up by re-visiting practices of knowledge production around Bangladesh. Farhana Sultana will address the coloniality of power that inheres in mainstream development models, seeking to move beyond techno-managerial approaches and the hegemonies contained therein. Farida Khan will speak to the web of neoliberal ideology and institutions that Bangladesh is trapped in and the possibilities for “decolonizing development” through alternative paradigms. Nayma Qayum will raise a set of questions around re-conceptualizing development from the ground, with particular emphasis on women’s mobilization programs by NGOs. Nafisa Tanjeem will critically reflect on the establishment of the Department of Women and Gender Studies at Dhaka University and the prevailing conditions of neoliberal feminism that eventually made it difficult to decolonize feminist knowledge-making pedagogies. Hana Shams Ahmed will address the settler colonial violence and erasure of indigenous subjectivities that the rhetoric of development enables. Elora Shehabuddin takes on the project of nationalist history writing in cold war era East Pakistan and the gendered developments it produced.

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

Current archaeological research is providing important new perspectives on the prehistoric and historic cultural developments across South Asia. Innovative new analytical, laboratory, and experimental techniques are being applied to a variety of projects expanding our knowledge of the South Asian archaeological record. This panel focuses on fresh areas of research that are further developing our understanding of South Asian technologies and site chronologies providing valuable lenses into past South Asian societies. Archaeometallurgy, ceramic thin section, faience analysis, and radiocarbon dating are the analytical avenues that will be discussed in this panel. The archaeometallurgy paper, presented by Alan Lee, will address ongoing research that combines microscopic imaging techniques with computer image analysis to reconstruct blacksmithing traditions used in the construction of religious stupa complexes in the first millennium AD. The second paper by K. Krishnan will be presenting an innovative approach to ceramic analysis that combines microstructural texture data with ethnoarchaeological research to develop a new model for the analysis of Indus Civilization ceramics from Gujarat. The third paper, by Sneha Chevali, examines regional variations of faience technology during the Indus valley tradition by combining microscopic imaging and chemical analysis to distinguish regional styles and innovations for this important ornamental technology. The final paper, by Teresa P. Raczek, presents an updated methodology for the evaluation of radiocarbon dates using chronometric hygiene as an indicator. This work critically examines the context of radiocarbon dates across multiple sites in South Asia.

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

This panel addresses the entangled histories of state, science and governance in colonial and postcolonial South Asia by centering scientific practices of knowing, diagnosing, treating, and classifying body-minds. A rich literature on colonial governmentality has demonstrated how the body became an important site for enacting, extending, and producing state power. However, rendering bodies and minds legible to scientific disciplines and bureaucratic institutions is by no means a straightforward process. Attention to practices of knowing, representing, and altering body-minds reveals tensions and points of disjuncture. It also makes evident the highly political, even if messy, process by which ascriptions of racial, sexual, gender and caste differences proceeds. By bringing together medical technologies, psychological projective tests, and sexological case studies, this panel reimagines the sites, spaces and ‘disciplines’ where knowledge about body-minds is produced. Honing on case-studies from both colonial and post-colonial South Asia, this panel asks: what happens to our understandings of biopolitics and biopower if we attend to the micro-practices of scientific encounters? How do the conceptual, material, and technological tools, that scientific disciplines use to understand body-minds, articulate and enact different political imaginaries of, and beyond, the state? And finally, what is the methodological significance of “theorizing up” from these micro practices?

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

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

This panel revisits debates on the “classicization” of music in twentieth-century India, bringing a range of vernacular materials to bear on the key scholarly issues at stake in these debates. The panel seeks to shift attention away from the institutions and brokers of cultural nationalism that dominate academic writing on the “music revival” to figures, musical genres, and texts that represent the margins of what was to emerge as “classical music.” In such works, we encounter discursive articulations of music’s supposed cosmopolitanism, pluralism, and hybridity, and also histories of genre and technique that are almost completely absent from mainstream public debates on music in this period. Working from the peripheries of Hindustani music in today’s India – small towns, “light” genres, non-famous gharanedar musicians, and lower class/caste milieu – Anna Morcom traces new histories of mobility and change. Using a range of hitherto unexamined print materials in Urdu, Gianni Sievers examines texts whose authors defend the Muslim presence and contribution to Hindustani music, voicing such articulations in response to both Hindu upper-caste nationalist visions and Orientalist perceptions of Indian music. Davesh Soneji presents a comprehensive longue durée survey of Tamil Christian music in raga, arguing that the centuries-old interface between raga music and hymnals represented a very significant sonic presence in early twentieth-century Madras that slipped through the cracks of nationalist-inflected music historiography. Praveen Vijayakumar focuses on two Christian musicologists who presented visions of Tamil musical history that spoke against the grain of emerging upper-caste histories on the one hand, but deployed the language of nationalism and Tamil regionalism on the other. Together, the papers consider fresh perspectives on this key moment in South Asian cultural history, and move us in the direction of a polyphonic understanding of the making of the category of the “modern classical” in music.

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

Since Diana Eck’s influential book Darsan (1981), scholarship in the fields of South Asian religion and art history have expanded our understanding of Hindu practices of visuality. Our panel explores the many ways in which the opposites of visibility and presence—invisibility, illegibility, reflection, and fragmentation—operate as vectors of experience within the Hindu temple. Our four panelists take as their points of departure inscriptions, built form and festival ritual to draw attention to temples as sites of hidden materiality to theorize the visuality of the unseen. Both Padma Kaimal and Leslie Orr grapple with the notion of the inscription as an infallible, always visible record of the past. While Padma Kaimal analyzes inscriptions still embedded in architecture, but whose viewers and purpose are now obscure to us, Leslie Orr examines the problematic production of inscriptions, particularly when they are incomplete, obscured or illegible. Archana Venkatesan draws our attention to the ways in which mirrors mediate visibility and obscurity in temple festivals as a means of ordering the relationship between god and the devotee. Anna Seastrand considers the unseen, richly decorated interiors of the temple gopurams of southern Tamil Nadu, to help us conceive alternative models of vision and visuality when the objects to be perceived are both inaccessible and hidden. Using the temples of Tamil Nadu as case-studies, our panelists foreground absence, erasure, obscurity, and invisibility to reframe our understanding of sight in Tamil temple culture specifically and Hindu religiosity more broadly.

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

Discussions of constitutionalism in South Asia often take the relationship between sovereignty and constitutionalism for granted. One way in which post-colonial constitutions are taken to be valuable is in the ways that they signal a departure from the colonial legal order. In some cases, e.g. India, they are taken to inaugurate, and be emblematic of, a new kind of national consciousness unavailable during colonial rule. This panel seeks to complicate the relationship between colonialism and constitutionalism. What changes in our view of contemporary constitutionalism if one takes seriously the claims of colonial legal orders to be *legal*orders? What should we make of traditions of constitutional thought which were outside the margins of the largely nationalist framework within which Indian constitutionalism is usually discussed? These are some of the topics which the papers in this panel address.

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

For Nepal, a non-colonized nation-state of South Asia, the negotiation of sovereignty has long been an internal struggle. Geopolitics hardened international borders, but the character of the nation-state has been shaped by perennial contests over the nature of authority and autonomy across diverse landscapes of peoples, environments, and political entities within Nepali state space. We observe echoes of past episodes of state-making in the present as Nepal shifts from a largely centralized state to a decentralized federal state; Yet we also acknowledge the impact of extra-territorial networks on the expression of a “New Nepal.” To further interpretation and understanding of South Asian sovereignty, this panel brings historians and anthropologists together to query the spatial dynamics of autonomy and authority expressed in 18th to 21st century Nepal. Papers include discussions of subject populations concepts of justice deliverance and the expansion of state power in early modern eastern Nepal; debates over territorial divisions and images of solid states amongst public intellectuals of the constitutional State Restructuring Committee; the entwined state logics of land valuation and the governance of the family; and the use of digital platforms in the construction of national identity, demonstrated in online debates in Nepal surrounding the 2017 Gorkhaland Movement. Grounded in specific historical moments, the panelists take up the theme of space in physical, representational, and virtual forms, creating connections and contrasts from which to explore the significance of space in the sovereignty of Nepal. Insights from Nepal have the potential to broaden understanding of South Asian and crypto-colonial sovereignty more generally, and this panel contributes to this endeavor.

