Annual Conference on South Asia

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

This symposium on heritage in modern South Asia considers what new scholarship on museums, memorialization, mourning, and archaeology in South Asia can offer the global turn in critical heritage studies. In turn, the symposium explores how non-state actors and local communities have contested colonial and national understandings of heritage and memory. Our interdisciplinary, multi-sited symposium examines heritage across South Asia and interrogates a diverse array of heritage sites in the region, including crematoriums and memorials alongside museums and archeological excavations. Building on scholarship on heritage as “a cultural and social process” for negotiating conflict (Laurajane Smith) and museums as “contact zone[s]” (James Clifford), our symposium panels reconsider the material histories of heritage sites, broadly construed, and what they reveal about contemporary debates on heritage and power. The first panel (“(Anti-)Imperial Heritage”) explores how both non-state actors and local communities have engaged archaeology and monuments in conjunction with or opposition to imperial projects, from the British Empire in India to the US presence in Afghanistan. The second panel (“Heritage beyond the Nation-State”) examines how museum exhibits and vernacular literature have conceptualized heritage beyond national borders through local and global collaborations. The third panel (“Technologies of Heritage”) addresses how different technologies, including cameras, crematoriums, and coins, can reshape understandings of heritage. The final panel (“Memorialization as Heritage”) draws together alternative heritage projects to consider counter-commemorations as interventions in heritage creation. A full day symposium would be ideal for this interdisciplinary, cross-border, and multi-sited approach and would enable the presenters to engage with different conceptions of heritage. Moreover, the Madison conference is the ideal venue for this conversation given the importance of contested historical sites in contemporary South Asia. (The scholars in our proposal who are not based in the US have committed to attending in person and applying for travel funding.)

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

Until recently, the most widely visible and thoroughly researched archives of South Asian screen culture have been selected archives of Indian cinema–typically repertoires of Bollywood and pre-Bollywood Bombay cinema or of arthouse auteur cinema. Over the past decade, the lens of South Asian screen studies has been slowly expanding to include cinematic cultures that are emergent and minoritized, navigating previously unexplored archives and adopting innovative methods and frameworks. Many of these screen cultures have been ignored or brushed aside as meaningless and tasteless entertainment. However, we believe that attunement to these cultural forms represents a more inclusive and democratic approach to screen studies in the region. This Symposium highlights peripheral screen media and those that have been minoritized by authoritarian and repressive regimes and formations. The papers explore geopolitical formations, sociosexual biases, as well as the privileging of particular media formats and access infrastructures over others. A variety of approaches are taken to screen cultures, including production and reception analysis of film, television, streaming, and other forms of narrative media. Thus, the presentations shine light on new or neglected South Asian screen productions and cultures beyond, around, or before Bollywood. A number of papers discuss methods of screen archive-building that help us to democratize the scope of South Asian screen studies. They aim to historicize the politics of cultural conservation as well as of memory and forgetfulness across South Asia. Combined, the papers examine screen cultures across the region as well as those that themselves question its borders. Ultimately, this Symposium seeks to understand how screen industries respond to, undermine, or even shape the political currents around them.

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

If space is fundamentally political, how can spatial injustices generate political power and construct new ways of thinking about inequities in the places where we live and work? How does mapping political agency and subjectivity of the disenfranchised in urban South Asia–in theory, method, and activism–unsettle existing frames about power and dispossession and contribute towards building a just world? Motivated by critical urban studies scholarship that focuses on regimes of violence, erasure, and agency, this symposium brings together a community of emerging scholars of urban Pakistan to build a collective understanding of exclusionary urbanization processes as the means of political agency of the excluded and dispossessed. We urge attention toward the micro-politics and encounters of ordinary life that reveal how the (un)intended effects of state policies, development aspirations, and liberal imaginaries transform everyday struggles. While the struggle to push stories of people, landscapes, and histories marginalized and othered in dominant discourses is an ongoing action, we want to think with our participants in a daylong symposium about what troubles the constructions of the marginal/ized, what is gained from attending to experiences on the ground, and how a careful and urgent engagement with alternative narratives of development and dispossession can support everyday struggles for resistance. We take contemporary calls of theorizing from the South seriously to consider what is at stake in amplifying the politics of the disenfranchised across theory, method, and activism. We propose a daylong symposium for building community and meaningful exchange of ideas among a group of emerging scholars of urban Pakistan–from diverse disciplinary backgrounds but with a shared commitment to mapping and theorizing the everyday experiences of ecological, social, and political disenfranchisement–about the possibilities of just worlds that emerge within their work.

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

Our symposium advances multidisciplinary methods and approaches to the study of craft communities across the interconnected geographies of South and Central Asia. It challenges the disciplinary boundaries of South Asian area studies by exploring transregional experiences that remain outside the ambit of elite cultural networks. It brings together scholars from diverse subfields of the humanities, arts and social sciences to facilitate research dialogue on the history of cross-cultural interactions among craft communities in South and Central Asia. Our goal is to develop craftsperson-centric approaches to historiography, which affirm the subjective experiences and creative imagination of marginalized communities. Our research reorients humanistic and social scientific discourses to elaborate upon new methods and practices of transregional histories. The plurality of craftworker experiences lies at the heart of our innovative methodology. Our papers disaggregate the category of “craft” in favor of analytical readings of historical sources on specific skills, technologies, ideas, objects and communities. Beyond courtly documents and official reports, our research draws on overlooked materials and knowledge systems, which were circulating among craft communities in South and Central Asia. We propose reconsideration of the relevance of craft histories for the purposes of building an inclusive model of historiography that goes beyond imperial, dynastic or colonial sources. Our presenters elucidate alternate narratives of shared cultural heritage, community values and family lore, upending our assumptions about the reach of imperial, statist or local power. Our symposium is part of our collaborative effort to build a community of scholars, researchers and craft specialists who—on account of their research and engagement with craft communities—challenge prior historiography with a view to advancing transregional, inclusive and connected histories of South and Central Asia. We cultivate the work of early career scholars and put them in conversation with senior scholars as respondents.

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

The notion of the "Kerala model" has dominated Social Science and Humanities discourses on South Asia since the 1970s. High rates of literacy and progressive social development coupled with low mortality and fertility rates pitched Kerala, in southwestern India, as a model for development economists. Many scholars have identified problematic aspects of this developmental paradigm, yet the notion of "Kerala exceptionalism," positing Kerala as a case study in social development, has long held sway for scholars of the region. This first-ever Kerala Studies symposium explores changes in this field of subregional studies in the context of increasing pushback against area studies. The symposium brings together scholarship that challenges and goes beyond the Kerala model, showcasing new work in the subregion and its diasporas. Our panelists come from media studies, literature, gender studies, history, art history, sociology, and the law. Composed of four interconnected panels on “activisms,” “transregional mobility,” “religions,” and “visual cultures,” our symposium features scholarship with an anti-caste, feminist frame, as we understand this to be the way forward for Kerala studies scholarship. Through these interconnected themes, our panelists engage with the continued expressions of the most marginalized in Kerala and the Kerala diasporas to fight against authoritarianism/fascism and against caste apartheid. Accordingly, the symposium speaks directly to the South Asia conference’s 2024 theme, “Democracy and Authoritarianism,” while engaging current challenges to the area studies approach and interrogating the forms taken by the critique of the “Kerala model.” The extended time of the symposium will allow participants and audience members to discuss and engage with the recommended texts and have open-ended discussion. Thus, each panel will feature 3-4 scholars speaking for 7-10 minutes about their work, followed by a Q&A session, a format we anticipate will generate a robust conversation among a diverse range of voices.

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

The Bhagavad Gita is one of the best-known and most widely read, studied, and recited texts in Hindu traditions, and has a long history of exegesis, commentary, and translation in South Asian and European languages. Only seven hundred verses long, this work continues to produce a diverse range of readings, in both scholarship and popular culture, encompassing religion, politics, literature, mysticism, philosophy, and statecraft; its growing role and visibility in contemporary Hindu nationalism makes it a particularly fraught and contested site for debates about South Asian pasts and futures. However, the Bhagavad Gita tends to be considered a stable, canonical work, often obfuscating the diverse interpretations that comprise the text’s multilingual, transnational archive. This symposium brings together early-career scholars who approach this text through a wide range of languages, historical periods, and disciplinary perspectives. The papers in this symposium speak to—and reveal— rich interpretive archives of the Bhagavad Gita not yet considered in detail in secondary scholarship. The scholars who will participate in this day-long symposium will explore the Gita’s interpretive life in premodern and modern contexts ranging from Sanskrit commentarial traditions and Mughal-era Persian translations to contemporary nationalist discourses. It is our hope that this symposium will be the first of many future collaborations that investigate the multiplicity and diversity of the Gita in South Asia and beyond.

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

This symposium aims to think in an interdisciplinary manner about how Jains have historically imagined and enacted individual and collective agency. Jain Studies scholarship has primarily examined the Jain notion of action and non-action through karma theory, centering on the classification of action, factors that play a role in the mechanics of action, and the production of its consequences. Research on Jain ethics and conduct, which has also included discussions on the concept of action, has tended to focus on its regulatory aspects in the context of mendicant discipline. The symposium seeks to expand on these explorations by investigating conceptualizations of the underlying agentive forces involved in the performance of actions. Papers will attend to the embodied dimension of various forms of actions as well as their situatedness in historical and social networks. The contributions of this symposium to the field of Jain studies are manifold. First, it brings together scholars investigating Jain conceptions of agency through a variety of disciplines and methodologies, highlighting the complexity of its textual treatments and lived realities. The presenters include scholars who specialize in various areas such as the history of Jain philosophy, Jain grammatical traditions, Jain ritual culture, ethnography of Jain religious practices, Jain political and economic influence, and the history of science and artisanship within Jain communities. Second, by examining the practices of literary and scientific elites alongside those often overlooked or marginalized in scholarship, particularly lay women and artisans, the papers, taken together, recognize and explicate how different orders of agency exist and interact at every level of Jain social organization. Third, the papers cover a wide range of historical perspectives, spanning from the medieval and early modern periods to the contemporary era. This approach allows for a productive, diachronic examination of conceptions of agency writ large within the Jain tradition.

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

This symposium brings together scholars interested in the history of everyday life in Mughal South Asia. Our goal is to explore how thinking in terms of common practice, materiality, lived environments, and even lived experience can enrich and complicate understandings of the larger narratives, institutions, and personalities central to how Mughal history has most often been written. Approaching this era from the perspective of the commonplace helps us to instead bring into focus the complex social and material setting of the Mughal world, through not only incorporating the objects, spaces, and customary practice that framed everyday life but also through offering ways of integrating a wide array of social figures, from the emperor himself and the broader elite to the vast understudied range of other figures populating the Mughal city, qasba, and countryside, from servant to soldier, from shoe-maker to rural cultivator. Presentations will address areas ranging from everyday law, religious ritual, and understandings of the body to literary networks, the making of urban environments, epistolary practice, and histories of the senses. In the process, the symposium will also take advantage of the diverse disciplinary entry-points of contributions to reflect on the archival challenges and opportunities of approaching the Mughal period from this vantage point.

