Material as Method: New Histories of the Built Environment
Symposium
Session: Symposium - Full Day
Room: Assembly Room
Floor: Floor 1
This symposium will bring into conversation scholars who approach the production of the built environment in South Asia through an interdisciplinary understanding of its materiality. Contemporary exhibitions and publications about postcolonial architecture in South Asia have drawn attention to the use of materials such as concrete and steel in postcolonial state-building. Indeed, whether as material things or wish-images, building materials mediated different political and economic approaches to development, postcolonial sovereignty, and the modernization of everyday life. By contrast, emerging scholarship centers environmental and social questions that scale differently than the temporal and spatial extents of the nation state and the relentless solutionism of corporate globalism. Contemporary research attends to how the visual aesthetics and meanings of materials are inextricably entangled in the unequal geographies of extraction, manufacturing, construction, maintenance, and wasting of resources. These entanglements enfold the complex histories and unequal geographies of colonialism and postcolonial world-making. How might an analysis of material worlds draw attention to enduring inequalities in the production of the built environment? How might it also show their contestation? Symposium panels will address these histories and their political and social entanglements. Paper topics may include, but are not limited to, themes such as labor conditions, ecological impacts, extractive industries, and experimental practices. Papers may attend to the relentless drive to produce new and modern architectural materials; the toxic environments created by material production; the new spatial geographies and institutional dynamics emerging from the regulation and management of industries; the pressure to produce an aesthetics of natural and sustainable materials; the managerial language around pollution and safety standards, among other topics.
Sri Lanka Beyond Area Studies: Insights from Literary Theory for the Broader Humanities
Symposium
Session: Symposium - Full Day
Room: Caucus Room
Floor: Floor 1
For most of the twentieth century, North American scholarship on Sri Lanka has been confined to the field of Area Studies. Concurrently, scholarship emerging from Sri Lanka was inclined towards theories of the Nation. While moving beyond these frameworks is not a novelty to many disciplines and regions across Asia Studies, Sri Lankan literary scholarship is yet to see a collective shift beyond these dominant frames. The proposed symposium questions the restricting disciplinary structures of Area Studies and the Nation and asks how literary critical methodology functions as a critique of twentieth and twenty-first century North American and Sri Lankan disciplinary boundaries. The proposed symposium explores Sri Lanka’s “location” within academic disciplines in the humanities and the impact its various types of regionalization, globally and within Asian Studies, might shape the reception and significance of the scholarship on it. The presenters draw on a range of theoretical approaches from the environmental humanities, affect studies, and secularism studies to recast writers, texts, and motifs of the Nation which for long have been read within the confines of Area Studies. We begin our symposium by interrogating the significance of literary voices from Sri Lanka in an attempt to imagine the humanities as a global transnational sphere of knowledge production. How might specific writers, thinkers, cultural contexts, approached through literary critical frameworks, be situated within Sri Lanka and transnational scholarship? How might such scholarship position the uses of literary analysis within the broader frameworks of the humanities and social sciences? The symposium will be organized around six papers with a focus on Sri Lanka, covering mainly the twentieth century. The papers will be circulated in advance with registered participants. Each paper will be introduced by a discussant whose scholarship is currently shaping the trajectories of the disciplinary focus of the relevant paper.
Queer Failures and Possibilities: Trans Movements in Contemporary South Asia
Symposium
Session: Symposium - Full Day
Room: Senate Room A
Floor: Floor 1
For over a decade trans activism and trans production has accelerated in legal, political, cultural, and artistic realms across South Asia. While these movements have animated possibilities for trans justice, so too have they often perpetuated narrow modes of legitimacy, reproducing hierarchies around class, caste, language, religion, kinship, labor, sexuality, nation and global capital. Violence against khwaja sira-hijra-kothi-trans persons is rampant; surveillance and policing have ensued; legislative achievements have been tremulous at best; while politicians wage voting capital on the backs of trans and queer bodies. We draw on queer failure to consider the dimensions of loss, elision and disappointment in and around trans social, legal and political movements, as well as the utopian possibilities of failure as a mode of resistance, intervention, speculation, fabulation and world making (Halberstam 2011; Takemoto 2016)— moving trans in South Asia toward other futures. The symposium welcomes paper presentations, roundtables, screenings, and artistic and creative responses. Participants represent a wide variety of disciplines–history, anthropology, theater and performance studies, gender and sexuality studies, sociology, geography, and law. We will explore accelerations and disruptions to trans movements alongside feminist, anti-caste, labor and LGBT and other mobilizations, not only in the contemporary moment but also situate these movements in broader colonial and postcolonial histories, in and across the borders of South Asia. In our movements across disciplinary, temporal, and national(ist) borders, we explore the capacious possibilities of trans in South Asia.
New Directions in Bangladesh Studies
Symposium
Session: Symposium - Full Day
Room: Conference Room 1
Floor: Floor 2
Driven by powerful new economic vectors, including the globalization of migrant labor and the garments industry, counterintuitive development markers, a globally assertive diaspora, and a challenge to Indian hegemony within South Asian studies, Bangladesh Studies has moved in exciting new directions in the last decade in terms of research agendas and methodologies. The growing coherence of the field has been made possible by the growth of a university network in Bangladesh, increased collaborations between scholars and activists inside and outside Bangladesh, the growing prominence of the Journal of Bangladesh Studies, and the establishment of a Center for Bangladesh Studies at University of California, Berkeley. The speakers at this symposium, representing a range of disciplines and institutional ranks and affiliations, are engaged in scholarship about Bangladesh that pushes beyond the longstanding preoccupations with development and security and beyond the boundedness of present-day national borders and national history. These scholars are decolonizing and reanimating Bangladesh studies by defining the field of Bangladesh studies as expansively, generously, and inclusively as possible, by challenging the hierarchies in development studies, literary studies, gender studies, South Asian Studies, and Islamic studies that have long cast East Bengal, East Pakistan, and Bangladesh and those who live there on the periphery of these fields—and as recipients, not producers, of knowledge. Three of the four symposium sessions will highlight new interdisciplinary approaches to a wide range of topics: the occlusion of the peasant in postcolonial knowledge production, the challenges posed by the climate crisis for different groups, and relations of friendship and control within and across generations of women. The fourth session will be a larger discussion led by the authors of recent English-language monographs on Bangladesh and the editor of the Journal of Bangladesh Studies about academic publishing about Bangladesh both within Bangladesh and the United States.
Tamil Religion? Contesting 'Tamilness' in Religious Domains
Symposium
Session: Symposium - Full Day
Room: Conference Room 2
Floor: Floor 2
Both among laypeople and in scholarly literature, it is not uncommon to qualify religious practices or identities as “Tamil”: “Tamil temple worship”, “Tamil ritual”, “Tamil Muslims”, “Tamil Catholicism”. Often, such qualifications are simple contractions identifying the language used by religious actors or texts. But to qualify something as “Tamil” carries the expectations that the entities thus described conform to notions of “Tamilness” that go well beyond the linguistic. “Tamil religion” thus becomes not simply “Tamil-speaking religion”, but a form of religion that is imbued with values, aesthetics, and identities considered “Tamil” by those who utilize the label. Sometimes, “Tamil religion” is accompanied by the demand that “religious” practices and identities be subordinated to an overarching “Tamilness”, as has often been the case in the context of the Dravidian Movement. In other cases, “Tamilness” is seen as fundamentally defined by particular “religious” practices or identities, for example “emotional bhakti” or Śaiva Siddhānta. And occasionally, even the simple linguistic qualification as “Tamil-speaking” may be doggedly resisted, as in the case of the Sri Lanka Moors. This symposium seeks to probe the unspoken assumptions and explicit politics that undergird the identification of “religion” as “Tamil” or its contestation. It explores the capacious ways in which practitioners and followers of different traditions in the Tamil region (broadly defined) understand “Tamil” to be more than just a linguistic or ethnic marker. It pays specific attention to the affective, embodied, and temporal dimensions of “Tamil religion,” also investigating what might be occluded by existing analytical frameworks. This symposium brings together scholars from different disciplines to critically examine religion in/and the Tamil region, and hopes to open up a conceptual and empirical space to reflect on the politics, conflicts, and negotiations inherent in qualifying “religion” as “Tamil”.
Transgression
Symposium
Session: Symposium - Full Day
Room: Conference Room 3
Floor: Floor 2
The 9th annual Regional Bhakti Scholars Network symposium, titled “Transgression,” seeks to uncover the latent principles that engender both the positive and negative analytics that the term deploys. First, the term transgression is often used with a positive valence in bhakti scholarship, wherein it includes a latent value judgment suggesting that transgressions of traditional Hindu caste and gender hierarchies in pursuit of greater equality are - and should be - viewed in a positive light. In the case in many scholarly works on bhakti, most particularly those focused on caste and gender, bhakti poets, gurus, temples, and traditions are often unreflexively celebrated for their transgressive contestations and refusals of “traditional” structures of Hindu hierarchy and exclusion. Second, in the negative valence, the term transgression tends to be used in relation to the behaviors of bhaktas that are deemed either non-Brahmanical (meat eating, alcohol drinking, caste violations, sexual practices, and so on) or criminal (murder, rape, fraud, tax evasion, immigration violations, prostitution, embezzlement, and so on). These transgressions are often marked by criminality and as such are also, by definition, socially and historically constructed and the result of political processes defined by those with social influence and juridical power. This symposium provides an arena in which to think critically about the term “transgression” and the broader lexicon in which it is embedded. It seeks to locate and interrogate latent exercises in cultural evaluation, and to question when such value judgments can be deployed with intention, awareness, care, and critical self-reflexivity. In hosting this pre-conference event, the co-coordinators aim to unearth the latent and historically-contingent ideologies that inform both the positive and negative valences of the notion of “transgression,” and in so doing reveal the ways that scholars unwittingly reassert Brahmanical dominance as idealized tradition and Anglo-European liberalism as the ethical norm.