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

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

This roundtable brings together literary, performative, and visual cultural threads to animate a conversation around class, gender, sexual norms, violence, and justice in contemporary Bangladesh. Exploring the intersection of feminism, human rights, and memory through cinematic narratives, Elora Chowdhury argues visual practices of recollecting violent histories of war and colonization can generate possibilities for just futures. Questioning the politics of gendered national memory-making in relation to experiences of vulnerability and violence, she asks: What role does women’s cinema play in addressing the memorialization of past violence and in creating visions for healing and justice? Nadine Murshid and Manosh Chowdhury discuss how film songs from the 1970s produce a set of inter-related binaries that are used to depict women, such as vamp vs. housewives, girlfriend material vs. marriage material, bold vs. slut, and sexual vs. naïve. These binary representations set the stage for the formation of a middle-class sensibility as well as normalize forms of sexual violence in the newly independent nation. Another marker of middle-class sensibility, Rabindra Sangeet informed the idea of secular Bengali nationalism as shonar Bangla, gaining popularity as a way to envision Bangladesh’s future. Navine Murshid asks what role Rabindra Sangeet plays in providing cultural capital to the upwardly mobile educated middle class who see cultural engagement, as opposed to capital accumulation, as a symbol of “class.” Turning to dance techniques as a formative mode of class and gender norms, Munjulika Tarah explores associations of morality that are significant aspects of dance pedagogy and performance in Bangladesh. Tarah argues, although dance technique training is primarily thought of as the physical conditioning of the body for a specific dance form, archival material and ethnographic anecdotes from Bangladeshi dance classes reveal that dance techniques are also ways of teaching feminine morality surrounding notions of middle-class respectability.

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

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

This panel features empirically and theoretically informed contributions that bring the history of science and medicine in South Asia in conversation with the history of knowledge. In particular, the papers are centered on the different processes in which scientific and medical knowledge, instruments, texts and practitioners from South Asia moved around the globe in the colonial and postcolonial period. By following the multidirectional trajectories of scientists, this panel emphasizes the need to complicate the unitary view of South Asia as an uncontested historical unit of analysis, and considers the experimental and relational process in which practitioners produced and exchanged ideas. A set of questions that this panel seeks to ask includes teasing out the participation of South Asian scientists as intermediaries that connected South Asia institutionally with other parts of the world. In particular, the papers will expose different knowledge modalities (botanical, medical, parapsychological, and technical) to demonstrate the interconnectivity between science, medicine, and other diverse South Asian traditions of knowledge. The paper considers the important role of science beyond its original site, and highlights processes that involved the reciprocal relationship of scientific knowledge on everyday forms of choices and negotiation among itinerants and the institutions they visited. In other words, the panel hopes to show that knowledge was in constant flux and transferable to new social settings.

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

Feminist historiography has enriched the knowledge of gender relations, particularly the patriarchy’s function in formulating social hierarchies. In the colonial context, it has problematized social reformism and colonial ideas of progress and liberation. This panel will discuss two recent prominent works on gender and sexuality which engage with this scholarship with different approaches. Asiya Alam’s "Women, Islam, and Familial Intimacy in South Asia" looks at women’s critique of the Islamic social reforms in the discourse on family and marriage in early twentieth-century Urdu print literature. It conceives family as a site of intellectual contestation of modernity by ashraf women. By refocusing on the everyday experiences of women, this work interrogates the influence of didactic literature in studying gender. Jessica Hinchy’s "Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India" looks at the colonial regulation of sexuality and gender in the context of the transgender Hijra community of the North Western Province in the late nineteenth century. The book explores how colonial surveillance criminalized and marginalized Hijras through state interference in households and social practices. The book employs a creative methodology focusing on the production of the archive to look at the colonial governance of social order. The authors will be joined by leading scholars of gender history. Siobhan Lambert-Hurley will discuss South Asian Islam’s influence on women’s writings and family. Anshu Malhotra will share her perspective on women’s appropriation of literary traditions for transcending social identity. Rochisha Narayan will comment on women’s negotiations with the colonial state to challenges of male authority. After the presentations, we open the floor to the audience for a lively discussion.

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

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

For over seven decades, the superimposition of a strong centralized power structure and an extractive economy on a terrain of ethnic and religious difference has produced a recurring pattern of conflict in the Indian borderlands. Beginning with Nagaland, followed by Mizoram, Manipur and other places in the northeast, Punjab, Kashmir and the central Indian Adivasi belt, Indian counterinsurgency operations too have followed a remarkably consistent pattern over the years. The experience of the target populations in the borderlands - which may be defined as physical, cultural and resource frontiers with a minority identity - has many parallels, even though the far-flung regions are widely separated by space, history and culture. The symposium brings together experienced and early career researchers to examine the social experience of life and resistance in the conflict zones. Read as a whole, these conflicts provide a portrait of the relationship between Indian state and society on the the one hand, and the ethnic and religious minorities which inhabit the borderlands, on the other. New research across the regions highlights the political economy of conflict, looking at control over land and natural resources, as wall as the cultural and territorial imperatives of the nation-state opposed to the claims of self-determination and cultural autonomy. Alongside the lived experience of conflict, participants will discuss life beyond politics and the sources of resistance. Insight into the goals of different movements, of which insurgency is one phase, illustrates the cultural bases of resistance and their critique from the margins of the expansionist Indian state and its corporate accompaniments. Movements for memory and justice too have many parallels and common learnings shared across time and space.

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

Moments of economic crisis are also moments of economic creativity. When war, disease, political upheaval, or social unrest disrupt the regular course of business, they also create space for new visions to emerge--visions that reimagine the balance between profits and losses, that reconsider the ties between risks and losses, and that reformulate the relationship between the haves and have nots. Certainly, social, political, and economic commentary throughout the pandemic, and the policy recommendations and programs that have emerged in recent months, recognize the potential for the novel coronavirus pandemic not only to reveal existing fractures and fissures in economic systems but also to provide an opportunity for societies as a whole to reconsider the net worth of capital accumulation and the problems that arise from ignoring capitalism’s underdogs. Working from the context of late-colonial and early postcolonial South Asia, the papers on this panel draw upon historical examples to explore the possibilities of alternative, unconventional, imaginative, and forgotten approaches to economic activity and life under capitalism. Specifically, they engage with materials found at the intersections of law, economics, social and business history to examine the formation and expression of alternative economic structures and to reconsider experiments with them. Working through a series of case studies--from the court of wards, to time -bargain contracts, to chit funds, to trusteeship--the papers engage with themes of financial expertise and management; responsible risk-taking and public gaming; the prospects of assigning value and speculating on material and immaterial goods; and the politics of public good and philanthropy. Taking the prolonged economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic as an opportunity to rethink economic assumptions, the papers on this panel use evidence from the past to evaluate the opportunities and uncertainties that moments of change create for new economic imaginings.

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

Conceptually, the region of Mithila (contemporary North Bihar) has occupied both the centres and peripheries of many overlapping and intersecting literary spheres. In its own right, Mithila boasts a centuries-long vernacular tradition that is self-conscious of its place in the literary and linguistic map of North and Eastern India. In the modern era, Maithili authors and literary critics have forged a contemporary tradition that at times looks inward to the ‘desa’ (homeland) and at other times outwards to the ‘rastra’ (nation). This panel considers Maithili identity from a variety of perspectives to reconstruct the ways by which Maithili-speakers and their audiences construct multilayered identities. These identities, which play on both prestige and marginalisation, are essential for a more nuanced understanding of subnational/regional vernacular traditions in South Asia. This panel will include discussions of the self-fashioned notion of ‘Maithili-ness’ in the historical and contemporary periods. Much of the stereotypical discussions on Maithili identity have revolved around elite structures of power and prestige, dominated by a Brahmin-Kayasth hegemony. A few papers in this panel interrogate the historical origin of this caste-oriented narrative of power by considering the historical and contemporary appeal of the Maithili language to project power, sovereignty, and prestige in Bihar and further afield. Other papers in this panel unravel that narrative and explore how other voices also construct ‘Maithili-ness’ through performance and story-telling. The narratives of women and non-Brahmins will be highlighted. This panel is multi-disciplinary and examines these many narrative threads told about ‘Maithili-ness’ through print, poetry, performance, and storytelling.