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

Animals, both real and imagined, are intricately woven into the histories, ideologies, images, and texts of South Asia. Likewise, human lives in South Asia have perennially existed alongside non-human animals within shared ecologies. Recent decades have been marked by the “animal turn” across the scholarly landscape, and the introduction of animal studies into South Asian studies is already well underway. This symposium radically centers animals in our study of South Asia without decentering humans, exploring human understandings of specific animals throughout the historical period, from deep history to the present day. Using a variety of methodological approaches including multispecies ethnography, history, textual studies, and material analysis, we delve into human-animal relations across diverse media, and trace how animals have been used for human purposes. Materials under study include various elephant science and elephant care manuals (gajaśāstra), Buddhist sculpture and architecture including at Bharhut and Sanchi, and colonial-era postcards and trade cards. We raise questions on the extent of animal personhood as natural personhood and ideal personhood, animal sentience, animal treatment, and animal categories and genders. Our projects include investigations of hospitality and interspecies relations with pigeons in Pakistan, a historical overview of the biological understanding of the elephant across the ages in South Asia and in Persian and Greek worlds, the overlap of nāga and elephant identities at ancient Buddhist sites, Buddhist animal identities in Āryaśūra’s Jātakamālā, and the role of the elephant in Mughal sovereignty. The symposium will dedicate a half day to one very exceptional animal—the elephant—and a half day to other animals in South Asia. Our research concerns animals as beings of their own; at the same time, focusing on animals aids our understanding of human histories, stories, archaeologies, ethnographies, and geographies.

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

The ‘decline’ of Indian Buddhism is often attributed to the twelfth-thirteenth century abandonment, destruction, and disrepair of several mega monasteries across Bihar, Bengal, and Orissa that emerged in the eighth-ninth century CE. However, recent scholarship by McKeown (2019), Waley (1932; also, Prasad 2021), and Hori (2018) has presented new evidence of a continuation of Buddhist monasteries and settlements, and Buddhist patrons respectively in the Magadha region (present-day south Bihar) questioning this understanding of the decline of Buddhism. This challenges the traditional understanding of the decline of Buddhism and raises questions about what happened to Buddhist institutions and their activities after the thirteenth century. This panel aims to examine the idea of the decline of Indian Buddhism and reconsider its fate during the medieval period (thirteenth to seventeenth centuries CE) in eastern India. The discussion will cover issues of historiography, patterns in artistic production, built landscape, patronage, and monastic and non-monastic Buddhism to better understand this phenomenon. The geographical area covered by the panel includes present-day Bihar, West Bengal, and Orissa in India, as well as Bangladesh. How was post-thirteenth-century ‘Buddhism’ in eastern India different from its ‘early medieval’ (c. 8th-12th century CE) aspects associated with mega-monastic institutions in Bihar, Bengal, and Orissa? What sources are available to reimagine the ‘final’ days of Buddhism in eastern India? What was the nature of continuing Buddhist monasteries and how did they cope with the newer forms of political authority? How did it affect their patronage and links with the laity in the existing settlements? With these questions, this panel brings together papers on different aspects of later medieval Buddhism in the eastern regions of the Indian subcontinent with papers on epigraphy, art and architecture, archaeology, ethnography, and textual studies as some of the approaches.

Session: Symposium - Half Day, Afternoon
Room: PDR
Floor: Floor 1

With the new geopolitical reality drawing global media and academic attention toward Bangladesh, scholars in social sciences are exploring Bangladesh through various academic lenses, evidenced in the publication of new books and scholarly journal articles. A notable observation in this new wave of scholarship on Bangladesh is the participation of young Bangladeshi scholars who grew up in Bangladesh but studied in Western academia and found their places in renowned universities and research institutions. While many of these scholars follow the early generation of scholars (i.e., anthropologists, historians, geographers, political scientists, and sociologists) in Bangladesh, the unique positionality of this new generation of scholars is evident in the choice of their research topics, analytical approaches, and publishing for both the academic and general audience. This half-day symposium gathers a group of these young scholars simultaneously positioned in academia in Bangladesh and the West, looking at their lived experiences from various disciplinary perspectives. The topics of research these scholars explore range from fictional depictions to historical and feminist understanding of the past, uncovering political struggles that significantly shaped the past and understanding the politics of the present and the future, political ideology influencing the institutional apparatus, including the state and its functions, authoritarianism and disinformation, securitization of society, racialization of religious identity and migrant transnationalism. While the collection of papers connects with ongoing discourses within relevant disciplines, the positionality of the authors allows for bridging Bangladesh with Western academia with both personal experience and professional expertise, making this symposium a unique space for germinating new insights about Bangladesh.

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

This panel examines how joy is articulated, understood, and generated in South Asian literary, religious, and ritual worlds. Each panelist seeks to understand the work of joy and how joy works in the text and traditions in which they are immersed. Through careful and close readings of texts and ritual praxis, the panelists explore questions of vocabulary, soteriology, and gender to delve into the place of joy in South Asian literary, religious, and ritual worlds. Panelist 1 draws on the Buddhist Pāli canon and commentaries to unpack the vocabulary of joy and its synonyms to argue that sukha (joy/happiness) is as important to Buddhist soteriology as the much more well-known emphasis on dukkha. Panelist 2 focuses on the conclusion of the Mahābhārata to draw attention to the text’s linking of desire and happiness, and in doing so appears to reverse course, suggesting that personal desire rather than being ruinous can be the source of a lasting, liberatory joy. Panelist 3 pays attention to the specific words for joy in the Sangam corpus—men speak of joy in terms of lust and pleasure, while women articulate it as relief—to argue for the gendered character of joy, most evident in the jasmine landscape that signals domesticity and patient waiting. Panelist 4 takes us into the festival world of a Tamil Śaiva temple to unpack how radically transparent ritual acts, such as public performance of the usually private ornamentation of the gods, creates a dynamic, mutually constituting relationship of pleasure and joy between priests and devotees that aims to recreate the rapturous joy of the tradition’s foundational Tamil poets. The discussant will respond to the four papers and provide comments to guide our appreciation of joy and its attendant affective dimensions—pleasure, desire, lust—in South Asian literary, religious, and ritual worlds.

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

There are eight Title VI NRCs for South Asia–far behind Latin America (19), East Asia/Pan-Asia (19), Africa (13), and the Middle East (13). One might conclude that South Asia is not of great pressing strategic concern to the United States, despite the region’s importance from politics and population to language and history. When higher education is facing demographic challenges from within and defunding challenges from without, how are we to justify studying South Asia? This panel critically reflects on “study” in terms of judgment and literacy. Their relationship is a persistent puzzle: why are polities with high levels of education not immune from dangerous policies and horrifying acts? Our papers suggest that studying South Asia is less about cultivating cross-cultural literacies and more about honing abilities to judge right from wrong—that is, providing opportunities for better understanding the relationship between judgment and literacy itself. Our panel leverages South Asia scholarship and National Resource Center administration. Paper 1 starts the panel with the ways in which epigraphy inspired the British Raj to cultivate political legitimacy through the support of vernacular education, paving the way for literacies to justify anti-colonial projects as right against imperialism as wrong. Paper 2 shifts from early colonial India’s epigraphy to contemporary India’s social media, exploring the ways in which digital literacies fuel political polarizations and how such polarizations complicate right/wrong distinctions. Paper 3 takes up the theme of polarizations in a comparative frame examining recent developments in India and the US, interrogating the relationship between “Hinduphobia” and racism to illustrate the role of classroom censorship in cultivating judgment. Finally, Paper 4 explores the relationship between literacy and refusal in forging world citizens, arguing that the latter grounded “cosmopolitan” efforts in interwar Tamil-speaking South India to cultivate right/wrong distinctions.

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

In November 2023, authorities in Batticaloa, a town in Sri Lanka's Eastern Province, detained nine Tamil individuals under the draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act, seizing materials intended for a vigil commemorating those lost in the war. This incident is part of a sustained effort by the state to control narratives around war memorialization, supporting a dominant ethnonationalism that legitimizes authoritarian rule and suppresses democracy. This was a sustained process of the state taking control of the meanings of symbols, events, and practices of memorialization of the war to ensure the continuity of the majoritarian ethnonationalism narrative. This narrative provides legitimacy to authoritarian rule and denies democracy, disproportionately affecting the minority Tamils and their struggle for rights. This panel draws on interdisciplinary perspectives from Anthropology, Political Economy, Performance Studies, and Literature and incorporates both scholarly and artistic voices. It addresses memorialization as a site of contested histories of the conflicts. It explores how art and performance embody, challenge, and reconstruct collective memory, offering alternative genealogies that resist the erasure and homogenization of diverse experiences and truths. Contributing to ongoing debates on the role of art and performance in grieving, witnessing, and constructing post-conflict identities and memories, we offer critical perspectives into how Sri Lanka's contested pasts are navigated and memorialized within the public sphere. Central to our discussion is the exploration of how artistic mediums navigate the tension between hegemonic, state-sponsored historiography that erases the multiple histories of othered communities in post-conflict, post-war memorialization. Rather than presenting the aesthetic as a simple alternative or solution to state oppression, the four papers highlight the nuanced embodiment of grieving, recollection, and addressing the enduring repercussions of violence. Collectively, we provide insights into the politics of memorialization and the rise of ethnonationalist authoritarianism in postcolonial societies.

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

This Roundtable brings together interdisciplinary perspectives on the intellectual and social history of the Library (Kitabkhana) in South Asia. We focus on one of India's oldest and most significant collections of manuscripts housed in Rampur Raza Library. The Roundtable follows two sets of questions about texts and context. We plan to discuss the historical development of manuscript from pre-colonial royal private collection in Rohillkhand to public library in post-colonial Rampur. Here our attention will be to discuss the collection, preservation, and dissemination of manuscripts particularly, Arabic, Persian, Pashto, and Urdu in the historical development of the library. Instead of taking a princely or national framework, we hope to map the geographies of knowledge circulation that connects Rampur with Mecca, Najaf, Tehran, Kabul, Peshawar, Delhi, and Lucknow. First, we focus on patrons, manuscript collectors, calligraphers, musicians, dastango, print publishers, librarians, and scholars who were part of the development and dissemination of the manuscript collections. Contributors will speak about various manuscripts, their histories of circulation, and their significance in writing a multilingual South Asian history. (Presenter 1, 2, 3 will address these issues) The second set of questions brings the texts into conversation with changing historical contexts. Here we want to raise questions about the social and political life of texts and readers under changing political contexts from precolonial, colonial, princely to the national context and knowledge production in the global academy. The participants will speak about endangered manuscript archives, preservation efforts, the value of the library in small-town vernacular intellectual culture. We also discuss politics of access in the age of digital archives. (Presenter 4 and 5 will address these issues) We hope to start interdisciplinary discussion on politics of preservation and dissemination in writing a critical history of manuscripts, reading publics, and democratization of knowledge in South Asia.