Delight, Levity, and Play in Urdu
Symposium
Session: Symposium - Full Day
Room: Conference Room 4
Floor: Floor 2
Notions of lut̤f (delight) are crucial among Urdu-language writers, reciters, performers, and artists for purposes of documentation, entertainment, and circulation. Among literary actors, texts, and even specific words, lut̤f as both a narrative strategy and affective register engages Urdu-language’s pasts and shapes its contemporary visions. The 2023 Urdu Symposium seeks to bridge previous formats (“How not to write a history of Urdu literature” and keywords approaches) to examine how a broadly defined notion of lut̤f informs Urdu literature and literary practices. By lut̤f (delight), we refer to the many styles, genres, and registers within Urdu writings that engage the following concepts: lat̤īfe (pleasantries), ḥikāyāt (stories), nuqūl (anecdotes), hādiṡāt (novel occurrences), chuṭkule (jokes), tamāshe (spectacles), and ʿajāʾib (oddities). Such categories within South Asian-language settings require us to ask how ambiguous notions of delight connect and/or differentiate times, places, companions, texts, genres, media, and identities. We engage a broad array of scholars focused on performance, games, discourse analysis, theatre, humor, multimedia, and visual sources. At the 2023 Urdu Symposium, twelve contributors will be invited to give brief, 10- or 15-minute presentations focusing on translations, commentaries, research, pedagogy, and followed by substantial discussions of theory, methods, and sources. As in the past, the Annual Urdu Symposium anticipates a well-attended and fruitful discussion among scholars from a varying array of disciplines, backgrounds, and career stages.
Quotidian Sacreds: Religion, History, and Performance in South Asia
Symposium
Session: Symposium - Full Day
Room: Conference Room 5
Floor: Floor 2
Recent studies of religion in modern South Asia have taken one of two approaches: either they have argued against the secularization thesis by pointing towards the continuing presence of religion (Bandyopadhyay and Sen, eds, Religion and Modernity in India, 2017) or they have traced the “reforms” within religious formations (Fuchs and Dalmia, eds, Religious Interactions in Modern India, 2019). Absent from these efforts is an attempt to link these two approaches by focussing on the political work of the sacred. Connecting both strands of the study of modern religion would emphasize thisworldly consequences of otherworldly conceptions in ways that put the ordinary and the metaphysical within the same experiential and historical frame. This full-day symposium will highlight the quotidian work of the sacred by examining the entanglements of the political and the spiritual (Marshall, Political Spiritualities, 2009). We will explore the historical contexts and political meanings of prayer, worship, and congregations in modern South Asia. In doing so, we will join the conversation with works such as C.S. Adcock’s The Limits of Tolerance (2014) and Milinda Banerjee’s The Mortal God (2019) to disentangle the historical braids of the worldly and the otherworldly beyond unwieldy categories of religion, secularism, and modernity. "Quotidian Sacreds: Religion, History, and Performance in South Asia" analyzes the work of faith and worship as discourse and performance, across cultural and historical contexts of colonial and postcolonial modernity. We are not primarily interested in posing the category of religion in opposition to modernity: we neither aim to reformulate or refute the secularization thesis in postcolonial contexts nor do we wish to trace transformations within genre conventions of discourses and practices of worship. Instead, we are seeking to understand the ordinary work of the metaphysical: to see what the act of prayer does to the congregations.
South Asian Disabiity Futures
Symposium
Session: Symposium - Full Day
Room: Capitol Ballroom A
Floor: Floor 2
Alongside the increasing presence of disability rights movements across South Asia, there has been a rise in early childhood screening programs in the service of eliminating or curing disability. For example, leprosy and polio have seemingly been eradicated and various states in India have called for their states to be “deafness free” by the year 2025 (which is soon coming up). In addition, South Asian governments, NGOs, and charitable bodies are funding cochlear implants, again focused on curing deafness and making deaf children almost, near-to, or perfectly normal. We choose to call our full day pre-conference symposium “South Asian Disability Futures” and in doing so, we draw upon the work of US-based feminist disability studies scholar Alison Kafer to insist that disability has a place in the futures in/of South Asia. It is therefore imperative that an interdisciplinary and multinational conversation happen around what South Asian disability theory could or should be. Much disability studies work has looked at the history of disability and how the history and present has been shaped by (post)coloniality, unequal political economic relations, and poverty. But what about the future? In this full day symposium, which includes scholars at different stages of career and working in different institutions and South Asian locations, we aim to interrogate so-called universal disability concepts such as inclusion, independence, mainstreaming, disability rights, and disability identity and pride, paying particular attention to the ways they’ve been adopted, adapted, refined, and circulating in South Asia. We also aim to attend to localized concepts and the ways that these have also been circulating. Finally, in conversation with broader concerns in South Asian Studies across the disciplines, we will consider disability as it intersects with kinship, care, religion, class, education, and politics, among other topics.
Dance and South Asia
Symposium
Session: Symposium - Full Day
Room: Capitol Ballroom B
Floor: Floor 2
A transnational scholars’ collective in the field of South Asian dance are co-organizing the first ACSA Symposium on Dance and South Asia. The primary aim of this symposium is to showcase new directions in scholarship on dance and South Asia and decenter dominant discourses and voices. Shifting focus away from hegemonic narratives about neo-classical Indian dance, this symposium features scholars and artists who work on a range of dance practices and performance traditions from South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the diaspora. The roundtables of this symposium feature 5-7 minute provocations rather than formal papers that cover four themes: 1) De-centering “Dance”; 2) Dancing Diasporas, Embodying (Trans)nationalisms; 3) Pleasure, Desire, and Dance; and 4) Dance, Race, and Ethnicity. The first roundtable, which features artists based in India, questions the very formation of the field of Indian dance studies and questions what gets counted as “dance.” The second roundtable examines the circulation of dance and performance in South Asia and its Caribbean, Southeast Asian, and European diasporas. The third roundtable centers pleasure, desire, and sexuality in dance practices from India, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. The final roundtable bridges the gap between scholarship on race and dance by examining discursive formations of race in relation to dance in Northeast India, jazz and blackface minstrelsy, contemporary fusion, rituals, and sexuality and visual cultures in the South Asian diaspora. All four roundtables contend with questions of caste in keeping with the symposium’s intentions to dismantle hegemonic discourses in South Asian dance. The presenters are from a range of academic ranks (graduate students, assistant professors, associate professors, and full professors) and also artists based in South Asia, UK, or North America. The twenty presenters focus on a range of geographies on dance in South Asia including: Bangladesh, India, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, and the Indo-Caribbean context.
AIIS Dissertation-to-Book Workshop
Symposium
Session: Symposium - Full Day
Room: Wisconsin Ballroom
Floor: Floor 2
The American Institute of Indian Studies holds an annual dissertation-to-book workshop at the Madison South Asia Conference, co-sponsored by the American Institute of Bangladesh Studies, the American Institute of Pakistan Studies, and the American Institute of Sri Lankan Studies. The workshop aims to help a select number of recent PhDs re-vision their doctoral dissertations as books. Author participants will submit a sample chapter and draft book proposal in advance. The interdisciplinary workshop will begin at 7 pm the day before our scheduled day-long symposium for a “Secrets of Publishing” Q&A session. During the day-long symposium sessions, each of three groups of approximately eight authors and two to three mentors will work intensively together discussing each project. We conclude the workshop with an all-group dinner at a nearby Indian restaurant. Faculty from a range of disciplines and areas of expertise will serve as mentors. Each mentor will have published at least one book and will specialize in a range of South Asian regions (including India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh) and come from various disciplinary backgrounds, including anthropology, history, literature, media studies, gender studies, and religious studies. For the Wednesday full-day symposium workshops, we will need three separate rooms, OR two separate rooms including one large room separated into two by a divider. We will follow the full-day conference symposium schedule, including the scheduled breaks.
Lineage and Caste through the eyes of the Gendered Householder
Symposium
Session: Symposium - Full Day
Room: University A/B
Floor: Floor 2
This symposium wishes to probe the making and unmaking of caste in the longue duree in the subcontinent by centering the formation and maintenance of different types of households at the center of contests over claims of belonging and exclusion, of respectability and disprivilege. For this reason, we seek to bring together a wide range of scholars whose work spans different chronologies, regions, and religious boundaries so that they can help us examine how institutional structures helped to solidify or dissolve inherited statuses. Drawing on the growing scholarly evidence of the persistence of caste status across diverse religious communities into the modern period, we wish to trace the ways in which legal, imperial, and regional understandings of lineage and household inscribed caste into practices of everyday life not commonly examined by scholarship. Using a wide array of primary sources from legal works, instructional books, regional courts, political decrees, classical and later medieval story literature, as well as vernacular poetry, panelists will trace how notions of lineage and caste could mutually shape each other, and in turn be shaped by new institutions and practices. We wish to examine claims to material resources, changing notions and practices of kinship, friendships and affiliation as well as their intersection with social and geographical mobilities in the subcontinent.
Love and Intimacy in South Asia
Symposium
Session: Symposium - Full Day
Room: University C/D
Floor: Floor 2
Love is relational. It connects or divides individuals, families, publics, and nations. Love is also political, and the last several decades have exposed a particularly vexed politics of love in South Asia, especially––conspiratorial ideas of ‘love jihad,’ for instance, have mobilized inter-caste and interreligious violence at the same time that activists and human rights lawyers have made important gains for queer relationality (the Supreme Court of India’s 2018 decision against Section 377 being but one of several notable gains). It is precisely love’s potency and its position in the interstices of affect, intimacy, and power that makes it a timely and productive subject of study. This symposium brings together a multidisciplinary group of scholars to examine love and intimacy in South Asia. Our interest is not to put forward a monolithic conception of love, but rather to highlight how love is always defined and deployed differently according to specific local, political, and historical contexts. The varied landscape of love in South Asia demands interdisciplinarity. This symposium brings together scholars whose collective study spans several disciplines, archives, languages, regions, and time periods. By putting an interdisciplinary group of scholars in conversation, this symposium does at least three things: first, it provides a vital forum for sharing new research. Comprised of eight presenters and three respondents, the symposium will provide a crucial opportunity to workshop projects at their various stages. Second, our emphasis on interdisciplinarity is intended to highlight key methodological and theoretical questions that span (or are specific to) certain areal and disciplinary formations. And finally, by tending to the politics of love, the symposium brings critical focus and nuance to the subject precisely at a moment when both critique and nuance are being purged from public debate in South Asia and beyond.