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

At least since the nineteenth century, if not earlier, India’s agricultural “sector” has been both a site of productive plentitude as well as degradation and immiseration. Only recently, the COVID-19 pandemic brought into stark relief the gross unsustainability of how India’s majority population live, stuck precariously between the rural and the urban, between agriculture and industry, and between debt and development. This panel stages a broad, but also focused, set of questions on the recent and historical relationship between “the peasantry,” the state, and colonial-capitalism; and how these are materially situated in a region. The panel points to some peculiarities that characterize the place of agriculture in India. The agrarian is caught in an impossible paradox: The colonial and postcolonial states have successively intervened to make the agrarian yield surpluses for the urban and the industrial. Given that the normative routes by which people transition from the rural to the urban have been routinely stymied, this paradoxical formation of agrarian dependence without a functioning industrial and manufacturing economy has produced a category of the peasant-worker who is forced to be mobile between the village and the city. And it is these populations that were made brutally visible during the migrant crisis of 2020. It is these themes that the individual papers elaborate on. Chhabria and Khorakiwala examine the role of famine and public works in the construction of the peasant worker, a source of constant cheap labor. Sethi’s paper describes the new economy of hybrid cotton cultivation that produced a brief plenitude for dominant caste groups in Maharashtra. Balakrishnan’s paper traces the consequences of these agrarian transformations for the urbanizing Maratha middle-classes. Each of these papers provides a perspective on the farmer’s movement today, since many of these issues come to a historical head at this moment.

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

This panel on Northeast India explores multiple thresholds of social, cultural and political life that articulate ambiguities from sites of actual and lived experience as well as from imagined and fictional worlds. We emphasize the term threshold as it signifies simultaneous insides and outsides. We also highlight how thresholds are in flux and represent objects of action by ethical agents. To this end, narratives of belonging, positionality and violence are also relevant for a borderland region like Northeast India. The four papers negotiate questions of agency and narratives of ethical being and being-together in a postcolonial space. Precarious and grievable lives, whether signified variously as indigenous or immigrant, simultaneously reveal agency. Fiction, poetry and other articulations in language enable claims to territory and identity. All these forms of politics are played out in the battleground that the fraught northeast of India assumes as it accommodates itself within the ‘nation.’

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

Within scholarship on colonial South Asia, the previous focus on the operations, institutions, and archives of the colonial state, and in particular its unwieldy institutionalized bureaucracy, has begun to shift. Scholars are increasingly taking into account the activities of indigenous actors, the importance of the concurrent emergence of new forms of institutions developed outside the realm of the state, and uncatalogued government records left outside of national and state record rooms. These stories are comparatively absent from state records and thus, are significant gaps now being addressed. Comparing and contrasting material collected from an assortment of such archives, this panel examines a range of influential institutions central to the development of the prominent North Indian city of Allahabad. Allahabad is a productive site in which to situate this inquiry for two reasons. First, it was perhaps the only city of such stature situated within the landlocked “heartland” and away from the coastal metropolises which witnessed such a wide spectrum of changes during its modern urban formation. Second, the city’s development was framed by both state-led apparatuses (such as the court and the university) alongside independent institutions rooted in civil society activity. Taking this historic city as its point of focus, the four papers thus examine different institutions and their archives, considering the networks they produced, and the individuals and communities that belonged to them. In doing so, we look at the ways in which these various institutions shaped, and in turn were shaped by, the social, political, religious, and economic life of the city. Moving across institutions situated at different places across the state-society divide, the papers examine the unpublished legal records of the Allahabad High Court, the American Presbyterian missionaries records relating to the Allahabad Agricultural Institute, archival material pertaining to the Kayastha Pathshala Trust, and indigenous knowledge production from Hindu pilgrims’ genealogical ledgers.

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

These four papers draw on Indian philosophical ideas to think through current issues. Thus, necessarily comparative, the breadth of the papers, including Sāṃkhya, Tantra, Advaita Vedanta and Jainism, offers a compelling case for thinking across Indian traditions, pointing to the relevance of the Indian philosophical tradition for contemporary Western debates. The first paper offers an insightful analysis linking the precisely adumbrated taxonomy of three different layers of self from the 14th century Advaita Vedantin philosopher Vidyāraṇya to current philosophical analyses of subjectivity. Vidyāraṇya points to a phenomenological self, akin to a current phenomenology derived from Husserl, arguing that Vidyāraṇya outlines a yogic meditative practice as a method of de-narrativization of the self. The second paper draws from the 11th century Indian philosopher Abhinavagupta’s formulation of a dual-aspect monism to intervene in a current hotly debated issue: the mind-body problem. Abhinavagupta’s dual-aspect monism offers a much-needed fresh perspective with two key divergences from most contemporary models today addressing this “hard problem” of linking matter to consciousness. These divergencies offer a novel solution to the mind-body problem, along with a different set of problems to address. The third paper traces out a key term within the early philosophical tradition of Sāṃkhya, mahat-buddhi, arguing that the pivotal mahat-buddhi functions as an impersonating agency. Drawing from the Sāṃkhya Kārikā’s theatrical metaphors, this paper suggests that the telos of mahat-buddhi is to imitate a great self who loses itself on a stage of ignorance only to then again remember its innate freedom. The fourth paper draws on Umāsvāti’s Tattvārthasūtra’s division of bound (saṃsārin) and liberated (mukta) souls to point to the ways in which Jaina philosophers addressed the problem of identity and difference within the seemingly undifferentiated group of liberated beings, in the process, distinguishing their metaphysics of liberated selves from the rival philosophical doctrines.

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

Consistent with this year’s theme of “Resistance,” I propose an Author Meets Critics Roundtable Session for discussion on Ather Zia’a recently published book Resisting Disappearance (University of Washington Press, 2019). Resisting Disappearance is a brilliant, bold, and urgent ethnography centered on Kashmiri women of the APDP (Association of the Parents of the Disappeared Persons). By combining meticulous historical analysis, ethnographic intimacy, and profound attention to the aspirations and tragedies of everyday life, Zia documents the discursive mechanisms and affective registers through which women of the APDP deploy and enact mourning as a politics of resisting the settler colonial regime of India in Indian Occupied Kashmir, especially its ghastly enforced disappearance of over 10,000 Kashmiris. Lyrically written, this book details and navigates the fascinating as well as courageous strategies of resistance mobilized by members of the APDP, while also sketching a vivid and at many times harrowing picture of Indian state brutalities and conditions of colonial rule that Kashmiris, including women of the APDP, must constantly contend and negotiate. Resisting Disappearance moves seamlessly between crafting intimate individual portraits of resistance, and describing the broader terrain of colonial occupation that informs, shapes, and limits the arc and practice of resistance. The key themes engaged in this book include “affective law” and its challenge to modern state sovereignty, gendered choreographies of resistance, military humanitarianism and its insidious operations, archive fever and the politics of mourning, and the interaction of poetry and ethnography. Resisting Disappearance is a theoretically sophisticated and politically powerful book that marks a groundbreaking moment in the anthropological study of Kashmir and South Asia; this gender inclusive and multidisciplinary roundtable panel will discuss and engage its key arguments and interventions with the aim to generating new questions and avenues of future research on the problem of “resistance” in South Asia.

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

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

Patronage of religious architecture was a widely adopted strategy for the expression of royal and imperial authority in early modern South Asia. Hindu and Muslim rulers alike sought to forge connections in stone between their territorial domains and older sacred landscapes of shrines and temples dedicated to gods and goddesses, gurus, Sufi preceptors, and martyred warrior-saints. While appeals to the miracle-working abilities of sacred figures aimed to perpetuate dynastic lineages, evidence from inscriptions, documents, and narratives shows that shrines produced spaces of contestation and resistance between state-based and individual donors, patrons, and worshippers. The potential for transgressive re-configurations of sacred and secular power was even greater amidst the fragmentation of Mughal sovereignty in the eighteenth century. Focusing on sites across northern, western, and central India, this panel of historians and art historians makes an interdisciplinary case for the salience of the built environment to competing struggles for recognition in a world without a single sovereign authority. Thelen’s paper analyses the implications of Rajput and Maratha patronage of the shrine of Mu’in al-Din Chishti at Ajmer and construction of temples and ghats at Pushkar for both high politics and local communities. Vendell examines how patronage of the dargah of the warrior-saint Shah Abdul Rahman at Achalpur cemented a friendship between the Afghan nawabs of Achalpur and the Maratha rajas of Nagpur in the context of joint revenue collection in Berar. Cummings’ presentation explores the complex provenance and strategic aims of the temple-building programme of the rajas of Nagpur at Ramtek Hill, especially their citation of architectural traditions from outside the Maratha heartlands. Finally, Shin shows how the Banaras rajas’ construction of the Sumeru Devi temple in Ramnagar, and support of the associated Ramlila festival, highlights the importance of local patronage in the re-making of a trans-regional pilgrimage centre.