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

Contemporary South Asian constitutions are by and large progressive and enumerate a host of socio-economic rights and civil liberties. Yet the Minority Question is yet to be substantially resolved. Strategic litigation has in some instances afforded citizenship rights, but the othering of diverse minorities across the region are a reminder of a colonial past that continues to haunt contemporary South Asia. In this roundtable, we propose to examine South Asian legal history over the long nineteenth and twentieth centuries as it relates to the making of minorities. We seek to engage in an interdisciplinary conversation between history and law, and in particular constitutional studies. A historical inquiry will not only help understand how minority questions developed in South Asia, but also the complex webs of local knowledge production which shaped the meaning of group identities. The proposed roundtable, therefore, will not only set a precedent for the larger epistemological objective of internationalizing Legal History but simultaneously conceive it from below by creating space for its local articulations including sites in the periphery of the Global South—and South Asia in particular. We propose to discuss the following non-exhaustive categories: i) Production of Minorities and Group identities ii) Personal Laws: Historical Reflections and Contemporary Relevance iii) Ethnic Minorities: Path Dependencies and Militarization (both colonial and contemporary) iv) The othering of Sexuality and Gender

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

Through ethnographic, formal, and comparative historical approaches to Indian media industries, this panel considers key understandings of contemporary global contexts, as well as key understandings of labor, regulation, and gender in accounts of South Asian cinemas. The first two papers explore tensions between national, regional, and cross-border political imperatives, especially as they have congealed around the labors of star actresses; and the latter two focus on grassroots unionizing by below-the-line women workers who decry the challenging and exploitative conditions of their places of work. Together, the four papers offer a wide view of gendered labor and regulation across Indian media industries, in order to reveal what kinds labor—and shifts therein—tend to fall through the cracks of global media studies. Speaker 1 begins with an account of Tamil-language Nayanthara-starrer Annapoorani (2023), which gained notoriety after its Netflix release was met with Hindu nationalists’ objections. Yet, the film’s initially unrestricted theatrical exhibition invites an analysis of complexities between regional, national, and nationalist media, in terms of contemporary reception and censorship. Speaker 2 continues with another case study of a contemporary commercial film, focusing on the Yash Raj Spy Universe’s Pathaan alongside its Tiger franchise, to argue that depictions of workplace romances between an Indian agent and a feminine Pakistani counterpart betray key shifts in the contemporary Indian spy film as well as ambivalent and contradictory nationalist and post-nationalist visions of justice. Speakers 3 and 4 offer contemporary case studies not of specific films, but of below-the-line workers in two unions: Federation of Western India Cine Employees, and South Indian Cine Women Workers Union, respectively. Speaker 3 emphasizes the patriarchal and exploitative working conditions that unionized women workers are fighting, and Speaker 4 highlights the tendency to overlook the contributions of below-the-line workers’ grassroots activism in studies of production and media industries.

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

This panel is part 1 of 2. It presents four interconnected papers that offer diverse perspectives on environmental, social, and political dynamics in early modern South Asia, particularly focusing on the Mughal Empire's formation and decline in the 18th century. The first paper delves into the history and symbolism of Kalhora wall paintings in Sindh, illuminating the religious beliefs and agrarian influences that shaped the Kalhora state within the broader context of Mughal hegemony. These papers offer new evidence in vernacular languages that shed light on precolonial 'rationalizations' and 'patrimonies' that made early modern political life possible. Moving to courtly visions and artistic representations, the second paper explores the forest as a worksite in Mughal, Mewar, and Awadh courts, highlighting how these spaces were integral to the empire's economic and symbolic frameworks. The third paper shifts focus to environmental migration and state formation, examining how the movements of pastoral communities like the Rebaris influenced territorial control and administrative infrastructure, crucial aspects of Mughal governance. Finally, the fourth paper presents a riparian perspective on the decline of the Mughal Empire, focusing on logistical challenges and economic shifts along the Ganga River that contributed to the empire's weakening and the rise of British influence in eastern India. Together, these papers weave a narrative of interconnectedness between environmental factors, artistic expressions, migration patterns, and imperial dynamics, offering fresh insights into the complex and multifaceted history of Mughal state power and its eventual giving way to instruments of early colonial hegemony in the eighteenth century which are explored in the panel to follow.

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

South Asia has been the site of rich interventions in the "agrarian question," a Left debate on the role of agriculture and the peasantry in bringing about a post-capitalist future. At its heart is a political question on the agency of the peasantry, but it also involves theoretical disputes over the analysis of agriculture under capitalism. Our panel will revisit the "agrarian question" in the territory of what would become Pakistan by seeing its intersections with class, nation, gender, caste, and imperialism. Drawing on the colonial and postcolonial articulations of agrarian revolt, the panel will explore the implications for how we imagine the agrarian questions in Pakistan. Moreover, it explores its broader interfaces with the global agrarian question, through the exploration of M.N.Roy's contestations in the Second Congress of the Comintern, the politics of the Kirti Kissan Sabha (1927-1935), the West Pakistan Kissan Committee (1947-now), and the Mazdoor Kissan Party (1968-now). Moreover, through exploring the intermeshing of caste, tribe, gender, labour and land relations in Khyber Pakthunkhwa, the panel will complicate political articulations of the Agrarian Question within past and present agrarian movements and Marxist theorizing. These grounded reflections from Pakistan are designed to offer broader insights for those researching global agrarian histories by foregrounding movement literature and practices, and how these interact with the complex socio-material worlds within which global and local agrarian relations are woven.

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

The study of stone beads found at site of the Indus Tradition (2600-1900 BCE) in northwestern South Asia provides an important window into multiple aspects of ancient social, economic, and ideological organization. Ongoing studies of beads from regional sites located near the agate and carnelian mining areas of Gujarat in western India provide direct evidence for the development of localized styles of ancient beads manufacturing technology and bead shapes. Presenter 1 will discuss the robust evidence for local production at two well excavated sites, Ghola Doro (Bagasra) and Shikarpur. Presenter 2 will focus on stone bead production and bead styles from the major urban center of Harappa, Punjab, as well as other sites in Pakistan to illustrate the important connections between sites in the core regions of the Indus River Valley and the resource area of Gujarat. Based on the comparative data from the earlier periods at Harappa, it is possible that craftspeople from Gujarat may have had a major role in spreading specific bead making technologies and bead styles throughout the Indus region. Presenter 3 will examine stone beads made from other types of rock some of which might come from regions outside of Gujarat, such as amazonite, grossular-vesuvianite and lapis lazuli. These other rocks were incorporated into the bead making traditions of the Indus cities and even are distributed in sites throughout Gujarat, showing the multidirectional movement of raw materials and also bead production technology and bead styles. Presenter 4 will examine the legacy of Indus stone beads that were produced in the Indus or Mesopotamia and traded to West Asia and the Mediterranean region during the 3rd millennium BCE or Bronze Age. There is also evidence for the hierlooming of Indus beads and trade of these rare ornaments more than 1000 years later during the Iron Age.

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

This double panel will revisit the special collection of essays on ‘Majoritarian Politics in South Asia’ published by Cultural Anthropology in 2021 for their ‘Hotspots’ section. Since the essays were published, there has been a contentious regime change in Pakistan and Bangladesh, the formation of a new coalition government in Nepal and a new government in Sri Lanka in the aftermath of a political crisis and upcoming elections in India in the face of widespread changes to laws regarding citizenship and marriage among others . However, what has continued through these changes is the attachments to ideologies of ‘injury’ and ‘violation’ in everyday social, political, economic and cultural life. Selected contributors from the collection will examine their continued engagement with the issues from the collection and their respective understanding of how majoritarian regimes ‘acquire legitimacy and longevity through attaching themselves to the quotidian desires, aspirations, fears, and resentments of ordinary people in the region’. The presenters, strengthened with further ethnographic and research insights, will analyse the continuing stitching together and the ‘stickiness’ of majoritarian politics by examining blasphemy politics treason and the reconstitution of citizenship in Pakistan, land regimes of plantation and the gendered politics of dissent in the making of political futures in Sri Lanka, the politics of sub nationalist agitations, the contradictions of syncretism and the cartography of temple Hinduism in India, and how queer narratives navigate the political field of majoritarianism and precarity in Bangladesh . The broad aim of the panels is to provide insights into the particular as well as universalizing majoritarian politics across South Asia through the prism of contradictions and heterogeneity that it both negates and reifies.

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

The “political” is usually approached through inquiries into institutions of sovereignty, governance, distribution, and force, and through standardized conceptual repertoires. This panel offers a distinctive approach, attuning analysis to aesthetic assemblages of form, material, and affect that authorize and produce a sense of the political. It is concerned with the present political moment in India. Panelist 1 focuses on the anti-CAA protests in Mumbai, attending to the materiality of kaaghaz (paper) and khoon (blood) in constituting psychologically individuated and affectively laden awaaz (voice) as the ground and evidence of citizenship. Voice is shown to be grounded in the crowd, which emerges as a “socio-technical, material infrastructure for the production and circulation of digital-renderings of awaaz-images.” Panelist 2 focuses on the contested Central Vista Redevelopment Plan in New Delhi and the emergence of a Hindutva grammar of the secular actualized in architectural form, offering a way to address emergent languages and affects of community and alienation and to delineate a range of political imaginaries being built into the revised aesthetics of monumental urbanism. Panelist 3 focuses on a collaboration between NGOs and designers in Mumbai rethinking autorickshaw interiors as a response to gendered violence. At stake is a “spatialized philosophy of design-as-politics” through the material and aesthetic production of a “de-gendered experience of the city” as civil space. Panelist 4 focuses on aesthetic and biopolitical claims for the architectural assemblage of the Kashi Vishwanath Corridor in Varanasi as emblematic of a new political grammar of vikaas (development), one that relieves the city and its concretions of religious value from the biological toxicity of the crowds produced by an alleged history of Muslim encroachment, and creates a new kind of crowd that can see the city and the nation differently.

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

Had Sri Lanka embraced pluralism—something it was well positioned to do—the island may well have established a liberal democracy. But having disenfranchised the Indian Tamils within a year of gaining independence in 1948, the country steadily moved in an ethnocentric direction. It is now best branded a hybrid democracy that combines relatively free and fair elections amidst malgovernance and ethnocracy. In this milieu, certain leaders have utilized executive powers to operate in authoritarian fashion, thereby compounding the country’s democratic deficits. But such democratic backsliding gets challenged, causing the political pendulum to swing between relative authoritarianism and illiberal democracy. This democratic regression and progression have been major aspects of the country’s politics especially since the semi-presidential system was set up in 1978. Sri Lanka is slated to hold a presidential election by September-October 2024 and parliamentary elections before August 2025. The present government postponed local government elections that were due in March 2023, claiming the bankrupt country lacked funds. Many fear it may do the same with the presidential election. A postponed election could unleash a violent uprising. On the other hand, if the presidential election is held on schedule and the new government alters course, that could exacerbate the extant crises. The upshot is that if democratic politics fails to minimize the present widespread angst, the country could well become even more authoritarian than any time in the past. Within this context, the proposed panel will discuss issues ranging from debt structuring and its gendered impact, how a weakened judiciary and parties contribute to democratic backsliding, the attendant illiberalism, and resulting resistance.

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

On the occasion of the publication of Kartik Nair’s "Seeing Things: Spectral Materialities of Bombay Horror" (University of California Press, 2024), this roundtable stages a discussion about the felicity of failure in plumbing social, political and material histories in South Asia. Committed to a close reading of glitches within film frames for their indexical trace of a historical touch that provides entry to histories of production, bodies, labour, control and pleasure, "Seeing Things" challenges us to perceive this trace as a series of aesthetic effects to be parsed speculatively and uncertainly to generate historical accounts beyond the familiar, the canonical and the normative. Exploring the ramifications of Nair's method for scholarship on South Asia, this roundtable brings together an opinionated panel of scholars who have worked with disregarded, degraded, disappeared, disdained and dubious public cultural forms to discuss how the glitch or tear is the entry point to an ‘uncanon’ (Nair 2024:39) of social and cultural life. The five speakers will respond to a different provocation of Seeing Things from the diverse geographic, historical and thematic contexts of their own research in South Asia. Speaker 1 will draw on his research on performance cultures to consider the performativity of glitches - the embodied and fleshy life of these aesthetics and their ability to work the body and activate the audience. Speaker 2 will examine how failure constitutes a form of worlding, creating transnational circuits of influence that render film genres 'globally familiar'. Speaker 3 will draw out how the ‘bad object’ of genre film encourages faltering interdisciplinary conversation between film studies and anthropology. Speaker 4 will discuss the significance of production and circulation cultures for aesthetic and material practices in South Asian visual culture. Speaker 5 will respond to these interventions and set out future lines of enquiry.