Printing Religion in South Asia
Symposium
Session: Symposium - Full Day
Room: Parlour Room 627
Floor: Floor 6
Our symposium explores how printing technologies and printed objects transformed religious communities in South Asia. We approach “print” as an all-encompassing category of replication technologies—from xylography to movable type to digital modeling. Book objects are not only repositories of historical evidence but also sites that shaped public consciousness. Therefore, our project will focus on how practices and tools used in the production of book objects may be governed by or influence politics, ideologies, and cultures. In unraveling the nexus between the history of print and South Asian religions, this symposium seeks to address a variety of critical and intellectual concerns. First, it will interrogate the impact of material cultures associated with printing technologies on the religious views, practices and identities of South Asian peoples. Second, it will deliberate upon the critical idioms and analytical tools, which are effective in appraising the dynamic relationship between print cultures and religious communities in South Asia. Furthermore, we will examine how indigenous terms and ideas were excluded from critical vocabularies of the history of the book in modern times through neglect, erasure, or censorship. By historicizing book objects in colonial and capitalist contexts, our project seeks to expand the critical vocabularies used in the history of the book to be more incisive through being more inclusive. Finally, building on specific case studies about printing technologies, printmakers, and printed objects, the symposium will reflect upon the advantages and challenges of exploring South Asian religions from the vantage point of the history of print. We have invited primarily early-career scholars whose research papers promise to make critical interventions in the study of material cultures. This symposium is part of our long-term intellectual investment in an upcoming generation of scholars, with an eye to building a community around the history of the book in South Asia.
Beyond the Alvars and Acharyas: Rethinking Shrivaishnava Studies
Symposium
Session: Symposium - Full Day
Room: Parlour Room 629
Floor: Floor 6
In the past fifty years, an impressive amount of scholarly attention has been given to the literature of the Shrivaishnava religious community in South India. There have been multiple translations of the Tamil compositions in praise of Vishnu by the twelve bhakti or “devotional” poets known as the Alvars. Additionally, there have been various studies on the Sanskrit and Manipravala compositions and commentaries of certain Shrivaishnavas acharyas (preceptors). The attention thus far, however, has mostly focused on already-known figures and well-studied texts. Two of our major impulses behind this symposium are to shine a light on Shrivaishnava materials that have largely been ignored by scholars and to bring different perspectives into discussion. For example, almost all of the work on Tamil Shrivaishnava literature has focused on the Alvars and overlooked later post “bhakti period” Shrivaishnava poets who wrote in Tamil, such as Aritacar, Manavalamamunikal, and Villiputturar. We also want to highlight Sanskrit and Manipravala works of Shrivaishnava literature that have been understudied, including hagiographies and works of ornate kavya poetry. Finally, we are deeply interested in Shrivaishnava texts in Telugu (a language that is infrequently associated with this religious tradition) by poets like Krishnadevaraya and Vengamamba. This symposium will serve as an opportunity to think about the Shrivaishnava tradition in myriad and innovative ways. We have gathered a group of nine junior scholars and graduate students to present papers that rethink and complicate the structure of the field of Shrivaishnava studies. Three highly respected scholars of Shrivaishnava literature have graciously agreed to be the respondents for these papers. It is our hope that this symposium will be the first of many future collaborations that celebrate the multiplicity and diversity of the Shrivaishnava tradition and Shrivaishnava studies.
The Vaiṣṇava Sensorium: Experiencing the Divine in Eastern India
Symposium
Session: Symposium - Full Day
Room: Parlour Room 634
Floor: Floor 6
This symposium brings together scholars from the fields of literature, philosophy, anthropology, ritual studies, and art history, to share and inspire research that focuses specifically on the Vaisnava sensorium in eastern India. Some scholars have already been working directly on the sensorium in the context of Gauṛīya Vaiṣṇavism, while the research of many others engages the subject indirectly. This symposium seeks to bring these scholars into conversation with each other around the central focus of the Vaiṣṇava sensorium as it is understood in Gauṛīya Vaiṣṇava philosophy, poetry, drama, aesthetics, and practices of ritual and interiority. In this endeavor, we intend to bring together research on eastern India—erstwhile Mithila, Assam, greater Bengal, and Orissa—in the early modern, colonial, and modern (and contemporary) periods. The aim is to look at both the roots of the Vaiṣṇava sensorium as it was understood in the Gauṛīya Vaiṣṇava canon but also to consider the ripple effects of this doctrine in the ways in which groups inspired by ideas seeded by the Gauṛīyas moved their understandings in new directions. Ultimately, the aim is to articulate a new poetics of perception and experience of the divine, among the Gauṛīyas and beyond. Questions we would like to consider, which are simply indicative, include: What does Vaiṣṇava doctrine say about the senses and the role they play in the phenomenology of experience, in the production of bhāva and mahābhāva, and the concomitant generation of psycho-physiological effects? How do yogic bodily regimens and/or tantric practices of interiority impact Vaiṣṇava understandings and affects? What are the precise experiences of meditation and bodily rituals among different kinds of Vaiṣṇavas? How do reading practices of canonical texts constitute Vaiṣṇava affective subjectivities? What is the role of ritual performance, temple architecture, and pilgrimage in activating the senses?
Thinking In and From Telugu: Understanding Connections, Querying Boundaries
Symposium
Session: Symposium - Full Day
Room: Parlour Room 638
Floor: Floor 6
‘Telugu’ as a linguistic, ethnic, literary and cultural category has both marked a contested terrain and served as openings for critical fields of enquiry. Over the last century, Telugu has been the staging ground for a range of struggles for statehood, self-respect, emancipation, revolution, and articulations of space (especially Andhra Pradesh and Telangana) in terms of language. Furthermore, Telugu also shares an interstitial and intermediate relation with broader politics in South Asia. In particular, it often eluded the nation-centric narratives, and worked as a historical site of political and cultural exchange with regions across the Deccan, the subcontinent, and even beyond through oceanic and other networks. It also played pioneering roles in translating and reinterpreting texts from various South Asian and global contexts. In this symposium, we bring together four multi-disciplinary panels to interrogate the contested and interstitial nature of Telugu, to arrive at newer frameworks for understanding South Asia. Through our symposium, we hope to generate a discourse with a requisite potential to query and deconstruct hegemonic boundaries and categories of language, nation, and religion. We bring together scholars from diverse positionalities and career stages, who are working with an eclectic range of Telugu materials—archival, ethnographic, literary, cinematic, and others—to facilitate a conversation across time periods and geographic scales. In doing so we seek to think with work happening at different nodes of knowledge production, ranging from feminist research centres (Anveshi) to ‘Dalit Studies’ (EFLU) to ‘Deccan studies’ (Khidki Collective, Maidaanam Project) to ‘Telugu Studies’ (UPenn, UChicago, Emory). Broadly, the symposium will be divided into four thematic panels that will engage with the regional specificities on caste and capital, religion, state-making, and translation. These subjects will each serve as thematic anchors to draw out connections that are present within and beyond them.
Political Contestations in Contemporary India
Symposium
Session: Symposium - Full Day
Room: PDR
Floor: Floor 1
This symposium explores the ways Hindu nationalists are devising strategies to anticipate and undermine opposition by Dalits, Muslims, women, and LGBTQ communities to the current political dispensation. Which groups are they seeking to incorporate or exclude through legal, cultural, and political means? And how have subaltern groups resisted the erosion of their rights and put forward alternative understandings of secularism, citizenship and nationalism? How is dissidence expressed within and outside electoral venues, through film, poetry, songs, and public protest? What has been the impact of the rescinding of Article 370 and Kashmiri autonomy on alternative understandings of citizenship and secularism? How did the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act and National Register of Citizen (2019-2020) challenge the legal and political imaginary of Hindutva? The symposium will include scholars from a variety of disciplinary perspective to provide an interdisciplinary understanding of the dialectics of Hindu nationalist domination and resistance.
Emerging Studies in South Asian Archaeology
Panel Group
Session: Session 1: Thursday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Assembly Room
Floor: Floor 1
.
A Critical Analyse on Ladhak Alchi’s Tibetan Stone Inscription and Sculptor during the Period of the Tibetan Empire.
Ghora Galis, Water Fountains and Western-Himalayan Material Connections
The Possible Camping Sites in Northern Pakistan: Rock Shelters, Art, and Inscriptions of Alam Bridge in Sai Valley
Interaction and influence between the archaeological cultures of the greater Indus Valley, South Asia and Yellow River region, China
Religion Beyond Borders
Panel Group
Session: Session 1: Thursday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Caucus Room
Floor: Floor 1
Francis Robinson has argued that "the boundaries of modern nation-states and the view of area studies scholarship have tended to obscure both important areas of shared experience and significant systems of connection…" (1997). The aim of this panel is to examine early modern histories of devotion–religious communities, sacred spaces, textual and visual archives –beyond both the constraints of modern nation-states and the barriers of regional and cosmopolitan linguistic divisions. In particular, these papers consider the cultural and religious networks and exchanges that took place across empires and regions in premodern India and address some of the challenges that exist for scholars in studying in post-partition South Asia. Speaker 1 investigates the literary, religious, and historical connections between two North Indian martialized communities: the Khalsa Sikhs of Punjab and the Dadupanthi Nagas of Rajasthan. Through close textual analysis of martial vocabulary, they will consider the intertextual ties between the communities. Speaker 2 explores two of the most important Nath Yogi settlements in early modern Hindustan: Gor Khatari and Tilla Jogian. These monasteries, located on trade routes that crossed Asia were not only patronized by Mughal rulers but archival evidence suggests that they provided environments for a paradoxical multiplicity of religious bonds. Speaker 3 will present how Waris Shah's eighteenth-century text Hīr represented the, at times, paradoxical character of the Nath Jogi. In particular, Speaker 3 examines how Ranjha’s conversion to a Jogi allows for simultaneously comedic and serious consideration of the merits of sensuality and the body, exploring locations of transgression across religious and regional boundaries. Speaker 4 examines the challenges of accessing and studying drawings of eighteenth-century Muslim saints that are currently divided between Pakistani Punjab and Indian Punjab and speculates on the origins of these illustrations.