Session: Session 3: Friday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Parlour Room 634
Floor: Floor 6

Whether it is the patrimonial bureaucratic state of the early modern period or the modern bureaucratic state, studies have emphasized the need to focus on the multi-sited institutions, practices, policies and discourses that continually redefine the state. Rather than treating states as bounded and monolithic entities, they have prioritized different nodes and evolving agencies of power that embed state in society and vice versa. The papers on this panel draw attention to such processes. Jyoti G Balachandran’s paper shows how histories of the formation of multi-generational Sufi networks and community in early modern Gujarat are essential to reconstructing those of the states which fostered them. Flows of capital and patronage intricately wove state and community together. Nicholas Abbott’s paper, too, illuminates such connections between state and community through the practice of zabt (“escheat”). Abbott develops a complex history of zabt in eighteenth-century Awadh, illustrating how it gained urgency under the looming presence of the East India Company. Rochisha Narayan’s paper foregrounds veiling as a political site of discourse, protest and subterfuge through which multi-generational ruling households, and the corporate communities attached to them, attempted to renegotiate shares of capital and relationships of power with the British in nineteenth-century India. Madhavi Murty’s paper emphasizes the continuities between the pre-liberalization state of the 1970s and 80s and the post-liberalization state, she shows how the possessive individual, rather than the collective household or community, came to mediate state and society relations in Modern India. Using a wide range of sources, she reconstructs the dense field through which the possessive individual was produced as the subject of modern capital. Together these papers examine state and society relations as they are produced through the workings of agencies of power that blur the boundaries between them.

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

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

In social identity theory, the self constructs identity. People know themselves, recognize themselves, present themselves as the result of socialization. Social interaction constructs self, self and society are dialectic. To what degree is there agency in social identity, or is the social construction of self primarily structural? How do people resist the imposition of social identity that clashes with self? This panel seeks to address these questions of identity and resistance using oral histories. Nation-building often involves selecting important cultural or iconic symbols to bind peoples together to create a national identity. How does state-sponsored national identity construction play a role in the construction of individual or group identity? If groups or individuals do not conform to the national identity, how might resistance occur? Adrienne Lee Atterberry looks at ethnic identity of transnational youths who grew up in India and the United States and how learning about Indian ethnicity allowed them to resist and resolve issues placed upon them by American identity concepts. Ruvani Fonseka’s work asks how gender-nonconforming young adults in urban Sri Lanka express their identity when it does not conform to the national identity. Tudor Silva examines how Sinhalese farmers suffering from a new kidney disease use a Sinhalese ethno-nationalist identity to make sense of their new life when farming is no longer a choice for them. Maria Ritzema examines the Sinhalese ethno-nationalist identity and how individuals and ethnic groups resisted its usurpation of a broader Sri Lankan national identity.

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

Squeezed between volatile and speculative commodity markets, unpredictable and changing weather conditions, and the receding benefits and mounting costs of Green Revolution technologies, Indian farmers have today taken to the streets in large numbers to protest the passing of agricultural laws which they see as a final, existential threat to their livelihoods. The agrarian crisis facing South Asia brings to the forefront technologies used to improve agriculture, their role in the future of agricultural sustainability, and their limits as agents of structural change. Since the colonial era, South Asia's agricultural sector has been sustained by scientific technology and improvement projects, even as scholars and scientists have questioned the efficiency and politics of implementing these technological and infrastructural investments on the small and medium holdings prevalent in the region. Agricultural technology has shaped farming ecologies and relations in South Asia. It has defined the very nature of the scientific expertise and state authority that develop cultivating and marketing agri-commodities on the ground. This panel is an ethnographic and historical exploration of agricultural technology in South Asia. Agricultural technologies involving seed development, animal husbandry, the standardization of markets, and the implementation of environmental sustainability measures seek to shore up and sequester nature, with an aim to enhancing market profitability. Through ethnographic stories of the implementation and experience of encountering agricultural technologies on the ground, the panel situates and contests agricultural technology's role in harnessing animal and plant ecologies in South Asian agriculture. Confronted with the limits of scientific investments geared towards monoculture, on the one hand, and the necessity for state investments to sustain the agricultural sector on the other, the papers foreground technology's limitations as a replacement for structural reform and environmental sustainability and highlight its centrality to the fortunes of a sector facing mounting distress.

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

The cartographic line drawn by British in 1947 continues to manifest itself in different ways even after more than seventy years of partition. The continuous process of blooded partition that perpetuates the antagonistic sentiments between the two countries calls for constant efforts towards peacebuilding. Peacebuilding, as noted by Johan Galtung, is the process of creating self-supporting structures that “remove causes of wars and offer alternatives to war in situations where wars might occur”. Pakistan’s initiative of promoting religious tourism by opening the Kartarpur corridor is the resilient strategy which is supposed to be acting as a catalyst for the peacebuilding between the two adversaries. This panel analyses the multi-faceted constituents of this project on the regional peace and critically examines the intersectional implications of its intended and unintended consequence. It is an important time in the regional history in which the environment is agonized by the politics of ‘other’ more than ever before and therefore, Kartarpur becomes a critical juncture in this convoluted temporality to be studied with an interdisciplinary approach. This panel analyzes Kartarpur project as a neoliberal site of heritage diplomacy that has become the epicentre of religious tourism in Pakistan and hence drawn significant media attention on both sides of the border playing a significant role in shaping the public sentiment. In addition to that, the cultural legacies of Sikhism have also been revived most important of which is the Sufi poetry of Baba Fariduddin Ganjshakar and Baba Guru Nanak that has reiterated the transcendent idea of ‘unity in diversity’. Whether and how these potentialities of Kartatpur corridor has been mobilized and positioned and when effect they are capable of producing, is what this panel aims to explore.

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

The vast textual ecosystems of early modern South Asia were the home of a diverse array of textual practices: different languages, genres, and material practices populated the cultural horizon of South Asia before the onset of colonialism. In the last decades, scholars have given deserved attention to this plurality, complicating the narratives and histories of textual traditions, and looking at the many languages used in different registers of the cultural, literary, religious, and everyday life of pre-colonial South Asia. But even in this outlook dominated by plurality and multilingualism, some textual practices, manifestations and artifacts still remain at the peripheries, pushed to the boundaries of scholarship and interest. By critically considering the peripheral position and marginal character accorded to these texts, the papers of this panel offer a well-deserved and insightful look into these peripheral texts; they question not only the validity of labels like 'marginal' or 'peripheral,' but also the bearing that these terms had in the understanding of well-traversed textual traditions and larger processes of canonization and recognition. The papers in this panel interrogate different ways of being, conceptually and literally, at the margins. Commentaries, translations and glossaries, often labeled as being derivative and uncritically repetitive; texts positioned at the juncture of the premodern/modern divide, said to be anachronistic; forgotten texts that tell a different history for canons and their audiences; texts positioned in regions relegated to the peripheries of histories of South Asian literature; an active engagement with these peripheral texts offer novel ways of thinking about textuality and its history in early modern South Asia, and the opportunity to reassess what it means to be out of place, and out of time.