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

This roundtable aims to reflect on our collective duty as scholars of South Asia, in the context of the ongoing violence in Palestine. As many legal experts have noted, Israel’s ferocious assault on Gaza has been and continues to be genocidal in intent, scope and scale. This has been war on children as well as on journalists, aid workers and medical staff. It has also featured deliberate and systematic attack on scholars. An integral part of the Israel’s multipronged war strategy has been the targeting of students, scholars and cultural and educational institutes in Gaza, a policy the Palestinian scholar, Karma Nabulsi, has termed “scholasticide”. This is the latest, most severe chapter in Israeli settler colonialism in Palestine, which has been supported by the United States, and aided by other Western powers for over a century. It demands attention from scholars worldwide, including and especially of South Asia, given our connected histories. This roundtable brings together scholars of South Asia, situated in various disciplines, including Gender and Women’s Studies, Anthropology, History and Classics to deliberate on the ethical responsibilities of South Asian scholars towards Palestine. Scholars will bring their particular expertise to discuss various topics including the interconnected histories of anti-colonial struggle in Palestine and British India, the history of Palestine solidarity movements in postcolonial South Asia, the comparable relationship between citizenship, exclusion and violence in Israel and Pakistan, India and Bangladesh and Palestinian feminist critiques of global empires and concepts such as “reproductive genocide”. The panelists will discuss actions scholars can take up to support Palestinian academics and students through pedagogy, research, and academic activism. At the same time, the group will also discuss the lessons we can draw from the Palestinian struggle and consider how the work of solidarity opens political possibilities in South Asia.

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

The plurality of film cultures in South Asia not only centers the region as a critical framework in understanding histories of popular media, but also offers multiple registers of cinema historiography. While the cinematic texts and their symptoms have shaped much of historiography (Prasad 1998, Mazumdar 2007, Sarkar 2009, Vasudevan 2011), the panel looks to participate in the more recent turn towards material histories to excavate encounters, cross-border exchanges, and minor histories (Mahadevan 2016, Mukherjee 2020, Siddique 2022, Nair 2024). The panel asks: if cinema, both in terms of its institution and intimacy, gets mediated by contiguous material cultures, what are the different constituents of such mediations? By looking at materials like gossip, photo albums, popular print, and production stills from diverse regional contexts across the colonial-postcolonial divide of the last century, the papers show how film cultures proffered new modes of participation and new performative possibilities in modernity. They employ region as an analytic category to demonstrate how caste, gender, and taste were mobilized through material cultures of Maharashtra, Bengal, and Hindi-speaking regions. The industrial milieu, another key determinant, shows how cinema as an industry became a space for voyeuristic speculation, alternative modes of production, creative interlocution with other media practices such as literature and portraiture photography. The papers also address how the public sphere becomes both the imagined and empirical locus to mobilize new cultural possibilities- be it through circulation of pleasurable fragments, proliferation of anti-caste attitudes, or infusion of literary sensibilities. Finally, while thinking through interconnected material registers spanning affective public cultures, industry patrons and paratextual interlocutors, the panel also seeks to reassess dominant articulations of the filmic archive, offering exploratory non-instrumental ways to think about the impact of cultural archives on public imagination.

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

This panel is part 2 of 2. It brings together authors of four new monographs and student discussants to delve into the complexities of early British colonial rule in South Asia, exploring themes of rationality, patrimony, and legal structures that made colonial discourse and effecting its rule possible. The first paper investigates the early colonial legal history under the East India Company's rule, questioning whether it established a rule of law or merely a rule by law, especially in relation to property rights and administration. The second paper delves into gendered property disputes in Awadh during the mid-19th century, highlighting how contested claims to royal patrimonies shaped notions of statehood and sovereignty. The third paper focuses on the financial intricacies within Baroda, showcasing indigenous actors' navigation of colonial economic frameworks to assert princely autonomy and economic viability. Finally, the fourth paper explores the concept of sovereignty in international law as applied to the princely states of colonial South Asia, analyzing jurisdictional politics and debates over legal status. These papers collectively offer a nuanced understanding of colonial governance, legal rationalization, economic strategies, and sovereignty dynamics in South Asia, shedding light on the interplay between colonial hegemony and indigenous agency. By examining historical contexts and power structures, the panel contributes to a broader discussion on the impact of colonialism on legal systems, economic landscapes, and political identities in the region, inviting critical reflections on the legacies of British imperial rule and its enduring effects on post-colonial societies. The Chair and Discussant are graduate students who will lead comments and critiques of the papers presented.

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

Water shapes our contemporary and historical worlds, from intimate, individualized scales, to vast global and geopolitical ones. In turn, the hydrosphere is shaped by contesting political, legal, cosmological, bureaucratic, aesthetic, cultural, and technoscientific concerns that render legible claims of territory, sovereignty, governance, belonging and livelihoods. This panel draws attention to the intersection of hydropolitics and mapping in colonial, postcolonial and contemporary South Asia to ask: How does mapping operate as a political technology of (il)legibility in watery spaces? What are the different mapping technologies at play in the hydrosphere, and what effects do they have on our understanding of the histories, politics, cultures, and ecologies in which they are deployed? And how does a transdisciplinary lens allow us to trace the intersections of water with caste, class, religion and citizenship in relation to increasingly precarious democracies and rising authoritarianism? By understanding mapping as a political technology as well as a lived experience, this panel highlights the constant tension between the politics of governance and the governed, and hence between sovereign space and lived place in the watery, soaking and muddied ecologies of South Asia. The four papers in this panel span a range of spatial and temporal hydrogeographies - from urban water infrastructures in colonial Madras, postcolonial water disputes between India and Pakistan in the Indus basin, and Cold War alliances to map the Indian Ocean, to contemporary negotiations about citizenship and nationhood in the border regions of Northeastern India. This interdisciplinary panel brings together anthropology, history, media studies, and science and technology studies to understand how the South Asian hydrosphere has been mapped. Drawing attention to the afterlives of British colonialism, partition and its still unraveling effects, and the rise of contemporary majoritarian politics, we cast light on the shared histories and ongoing intimacies of hydropolitics in South Asia.

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

Seals and writing from the Indus Civilization (2600-1900 BCE) continue to receive considerable scholarly and public attention, and for good reasons. The script has yet to be deciphered, and the seals inscriptions are often engraved upon represent some of the best evidence of Indus administrative behaviors and technical virtuosity. A small but dedicated group of scholars across the world are applying new methods to study seals, writing, and the dynamic role both played in Indus organization and integration. For nearly 50 years, the Corpus of Indus Seals and Inscriptions (CISI) project headed by Dr. Asko Parpola and colleagues has been the primary source of data to study Indus seals and writing. As the project nears completion and fewer materials are recovered and published, how can we continue to study the earliest South Asian seals and writing and ensure accessibility? Given the significance of both in the development and fluorescence of the Indus Civilization, now is the time to prepare for the future of studying seals and writing after the completion of the CISI project. This session highlights current efforts and outlines future goals to ensure that what first identified and heralded the Indus as a unique, indigenous South Asian cultural phenomenon will continue to drive scholarship and public interest in the future.

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

Development, which served as a raison d’état for modern nation-state building in India, led to rapid industrialization and economic growth for the state. However, development also created a category of marginalization that furthered the historical oppression of certain social groups, particularly indigenous tribes inhabiting resource frontiers. This category of marginalization measured economic progress through state GDP markers and social markers of modernity while simultaneously excluding communities who had alternate views about socio-economic progress steeped in their place-based relationships with land and livelihood. Despite numerous critical assessments from both within and outside academia, development continues to function as a hegemonic force, advancing political and economic agendas across various forms throughout the post-colonial landscape. In this development narrative, tribal communities continue to be relegated to the image of a primitive “other” and their political assertion against the exploitative and extractive resource regimes is viewed as antagonistic to the narrative of development and modernity. In this backdrop, the papers in this panel examine alternative demands for political and economic inclusion. We ask: How do indigenous communities perceive and engage with development, both on an individual and collective level? How are their hopes, desires, and sense of futurity mapped onto the unrelenting spree of development that saturates their everyday lives?

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

What happens when borders encounter the confounding nature of rivers in South Asia? This panel seeks to explore the complicated terrain of rivers as borders, where together, they visibilize the various ecological, political, and social anxieties of a landscape. Some rivers cut across boundaries to become trans-boundary rivers, some act as a border themselves, political and/or social. Rivers in border regions are also often crucially implicated in infrastructural projects of various kinds such as energy, irrigation, mobilities, and more. Thinking through such a bounding of space with the integral presence of a flowing river extends our understanding of the environment, nation-making, and society. As borders - spatial, political, and social - encounter flowing and shifting rivers, what becomes of the landscape that is produced? We propose this panel to answer this animating puzzle in different ways - how an incomplete dam on the Subansiri River reshapes the everyday life of communities along the inter-state borders in Northeast India (Speaker 1); the ways in which engineering interventions along the Ganga-Padma river-border reveal a science and statecraft that is saturated with an anxiety about fixing a landscape (Speaker 2); what forms of political mobilizations and activisms emerge from the ‘recalcitrant rurality’ of living root bridges at the Khasi Hills-Sylhet floodplains of the Indo-Bangladesh borderlands (Speaker 3); and how by looking at the history of infrastructures, the transboundary Ganges is transformed into an object that contained or relayed data, an information flow that in turn defined the border itself (Speaker 4). Within such a site of rivers and borders, this panel thus examines various sets of actors, objects, and spaces which are involved in the making of such often precarious geographies.

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

On the heels of the 2024 publication of The Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures, this roundtable examines the paratactic structure of the Handbook to see what the genre affords in its discussion of its three major terms: “the modern,” “the Indian,” and “the literary.” Taking a multilingual and a multimodal approach, the roundtable addresses how cosmopolitanism, regionalism, and nationalism produce a modern Indian literary sphere, as they are configured through local realities such as caste hierarchies and Dalit assertions, patriarchy and women’s writings, and political violence and utopian imaginaries. The roundtable addresses these questions through some of the locus-based studies of literature from the Handbook—in Marathi, Punjabi, Bangla, Urdu, and English—while bringing in insights from other languages such as Hindi, Tamil, Gujarati, Kashmiri, and Assamese. The roundtable, organized by the volume’s co-editors, includes five of its contributors and an external discussant. The organizers are scholars of modern Indian literature, interested in questions of form, genre, realism, and modernism. Speaker 1’s expertise is in Marathi modernism, poetry and poetics, and translation. Speaker 2 is a scholar of comparative literature and refugee studies, focusing on realism and fantasy in the Indian novel in English. Speaker 3 studies Urdu modernism, destabilizing the perceived boundaries between modernism and progressivism in Urdu, in both India and Pakistan. Speaker 4 studies material histories of print in colonial Punjab, focusing on little magazines. Speaker 5 focuses on Bengali literature and subaltern approaches. The different regional, linguistic and thematic expertise of the panel participants allows us to approach the question of Indian literary modernity from multiple angles. Lastly, our external interlocutor is a scholar of the vernacular in Indian literature, and she will raise larger questions that address the relationship of the individual literary traditions to the field as a whole.