Poetry, Martialities, and Literary Landscapes: Khalsa Sikhs and Dadupanthi Nagas in Early Modern North India
Saints, Sacrality, and the Silk Road: Gor Khatari and Tilla Jogian in History and Literature
The place of desire: Perspectives on renunciation and the Nath Yogis in Waris Shah’s Hīr Anne Murphy
Crossing a Regional and Historiographical Divide through a Series of Drawings from Punjab
Intellectual Histories of Intoxicants, Medicines, and other Chemicals in South Asia, 1719-1915
Panel Group
Session: Session 1: Thursday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Senate Room A
Floor: Floor 1
This panel considers colonial and Islamicate writings about drugs, drug use, and drug users over a two-century span to understand the epistemological traditions inspired by substances with flexible social, commercial, and chemical potentials. As historical commodities, drugs remain difficult to classify over time, as such commodities were highly profitable, easily transportable substances that often resisted classification among chronologies and across regions of wider South Asia. For this reason, writings about substances said to produce novel side effects in consumers allow historians access to changing ideational regimes during South Asia’s pasts. Intellectuals, state actors, and everyday consumers relied on various interpretive regimes such as medicine, literature, law codes, and music to contextualize drugs, those who used drugs, and the social issues encompassed by both substance and user. To understand these processes, we aim to discuss how socially ambiguous substances impacted emergent knowledge regimes in the past, synthesizing ideas between user, substance, and text. Our first presenter will reconstruct Persianate medical guidance on drinking through tracing the circulation of a famous medical text to show how discussions about wine, medicine, and sociability shifted over time. The second panelist discusses poets of eighteenth-century Delhi who considered the socio-chemical impacts of drugs on verse and bodies as such forces defined forms of urban consumption and shaped public life. The third panelist considers nineteenth-century colonial knowledge regimes surrounding opium that reclassified commodity, user, and geography based on legal frameworks and in dialogue with indigenous networks that circulated opium. Our final speaker considers turn-of-the-century Urdu musicological texts which critique musicians who used intoxicants, demonstrating how such texts overturn assumptions about music reform and its relationship to Islamicate musical lineages. These varying narratives reveal how intoxicants made history as highly charismatic commodities due to their fungible conceptualizations that stimulated shifting intellectual spheres of South Asia.
Wines of Love: Alcohol and Intimacy in the Indo-Persianate Assembly of Pleasure
Green Imagination: Chemicals and sociability among Delhi’s poets in the middle 1700s
Criminality and Surveillance: Opium and colonial state-building in Nineteenth-Century India
Ustads on Drugs: Addiction and Degeneracy in Urdu Music Texts, 1876-1915
Culture and Sovereignty in the Early Modern Deccan Sultanates
Panel Group
Session: Session 1: Thursday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Senate Room B
Floor: Floor 1
This panel focuses on culture and representations of sovereignty in the Deccan Sultanates: dynamic Indo-Islamic polities that were simultaneously characterized by Persianate cosmopolitanism and Deccani regionalism. Taken as a whole, traditional historiography of the Deccan Sultanates—the Bahmani, ‘Adil Shahi, Nizam Shahi, and Qutb Shahi dynasties—has chiefly been concerned with their political power and the fragmentary nature of their states rather than with their cultural and scholarly production. Unlike the hitherto more extensively studied Mughal Empire, these smaller southern polities had limited expansionist ambitions, yet they saw a proliferation of cultural and scholarly production in Dakani, Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit, and Telugu between the fourteenth and the seventeenth centuries. Scholars and sovereigns in the Deccan incorporated conventions shared with the broader Islamic and Persianate worlds while drawing on themes and motifs from the regional landscape of the Deccan. The papers in this panel discuss representations of sovereignty in dynastic histories, praise poetry, art, and architecture from the Deccan Sultanates. While scholars have emphasized the fragmentary nature of cultural production in the region, as poets were rarely associated with a specific sovereign or court, the figure of the sovereign was taken up as a topic of interest to many Dakani and Persian writers. We investigate which cultural forms patrons appealed to in order to establish their authority, and alternatively, how sovereigns were perceived in the broader court culture of the Deccan. Speaker 1 discusses the idea of aesthetic kingship in texts dedicated to Ibrahim ‘Adil Shah II of Bijapur. Speaker 2 delves into motifs of gender and sovereignty in narratives and visual depictions of the warrior queen Chand Bibi Sultan. Speaker 3 explores the inherent challenges of Persianate chroniclers in their depiction of Deccani kingship. Speaker 4 examines expressions of sovereignty in the architectural landscape of the royal tombs in Khuldabad.
The Sultan as Artist: Aesthetic Kingship in Ibrahim II’s Bijapur
Chand Bibi, Warrior Queen of the Deccan: Narrative Motifs and the Power of the Zenana
Persianising the King: Cosmopolitanism, Locality, and the Conflicting Language of Sovereignty in Bijapur
The Status of the Sovereign in the Khuldabad Necropolis
Ethnographies of Test Preparation in India - VIRTUAL PANEL
Panel Group
Session: Session 1: Thursday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Conference Room 1
Floor: Floor 2
Test preparation has largely been studied through the rubric of ‘shadow education’ (e.g., Bray & Lykins, 2012) as a phenomenon closely tied to the formal schooling system. In the Indian context, scholarship on test-prep or ‘coaching’ has primarily focused on secondary school and the IIT-JEE exam (Ørberg, 2018; Sancho, 2015; Subramanian, 2019), explaining family pursuits of social reproduction in a context where the reproduction of privilege is increasingly uncertain (Kaur, 2022; Sancho, 2013). In contrast, coaching for post-college opportunities is animated by questions of social mobility. This panel thus seeks to expand understandings of exam preparation in India by capturing the hopeful waiting and long-term efforts of test-takers in college and post-college landscapes, through lenses of merit, precarious work, and disciplinary regimes. Once a resource primarily available to elite, metropolitan youth, test preparation services are now widely available in smaller towns and rural areas, both in ‘offline’ formats and through the recent expansion of educational technology platforms, further diversifying aspirant experiences. These aspirants, while participating in a life stage of youth commonly linked with fun, masti, time pass, and ‘unproductiveness’ (Krishnan, 2014), have to transition to or balance the disciplinary regimentations of coaching. This panel curates post-college coaching across a range of contexts. Three of the panelists focus on diversity, asking: How do young men from ‘cursed lands’ (agrarian crisis-affected regions) in Andhra Pradesh, tribal girls from a predominantly Scheduled Tribe region of Rajasthan, and youth with professional degrees from Gujarat imagine good futures through coaching? In what ways do caste, class, and gender shape experiences of coaching, ‘self-study,’ and other modalities of preparation? The fourth panelist shifts focus to structural arrangements of testing and its implications for test-prep, exploring the leakages of testing technologies and how these affect the notion of merit as well as aspirants’ self-work around test-prep.
Coaching, aspiration, and tribal girls of Pratapgarh (Rajasthan)
Precarious Laboring for ‘Secure Jobs’: Young Men’s Imaginations of ‘Adulthoods’ in a Southern Indian Coaching Town
Unruly Papers: Disciplining Documents in Bihar's Exam Raj
I was meritorious: Test-prep, personhood, and professional education in Western India
Spaces of Belonging/Unbelonging: Material Histories and Sri Lanka’s Present - VIRTUAL PANEL
Panel Group
Session: Session 1: Thursday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Conference Room 2
Floor: Floor 2
This panel explores the construction of ideologies of belonging/unbelonging through spatial politics in a variety of Sri Lankan and diasporic contexts. Tracing across communal, material, symbolic and psycho-social practices, we bring together four papers that interrogate the various scales through which state, non-state organizations and individuals participate in national and non-national forms of place-making. Speaker 1 examines Jaffna-Tamil diasporic identity formation in early 20th century colonial Malaya. Drawing on the practices of community organizations in ethnic neighborhoods, this paper explores Jaffna-Tamils’ contradictory positionalities in the political landscape of South and Southeast Asia, the legacy of which is seen through historical and contemporary functions of caste dynamics, class, education and employment. Also focusing on Jaffna identities, Speaker 2 examines how the presence of Palmyra trees and production activity relating to them have been the object of intervention by various political projects over the 20th century, and considers the way that Palmyra has spatially configured stratified ideas of belonging. Positioning the verandah as both a material structure, and an affective space, Speaker 3, argues that the 19th century verandahs of Pettah, reflects larger questions about the relationship between the production of space and the politics of home and place-making in the colonial city. Finally, Speaker 4 analyzes a local state-based mental health program in a predominantly Sinhala-speaking district of the Central Province to consider how the provision of state social services reinforce ideas of civic belonging whilst reproducing exclusion along the lines of class, ethnicity and language. Our goal in this panel is to discuss commonalities and divergences across different temporal and spatial paradigms, debating the construction and contestation of ideas of un/belonging through a range of socio-spatial formations connected to Sri Lanka and beyond.
For the Community: Spaces of Jaffna Tamil identity and place in colonial Malaya
Palmyra Politics: Tamil identities in Northern Sri Lanka
The Verandah before the Rebellion: Material Structures and Affective Spaces in a 'Burgher' Pettah.
“Happy Families” and Structural Forms of Exclusion from Divisional-Level Social Services in Sri Lanka’s Central Province
Enchanted Publics: The “miraculous” in contemporary Pakistan
Panel Group
Session: Session 1: Thursday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Conference Room 3
Floor: Floor 2
What is the place of “miraculous” narratives in contemporary Pakistan? What kinds of speakers and what kinds of audiences produce, and are produced by, everyday Islamic discussions and controversies around muʿjizāt (pl. of muʾjizah) and karāmāt (pl. of karāmat)? How does an investigation of miracles and the spaces and publics in which they are recounted and discounted lend itself to broader questions about sovereignty, enchantment, and hierarchy in public and private life? Building on classic research on miraculous narratives and religious authority in Pakistan (Ewing 1997; Khan 2012) and broader Muslim South Asia (Flueckiger 2008; Taneja 2018), this panel will address these questions through diverse case-studies from across Pakistan. Speaker 1 discusses how competing Barelvi groups attempt to perform sovereignty by deliberating upon the undecidable zone between the blasphemous and “miraculous”. Speaker 2 considers how charitable workers in Karachi “miraculously,” yet reluctantly, attend to gaps in city infrastructure and service delivery systems through religious giving. Speaker 3 examines the khwāja sirā narratives around the “miraculous” existence of queer ciswomen and trans men, observing how such narratives impact the hierarchies within and between newly emerging networks of queer and trans people assigned female at birth. Speaker 4 demonstrates how the public recounting of “miraculous” narratives in Shiʿi majālis (commemorative gatherings to mourn the dead) becomes a site of intra-tradition competition between rival and arguably mutually exclusive forms of Shiʿi normativity. Drawing on cutting-edge ethnographic research, the papers presented in the panel argue against viewing miracle stories as purely symbolic or functionalist. Moving past totalizing notions of Weber’s disenchantment or Taylor’s buffered selves, this panel proposes to reframe ‘miracles’ as problem spaces that index the anxieties and hopes of Muslim becoming in contemporary Pakistan.