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

The papers on this panel, rather than assuming that acts of social service and charity are informed solely by internal emotive elements of selflessness, empathy, and compassion, explore intentionality with contextual and temporal specificity to identify processes of ideational and practical accommodation, adaptation, and maturation. Drawing from the burgeoning fields of moral anthropology and faith-based philanthropy, panel contributors focus on various areas of India, including the states of Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat, and specific diasporic settings, including Antwerp and London, to analyze how service practices popularly known in India as Sevā, Dāna, Chandah, and Zakat among other designations interact with contextual norms of ethicality, societal ideals of civic duty, and institutional doctrines of moral ambition and formation. The first paper focuses on Muslim communities in Lucknow harmonizing Qur’anic injunctions to maintain secrecy and modesty in almsgiving with public gifting practices becoming an ethical identity marker for Muslim communities in north India. The second paper explores how Sikh sevādars in Delhi conceptualize worthiness of recipients of sevā (service) through Sikh ethics. Drawing upon ideas of sangat and kinship, this conceptualization creates a relationship between giver and receiver that differs from mainstream care providers within urban India. The third paper studies how female ājīvan sevaks (lifelong volunteers) within the devotional Hindu movement known as the Swaminarayan Sampraday, interpret and utilize the socio-religious practice of sevā in their everyday lives to achieve theological ideals and establish social and spatial forms of agency. The final paper traces how multiple Jain diasporic communities in Europe and the United States (re)interpret the Jain doctrinal principle of soul interrelationality to become and remain active in local charity work in these transnational locations. A senior scholar, whose work considers philanthropy and development in South Asia, will serve as panel respondent.

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

From theriomorphic deities to anthropomorphized talking companions, from divine consorts to creaturely saints, nonhuman animals have populated South Asian religious imaginaries for centuries. Sacred religious texts, epics, folktales, oral narratives, storytelling traditions, and performative genres from across a wide spectrum of religious affiliation and spiritual sensibilities have underscored the dynamic influence of nonhuman animals in shaping human discourses of ethics and morality. Whether it is the right-wing appropriation of the Hindu monkey-god Hanuman’s visual imagery, the communalization of bovine creatures by the proponents of sectarian politics, the material-symbolic instrumentalization of domesticated animal bodies during communal violence, or the institutionalization of ethnocentric masculinities through symbolic appropriation of animal-taming sports, religion-motivated appropriation of nonhuman animals animate contemporary social and political lives in South Asia. South Asian literary narratives are uniquely attentive to the discourses that emerge as a consequence of interspecies encounter through cultural critique, appropriation, invocation, and reinterpretation of animals in religious discourses, alongside focusing on the contextual specificities of multispecies sociality. Narrative genres from a diverse range of religious practices often use the figure of the nonhuman animal to talk about social responsibilities, moral righteousness, and ecological concerns. This panel analyzes the relationship between religiosity and nonhuman animals in narrative genres generating from Buddhist, Hindu, and Islamic religious traditions in South Asia. By focusing on how South Asian oral and textual narratives historicize nonhuman animals and represent them as intelligent, sentient, agential beings with metonymic qualities, this panel will analyze the importance and consequences of human-nonhuman interactions and multispecies cohabitation on the dissemination of religious knowledge.

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

This panel considers the methodological, epistemological and political challenges involved in studying South Asian performance traditions through archives, textual documents, and visual artifacts at large. While para-textual documentary sources, such as scripts, librettos, promotional photographs, online content, and drawings, art works, etc, can be found and be a primary source for researchers, such documents are often marginal to how performance arts are taught, memorized, remembered and performed in South Asia. In the case of arts that are “dying,” or are no longer performed, what does it mean to access a form of performance through an archive, and what are the blind spots of the analysis, reconstitution, and reinvention this can support? To what extent is it possible to understand movement-based practices in the still forms through which we access them? As to contemporary performance arts, what biases and challenges do the formation of their future archive reveal, be they institutional undertakings, the spontaneous accumulation of data online, or the ethnographic records of a researcher? Does this limitation of imagining movement in its preserved forms contribute to the perception of South Asian performance arts as always under threat, as eternally disappearing traditions? In this panel, we invite performance arts scholars to engage with this question through their own research, whether it be tied to already constituted archives or through documents they have been gathering on their own, whether it is focused on past performance traditions, or contemporary ones.

Session: Session 4: Friday, 3:45 pm - 5:30 pm
Room: Parlour Room 627
Floor: Floor 6

Sacred spaces are central to the consolidation of religious and political power; they are often cast and recast through narratives, whether etched in stone, sung in song, or otherwise. This panel responds to the conference theme, “resistance,” by considering how sacred spaces and their narratives interact with mainstream religious and political powers – sometimes buttressing and other times challenging them. Our presentations highlight an array of sources germane to the negotiation of place and the sacred, ranging from architectural features such as samādhis and monumental sculpture to textual sources including māhātmyas and kāvya, to the rituals and pilgrimages that structure how people spend time in such places. We will address the ways preexisting conceptions of sacred space succeed and fail to determine built environments, and vice-versa. Aalekhya Malladi’s presentation explores the characterization of sacred space in a pilgrimage site in Tirupati. She extrapolates how the vernacular māhātmya resists and/or reinforces the Sanskrit version, while examining how contemporary rituals reconfigure sacredness in Tirupati. Nick Tackes details the transposition of mainstream Hindu (and other) myths into the art and architecture of the Brahma Kumaris and their headquarters in Mount Abu, Rajasthan. Through a spatial and material analysis of Burhanpur’s urban fabric, Rachel Hirsch analyzes the appropriation of the city’s appeal to Sufi authority as it changed hands from Faruqi to Mughal rule. Aditya Chaturvedi describes how the sacredness of Mithila has been (re)conceptualized through a local Ramayana and the samādhi of a king. Addressing various geographies and religious contexts across South Asia, these presentations highlight how sacred spaces have been reconfigured to meet different religious, political, and social needs over time. The four panelists are graduate students in departments of Religion and Art History. The discussant, Dr. Harshita Mruthinti Kamath, is a professor of Telugu literature and performance at Emory University.

Session: Session 4: Friday, 3:45 pm - 5:30 pm
Room: Parlour Room 634
Floor: Floor 6

Recent historical works have examined the nature of the colonial state in India by turning to exceptional displays of state power—from emergency ordinances, repressive legislations, horrors of the colonial prison and detention camps, to the use of torture. But colonial power also invaded ordinary life in South Asia in more insidious ways. “Policing Thought, Surveilling Bodies: Everyday Operations of State Power in Colonial India” considers how there was an expansion in systems of policing and surveillance in the late 19th and 20th centuries as the colonial state intensified its watch over everyday life. Faced with various forms of unrest, including the threat of mass nationalism, peasant agitations and incipient communism, the state now established newer agencies like the Central Investigation Department and the Intelligence Bureau, while also expanding the existing infrastructures of policing and control within the Empire. The nature of the emergent systems is the subject of “Policing beyond Surveillance: Crime and Detection in British India, 1868-1920” and “The Adventures of Detective Luck and Sergeant Chance: The Advent of Political Surveillance in 20th Century India”. “A Tale of Two Sentries: Everyday Incarnations of Police Power in 20th Century Colonial Punjab” and “Policing Thought and Borders in Colonial India” trace how 20th century state practices made and re-made colonized bodies as well as notions of territorialized sovereignty within the Empire. The four papers draw upon a diverse archive—from recently declassified police and intelligence reports, colonial laws and ordinances, newspapers and journals, to detective fiction—in Hindi, Bengali, Urdu, Punjabi and English. Taken together, the papers reveal the inner workings of an expanding colonial governmentality and offer a better understanding of state practices still endemic to the post-colonial world.

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

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

The events of the Second World War have incited numerous scholarly and artistic responses that have largely remained European and US-centric, commemorative, and oblivious to the ‘small voices’ from ex-colonies. The Bengal Famine of 1943, especially, has been usurped by the grand narratives of the Second World War, Partition and Indian Independence, and its long-term repercussions are much less discussed, as recent scholarship has pointed out (Mukherjee, 2015). ‘By predating the genocides and displacements of 1947, the famine in fact set the terms through which the region could enter the “promise” of freedom’ (Sunderason, 2020: 8). As the ‘famine activated multiple and contesting forms of art becoming political’, it equally elicited emotional responses of people directly involved in the war effort as soldiers, women labourers and cultural activists. This panel brings together scholars working on the various aspects of such ‘small voices’ of war and famine histories by looking closely into the South Asian context and exploring emotional responses emerging out of photographs, letters, interviews, literature and performances. Annu Matthew and Diya Gupta navigate photographs and letters related to Indian soldiers during the war to unravel the complex ‘politics of remembrance’, and the disjuncture between colonial authorisations of subjective experiences and textual responses to atrocities. Urvi Khaitan brings to the fore the hidden histories of low-caste and Adivasi women as employed by the Bengal Labour Corps during the famine, the coercive conditions of their work and their emotional responses to it. Priyanka Basu explores literary and artistic responses to show how the cultural labour during the 1940s has been disproportionately mapped in histories. By writing such underappreciated and seemingly peripheral responses back into the historiography of the war and famine, this panel seeks to answer why such a methodology is crucial to the decolonisation of existing archives, arts and sentiments.