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

This panel engages with the state-society relationship in East Pakistan through the lens of refugee settlement, community formation, and Hindu- Muslim tensions in local contexts. The collection of papers in this panel moves away from a given and static description of the state-society relationship and explains how the ongoing processes of the formation of communities play a critical role in mediating the state-society relationship. Speaker 1's paper examines the impact of the Partition of India in 1947 and its effect on various religious or ethnic groups. His paper problematizes the plight of working classes in Calcutta to understand their experiences of being displaced to the other side of the border. Speaker 2’s paper, in the same vein, explores the complexities of how labeling individuals from Chittagong, Bangladesh, as ‘evacuees’ and ‘refugees’ obscured the long journey that formed their socio-political identities, beginning in the colonial period and stretching into post-colonial Bangladesh. Speaker 3’s paper unravels the concept of community and theorizes the origin of the idea of the political community through a discussion of the political understanding of Muslim scholars in late colonial South Asia. Speaker 4’s paper examines how Hindu-Muslim local tensions in Noakhali continued as much before as did after partition, impacting local and national political rhetoric.

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

Focusing on a new book, Rated A: Soft-Porn Cinema and Mediations of Desire in India (University of California Press, 2024) that looks at sexuality, gender and desire in India, this panel brings together five senior scholars in the field of cinema and media studies to discuss the stakes of this book, and its contribution to study of film and media. Each of the speakers addresses aspects of theoretical framing, methodological premises and stakes of Rated A, and the book’s impact in the field of South Asian film and media. In the 1990s, India’s mediascape saw the efflorescence of edgy, soft-porn films that emerged in the Malayalam-speaking state of Kerala. In Rated A, the author examines local and transnational influences such as vernacular pulp fiction, illustrated erotic tales, and American exploitation cinema that shaped Malayalam soft-porn cinema. Through a mix of archival and ethnographic research, the author traces how actresses and production personnel negotiated their social lives marked by their involvement with a taboo form. Rated A maps the soft porn industry’s utilization of gendered labor and trust-based arrangements in tandem with the genre’s circulation among blue-collar workers of the Indian diaspora in the Middle East, where pirated versions circulate alongside low-budget Bangladeshi films and Pakistani mujra dance films as “South Asian” pornography. By locating the tense negotiations between sexuality, import policy, and censorship in contemporary India, Rated A offers a model for understanding film genres outside of screen space, emphasizing that they constitute not just industrial formations but entire fields of social relations and gendered imaginaries. Chair: Associate Professor, Binghamton University Panelists: Associate Professor, Loyola Marymount University; Professor, Michigan State University; Associate Professor, University of Virginia; Assistant Professor, Stanford University

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

This panel explores the marginalization of women in medical and legal discourses in colonial and post-colonial India. Interrogating the differential treatment of bodies at the margins of colonial society by medicine, philanthropy and law– centering the orphan, the prostitute, the patient and the protestor – this panel seeks to study epistemological shifts in understanding how gendered relations are interspaced with questions of negotiations of power in the colonial and postcolonial period. Sexual health, family, and morality emerge as intertwined motifs across the papers, revealing how colonial ideologies shaped notions of bodily purity, moral conduct, and gender norms. By putting studies of missionary activity, healthcare and incarceration in conversation, we highlight common patterns in regulating subaltern female subjects, underscoring the intersectionality of gender, religion, and caste in constructing medico-legal discourses. Through nuanced examinations of missionary activities, colonial health discourses, shifting perceptions of venereal diseases, and the political incarceration of women, the papers offer insights into the complexities of gender, health, and morality in South Asian history and their enduring relevance in contemporary society. The papers collectively engage with the enduring legacies of colonialism in the region, highlighting how colonial interventions in areas such as education, healthcare, and incarceration continue to shape contemporary discourses and practices, revealing common themes that resonate across temporal and geographical boundaries.

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

This panel proposal, titled “Seeing, Reading, Speaking the State: Dynamics of Political Cultures and Powers in India,” presents an exploration of the political cultures and powers that have shaped India through its colonial and postcolonial phases. It seeks to understand the complex relationships between identity, nationalism, violence, and the state, and their influence on the political landscape from historical and contemporary perspectives. The discussion will encompass the tension between democratic aspirations and authoritarian governance, the roots and impact of communalism on Indian society, the colonial legacy of ethnicity and philology, the dual role of the state in (gendered) violence, and the public’s response through political participation and resistance. The interdisciplinary composition of our panel will enable us to furnish a rich conversation that thinks through our shared themes of political cultures and powers across subjects. Various permutations of speakers will touch on gender and embodiment, subaltern conceptions of power and contestation, community memory and aftermaths of violence, and narratives of identity. These topics are explored in our panel across time periods and locations ranging from Kashmir to Maharashtra, and the colonial period to the present day. Additionally, speakers will utilize diverse interpretative approaches to analyze literature, official documents, press publications, and other popular sources to offer insights into the various ways the state and its politics are read, understood, and critiqued by society. In doing so, the panel will aim to foster a comprehensive understanding of the multifaceted political cultures in India and encourage a dialogue that bridges historical divides and offers perspectives on the evolving nature of power and governance.

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

This panel maps the diverse ways in which Dalit, Bahujan, and Adivasi communities in Telangana engage with ritual practices, oral narratives, and devotional traditions to articulate their lived experiences, negotiate socio-political representations, and construct alternative epistemologies. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork and archival data, the panel explores how these communities create and inhabit ritual and narrative landscapes that enable them to remember, reproduce, and renegotiate their histories, identities, and systems of meaning-making. Focussing on sites such as annual jataras and temple rituals and centering the body of the marginalized ritual specialists and oral-performing communities this panel analyzes how notions of “rootedness,” caste self-identification, and vernacular epistemologies are articulated. They investigate how ritual performances, oral narratives, and devotional practices by ritual specialists such as the Ogguvandlu and Shivashaktis serve as modalities for communities to map out their sense of belonging and construct sacred landscapes that reflect their contemporary subjectivities within Telangana's broader cultural and political formations. By analyzing the convergence of ritual specialists, devotees, caste associations, and political actors at their respective field sites, the panel sheds light on the intricate negotiations and contestations that shape these communities' lived experiences. It highlights how ritual and oral traditions offer alternative interpretations and epistemological frameworks that challenge mainstream knowledge systems, enabling communities to deconstruct dominant narratives and assert their agency in the face of marginalization, displacement, and socio-political aspirations. Conclusively, the panel aims to explore and map the complex interplay between religion, memory, placemaking, and decolonial epistemologies, underscoring the centrality of ritual landscapes and vernacular traditions in mapping the diverse lifeworlds of Dalit, Bahujan, and Adivasi communities in contemporary Telangana.

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

This panel brings together a diverse group of scholars to discuss the nature of spatial practice, urban negotiation, and evolutionary urbanism in colonial and post-colonial South Asia. Geographically the session spans a territory that covers parts of both India and Pakistan and their entangled urban pasts in between. The session explores the questions of “modernization,” migration, urban amalgamation, and everyday negotiation to shed light on the complex urban biographies of Southern Asia. The four papers look at interactions and negotiations between planners, builders, architects, residents, and migrants as they carved out spaces for themselves in their cities. Historiographically, the panel focuses on sites that have often been left out from the canons of urban history in South Asia. By bringing together voices from the spatial margins of the discourse—spanning colonial and post-colonial temporalities in a single analytic field—the panel proposes to tread new directions in the study of South Asia’s urban past. Primarily, the panel foregrounds the question of dialectics in shaping the nature of urban form and experience. Spk 1 and 2 scrutinize the question of international modernism in spatial and social planning in post-partition India and Pakistan. Spk 1’s focus on building university spaces in Pakistan and Spk2's emphasis on the building of “new towns” in Delhi demonstrate the emergence of overlapping ideas about migration, population, mobility, and evolutionary urbanism in the Third World. In a similar vein, the dialectical nature of interaction between the inhabitants of the city and those who govern it plays a pivotal role in the works of Spk 3 and 4. Both Speakers demonstrate how the marginalized residents of colonial Kanpur and Puri innovatively carved out a space for themselves in the face of increasing exclusion brought about by powerful pressure groups.

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

This roundtable features a conversation about Karma and Grace: Religious Difference in Millennial Sri Lanka (Columbia University Press, 2023), by Neena Mahadev. The ethnography examines Theravada Buddhist and Christian disputes over religious conversion that intensified in the early 2000s. Informed by broader histories of inter-religion, the study analyzes how the growth of Pentecostal and dominionist discourses became contentious in a country which majoritarian nationalists take to be the sovereign “Island of the Dharma” (Dhammadipa). In 2004, Theravadin Buddhists began a campaign to lobby for a ban against “unethical” religious conversions. While Pentecostal evangelists publicize “the Good News” (Sinhala, Subha Aranchiya), the study interrogates what happens to this “news” when it is propagated among subsets of a population that sharply resists it. Delineating how exclusivist claims of Pentecostal ministerial discourses go against the grain of nationalistic efforts to recuperate the Sinhala Buddhist heritage of the postcolony, this phenomenon of inter-religious contest adds a new dimension to studies of secularism and the politics of religious freedom. The work also elucidates why religious belonging became a revived source of conflict in a country that had been long afflicted by ethnic war, and what effect nationalistic postwar political maneuvering had upon the perceptions of minorities. Addressing locally and doctrinally-specific claims about the _ethics_ of mass mediated religious persuasion, the author examines the interplay of Buddhist devotional repertoires, Born-again Pentecostal and Catholic rituals of receiving grace, and how hostilities are channelled through vernacular media. It offers new insights on competing political theologies, competitively-wrought religious innovations, and how ordinary people navigate a multi-religious public. The book proposes a “multicameral” methodological and theoretical approach to pluralism. together with author, five commentators draw upon their own expertise in the anthropology of religion, nationalism and ethno-religious conflict, postwar sovereignty, to discuss the book’s contributions to South Asian Studies.

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

Both humor and hurt sentiments play a central role in South Asian social and political life, and joking is a powerful tool that can often result in either or both. Joking can simultaneously achieve various ends through the delight and discomfort it engenders; it can establish community boundaries, expose moral anxieties and tensions, and maintain, negotiate, and disrupt social orders. This panel takes joking seriously, drawing inspiration from seminal South Asian Studies scholarship on humour (Ghassem-Fachandi 2012, Hall 2019), offence (Scott 2023, Rollier et al 2019), and fun - queer and feminist fun (Kirmani 2020, Phadke 2020), authoritarian and nationalist fun (Hansen 1999, Verkaaik 2004), and ‘fun for fun’s sake’ (Anjaria & Anjaria 2020). This panel also aims to expand upon the classical anthropological inquiry (Douglas 1975, Mauss 1928, Turner 1967) into joking relations beyond structural-functionalist assumptions of harmony and cohesion towards a recognition of messier and more nuanced realities. The papers on this interdisciplinary panel examine the politics of humour and offence in South Asia and the diaspora in literature, on stage, and in daily life. Speaker 1 argues that anti-blasphemy activists in Pakistan formed both violent and humorous intimacy with the sacred by entering into joking relations with God. Speaker 2 examines how the relations between and interactions amongst comedians and audience members at stand-up comedy shows in Delhi determine and mediate collective framings of offence. Speaker 3 explores how derogatory jokes in Urdu and English literature reveal an adherence to ritualistic purity and casteism that is often otherwise societally denied. Finally, Speaker 4 investigates the social role of gallows humour and ‘roasting’ as two forms of joking popular in Indian Singaporeans social gatherings that required navigating the delicate balance between the funny, the taboo, and the painful.