Saint or Blasphemer? Sovereignty, Miracles, and Transgression in Barelvi Public Life
Allah Hi Hafiz Hai: Anxiety and Ambiguity amongst Karachi’s Miracle Workers
Miraculous Existence: Khwaja Sira Narratives of Survival in Pakistan and the Bargain of Middle-Class Queerness
Miracles in the Public Sphere: The intra-tradition contestation in Urdu Shiʿi khiṭābat
Aesthetics, Forms, and Emergences
Panel Group
Session: Session 1: Thursday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Conference Room 4
Floor: Floor 2
.
Building Postcards: Rössler’s Calcutta 1896
Afro-Asian Worldmaking: Shahzia Sikander’s "X"
Traveling with Feluda: Mapping Memory and Literature through New Media
Gift of Photography: Camera, Photo-Album and Women’s Work
“South Asia according to Liebig: trade card representations, 1880-1940”
New Perspectives in South Asian Art and Aesthetics - VIRTUAL PANEL
Panel Group
Session: Session 1: Thursday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Conference Room 5
Floor: Floor 2
.
Qawwali in a Qasbah: Listening to Muslim Musicking in Critical Times
Silences, Privileges and Elite South Asian American Experiences in Pakistani Cinema
Silence Caused by Affective Tussle in Shashi Deshpande’s "That Long Silence": A Dharmic and Rasic Approach
Acid-Attack Survivors, Indian Films, and Aesthetic
South Asian Literature in Translation
Panel Group
Session: Session 1: Thursday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Capitol Ballroom A
Floor: Floor 2
South Asian-language literatures often rely on translation to reach a global readership. Arunava Sinha's translation of Akhteruzzaman Elias' Khwabnama (2021) has created a stir in South Asian literary and scholarly circles. Similarly, Tomb of Sand, Daisy Rockwell's translation of Geetanjali Sree's Ret Samadhi, has generated new interest in translations of literature in one of many languages of the Indian subcontinent. In fact, translation within South Asia is generously supported by the Sahitya Akademi Translation award. With the recent upsurge of publishing houses dedicated to literature in translation, both within and outside South Asia, this panel inquires how the critical agenda of translation is different from the Anglophone tradition of globally renowned South Asian writers. Subsequently, the four papers in the panel see to articulate South Asian translation's significance in literary studies and beyond. Speaker 1 wonders if the translation of Akhteruzzaman Elias' Khwabnama (2021) will elicit a recasting of the peasants and the Pakistan Movement in the context of Bengal's Partition in 1947. Speaker 2 comparatively studies Chuden Kabimo's novel, Song of the Soil (2022), translated from Nepali into English, and Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss (2006), not only to understand the distinct representations of the many insurgencies in postcolonial South Asia, but also to trouble the categories of the vernacular/regional and the global/anglophone. Speaker 3 illustrates how the translated works of South Asian writers and artists like Amrita Pritam and Qurratulain Hyder register a sharper encounter between postcolonialism, trauma, and ecocriticism. A 19th century Urdu vernacular is the focus on Speaker 4, who explores the influence of Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605) on the Lucknow centric novel Ratan Nath Sarshar's Fasana-e Azad (1881-1883). Therefore, the panelists elicit South Asian translation's significance in literary studies.
Translating the peasant and the Pakistan Movement in Akhteruzzman Elias’ Khwabnama
Translation and Global Histories of Conscription
Environmental and Embodied Figurations in Translated South Asian Literature
The Adventures of ‘Azad’ and ‘Alonso Quixote’: Studying ‘transcreation’ in the 19th century Urdu Literary Sphere
A discussion of Shailaja Paik’s The Vulgarity of Caste
Round Table
Session: Session 1: Thursday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Capitol Ballroom B
Floor: Floor 2
Shailaja Paik’s The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity in Modern India (Stanford University Press, 2022) offers the first social and intellectual history of the Dalit (“Untouchable”) performance of Tamasha—a popular form of public, secular, traveling theatre in Maharashtra, Western India—and places Dalit Tamasha women who represented the desire and disgust of the patriarchal society at the heart of modernization in twentieth century India. Drawing on ethnographies, films, and untapped archival materials, Paik illuminates how Tamasha was produced and shaped through conflict over caste, gender, sexuality, and culture. Dalit performers, activists, and leaders negotiated the violence and stigma in Tamasha as they struggled to claim manuski (human dignity), and transform themselves from ashlil (vulgar) to assli (authentic) and manus (human beings). This roundtable aims to focus attention on Paik’s important contribution by initiating a conversation among scholars of caste and performance. Scholar One (Savitribhai Phule University) will explore the possibilities of Paik’s Dalit feminist politics of ashlil, assli and manuski through the politics of folk/ lok. Scholar Two (O.P. Jindal Global University) will engage with Paik's provocation of queering the dance from a Dalit queer standpoint. Scholar Three (Ashoka University) will discuss the ways in which Paik's methods open new approaches to caste and embodiment. Scholar Four (University of Pennsylvania) will address the book's contribution to cementing the relationship between the study of caste and the historical and ethnographic study of South Asian performance. And finally, the author (University of Cincinnati) will respond to the comments of the other scholars, following which we will open the discussion to the audience. We intend to restrict remarks by all five roundtable participants to fifteen minutes each, so that we will have ample time for audience questions and comments.
Bangladeshis in Motion: Gender, Place and Transnationalism
Round Table
Session: Session 1: Thursday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: University A/B
Floor: Floor 2
Bringing together scholars from law, sociology, social work and social anthropology backgrounds, this roundtable seeks to critically examine the “marginal” location of Bangladesh Studies within South Asian Studies. The panel will explore ways in which gender, relationships, aesthetics, and migration are intimately tied to Bangladeshi experiences of place and identity construction. Speaker 1 will share preliminary findings from ethnographic research on why Bangladeshis migrate to Spain, despite unfamiliarity with culture and language, and how the Spanish government and society have responded to this new migrant community. Speaker 2 will examine British Bangladeshi Muslim women’s investment in race relations via performative visibility in everyday spaces (e.g., work, education, shops, streets etc.). Speaker 3 will discuss the experiences of transnational Bangladeshi women in the US to show how race, class, gender, sexuality, citizenship, geographic location, and associated status impact the intimate economies in which they experience inequities related to love, sex, and desire. Speaker 4 will explore the religious aesthetic negotiation by British Bangladeshi Muslim men vis-a-vis lungi, funjabi and the thobe. Speaker 5 will explore diasporic Bengali identity and Bengaliness in Britain, through a transnational, trans-border and intergenerational approach, factoring in the role of nationalisms and caste, class and gender disparities. In doing so, this panel will make visible Bangladeshi experiences of exclusion, erasure, and exploitation as well as the importance and significance of Bangladesh Studies and its place within academia.
Ramifications of Digitization Projects: Case Studies from Sri Lanka
Round Table
Session: Session 1: Thursday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: University C/D
Floor: Floor 2
This roundtable will explore the relationship among intellectual, ethical, and logistical concerns raised by efforts by the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies (AISLS) to digitize research resources and make them available on open access . It considers perspectives from project managers, digital hosts, and scholars using the materials. The round table seeks to show how these concerns are intertwined and cannot be addressed in isolation. As digitizing materials become more and more common, greater understanding of the complexity of such projects is critical. John Rogers will focus on how AISLS entered the field with a straightforward desire to both preserve and disseminate research materials, but quickly encountered myriad concerns. He will highlight the need to integrate ethical, intellectual, and logistical issues into policy decisions. Crystal Baines will discuss an ongoing effort to digitize a collection of photographs on left-wing protests (1950s—1980s) to show how “routine” or “technical” decisions require sophisticated ongoing intellectual and ethical judgements. Ellen Ambrosone, a librarian at Princeton University, which is serving as a digital host for some AISLS projects, extends themes discussed by Baines, highlighting issues of labor and ethics on the American side. Jonathan Spencer, a scholar who managed a broader research project that included the production by AISLS of an open-access digital library, clarifies intellectual issues raised by using the materials for his own work. Finally, Janice Leoshko will discuss how a project to digitize a collection of photographs produced in Sri Lanka between 1903 and 1906 and immediately taken to the West will now be available globally, including in Sri Lanka. She will demonstrate the need to rectify the disparity of access for material no longer available in the country of origin. Such efforts can ultimately help create new avenues for research.
Neoliberalism and the Nation
Panel Group
Session: Session 1: Thursday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Parlour Room 627
Floor: Floor 6
.
Disability and digital regimes in India
Intimations of Fireside Chat: Radio, Governmentality, and Citizenship in Neoliberal India
On Vulnerability and Researching the Military in Contemporary India
METAPHORICAL MAPPING AND SOUTH ASIA
Panel Group
Session: Session 1: Thursday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Parlour Room 629
Floor: Floor 6
Metaphors facilitate social cognition by allowing people to use their understanding from a relatively concrete (source) domain to understand a more abstract (target) domain. The emergence of metaphor is related to the characteristics of human thinking but more importantly, its other side is that once it gets into our repertoire via various media, it starts to shape our thought. The Case of Reception in the Usage of Metaphors in Modern Bengali Poetry will discuss the formulative aspects of metaphors in Bengali. Nature Metaphors as Emblems of Excellence Used to Honor Lovers’ Bodies in Urdu Poetry: A Cognitive View finds out why generations of Urdu romantic poets have looked to nature while describing the beauty of the beloved. Metaphorization of South Asian Words in English: A Semiotic Study will delve into semiotically analyzing South Asian words that are figuratively borrowed in English, and finally venturing into Mythology, Mythological Metaphors in Hindi: A Conceptual Analysis showcases the metaphorical usage in everyday life. The genres in these studies range from dictionaries, comic books to textbooks, magazines and newspaper articles, film and dramas, novels and anthologies. The papers in the panel emphasize how the knowledge of the culture occupies centricity in order to understand the semanticity of metaphors and vice-versa. This panel endeavours to explore various dimensions of metaphors in South Asian Languages and unpacks how culture shapes conceptualization. Employing Lakoffian framework, these papers help shed insight into linguistic and societal structures, behaviors, and attitudes in South Asian Communities and beyond.