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

The aim of this panel is to discuss and review the re-making of post conflict/disaster worlds in South Asia. Natural disasters and human induced cataclysms can often bring about profound transformations that cause the dramatic unravelling of previously existing social, economic and political arrangements and provide contexts for subsequent efforts for renewal and the re-making of different worlds. The 2001 Gujarat earthquake in Western India, for example, paved the way for Narendra Modi to become the Chief Minister of Gujarat in 2001. The 2002 Gujarat communal carnage also contributed to Modi consolidating his power base and pivoted him to becoming the Prime Minister in 2014. In a similar vein, the 2015 Nepal earthquake proved crucial in getting the country to adopt a new constitution, reworking the notion of national integration and creating a fresh rhetoric around the notion of ‘New’ Nepal. Clearly, post-conflict/disaster events can enable us to analyze South Asian social dynamics and understand how new worlds are created. Drawing upon the insights from post disaster and conflict studies, this panel will debate four specific instances of how natural and human induced ruptures in South Asia have proved to be defining in re-creating new social and political possibilities. Nakamizo will discuss the creation on the ‘new normal’ after the major riots in India. Ito discusses the post-earthquake reconstruction in urban Nepal under the influence of the new local governments that emerged as a result of the enactment of the constitution. Appuhamilage will debate how the cultural, socio-political and psychological implications of death help communities negotiate against the alarming rise of disappearances in post-war Sri Lanka. D’Souza reviews the many policy challenges for urban flood management in South Asia, especially with handling the shocks from the emergence of ‘Anthropocene Rain’.

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

This panel will consider how cultural productions are fueled by experiences and imaginaries within contexts of state repression, confinement and contested spaces in South Asia. We bring together literary and cinematic articulations of these experiences and imaginaries to critically investigate audiences and publics. We argue that these audiences and publics both constitute and are constituted by these articulations in notional, empirical, and affective terms. Thus, the panel will also consider how the authors of these cultural productions create sites of discursive contestation, which problematize local and scholastic understandings of their relationships with dominant forms of ordering. The panel works with the recognition that these sites are imbricated in power hierarchies which span gender, class, religion and time. Building on the aforementioned concepts, this panel brings together texts and contexts to ask: how do custodians of subjugated forms of knowledge mobilize the popular to develop an architecture of dissent which allows them to be critical of, and sometimes act in collusion with, hegemonic nationalist discourses? Consequently, the cultural productions under consideration inspire challenges to how we read the elision of ‘realism’ and imagine productive pasts in the works of Khadija Mastur and Ismat Chughtai; Hindi, Urdu and English narratives of political prisoners in postcolonial India; digitally mediated practice of poetry recitation in contemporary Kashmir; and the political imagination of the Kashmiri state as manifested in a Bollywood film like Haider and the documentary drama ‘A Valley of Saints’.

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

The COVID-19 pandemic-induced nationwide lockdown and social distancing measures have added a layer of marginality to communities that were already dealing with issues of stigma, social exclusion, oppression, and inequality in society for their caste, religion, disability, gender identity, and lived experiences of domestic violence/sex work/poverty. This roundtable, comprising scholars who have conducted ethnographic/qualitative research with diverse South Asian marginalized communities, such as, Dalits, indigenous tribes, people with disabilities, and survivors of domestic violence, will shed light on the unique ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic- has affected the health and safety needs of these communities and how despite their plight being visible in mainstream media, they remain invisible within the policies and programs developed by the government.  Prasad, having conducted ethnographic/social mapping research with Dalit women in Bodh Gaya, Bihar, will discuss the unique effects of social distancing measures implemented by the government on the Dalit communities in India.  Sinha, based on her extensive research with sex workers in Kolkata, India, will draw attention to the unique health and safety issues for transgender sex worker communities, and rising internet-based sex work during COVID-19.  Azhar will discuss how the livelihoods and mental health of khwaja sira who are sex workers in Swat, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan have been impacted by the stay-at-home orders during the COVID-19 pandemic.  Deka draws on her research and practice experience with South Asian survivors of domestic violence in the United States to discuss the barriers/service utilization issues faced by the community during the pandemic. Kindo, who has expertise in the areas of law and critical indigenous studies, will examine the pandemic from the lens of indigeneity and explore its effects on indigenous tribes in India.  Chowdhry, a disability scholar herself, will discuss how the pandemic affected people with disabilities in India using a disability justice perspective. 

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

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

Recent scholarship on early modern South Asia has challenged the notion of “women’s history” in the singular and as a separate sub-discipline (Indrani Chatterjee, Uma Chakravarti, Ruby Lal, Rosalind O’Hanlon, Ramya Sreenivasan). The archival desire to locate, recover, and restore female agency in early modern South Asian archives, however, is still often complicated by the deeply normativizing impulses of the sources and textual traditions considered in this panel. Grappling with this constraint, our panel resists the binary of oppression and resistance as a framework for defining the scope of inquiry into the question of female agency. We turn instead to methodological approaches that attend to shifting lexical categories and other classifications embedded in a wide range of Sanskrit, Persian, Marathi, Urdu, and architectural archives. Through close engagement with juridical, poetic, political, and medical texts, and monumental architecture, we highlight how lexical categories and other classifications were never stable, and how the interactions among women, and of women with men, constantly pushed the boundaries of gendered conventions. Our papers explore categories of kinship and kinlessness through Sanskrit sources from Maratha-ruled Thanjavur, the emergence of social and legal categories for denoting forcible sex in the Maratha empire, anecdotes about madness among women in the Mughal Empire even as new categories of mental illnesses were being diagnosed, and the relationship between gender, strategic acts of construction, and social stratification in the kingdom of Marwar. Women and women’s issues are often buried and concealed beneath a grander narrative of history-making in early modern South Asia. Our panel highlights the significance of being sensitive to the dynamic vocabulary of early modern sources as one entry point for making these histories visible.

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

In the context of both the historical and contemporary study of Hinduism, scholars often focus on various forms of public practice, such as pilgrimages, festivals, śrauta sacrifices, and temple rituals, as representative of the core of the tradition. Yet domestic spaces are often the loci in which religion is performed, contextualized, preserved, and understood by practitioners. This panel underscores how Hinduism is expressed ritually in the domestic space to address two issues: 1) the mutually constitutive relationship between the religious and the domestic within the tradition, and 2) the reciprocal relationship between textual constructions and everyday practice. Religion is necessarily a multivalent area of study, and any attempt to present a coherent picture must not only account for, but also embrace these intersections. While domestic religion has been studied ethnographically, this panel brings ethnography into conversation with textual studies, examining the topic through the concepts of dharma, sādhanā, vrata, reproductive labor, and space. Together, these different methods and analytical lenses show not only the diversity and importance of domestic religious ritual within Hinduism, both in India and in the diaspora, but also how Hindu identity continues to shape, and be shaped by, the interplays of text and practice at home.

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

This panel offers a look at forms of dissent throughout twentieth-century South Asia, from the colonial partition of Bengal in 1905, through post-Partition Delhi and Indira Gandhi's Emergency, to women travel narratives in the latter quarter of the century. As this list already makes evident, the panel takes a capacious approach to dissent, locating it not only in overt political protest but also in individual, domestic, or private realms. As a panel we find dissent in places both expected (prison memoirs) and unexpected (travel narratives), in historical documents and literary writing. Proceeding chronologically through the twentieth century, the four papers examine the historic and discursive ways in which a distinctly Indian idiom of dissent was developed, augmented, and complicated. What happens, we ask, when anti-colonial forms of dissent are taken up against the post-colonial state? What happens when similar forms or genres of dissent are adopted by ideological foes? Our papers show that articulations of dissent necessarily build on previous moments of protest and traditions of opposition, while simultaneously pulling away from their predecessors to make new distinctions. Creating a constant tension between the iconoclastic and the familiar, dissent creates cleavages in communities, but also serves to forge new ones, or rearrange their structuring principles. Most importantly the four papers show that articulating dissent is a complicated task, often caught up in its own negation – of loyalty, tradition, or authority. In so doing it touches on a wide range of discursive fields: political, gendered, affective, social, artistic, and linguistic, to name but a few.