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

This roundtable assembles a diverse group of interdisciplinary scholars to discuss the contributions and implications of Navyug Gill's new book Labors of Division: Global Capitalism and the Emergence of the Peasant in Colonial Panjab (Stanford University Press, 2024). The book explores the landowning peasant and landless laborer as novel political subjects forged in the encounter between colonialism and struggles over culture and capital within Panjabi society. One of the most durable figures in modern history, the peasant has long been a site of intense intellectual and political debate. Yet underlying much of this literature is the assumption that peasants simply existed everywhere, a general if not generic group, traced backward from modernity to antiquity. Through a careful interrogation of a disparate archive - settlement reports and legal judgments to labor contracts, vernacular poetry, and family budgets - Gill challenges the givenness of the peasant by explicating the ideological and material divisions that transformed power in Panjabi society as well as global history. Drawing on the disciplines of history, anthropology, and economics, the panelists will put Gill's work in conversation with debates in several fields: religious identities, commodity studies, social hierarchy, diaspora politics, and political economy. By implicating economic logic with cultural difference, this book roundtable will allow us to re-think the itinerary of comparative political economy alongside alternative possibilities for emancipatory futures.

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

That publics are intimately connected to media forms is a given anywhere. In postcolonial India, the question of the public vis-à-vis media has received attention from myriad directions- forms of address (Vasudevan 2010, Prasad 2015, Alonso 2023), fandom and mass politics (Pandian 1992, Srinivas 2016), the construction of new audiences and events (Batabyal 2012, Cody 2023) etc. This panel is prompted by the recent turn towards conceptualizing media publics by attending to how the media texts, events, and publics produce each other through interconnected processes (Mukherjee and Singh 2017, Sunya 2020, Sarkar 2022). More specifically, this panel asks: what could be the modalities of the production of media publics that help draw a throughline through the plural, multi–local, and fragmented nature of the public sphere in postcolonial India? It attempts to answer the question by destabilizing the categories of the national and regional publics through a media-specific lens. The papers on disaster relief and experimental documentary touch upon how divergent imaginaries of national publics shaped the social welfarist impetus of film stardom and aesthetic choices of state-sponsored documentary practice. The papers on popular comedy and erotic thrillers underline how even the regional public can be fragmented by conditions of media production, wherein genre becomes the decisive modality of production. Alongside genres, another throughline emerges through discourses, since discourses of humanitarian aid in the context of disaster relief and taste cultures in the context of popular comedy become instrumental in understanding how the public makes meaning out of the film star as a mediated formation. Finally, whether it is the media event of film functions or media texts ranging from B-grade video and popular comedy to experimental documentary, the aesthetics of representation emerge as a connective thread in shaping the imagined, addressed, and intended publics across the papers.

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

The long seventies is often staged in scholarly accounts as the aftermath of the revolutionary sixties. Across South Asia, the seventies were marked by the specter of diminishing democracy and the rise of authoritarian regimes. The Bangladesh War, Indira Gandhi’s imposition of a national Emergency in India, and the dictatorship of Muhammad Zia-Ul-Haq in Pakistan all marked the fading of the dreams of decolonization. In Sri Lanka, 1976 saw the formation of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, setting the stage for the Sri Lankan Civil War, and Afghanistan witnessed the April coup with the deposition of Muhammad Daoud Khan. Despite these democratic challenges, the Seventies was also a time of revolutionary social and political movements that persisted alongside rising authoritarianism. Writers, filmmakers, and public intellectuals responded to the crises of the seventies in myriad ways. From international conferences to prison accounts to underground poetry, genres of resistance and subversion flourished during the period. The South Asian novel post-1947 has turned to the seventies to narrate postcolonial life through the decades of decolonization. In recent years, print and social media have evoked the seventies in memes and political cartoons to critique, through comparison, the growing turn to the right in their respective countries. The papers in this panel stage a comparative dialogue on the Seventies in South Asia. Through a reading of literature and film from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, the papers renegotiate characterizations of the period as one of decline and malaise. In turn, we hope to establish a comparative framework for reading the Seventies across national and regional traditions in South Asia.

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

As the anthropogenic climate crisis intensifies, South Asian countries are facing grave ecological challenges ranging from devastating floods, water scarcity, heat waves to land grabbing, mass displacement, and uneven development. Home to more than a quarter of the global population, the region has a long history of political instability, resource conflicts, and territorial disputes. A resurgent authoritarian politics and widening power inequities between the haves and have-nots have made matters worse. Within South Asia, Pakistan has emerged as the flashpoint of the ecological threat caused by the global climate crisis. The recent extreme environmental events, monsoon rains, floods, droughts, and wildfires, suggest a worsening trend in the extreme weather events. The state and society in Pakistan face grave ecological challenges. These ecological challenges cannot be divorced from the political context within the state and the region. Political realities governing the state and society determine the way ecological threats are negotiated and managed. As the worsening environmental crisis intensifies so too struggles around environmental commons, it feeds into existing conflicts and power hierarchies and reconfigures the prevalent power relations. How do existing political inequalities figure into the dynamics of resource struggles as the ecological crisis picks up speed? How do resource struggles reconfigure state-society relations in Pakistan at multiple political, spatial, administrative scales? How does ecological crisis put strain on regional and international relations? These are some of the central questions that animate reflections at the intersections of ecological and political crises in Pakistan. The panel will explore how ecological scarcity figures into the political dynamics of the state and society in Pakistan. The speakers will dissect the authoritarian state apparatus that is intent on further accumulation through building more highways, gated housing schemes, hydropower stations, and tourist facilities, all the while shrinking living space for ordinary Pakistanis.

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

ad hoc

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

This panel is part 2 of 2. While South Asia, a diverse and dynamic region, has witnessed various forms of governance throughout its history, in recent times, concerns have been raised about the rise of populism and/or authoritarianism. This panel seeks to explore multiple shades of authoritarianism in this region. Simultaneously, it focuses on contemporary resistance against the cultural hegemony of authoritarian power. Speaker 1 identifies the process of transforming Bangladesh into a single-party state and argues that it has been shaped by both internal dynamics and external influences, some overt and others insidious. Speaker 2 focuses on India’s regional hegemony and how it facilitates the authoritarian rise in the region. Through a textual analysis, the presenter explores India’s longstanding desire to be the “big brother” in the region and how this desire has snatched the basic right of political franchise of the people of Bangladesh, leading to a sustained authoritarianism in the country. Speaker 3 delves into the resistance against Hindutva hegemony through an ethnographic lens, focusing on Jharkhand, an eastern Indian state with a significant Adivasi population. Drawing upon ethnographic narratives and fieldwork observations, the presenter examines how Adivasis in Jharkhand navigate and challenge the dominant Hindutva narrative and destabilize Hindutva’s claim of autochthony by asserting their indigenous identities. Speaker 4 explores the systems of medical care in and beyond the biomedical landscape in one of the world's most militarized zones in Kashmir and scrutinizes the many faces of the Indian authoritarian regime, especially in the context of health and well-being in relation to the multifaceted impacts of the prolonged militarization that shapes the experiences of medical interactions in the valley.

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

Over the last few decades, scholars in the humanities and social sciences have increasingly attended to questions of scale. Urban geographers and sociologists have addressed it through concepts of global/world cities, ordinary cities, and planetary urbanization (Sassen 1991; Robinson 2002; Brenner 2019). In architectural history and South Asian history, scholars have used different scales of analysis to study artefacts and objects, from local, national, and international, to more recently deployed scales like “third world” (King 2004; Confino & Skaria 2002; Lu 2011). Indian Ocean historians have also called for alternate temporal and scalar attitudes to history writing (Hofmeyr 2012, Menon 2020). Staying with this trend, recent endeavors in postcolonial urban and architectural theory have taken up the task of building theory from sites that lie beyond the Global North. Yet, the dominant sites of theory generation still largely remain globalized metropolitan centers, like New Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, and Kolkata (Bunnell and Maringanthi 2012). This panel seeks to go one step further by examining processes of urban transformation in rapidly developing small towns and regions that are not part of mainstream urbanization discourses, thus lying “outside the metropolitan shadow” (Mukhopadhyay et al. 2020: 582). As scholars have noted, such spaces have played an important role in mediating rural-urban migrations, creating economic growth, and displaying provincial cosmopolitan cultures (Chattopadhyay 2012; Scrace et al. 2015). This panel highlights the experience of ordinary places, artefacts, and everyday practices through case studies of lesser studied and theorized regions/cities/peripheries in South India, like Vijayawada, Hyderabad, Kochi, and Malappuram. The panel invites participants to engage with scalar concepts, theories, and methods within their own disciplines of Geography, Anthropology, Urban Planning/Studies, and Architecture, while reflecting on its larger implications for South Asian Studies.

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

This roundtable will discuss intellectual and ethical issues raised by the prominence of the West in the production of humanities and social science scholarship on Sri Lanka, a phenomenon that is related to broader imbalances in resources between the Global North and the Global South. In doing so, it will pay attention to the “positionality” of institutions and individuals -- their funding, their location, and their intended audiences -- in shaping scholarship and teaching. The session is prompted by the belief that despite structural constraints, self-critical awareness of positionality can lead to policies and practices that can produce better quality scholarship and can do so in more ethical ways. John Rogers is the United States Director of the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies (AISLS). He will review ways in which AISLS, which is mostly funded by US government grants, seeks to promote scholarship and ethical research practices while necessarily operating within many contradictory and often problematic fields of power. Ramla Wahab-Salman heads up the AISLS Colombo Center. She will reflect on some of the issues raised by operating an “American” research organization in Sri Lanka. Harshana Rambukwella will consider how his move from the Open University of Sri Lanka to NYU-Abu Dhabi has impacted his scholarship and teaching. Phusathi Liyanaarachchi, a master's students at Harvard Divinity School, will reflect on the intellectual disjunctions involved in moving from Sri Lanka to a program where Sri Lanka is of little concern. Tamara Fernando, a historian of the Indian Ocean, is a dual US-Sri Lankan citizen who has recently returned the United States after eight years based in other countries. She will reflect on how her different subject positions in various locations have shaped her research and teaching agendas.

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

A wide range of other-than-human subjects—animals, plants, microbes, among others—animate contemporary South Asian lived experiences. Relationships formed across species boundaries— whether brief or long-lasting, utilitarian or altruistic— are imbricated in the intersectional operations of race, caste, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and indigeneity. From quotidian instances of touching, witnessing, and other forms of interacting with other-than-human subjects to exceptional, contextually specific use of them to bolster anthropocentric concerns, the ubiquity of multispecies coexistence is uncontested. How can we rethink the political and ethical repercussions of multispecies interdependence in the contexts of interwoven social and environmental transformations? This panel interrogates the relevance of entanglement, enmeshment, co-constitution, and related analytical concepts to interpret the interconnections of human and nonhuman concerns in modern South Asia. It draws on a wide range of emergent theoretical frameworks from environmental humanities to address inequities characterizing South Asian social, cultural, and economic circumstances and redefines the ethics of multispecies relationality. This panel focuses on papers that interrogate these and related questions through literary and cinematic explorations of multispecies worldmaking across languages and genres in contemporary South Asia.