THE CASE OF RECEPTION IN THE USAGE OF METAPHORS IN MODERN BENGALI POETRY
NATURE METAPHORS AS EMBLEMS OF EXCELLENCE USED TO HONOR LOVERS’ BODIES IN URDU POETRY: A COGNITIVE VIEW
METAPHORIZATION OF SOUTH ASIAN WORDS IN ENGLISH: A SEMIOTIC STUDY
MYTHOLOGICAL METAPHORS IN HINDI: A CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS
The structural and technological interventions in communication and early childhood education in Pakistan
Panel Group
Session: Session 1: Thursday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Parlour Room 634
Floor: Floor 6
Pakistan has undergone significant social, political, and economic changes in recent years, and technology has played a pivotal role in this transformation. With the ever-increasing popularity of digital devices and the internet, technology has now become an indispensable part of our daily lives. The technological advancement in the field of linguistics has enhanced the effectiveness of communication strategies and impacted the way the narrative is shaped. It has also enabled educators to create a dynamic learning environment for early childhood education. This panel examines the impact of technology in the field of linguistics to improve communication and shape the narrative. The panel also explores the diverse perspectives on structural and spontaneous interventions on the learning outcomes of primary school students in Pakistan. The first presentation highlights the importance of addressing the learning disabilities of primary school students using the collaborative team teaching (CTT) technique. The second presentation discusses the use of technology-based interventions for the continuous professional development of primary school teachers. The third presentation highlights the significance of digital communication in shaping the political narrative by highlighting the use of social media in creating political awareness in Pakistani youth. The final presentation explores the impact of cultural norms on transmodal communication. Thus the panel provides a comprehensive understanding of the impact of technology on education and communication.
Addressing the Learning Disabilities Among the Primary School Students Using Collaborative Team Teaching (CTT) Technique
Use of Technology Based Intervention for Continuous Professional Development of Primary School Teachers in Pakistan
Social Media as a Tool for Shaping the Political Landscape in Pakistan
Exploring the Impact of Cultural Norms on Transmodal Communication in Pakistan
COVID-19 pandemic and networks of care: How religious minorities shape welfare and belonging in India
Panel Group
Session: Session 1: Thursday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Parlour Room 638
Floor: Floor 6
Throughout the world, COVID-19 pandemic related public health measures put in place by governments to control the virus have had tremendous social and economic consequences, especially on groups that were already marginalized. In India, with multiple extended lockdowns during the first and second wave of COVID-19, vulnerable groups but also middle-class families suffered job losses, started running out of daily necessities, experienced acute isolation, and faced (particularly during the second wave) massive obstacles in performing the last rites of the dead. These developments sparked the emergence and mobilization of various nonstate (formal and informal) networks of care, alongside public welfare provisions. Such a crisis has, more than ever, brought to light the strength and weaknesses of various welfare systems, as well as the unusual ways in which citizens stepped in to fill the welfare gap. Taking the COVID-19 crisis as a case study, the main objective of this panel is to examine the nonstate actors’ involvement in emergency aid provision, and its entanglements with belonging and citizenship in India. More specifically, the panel calls for a close examination of the particularly striking mobilization and involvement of various religious minority groups and organizations in response to the pandemic. Drawing on examples of Christian, Muslim and Parsi initiatives, papers in this panel will thus discuss the different forms of aid provided by these religious groups during the crisis, the imaginaries of social justice and belonging driving religious actors’ interventions, and the ways in which these groups perceive their role and social contribution in the country. By doing so, the panel addresses larger questions regarding welfare and social justice, minorities and care practices, and the organization of care in times of crisis.
Reimagining Hyderabadi Tehzeeb: Minority led COVID welfare and its ambivalent entanglements with the city administration
COVID, Care and Cremation: Shifting Zoroastrian Funerary Practices
Religion, Welfare and the Margins of the State during the COVID-19 Crisis in India
Keeping religion in the backstage: Christian associations and COVID-19 relief in Delhi
"Structuring Stone: Traditions and Transitions in Art History and Archaeology Across South Asia
Panel Group
Session: Session 2: Thursday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Assembly Room
Floor: Floor 1
.
Spontaneous insertions, structural disruptions: Understanding “visual elasticity” in early representations of Buddha’s Parinirvāṇa
Temples in Transition: Early Medieval Sūrya Shrines in Central India
Between Mughal and Rajput, Muslim and Hindu: The Intertwined Histories of Shah Begum and the Funerary chhatri
Village Industry in the Colonial Economy: A De/Industrial Archaeology of Nineteenth Century Ballari
Material Agency and Spontaneous Assemblages: Understanding Religion Through Objects
Panel Group
Session: Session 2: Thursday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Caucus Room
Floor: Floor 1
This panel aims to make a critical intervention in the burgeoning field of material religion by presenting an analysis of objects and sensational experiences from the perspective of South Asian religions and cultures. Keeping with this year’s conference theme, each paper will demonstrate that the design, cultivation, and/or use of various objects, events, and religious environments includes, and perhaps even requires, notions of spontaneity, contradiction, and responsiveness. The first panelist uses two concepts, “mattering maps” and “assemblages,” to engage with the materiality of Krishna’s flute in fifteenth-century Gujarati bhakti songs and the rhetorical-cognitive ways that devotees cultivate anticipated and yet spontaneous sensory experiences with the flute and other non-human objects. The second panelist presents ethnographic research from Nepal and considers material agency in Tulsi Vivaha, a wedding ritual that is entirely staged by people but that features a basil plant as the well-dressed bride. The third panelist interrogates the transformative power of debris, various ritual objects, such as lemons, chillies, and paper chits, at a Sufi shrine in Maharashtra that is largely inhabited by Hindu devotees. This panelist proposes that these vibrant assemblages of agential objects transform and reframe the dargah as a temple. The fourth panelist attributes agency and vitality to humans, organic and inorganic materials, and environments at a beach festival in Pondicherry, South India in the contexts of both the planned schedule of the procession and the spontaneous responses to the unplanned events and conditions of the day. Building on the work of Bennett (2010), Dempsey and Pitchman (2016), and Flueckiger (2021), the collective aim of this panel is to consider the theoretical impact of the panel as a whole, which propels and even disrupts the ever-evolving definition of material religion.
Material Matters: Shaping Bhakti Experiences through Cognitive Engagements with Materiality
Assemblage, Materiality, and Basil Brides
The Power of Debris
Material Religion and Material Agents at a South Indian Beach Festival
Archives of Encounter in Colonial India
Panel Group
Session: Session 2: Thursday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Senate Room A
Floor: Floor 1
.
Constructing the “Heathen”: Sensational Appeals and Contradictions in the American Missionary Periodicals.
Punda, Daroga, Sepoy: Reading Muted Histories of Caste in the Colonial Archives of a Hindu Holy City
In the Light of the Cross: Situating the Christian Encounter in the Long Nineteenth-century Orissa
Religion and Resistance in Modern Bengali Literature
Hindu Nationalisms, Past and Present
Panel Group
Session: Session 2: Thursday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Senate Room B
Floor: Floor 1
.
Painting Gandhi Saffron: M.S. Golwalkar and the Appropriation of Gandhi by the RSS
Seva, Swayamsevak, and Sangh Exploring the role of seva in the making of the RSS
The Bovine Politics of Contemporary Hindu Nationalism: Cow Protectionism, Beef Exports, and the Neoliberal Restructuring of the Bovine Economy
Affective Attachments: Emotions, Gender, and Urban Life in South Asia - VIRTUAL PANEL
Panel Group
Session: Session 2: Thursday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Conference Room 1
Floor: Floor 2
The pleasures and perils of the South Asian city have engendered rich scholarship that has nuanced our understanding of how gender intersects with urban configurations. While fear of sexual harassment and the desire for women’s safety have long been presented in academic and popular discourses as the predominant narrative around gender in South Asian cities, more recent work has foregrounded ‘fun’ and pleasure as a crucial conceptual device for unpacking agential practices (Kirmani 2020; Phadke 2020). Yet, happiness and dread are only fragments of a complex emotional mosaic constituting gendered experiences in cities that are rapidly transforming – infrastructurally, socially, and politically. This panel brings together theoretical and empirical contributions that provide a more expansive view of emotional and affective responses to navigating the city for employment, care or leisure, where the urban public may be a site of nostalgia and longing; or hope and desire; or melancholy, jealousy, rage or disgust. Placing gender in conversation with other vectors of identity, such as caste, class, age, religion, sexuality, and disability, this panel sheds light on how urban transport systems and infrastructure, spaces for work and play, and policies and practices, may all generate their own affective modalities. As this panel highlights, (im)mobility, belonging, exclusion, community or solitude, can each provide us insights into how emotion impacts gendered access to the city, and, in turn, how gender shapes affective dimensions of urban life.
Shauq (Passion) and Majboori (Compulsion): Narratives of Beauty Work in Urban Pakistan
Affective Registers of and in an Ooru
Gendered Spatiality of Street-Food Vending in Colombo and Delhi
“Maybe This is What a City is Like!”: Making Sense of the Urban Through Gendered Violence, Possibilities, and Resistances in Everyday Life
Gendered Realities Across South Asia - VIRTUAL PANEL
Panel Group
Session: Session 2: Thursday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Conference Room 2
Floor: Floor 2
.