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

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

This panel considers the complex entanglement of caste, indigeneity, region, and settler/colonialisms under Hindutva rule in Modi’s India. That is, pushing upon the the urgent question of how social and political belonging has been radically constricted to equate to Hindu identity, this panel interrogates how caste crucially distinguishes Hindutva rule as an upper-caste project, how prior identity formations in region variably shape the fallout of Hindutva ideology, and how ongoing projects of settler/colonialism and contested claims around indigeneity have been intensified and even co-opted under the banner of Modi’s India. Towards this end, the panel specifically explores the role of media narratives, post-2016 legislation, and the fraught semantics of indigeneity that remain bound to the religious communalism of Partition and regional claims of continued coloniality. Khatija Khader’s paper brings to light the exacerbated plight of the Kashmiri journalist, at once heavily surveilled under settler colonial governance and strategically navigating the same towards accurate reportage, including that of resistance to lockdown. Dheepa Sundaram’s paper considers the co-opting of the language of decolonization for the ethno-nationalist project of the BJP, through multi-media strategies that further marginalize vulnerable communities even as it erases historically key differences. And in looking at a region described via the umbrella term “Northeast,” my paper examines the volatile category and convergence of indigeneity/claims with the Citizenship Amendment Bill and the National Register of Citizens, both of which elicited mass response in Assam. Together, these papers constitute the panel’s objective of offering a multi-perspectival and place-sensitive take on timely and high-stakes questions of caste, indigeneity, and settler/colonialism under the current Indian regime.

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

In this panel that is part two of two, we focus on bovine politics in India. Since the coming to power of Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government, India has witnessed renewed emphasis on the divisive politics of the cow. The violence and disruptions carried out by Hindutva forces over alleged trespassing of ever-stricter cow protection legislations has attracted international attention. Among its many detrimental consequences, bovine politics in Modi’s India has had an especially hard impact on a key aspect of rural livelihoods: the cattle economy. Indeed, while cattle has historically been crucial in sustaining many rural households, raising, keeping and selling livestock is becoming increasingly precarious and outright dangerous in contemporary India. This has repercussions across agrarian systems of production and reproduction. Beyond the occasional journalistic report that has accompanied the rise in cow vigilantism, however, we still know little about the resulting patterns of agrarian change that are unfolding in rural India. How do smallholder farmers react to the incursions of violent Hindutva politics? How is the cattle economy transforming under the impact of such aggression at different levels of scale? Against this backdrop, this panel seeks an empirically grounded understanding of the evolving relationships between bovine politics and agrarian change in contemporary India. The papers focus on the consequences for one or more “phases” in the process of raising, keeping and selling livestock, and are grounded in in-depth field research.

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

2021 marks the fiftieth year of the 1971 Liberation War of Bangladesh. The twentieth century witnessed several major political transitions in the history of the eastern part of Bengal, beginning with the first Partition of Bengal by the colonial state in 1905. From East Bengal to East Pakistan and then on to Bangladesh, the social, political and legal identities of this region have been in constant flux. This panel seeks to trace Bengali Muslim subjectivities in East and West Bengal by exploring constitutional, legal and linguistic ruptures and continuities across the colonial and postcolonial states. The panelists will address these questions: First, how were East and West Pakistan united on the question of giving voice and representation to Muslims in South Asia, but divergent on fundamental issues such as state policy and land reform? Second, how did cultural particularities increasingly lead to great differences between East and West Pakistan in terms of configuration of land, language and culture? How did law and policy absorb or exacerbate these divides? The papers also reflect on the curious fact that the Partition of 1947 changed Bengali nationalist political figures into Pakistani parliamentarians. This new political class had allegiances across Hindu and Muslim civil societies in undivided Bengal, and their earlier experiences informed their subjectivity as East Pakistani citizens. How did they negotiate their Bengali and Pakistani identities? Third, who were the drafters of the Constitution of independent Bangladesh and what kind of nationalism did linguistic and economic liberty ultimately give rise to? Finally, what happened to the large number of Bengali Muslims who opted to remain in Bengal, Assam and Tripura after Partition—what political subjectivity can they claim in the Hindu majoritarian Indian polity today?

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

Ever-evolving language pedagogy and the recent outbreak of COVID-19 have convinced language educators to re-evaluate teaching materials and instructional modes. These developments present new opportunities to pilot innovative teaching materials and methods. This panel consists of four issues related to (post)pandemic pedagogy for Hindi-Urdu and LCTLs. Dr. McCarter discusses the efficacy of one tool that can serve as the substrate of the distance learning experience: Microsoft’s OneNote. He presents core functions of this platform and its integration with university learning management systems. He demonstrates the fitness of this software for online learning and proposes to use the same application for collaboration among language instructors for the continual development of learning materials and resources. Dr. Chaudhry proposes that instructors can promote learners’ intercultural understanding through designing instruction focusing on interactional competence and “making explicit key L2 interactional resources that interactants employ.” The presentation demonstrates how a Hindi instructor a classroom used the conversation analytic framework to teach interactional competence. Sample activities, worksheets and suggestions will be provided for teaching interactional practices. Dr. Knapczyk targets a recent trend in foreign language pedagogy to incorporate lessons on social justice at all levels of proficiency. Social justice topics offer a richer experience than traditional teaching. She presents a few complete reading-based lessons to explore ways of using social justice topics in classes. She demonstrates how such topics provide opportunities to use language in engaging contexts and help students think critically about their communities. Dr. Ranjan discusses the role of textbooks in language teaching and analyzes four Hindi language textbooks through the lens of communicative language teaching. He aims to showcase gaps between modern pedagogical approaches and available teaching materials. He also discusses the future of material development which not only fits well with ever-evolving pedagogy, but also fits with both face-to-face and online instructions.

Session: Session 6: Saturday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Conference Room 5
Floor: Floor 2

Whether from the field of religious studies, South Asian studies, philosophy, or anthropology, works on Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava communities, theologies, and practices typically approach the topic using one lens and focus on any one of these subfields. Scanning the literature across Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava studies, we see works that categorize the contemporary transnational forms as new religious movements standing apart from works that analyze the practices and theologies of these same communities as a part of an unbroken historical lineage. We see works on philosophy, analyzing the textual canon of the tradition separate from works that study the living tradition of these texts. Few works tackle theology and practice, text and tradition, historical and transnational using multiple methodologies and many different kinds of sources To foster new multidisciplinary directions in Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava studies, we present a diverse panel that showcases new work that expands beyond text/use, body/space, historical/contemporary periods, traditional/transnational, and theology/practice binaries. While each individual paper retains a narrower framework and dwells on a more limited set of concerns and sources, we bring these papers together to foster the sort of boundary-breaking discussion we seek. Two papers read pre-modern Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava textual sources, but do so quite differently: Aleksandar approaches philosophical texts and questions, while Ishan examines literary sources and aesthetic questions. Together, these two offer a picture of the world of early Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava thought. Two further papers reflect anthropologically on contemporary Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava culture: Anandi questions our understanding of devotional practice, while Claire annotates an historical process of urbanization. Between the two, we gain insights into the contemporary Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava world. Taken as a set, the papers contribute to a discussion of Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism as a whole and question the coherence — or lack thereof — of the concept itself.