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

Artists have been recognized for their ability to represent totality – as opposed to the limits of contemporary social sciences – through literal or metaphorical cartographies mapping capitalism (Toscano 2012). Inspired by this theoretical approach to artistic production and social theory, this panel is informed by the realization that any critical theory of caste has engaged with ‘systems’ that are indeed totalizing whereby no discrete understanding of this social category is ever possible. On the other hand, even such systemic view has often occluded the possibility of envisioning broader totalities, that is caste-scapes manifesting in, shaping and speaking of broader worlds – and certainly beyond the usual colonial/postcolonial dialectics that is no longer able to contain or even explain such scapes. To rekindle the inquiry, this panel shifts the quest for the representation of totality from the sole focus on capitalism to broader concerns on how to inhabit (un)democracy and caste supremacy and authoritarianism in social life. Our papers consist of forays into the visual arts and technoscience to generate novel and granular cartographies aiming to disrupt not only savarna power (and its embeddedness within global capitalism) but also to illuminate the linkages with and similarities of this power’s operations with other contemporary projects of subjugation through and beyond their racializing dimensions. In particular, the papers address the representation of totality through the ways artistic practice and the analytic/medium of dirt unravel the deeper connection between dalit bodies and political life; photography’s affordances uncovering yet unspoken dimensions of caste in city spaces; the use of emergent digital media portraiture as a tool of dalit liberation that transcend caste and race; and by experimenting with engineering as a navigation compass to gauge the limits of radical humanism.

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

This panel offers a historical analysis of constitutive engagements between the colonial and postcolonial state and a range of socio-technical systems and technological projects in India. The speakers collectively engage with a deliberately wide range of systems and technologies – including art and architecture, forensic science, the print media, and transportation – to understand not only how these were individually shaped by state institutions and actors but also to tease out comparative frameworks of state influence and regulation. In this same vein, they explore how these technologies were vibrant sites of social, political, and legal contestations and understand how such negotiations have materially shaped the historical impact of these technologies. In developing their analysis across the boundary of colonial and postcolonial, the speakers suggest the usefulness of a continuity and comparison in understanding technology and state relations in India across 1947. Speaker 1 traces how state officials and techniques of governance influenced relationships between labor and management in the sphere of railway technology, especially critical to state projects in the volatile years surrounding WWI. Speaker 2 parses how colonial judges and magistrates intervened in the production and use of forensic information during police inquiries and medical examinations in colonial India. Speaker 3 focuses on how ideas about a postcolonial democracy influenced the internationally-circulating representations of the technopolitical projects of the 1950s and 1960s, both then and now. Speaker 4 examines official regulation of newspaper production in postcolonial India to explore the more prosaic ways in which press freedom can be curtailed in practice and highlight the tension between abstract ideas of freedom and affirmative commitments to equity in a postcolonial democracy.

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

Over the past two decades, scholars have insisted on the significance of studying history of South Asia using global and transnational methods. This panel responds to such scholarly provocations by bringing together advanced graduate students and early career scholars working on the various circulations of South Asia labour across the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The British imperial project necessitated and created the conditions for the movements of different types of labour across its empire and beyond. Indians toiled as indentured laborers in sugar colonies in the Caribbean and rubber plantations in Malaya, built trains in Uganda and Kenya, lumbered in the forests of Canada and worked on ships across oceans. Economic hardship and political instability drove communities to migration across the Indian Ocean. While varied in temporal and geographical focus, the papers are all concerned with the political aspects of labour migration. We are interested in how colonial and postcolonial governments categorized and managed migrant labour. At the same time, this panel will consider how labour communities organized resistance and the intersection of their struggles with questions of caste, gender and nationalism. The panel will shed light on the how diasporic labour communities variously influenced and informed debates on imperial subjecthood, national belonging and eventually on modern citizenship during this long period.

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

What is lost or gained as commodities move from the scale of the artisanal to the industrial, the marginal to the national? This roundtable follows Anna Tsing’s (2012) attention to scalability and the later identification of a Plantationocene (Haraway 2015) as an era defined by the “remarkable speed and scale” of industrial agricultural and food production (Barua, Martin, Achtnich 2023). The discussants in this roundtable focus on commodity chains that are associated with minority difference and marginality, but are deeply significant to the workings of nation-making. We look at how the scaling-up of commodity production due to state policy, local politics, international development, and community resistance transforms agrarian and urban environments, land, sea, and river-scapes. We explore how changes to traditional and modern agrarian orders (also including their effects on farming, forestry, and fishing) eventually spill over into the realm of the political. We are particularly interested in commodities that are or were once living: animals, plants, and their byproducts. This liveliness is significant as we consider these commodities possessive of their own unexpected agencies, decisive with the demands of their consumers or the labors of their suppliers. We read the scaling-up of these economies alongside movements of majoritarianism, as a drive towards the death of difference, the destruction of multi-species lives and landscapes, and the attempt to make the natural mirror the industrial. This roundtable generates dialogue amongst different research contexts in jute, rubber, and silkworm plantations in northeast India, teak production in Malabar, grain and fisheries transformation and commercialization in northwestern Nepal and Chittagong, Bangladesh respectively.

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

ad hoc

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

In 2014, Narendra Modi became the 15th prime minister of India since independence. His political rise enabled the BJP to secure the first single-party parliamentary majority since 1984, inaugurating a new era in Indian politics. Its re-election in 2019 emboldened it to pursue its Hindu nationalist agenda with greater intensity. On the eve of the 2024 general election, the BJP is poised to return to power, cementing a decade in office. The establishment of a new party system has given birth to a political regime that may decisively transform India’s original constitutional order. What explains BJP’s dominance and the capacity of some opposition parties and social movements to resist over the last decade? How should we assess the record of the Modi government in various policy domains, from economic development and social welfare to foreign policy? What impact has the concentration of power under Modi had on civil society, institutions, the wider public sphere, and Centre-state and state-business relations? Why has Narendra Modi remained popular and been able to attract the support of marginalized groups despite jobless growth and growing communal violence? Finally, does the outcome of the 2024 general election deepen these preceding trends or signal changes in their trajectory? The five speakers in this roundtable have complementary areas of expertise, covering public policy, state capacity, Centre-state relations, electoral politics, party systems, the politics of welfare, state institutions, voter behavior, state-business relations, the political economy of industrialization, and international trade, and foreign policy. They will address these questions and assess their ramifications for democracy, welfare, and citizenship in India amid its search for great power status in the evolving international order. We anticipate that our views will generate areas of consensus and disagreement, setting the stage for broader deliberation with the audience.

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

South Asian cities, particularly those representing a palimpsest of rich histories and cultural traditions have witnessed significant growth and transformations in recent decades. All kinds of places at all spatial scales – sacred landscapes, institutional campuses, historic capitals, temple-towns, and ancient archaeological sites have transformed in some or the other way due to political and social forces. On one hand, there is burgeoning tourism which is seen as a democratic force (where people are free to do what they want to) that is contributing quite dramatically to the alterations in cultural landscapes. On the other hand, authoritative forces in form of state-sponsored projects tend to simultaneously build new layers and erase older layers in the name infrastructural developments. In historic holy cities, such as Vrindavan, Banaras, Ujjain, and Puri, the informal economy of religious rituals intersects in many ways with the increasing formal economy of tourism enterprises and tourist services. One could say that the new Rama temple in Ayodhya, Kashi-Vishwanath Corridor redevelopment, Jallianwala Bagh redesign in Amritsar - are symptomatic of how state authority is being used to redefine what heritage is and what it will mean for the future generations. Although democratic in appearance, it is apparent that state is preserving selective heritage and, in the process, erasing other layers such as those in case of Amer. These concerns become even more acute in pilgrim-towns and designated holy-heritage cities that are repositories of exceptional natural, religious, and cultural heritage. The proposed panel aims to explore both the exercise of state authority and the democratic entrepreneurial efforts in preserving cultural heritage and heritage tourism in India.

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

Care is ubiquitous and multidimensional encompassing an array of practices, conditions, and sentiments. It constitutes emotional and material labour that sustains life, maintains community, and is indispensable to social reproduction. Care is a gendered practice, a relational process, an agentive feeling, and affect rooted in habits and ritual of the everyday. Care is an institutionalised practice and an infrastructure essential for maintaining the wellbeing of nation-states. Care is also an approach to research that is deeply engaged. Recently, anthropologists have called for the ‘troubling of care’ by going beyond the mapping of life-sustaining ecologies. They call for the careful investigation of how care produces bonds, but also reproduces social hierarchies and performs exclusions through repression and control. Feminist scholars are reimagining care as an antidote for the ‘culture of carelessness’ that grips contemporary societies, proposing care as a radical alternative for reorganising kinship, community, the state, and the world’s political economy. The aim of this panel is to examine the meanings, practices, and potentialities of care in the context of Sri Lanka. By focusing on four ethnographic, person-centred research studies in Southern and Central Sri Lanka, it foregrounds care as an analytic category to examine care across its dilemmas, contradictions, problematics, and potential as a social process, an institutional practice, and an ethical orientation in research. We ask: What are the materialities, ethics, and performative politics of care? How is care imagined in and contingent upon institutional contexts? How do everyday caring practices respond to global events and economic crises? How does adopting care as an approach to research trouble the current research climate focused on minimising risk? How can care as an ethical principle and political practice speak to the on-going political and socio-economic crisis in Sri Lanka?

Session: Session 7: Friday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Conference Room 5
Floor: Floor 2

The territory of India has been marked by not just the history of colonialism but also its modern, “democratic” structure of governance. Much of the studies of political history claim the Enlightenment principles of reason, rationality, secularism and democracy as hallmarks of political foundations of colonial regimes, bourgeoise modern capitalist regimes and their “post-”s. As per Ann Stoler (1995), “Students of the colonial consistently have argued that the authority to designate what would count as reason and reasonable was colonialism’s most insidious and effective technology of rule – one that, in turn, would profoundly affect the style and strategies of anticolonial, nationalist politics”. In studying the authority and praxis postcolonial politics in India, one cannot ignore the influence of the ideologies of coloniality and modernity on the social-political affective dimensions of everyday living. As William Mazzarella (2019) emphasizes, any ideological formation has to be affective in order to be effective. Some of the questions to be dealt with in this panel are: What are some ways in which the political-economic ideology is manifested in the form of affective populism? How does the Sanskrit concept of Rasa help us to comprehend the neocolonial affectivity in contemporary time? How does affect enable authoritarianism to strengthen through its discursive, visual, aural and sensual entanglements specifically through the social media? How do structures of power ideologically and affectively manipulate, mass mediate and resonate beyond its own contextual time and space through architectural projects? The papers in this panel seek to study the ways in which the ideology of a majoritarian nation-state affectively (re)produce hegemony of neofeudal-neocolonial nationalism in modern India.

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

Since Louis Dumont’s (1966) infamous articulation of caste as a holistic Hindu hierarchical ranking system based on a scale of relative purity, a key preoccupation of postcolonial scholarship has been to re-conceptualize the caste system as a set of hierarchical relations that are perpetually indeterminate, inconsistent, subtle, and shifting. While some scholars have demonstrated this indeterminacy by highlighting the diversity of named jatis and their varied interrelations across contexts, others have focused on how caste transcends Hindu worldviews altogether, appearing across religions in South Asia and the diaspora. Importantly, scholars have highlighted the instability of caste hierarchies by conceptualizing how caste groups have historically challenged their rankings. Among the most influential are anthropologist M.N. Srinivas’ (1956) concept of Sanskritization, a form of upward social mobility that low- and middle-ranking caste groups pursue by emulating higher caste orders, and B.R. Ambedkar’s strategy of ethnicization, which occurs when previously named “untouchable” caste groups reject Hindu value systems altogether by re-articulating their identities as Dalits and converting to Buddhism. These strategies, although demonstrated across regional contexts, remain on two ends of a spectrum– either mimicking upper-caste sensibilities, or outright rejecting the hierarchy. Taking as its starting point the existence of caste mobility, this panel asks: what other strategies do individuals and caste groups deploy to destabilize or question caste hierarchies? What histories, narratives, and everyday actions do people evoke to challenge and obscure their caste rankings and what can these strategies tell us about how caste is understood and how it functions in contemporary South Asia and the diaspora? Through highlighting more subtle and perhaps less explored techniques of challenging caste rankings, the papers in this panel offer a moment to reassess how caste continues to be an enduring identity.