The Conundrum of Victimhood: Sexual Violence, the Medicalization of Disbelief and Testimonial Injustice in Bangladesh
What Gig Work Can Tell Us About Women's Employment Futures: A Study of Women Platform Workers in Mumbai
Arunima Ray - arunimaray@lsr.du.ac.in ()
Women in the Indian Metropolis: Gender, Violence and the Urban Space
Unveiling the Impact of Infrastructures as Social Structures on Women's Spontaneity: A Case Study of Educated Working Pakistani Mothers
Language/s of Gender: Post-Independence Vernacular Innovations by South Asian Women Writers
Panel Group
Session: Session 2: Thursday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Conference Room 3
Floor: Floor 2
In the post-independence period in South Asia, prose offers multiple ways of documenting, mediating, and representing the present. While much scholarship has been produced about Anglophone and primarily male-authored fiction, not a lot of attention has been paid to women’s writing beyond the pale of the partition. In this panel we address this lacuna by analyzing post-independence South Asian women’s prose with special attention to how they deploy new understandings of gender and the vernacular to reflect on their intimacies and aspirations. Since in post-independence prose “gender and genre function as intersecting aesthetic nodes” (Preetha Mani), how do a range of genres in women’s writing–novels, short stories, memoirs, speeches, interviews, and critical essays– experiment with the boundaries between structure and spontaneity? The four papers in this panel narrate different stories of gender and vernacular imaginations in post-independence South Asia. Our first speaker reflects on Mappila women’s literary negotiations with tradition and modernity in the context of Nehruvian scientific rationale. Speaker #2 examines communal violence and affective masculinities across Anglophone and Hindi writings by prize-winning women authors in contemporary India. Speaker #3 interrogates the relationship between vernacularity, speech, gender, and disability in Pakistani writing against the backdrop of postcolonial debates about language and the anthropocene. The final speaker analyzes a 1980s Bengali novel that borrows from pulp fiction tropes to pry open the cracks between shifting sexual terrains and gender identities, and offers new literary imaginaries for the future. Through the range of papers in this panel we argue that it is in post-independence women’s prose from South Asia that we can witness what Akshya Saxena has called “an invitation to think language again–not at its limits but in its proliferation with bodies, media, and languages.”
Mediating Tradition and Modernity: Twentieth Century Māppiḷa Women’s Short Stories
Fear, Anxiety and Shame: Masculinity in Geetanjali Shree’s and Annie Zaidi’s Novels
Geological Histories and Vernacular Aesthetics: Reading Gender and Disability in Uzma Aslam Khan’s the geometry of god
Man/Woman/Widow: Provocations of Gender Deviancies in Postcolonial Fiction
Critical Arts Pedagogies in India
Panel Group
Session: Session 2: Thursday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Conference Room 4
Floor: Floor 2
This panel explores how practitioners of the visual arts, design, film, and theatre have produced and communicated forms of artistic knowledge in India during the 20th and 21st centuries. We ask how artists participate in processes of democratization, institutionalization, and/or commodification through which artistic knowledge gains value across various publics and reframes the role of the artist in society. We explore pedagogical contexts shaped by critical, self-reflexive perspectives on the construction of authority and the meanings of art. We seek to understand how artists bridge art and social responsibility and participate in broader conversations about national, racial, and caste identities. In keeping an eye on the spatialization of culture, we ask how artists’ placemaking constitutes a strategy of innovation and radicality beyond conventional concepts that reify “art as object” or the ephemerality of performance. The papers aim to generate an interdisciplinary view of art worlds in India, as well as write against Western generic distinctions in speaking across art history, design history, media studies, and performance studies.
The Spatialization of Technique and Veenapani Chawla’s Adishakti Laboratory for Performing Arts Research
Teaching Caste via Contemporary Dalit-centric Indian Film and Media
Spatial Documentation and Photography Pedagogy at the National Institute of Design
The Art of the Contemporary in the Indigenously Inhabited Postcolonial South Asia
Understanding Built Environment: Space making, Urbanity and Heritage in twentieth and twenty-first Century South Asia - VIRTUAL PANEL
Panel Group
Session: Session 2: Thursday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Conference Room 5
Floor: Floor 2
This panel explores the ways in which the built environment is studied in the South Asian context. Its twentieth and twenty first century form is seen in the development of capital cities, the pervasiveness of capitalist logics in the non-urban, the construction of roads, and regulations around heritage. Despite the crucial role of built environment its political, social, and economic configuration has been understudied and needs further exploration in colonial and post-colonial South Asia. Scholarship, on South Asia tends to treat the built environment as a relic frozen in time and thereby overlooking the historical palimpsest it carries and the temporal challenges it reckons with. An example of the same are the capital cities which get attributed to their key architects like Lutyens New Delhi, and Ganga Ram’s Lahore. However, this problematic approach extends across all scales and mediums including built spaces such as roads and bridges, commercial and residential buildings, historical monuments, and non-monumental architectural heritage in both urban and non-urban spaces. Therefore, through this panel our aim is to move beyond the static sense of space and look at the various facets of the built environment in transition. The panel brings together papers situated in different socio-cultural contexts such as the national and regional space, city and provinciality, transportation, media imagination and heritage. In doing so, the essays in this panel draw upon and extend the idea of built environment, space, and architectural heritage which has been studied by scholars like Sandria Freitag, David Arnold, A. D. King, Lynn Meskell, Hilal Ahmed, and Priya Jaikumar. The presenters hope that the panel shall be able develop an understanding of South Asia’s built environment and heritage by addressing it as a complex, changing, and transitioning entity.
Speed in Modern Cities: An Analysis of Road Transport in Twentieth Century India (c. 1900- c.1960)
The Indian idea of New Delhi: Changing built environment from Imperial to National Capital , circa. 1930-1950
'In Service of the Shot’: Heritage Afterlives of the Shekhawati Haveli in Rajasthan
From Present to Past, Through Cracks and Crevices: Palimpsest of heritage in post-partition Rawalpindi
Writing and Researching Disability in South Asia
Round Table
Session: Session 2: Thursday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Capitol Ballroom A
Floor: Floor 2
This roundtable engages with critical disability studies and disability justice as analytical frameworks, asking listeners to reflect on what these frameworks have to offer for scholars researching and writing within South Asian studies. Although this issue has been made especially pertinent by the COVID-19 pandemic, it is one that has always been relevant for disabled/chronically ill scholars at all stages of their careers, and for those of us working on questions of disability within the field. Some of the threads we seek to weave together in this roundtable include: What is the state of the field in the thriving, interdisciplinary field of South Asian disability studies, and what are the possibilities for the future? What does disability studies offer to scholars thinking about specific sub-fields within South Asian studies, such as the premodern histories of South Asia and the anthropology of disability, for instance? What kinds of insights can disability studies offer us about the embodied processes and burdens of research in and on South Asia? For example, what does it mean to be a disabled and/or chronically ill researcher working in multiple archives across South Asia, or conducting interviews, or undertaking ethnographic research? What does it mean to openly claim or not claim disability in our fields; how do scholars navigate stigma, discrimination and ableism? How does disability studies allow us to think critically, expansively and inclusively about other equally important categories of difference in South Asian studies like caste, class and religion? Given that this roundtable is imagined as the opening to a broader dialogue in South Asian studies on disability, ableism, and accessibility, it will be offered in a hybrid format, with most of the participants joining virtually and the organizers attending in person.
Caste in South Asia and the World: Past and Present
Panel Group
Session: Session 2: Thursday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Capitol Ballroom B
Floor: Floor 2
.
Globalizing Caste, Globalizing Majoritarianism: Ambedkarite Democratic Theory
Representation and the Dilemma of Dalit Politics: A study of Political Pragmatism in Northern India, c. 1932-1991
Dalit Marxism and a Critique of Racial Capitalism
Abolitionist and Anti-Caste Critique of Slavery and Brahmanism during British Colonial Rule: Reading the Scriptures with Cugoano and Phule
Negotiating Gender in South Asia
Panel Group
Session: Session 2: Thursday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Wisconsin Ballroom
Floor: Floor 2
.
Indian Women Construction Workers' Social Construction of Human Security
Feminization of a Village: Women-Led Transformation of Nelibewa, Sri Lanka
Why should I change my name? Contextualising Resistance in the First Name-change Practice of Women post-marriage in India.
Future Beyond Dystopia: Dismantling Power Structures and Reconfiguring Agency in South Asia
Panel Group
Session: Session 2: Thursday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: University A/B
Floor: Floor 2
The rise of Hindu fundamentalism, societal collapse, technological advancement, militarization, and pro-capitalist domination create multiple structures of oppression. This panel examines how post-apocalyptic and totalitarian spaces are imagined in South Asian dystopian works–a relatively new genre that explores the human condition, agency, and failure to conceptualize utopic futures. Our panel explores the presence of many voices and many dystopias that exist within the Indian context that often compete with one another through an examination of literature and allied arts. We examine how novelists/poets/playwrights/filmmakers problematize the complexities of representation even as they grapple with the realities of our contemporary dystopian world. We argue that in the reconfiguration of an individual’s agency, these works pose a threat to tyrannical power structures where a future beyond dystopia is often only an imaginary construct. The papers in this panel tap into the collective unease about the modern world and our role in creating and perpetuating a dystopia.
“The Land of Half-Humans”: Between Dystopia and Rebellion in India’s Militarized Zones
Dalit Precarity and Pro-capitalist Violence in Vauhini Vara’s Dystopian Novel The Immortal King Rao (2022)
Exploring Feminist Politics and Agency during the rise of Hindu Nationalism in Deepa Mehta’s Adaption Leila (2019)
India without the ‘Other’?: Interrogating ‘Hindu Rashtra’ in Saeed Naqvi’s The Muslim Vanishes (2022) and Maktoob Media’s Erazed (2022)
Sri Lanka’s Polycrisis: Retrospect and Prospect Roundtable in Honor of Professor S. W. R. de A. Samarasinghe
Round Table
Session: Session 2: Thursday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: University C/D
Floor: Floor 2
Sri Lanka commemorated 75 years of independence in 2023 amidst the island’s worst ever economic crisis. Economic crises have socio-political ramifications, so the country has also experienced upheaval. Scarcity of essentials was accompanied by massive protests, strikes, periodic violence, brutal government crackdowns, and arrests. The most consequential protest was a weeks-long aragalaya (struggle) that forced President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and his brother Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa to flee. New President Ranil Wickremesinghe put down the aragalaya, and he has enabled the Rajapaksas to continue to influence politics. The politicking aside, the country’s socioeconomic projections are dire, with Sri Lanka likely to have suffered a lost decade of growth by the time it stabilizes. Internal and external forces have collectively contributed to Sri Lanka’s polycrisis. These range from serial budget deficits, corruption, ethnonationalism, COVID-19, the Ukraine war, Chinese and commercial non-concessionary loans, and global inflation. The overarching consequences have ranged from widespread poverty, malnutrition (especially among rural dwellers), emigration (particularly among educated professionals), authoritarianism, and anomie. The proposed roundtable will cover these and related issues. It is organized in honor of Professor Sam Samarasinghe who over nearly five decades contributed immensely to our understanding of Sri Lankan affairs more generally and the island’s economics and politics more specifically. The yearly Madison conference was a venue he cherished. We offer this roundtable in appreciation of his scholarly legacy.