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

Organized around a new book on borders and mobility this roundtable will discuss race and ethnic boundaries, suspicion and violence in nation-building, the temporality of ‘illegal’ migration and smuggling, and human- animal relationships in South Asia. These themes emerge from Malini Sur’s book Jungle Passports: Fences, Mobility and Citizenship at the Northeast India – Bangladesh border (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). Since the nineteenth century a succession of states have classified the inhabitants of what are now the borderlands of Northeast India and Bangladesh as Muslim "frontier peasants", "savage mountaineers" and Christian "ethnic minorities" suspecting them to be disloyal subjects, spies, and traitors. Sur follows their struggles to secure shifting land, gain access to rice harvests, and smuggle the cattle and garments upon which their livelihoods depend against a background of violence, scarcity, and India's construction of one of the world's longest and most highly militarized border fences. She shows how the partitioning of sovereignties and distinct regimes of mobility and citizenship push undocumented people to undertake perilous journeys across militarized borders every day. Since borders are sites where established notions of space, politics, and identity have historically been put to test, how may insights from border ethnographies enable us to engage with the present-day crisis of mobility and belonging in South Asia? How do conviviality and kinship encounter the seemingly impersonal worlds of commodity flows and state control? How do ecological and political fluidities realign human-animal relationships? How do competing notions of legality/ illegality remake life? Scholars participating in this roundtable will seek to answer these questions drawing on their fieldwork and the archives, and cutting across contemporary debates in anthropology, history, sociology and the study of race and gender in South Asia.

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

How are memories of the past called upon and ethically reworked as performers, healers, and ritual specialists critique social change and craft new futures? How do their articulations of the past challenge us to rethink the relationship between collective memories and authoritative claims about appropriate future change? This panel explores the interface of expressive practice and modernity in south India. There has been important research on the idealized imagining of the past through expressive arts (Peterson and Soneji eds. 2008). Building on this, the papers in this panel consider how in the process of performers invoking reference to idealized pasts, they articulate and contest future possibilities. Each paper illuminates how skilled practitioners imaginatively revive past memories into the present tense, in order to reshape future authoritative possibilities. In this panel, we use the term ‘authority’ to refer to the ways that performers and practitioners call upon and challenge caste, education, kinship, and genre as they disrupt, revive, or articulate continuities within idealized traditions. By employing the term ‘expressive traditions,’ we bring together performing arts, ritual theatre and therapeutic practices, insofar as they similarly frame the body as a site of ethical articulation, narrative retelling, and religious belonging. At the same time, they invoke ideals of the past in order to articulate and contest future aspirations. This panel more broadly questions static boundaries between performance, ritual, and healing, as they each grapple with the contradictions inherent in discursive claims and their interpersonal enactments.

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

This two-part panel brings together researchers of South Asian religion to present papers on their current work researching evidence for a brand new thesis regarding two major converging and diverging currents which increasingly shape contemporary Hindu practices and beliefs, namely intensification and sweetening. Comprised of scholars at different career stages and in several disciplines, these panels will pay particular attention to the increasingly visible move to insist on the continuing relevance of more rigorous—and frequently marginalized—religious practices and beliefs, in contrast to the long prevailing currents to mellow divine personalities, standardize ritual performances, and mainstream theologies. Discussing two exemplary case studies, the century-old Navadurgāyātrā and the newly invented Daśamahāvidyāyātrā in Vārāṇasī, the first paper analyzes how and why contemporary pilgrimages may be powerful tools for mainstreaming deity representations and worship practices, thus facilitating and supporting uniforming processes and currents. The second paper explores the ways in which the website tarapith.com disrupts the online Hindu ritual industry’s “vedicizing” of virtual spaces, by specifically showing how the semiotic mechanics of tarapith.com act as a resistant counterpoint by showcasing Tara as a Tantric goddess who demands a blood sacrifice. The third paper examines if and how the digital platform WhatsApp may be an enabler to mainstream and soften the ritual space of the goddess Bagalāmukhī in Kāmākhyā while shielding the devotees from her fiercer elements, and how the use of WhatsApp alters the devotees’ religious experience. The final paper addresses how recently Jain patronage has transformed Bhairava, who had previously received blood and alcohol offerings, into a Vaishnava-upholding deity of miracles, and argues that this sweetening illustrates the broader phenomenon of the preeminence of Rajasthan-descended Marwari merchants, including Jains, who have effectively underwritten vegetarian miracle-centered worship in an expanding devotional public reaching even beyond Jains.

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

The Citizenship Amendment Act (2019) has, yet again thrown the spotlight on the continuing debates on citizenship and belonging in India. Who belongs and how do they provide evidentiary proof of such belonging? Recent scholarship has clearly outlined Indian citizenship’s territorial conceptions after 1947 and the subsequent changes to the principle of jus sanguinis in recent decades. These frameworks have located citizenship in multiple ways – as a bundle of rights and obligations, as a mechanism of incorporation, as a status claimed and performed, and as political, social and cultural discourse. This panel borrows from this scholarship and charts a different path by shifting the focus to the ways in which mobility and the status of new ‘categorical citizens’ (refugees, evacuees, minorities) became central concerns in the framing of post-colonial citizenship and belonging. Based on original research, the panelists explore the intersections of legislations, state policies, and technologies that emerged to control and situate individuals within and outside India’s territory. The panelists highlight the histories and technologies of citizenship in their focus on mid twentieth century documentary technologies such as passports and visas that tracked mobility, claims of extra-territorial belonging from Indians in Burma, proxy citizenship of Pakistani Hindus, and the distinctions between citizenship and belonging in the context of Indian Muslims. In the process, the panel hopes to discuss and historicize the 2019 CAA.

Session: Session Special: Saturday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Off-Site
Floor: Off-Site

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

Sanskrit versions of the Indian epics have predominantly enjoyed an esteemed position in scholarship when compared to their regional counterparts. Yet, it is the regional stories that have often been canonized in the Sanskrit epics and, it is the regional versions that have further popularized them. Stories have been reworked, reinvented, and sometimes invented and added anew to form an “epic consciousness” in the Indian subcontinent. This panel is an effort in understanding the workings of the regional canons as well as highlighting regional “epics” beyond the Sanskrit epic tradition. The presentations span across works in Maithili, Bangla, Odia, Tamil and Hindi, and address questions of gender, regional canons, caste and performance. Shruti Amar and Amrita Chowdhury deal with the theme of gender and regional canons. Shruti Amar’s study on the oral song culture in Maithili, throws an important light on the conception and celebration of Sita as the divine feminine (adya shakti) that transcends her role as an obedient wife in “mainstream” Ramayana perceptions. While Amrita Chowdhury situates how medieval Odia and Bangla Mahabharatas used the device of humor to rework the Sanskrit version of the story of Subhadra’s abduction and canonize it into a romantic-comedy, which heavily plays on the persistent Seductress trope. Shreya Sangai and Preethi Ramprasad deal with the themes of caste identity and consciousness. Shreya Sangai’s study focuses on the character of Ekalavya and post-colonial savarna representations of oppressed castes in Hindi visual medium, by interrogating the comic book Amar Chitra Katha, Drona (1974) and Sauptik (2016). While, Preethi Ramprasad focuses on the expression of Dalit identity through the modern Tamil epic Nandanar Charitam and its performance in the film Nandanar (1942).

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

This panel provides new contributions to examining the agrarian question in the historical specificities of the region of Pakistan. The panel addresses two dimensions of the agrarian question, that of the character of the historical-geographical contingencies of capital's penetration in agriculture, and the role of agrarian classes in a social revolution. In the first dimension we highlight the historically contingent ways in which capital penetrated agriculture in (post)colonial Pakistan through property relations mediated by zamindars, khans, jagidars, coparcenary, and imperialism. Second, our panelists demonstrate how the political question about the role of agrarian classes in a socialist revolution is challenged by how class, tribe, nation, religion, gender, and space are interlocking. Our panelists demonstrate through their specific case studies the contingency and antagonisms that are constitutive of the agrarian question in Pakistan. Khan’s paper examines the tensions around property within migrant households in rural Khyber Pakthunkhwa. In examining inter-household conflict, the paper unpacks how the agrarian question of labour is tied to gender and kinship and different spatial ‘sites of the social division of labor’. Ali’s paper examines how peasant subalternity is constituted through agrarian change and political struggles. By looking at how class differentiation ruptures solidarities, we can better understand subalternity as a contingent convergence of divergent interests. Raza’s paper examines the mediating role of theory-making in agrarian change, looking at how landlords in the former “Punjab Frontier” reconceptualized Baloch ethnic identity and re-arranged political-economic relations to achieve hegemony. Tirmizey’s paper looks at sharecropper struggles in Punjab in the early years of Pakistan to look at how they attempted to shape tenancy, land, and the post-colonial nation.