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

In the recent aftermath of the January 2024 elections, Bangladesh's democratic trajectory since 2009 has come under intense global scrutiny. Ali Riaz's latest book, "Pathways of Autocratization: The Tumultuous Journey of Bangladeshi Politics" (Routledge, 2024), offers a comprehensive framework to analyze the country's shift from democracy to autocracy, focusing on political developments post-2009. The upcoming roundtable "Autocratization in Bangladesh: A Comparative Perspective" aims to critically examine this democratic regression. It contextualizes Bangladesh's experience alongside other nations like Bolivia, Cambodia, and Hungary, illuminating broader patterns in institutional transformations, media and ideological roles, and the involvement of international actors in the autocratization process. Furthermore, the discussion will explore potential future trajectories for Bangladesh's political and governance landscape.

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

ad hoc

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

This panel convenes a conversation among five established historians and political anthropologists South Asia, with expertise in India, Bangladesh and Nepal, to discuss Lisa Mitchell’s important new book, Hailing the State: Indian Democracy Between Elections (Duke University Press, 2023). Beginning not with eighteenth-century Europe but rather at a much-earlier moment and in the Indian subcontinent, Mitchell’s alternative genealogy of democracy pushes past contemporary diagnostics of mass politics as ‘populist’ by rendering untenable the broad-stoke reduction of contemporary political churnings to the abiding contradictions of liberalism. Mitchell’s book instead gestures towards rather different questions (both normative and empirical) of the global contemporary. Through a longue-durée account of popular assembly in the Indian subcontinent from precolonial times to the present, Hailing the State expands a liberal notion of the public sphere to include mass politics, exploring how crowd gatherings work as highly coordinated communicative acts—strategically employed by marginalized citizens to “broadcast” concerns and claims into a public sphere. The book argues that embodied mass politics (crowd gatherings) are not a challenge to state authority, but works as a material technology of political communication, and one that has a democratizing impetus—employed strategically and instrumentally not as a challenge to the state, but rather (and on the contrary) to get its the attention – making grievances heard by state officials, who are thereby held accountable to their constituents. Mitchell’s book offers up new concepts and categories for analyzing democracy more generally. The aspiration of the panel is to use Mitchell’s book as a springboard for thinking about how thinking and theorizing from the subcontinent might offer up a new political-conceptual vocabulary and research agenda for theorizing the promises and perils of democracy.

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

This interdisciplinary panel examines caste, gender, spatiality and Christianity to discuss the resistance and survival of minorities in hegemonic, caste-ridden, Hindu nationalist governed India. Caste is a crucial category in analyzing Christian cultural life as well as the persecution of Dalit Bahujan minorities in India. Panelists discuss the politics of scriptures in contemporary politics, caste in Catholic missionary work, Dalit Bahujan Christian women’s silence in cinema vis-a-vis their leading role in protests for spatial justice, and the role of Christian missionaries in the emancipation of Dalits. The questions raised are enriched by the disciplinary expertise of each speaker- they range from gender studies, history, cultural studies to philosophy. Speaking to the conference theme “democracy and authoritarianism,” this panel foregrounds the deep roots of caste within Christianity, and the religion’s complicated exchanges with Hindu majoritarianism. Recent events have shown that even well-structured democracies can be subverted to promote authoritarianism through the use of identity politics to create a separation between a compliant majority and ostracized minorities. The crackdown on foreign missionaries, implementation of the CAA, and jailing of activists calls for an examination of caste/religious power, and religious minorities’ resistance and survival. Speaker 1 examines Catholic missionary work and Dalit Bahujan protests against how the Catholic hierarchy has replicated the caste hierarchy. Speaker 2 is interested in showcasing how the rise of Hindu Scriptures in Narendra Modi-led India is a visible sign of them being used as a potent political force to facilitate BJP's socio-religious and political aims. Speaker 3 takes up the connected questions of caste, gender, space and Christianity by analyzing cinema and protests of lower-caste Latin Catholic women from the islands in Kochi. Speaker 4 examines how missionary Christianity in Kerala fueled Dalits with aspirations for emancipation from upper caste hegemony, through education and medicine.

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

The 2020 National Education Policy (NEP) revisited earlier policy iterations to propose a revision to the Indian education system. Although the notion of mother tongue has been a part of Indian education policy since before independence, the 2020 NEP called for an unqualified use of students’ mother tongue in education and had little to say about English. The 2020 NEP has been widely criticized for exacerbating inequalities in education (Annamalai 2019; Chandras 2023). For example, it assumes that one’s first language corresponds to their mother tongue when only a small number of Indian language and linguistic varieties have historically received institutional support in education (LaDousa and Davis 2022; Mohanty 2019). This panel combines examination of policy with ethnographic approaches to analyze inequalities in access to and the reproduction of education in India and Sri Lanka. Although the work of Lall and Anand (2022) and others have critiqued the NEP for its neoliberal underpinnings, the social life of language under the shadow of neoliberal development in education has not received sufficient ethnographic attention. This panel addresses questions about the ways in which language provides a fulcrum for examining dimensions of inequality such as caste, class, gender, religion, region, and generation amidst rapidly changing political and economic circumstances and post-conflict situations. We contribute to interdisciplinary approaches in education in South Asia by attending to how ethnographic research can enrich the study of policy.

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

Feminism(s) today mandate new histories of the South Asia. Even as racial capitalism and the attendant erosion of social provision escalates global ecological doom, the meteoric rise of authoritarianism in South Asia as explicit statecraft shapes universalized conditions of catastrophe. The march of authoritarianism alongside worldwide struggles for racial, territorial and economic justice calls for a re-dressing of settled modes of thinking and practice. This roundtable will serve as a gathering for feminist hope, to forge new vernaculars of South Asia, to assemble spatial imaginaries that refuse rather than relent to the insistent march of communalism, hate and empire. The moment is particularly ripe for developing feminist initiatives on dissent, gender and geopolitics, given our renewed commitment to area studies initiatives, global justice projects and a larger focus on democratic futures. Each of our panelist will draw on scholarly and activist efforts to speak to the relevance and urgency of speaking within and through feminist epistemologies of solidarity, labor and conflict in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Our roundtable will use the rubric of feminism(s) across the global south to forge vibrant, nuanced and regionally specific collaborations on dissent as they engage challenges around food security, human rights, environmental ecologies, gender justice and more. At the heart of our engagement is the possibility of dialogue, deliberation and a renewed sense of possibility for a world in peril. The ambition here is not to “survey” efforts across South Asia; rather each speaker will address specific strengths and lacunae of feminist interventions, and gesture to potential pathways towards dissent.

Session: Session 9: Saturday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Conference Room 4
Floor: Floor 2

Nepalbhasa, the language of the Newars of Kathmandu Valley, has faced systematic repression through much of Nepal’s modern history. During the 20th century, the state brutally suppressed the language by imprisoning writers and restricting publishing and broadcasting. Despite the repression, this period saw an emergence of modern Nepalbhasa literature. While past efforts have concentrated on the translation of Buddhist texts, only a fraction of the literary production from the last century is available in English. A minor literature from a small country that itself straddles the area-studies divide between Himalayan Studies and South Asian Studies, Nepalbhasa literature has remained fairly unknown in the Western academy. As a contribution towards changing this situation, this roundtable will facilitate a discussion of an ongoing project in translating and preserving Nepalbhasa and its literature. The roundtable speakers are translators and scholars engaging in their research with the Newars and their language. They are all founding members of an ongoing collaborative translation project, with the goal of publishing an anthology of modern Nepalbhasa literature in English. The collective is inspired by recent coordinated translation efforts, such as the 84000 Translating the Words of the Buddha project, that favor the collaborative translation over both the solitary translator and the division of labor between the native speaker’s interlinearity and the author’s poiesis. The speakers bring with them different disciplinary expertise, including cultural anthropology, comparative literature, South Asian religions, and language revitalization, as well as a range of translation experiences and language backgrounds. They will present arguments in favor of producing translations that emerge out of a dialectical and intersubjective translational engagement as much with the source as with the synchronously proposed alternative renderings by the group’s members with the aim of jointly facilitating a multi-vocal, integrated, and consensual iteration of the text.

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

This panel brings together fresh empirical research, drawing on unused and new sources, to investigate the question of Muslim religious authority in South Asia. How did it get established? Based on which sources? In which historical settings does established religious authority get challenged and how are such conflicts related to concrete and envisioned Islamic states? In concrete terms, Speaker 1’s presentation analyzes a neglected 16th century Mughal treatise written after the arrival of a controversial footprint relic of the Prophet Muhammad to the court at Fatehpur Sikri. The presentation reveals how the Mughal court rhetorically deferred to Sunni juridical authority, while reading it only partially, and which role the religious authority of the emperor played in such disputes. Speaker 2 investigates intense internal rifts within Pakistan's Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) party in the 1980s over whether to adopt Ayatollah Khomeini's revolutionary model or, rather, to stick with the vision of Maududi, the JI founder, of gradual Islamization, underscoring tensions over defining an "Islamic revolution." The remaining two papers foreground contemporary Pakistan. Speaker 3’s ethnographic work examines how Pakistani Shi'a female clerics ('aalimat) employ their religious expertise to both reinforce and reshape gender norms and modes of religious authority within their minority sect. Speaker 4’s presentation focuses on heated contestations surrounding the Bibi Pak Daman shrine in Lahore, where divergent historical narratives and sectarian claims have sparked broader conflicts over defining Pakistan's Islamic identity, state management of religious sites and local traditions. Taken together, the panel productively brings into conversation more text-centered studies and anthropological accounts while also displaying a strong interest in majority-minority dynamics, gender, and the impact of public religiosity and private religious conversations.

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

ad hoc

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

After another contentious general election in January 2024, the Awami League (AL) -- led by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina -- is ruling Bangladesh for an unprecedented fourth consecutive term since 2009. Despite achieving impressive economic growth and developmental milestones, under Hasina’s leadership, Bangladesh has seen steep democratic backsliding most notably through cracking down on political opposition, limiting civic liberties and administering controversial elections. However, Bangladesh’s gradual transformation from a violent yet intensely competitive multi-party democracy to a competitive authoritarian state in the last 15 years has been largely neglected by researchers in South Asian studies. With this panel, we aim to present some of the latest research focusing on Bangladesh’s politics and societal developments under the long uninterrupted power stint of the ruling AL. As the AL begins its fourth consecutive term, this panel brings together scholars working on different aspects of electoral and everyday politics in Bangladesh. In doing so the panel explores the political processes and complexities of the ‘Awami regime’, delving into diverse subjects ranging from the linkages between crime syndicates and party politics to the production of electoral competition to the impact of loyalty incentives and elite narrative building on the consolidation of power. The research contributions included in the panel cover multiple social sciences disciplines including development studies, criminology, political science, and sociolinguistics and use both in-depth ethnographic research and comparative discourse analysis.