Author-Meets-Critics Roundtable on Slandering the Sacred: Blasphemy Law and Religious Affect in Colonial India
Round Table
Session: Session 2: Thursday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Parlour Room 627
Floor: Floor 6
This roundtable brings together four leading scholars of modern South Asia to discuss J. Barton Scott’s new book Slandering the Sacred: Blasphemy Law and Religious Affect in Colonial India, published this year by the University of Chicago Press as part of the “Class 200” series. Slandering the Sacred takes the specific case study of Section 295-A of the Indian Penal Code, which prohibits deliberate harm or injury to religious feelings, to raise larger questions about the interaction of law, religion, and secular power in India and beyond. A multifaceted intellectual and cultural analysis of blasphemy law, the book moves between nineteenth-century and contemporary Britain and India to trace a new history for outrage as structure of religious feeling. The four discussants will use the book as a springboard for thinking about questions of wounded sentiments, political affect, and the consolidation of religious identity in various South Asian contexts. Speaker 1, a scholar of secularism and the Arya Samaj, will discuss the book in relation to the genealogies of Hindu nationalism, especially around the affective symbol of the cow. Speaker 2, a historian of colonial law and South Asian Islam, will consider how the politics of wounded feelings have shaped the formation of religious identity both in South Asia and the diaspora. Speaker 3, a historian of Parsi legal cultures and colonial criminology, will situate the book within the field of interdisciplinary legal history. Speaker 4, an anthropologist of Sufism and other contemporary religious forms, will use the book to reflect on twenty-first century formations of Hindu nationalism and Islamophobia, as well as Muslim ethical responses to them.
Landscapes in History: Journeys through the Wilderness of Medieval South India
Panel Group
Session: Session 2: Thursday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Parlour Room 629
Floor: Floor 6
South India has been shaped by a distinctive history of ecological and environmental encounters. Throughout the past millennium, courtly, devotional, and temple narratives portrayed seamless movement across overlapping geographies and cultural frontiers where kings, saints, and temples encountered wilderness and forest people. Such encounters include the worlds of saivas but also of the Chenchus on the edges of imperial and temple worlds. To date, scholars of South India have tended to view the encounters within a binary paradigm of “core” and “periphery,” which betrayed a bias towards the sedentary over the itinerant and the agrarian over the forested. Instead, the papers in this panel invert the scholarly gaze and method and look at South India from the vantage point of its ecological frontiers and ask: How did the frontier encounters constitute place in South India historically? Presenter 1 examines devotional encounters as imagined in the vacana poetry of the itinerant saiva ascetics. The saiva geography that emerges is shaped as much by the forests as by the saiva centers at Kalyana, Srisailam, and Billigavi. Presenter 2 examines temple gardens as ecologies and economies of devotion at the Chidambaram temple. Presenter 2 reads the dancing Shiva at Chidambaram from within the larger landscape of the garden and the wilderness. Presenter 3 examines the representations of the forest dwellers, the Chenchus, in the 16th c. courtly text (Yayati Caritra) and temple histories (Srisaila Mahatmyamu) in Telugu. Presenter 3 moves between the precolonial representations of Chenchu inclusion and the colonial narratives of exclusion and asks how best we may understand the frontier narratives. Presenter 4 examines Vijayanagara era Sanskrit texts (Vasantotsavacampu, Varadambika Parinaya), for their portrayal of the gardens, wilderness, and the Chenchus and asks how such portrayals function to shape the urban, courtly and temple environments.
Towards a Narrative Geography of the Vachana Movement
Landscape and Environment in Tamil Temple Narratives
Literary Imaginations of an Imperial Frontier in 16th century Sultanate Telugu
The Forest and the Garden in Two Vijayanagara Campukavyas
Contesting the Curriculum and Educational Practices
Panel Group
Session: Session 2: Thursday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Parlour Room 634
Floor: Floor 6
.
Accountability, School Choice and (Ethno-)Politics: Competing Communities and Conflicting Demands in Education Practice and Policy in India
Tahreem Fatima - fatimat@miamioh.edu (Miami University, Oxford, Ohio)
‘New Womanhood’ among Pakistani women: Decolonizing discourses of gender and education in South Asia
Deleting Mughals, Marx, and Mahatma Gandhi: History Education and Hindu Nationalism
Girlhoods in Public Institutions: (Re)tracing Schoolgirls’ Narratives in Late Colonial India
De/Colonial Perspectives on Health and Medicine in South Asia
Panel Group
Session: Session 2: Thursday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Parlour Room 638
Floor: Floor 6
.
Historical Construction of Two-Child Norm in India: A Story of Putting Cart Before the Horse
Decolonizing Public Health: Ayurveda and Biopolitics in West Bengal (1950-1955)
Structuring Imperial Legislation: Pharmacy in South Asia, the Colonial British Government and Competing Interests in the First ‘War on Drugs’, 1900-1920
Digital Repatriation in South Asia
Panel Group
Session: Session 3: Thursday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Assembly Room
Floor: Floor 1
This panel will explore the challenges and opportunities associated with 'digital repatriation' in the context of South Asian material cultural heritage. 'Digital Repatriation' refers to the use of digital humanities (DH) tools to create digital assets of heritage items, such as manuscripts and art objects, to provide broader access for stakeholder heritage communities across South Asia. The panel will examine the complexities and unique needs of various repatriation contexts in the digital era, along with the role of digital humanities in addressing the colonial legacies that have influenced South Asian cultural heritage work in the West for nearly three centuries. The panel brings together four papers that discuss innovative approaches to preserving, disseminating, and revitalizing diverse aspects of South Asian cultural heritage. These include Maithili manuscripts in India and Nepal, Gandharan art objects and manuscripts from Afghanistan and Pakistan, and Vedic texts from across the region. Collectively, the papers explore how digital repatriation can promote the decolonization process by empowering local communities to reclaim ownership and control over their heritage items while ensuring equitable access and participation, despite limitations imposed by colonial scholars, institutions, and research practices. By examining various contexts and divergent histories of cultural heritage extraction in different regions and time periods in South Asia, this panel seeks to investigate digital tools and scholarly approaches that can transform the study of South Asian cultural heritage. The goal is to promote cross-cultural, collaborative engagements that challenge colonial power structures and authority. The papers emphasize the need to create sustainable digital projects that empower local heritage communities through open access and pedagogical approaches.
Reimagining Repatriation: Decolonising and Digitising Maithili Manuscript Heritage across the India-Nepal Border
Image Gandhara: Revitalizing Objects from Gandhara
Whose Veda, Whose Story? Reflections on Digital adhikāra and the Straitening of Sanskrit
Access and Authority in the Study of Gandharan Buddhist Texts: A Reflection on New Digital Resources
Devotional Visualities and Indic Material Cultures
Round Table
Session: Session 3: Thursday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Caucus Room
Floor: Floor 1
This Roundtable of seven speakers is made up of the editors and contributors to a new book scheduled to be released at the time of the conference, on devotional visualities of Indic material cultures that interpret and circulate bhakti images. A premise of the volume and roundtable is that bhakti is one of the most-studied aspects of Indic devotionalism through its emotive poetry, song and vivid hagiographies of saints, yet to date there have been many publications on bhakti texts but none centrally focused on Indic devotional visualities that engage bhakti imagery. The volume and roundtable show such imagery in motion as it inspires, shapes, and changes both the visual practices of devotional communities as well as possibilities for extending the reach of devotion in society in new and often unexpected ways. In its concern with the established and the experimental in imagery, the volume and this roundtable fit with the Madison 2023 conference theme of “structure and spontaneity.” Communities of interpreters of bhakti images discussed include not only a number of distinctive Hindu bhakti groups, but also artisans, diaspora women, South Asian Sufis, businessmen, dancers, and filmmakers. Identified devotional practices of looking – materializing memory, mirroring and immaterializing portraits, and shaping the return look - connect material and visual cultures as well as illustrate modes of established and experimental image usage. Each contributor’s focus illustrates one of these visual techniques; different contributions on the same general technique allow nuance and comparison. These diverse devotional visualities meaningfully circulate bhakti images in past and present, generating their renewed relationship to contemporary concerns. This book originated at a Madison Symposium in 2019; this Roundtable gives the diverse participants a valuable opportunity to revisit and share the project as a matured inquiry and to collaboratively develop future directions with the audience.
Contestation and Transformation in South Asian Islam
Panel Group
Session: Session 3: Thursday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Senate Room A
Floor: Floor 1
.
Bridging Science and Religion: Shibli Nomani’s Efforts to Reconcile Darwin’s Theory of Evolution
Traversing between a Textual Archive and Oral History: Pakistani Shia Ulama's memory of the 1980s and Beyond.
Contesting the Biography of the Prophet in Mughal India
The Sufis and Hadith in the early modern period: Renewal and the Traditionalism of Shah Wali Allah of Delhi (d. 1762)
Contesting the Political in 20th Century South Asian Islam: Between Mawdūdī and Vaḥīduddīn Ḵẖāṉ
Investigating Nationalism in South Asia, Past and Present
Panel Group
Session: Session 3: Thursday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Senate Room B
Floor: Floor 1
.
Inferiority Complex: Nineteenth century thinkers in Bengal and the Hindu quest for self-esteem
Militant Masculinities: Anxiety and Insecurity in Contemporary India
Divided We Stand: How Hindutva is Thriving Despite Differences in Ideologies and Goals?
South Asia as Home & Field - VIRTUAL PANEL
Round Table
Session: Session 3: Thursday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Conference Room 1
Floor: Floor 2
From living with and caring for one's family members during fieldwork, to doing fieldwork on questions that might unsettle the peace of one's home, the home and field are never entirely distinct entities. By virtue of having a shared history and future with their field sites, researchers in their home countries/communities have to be particularly attentive to questions of rigor, objective distance, and ethics in fieldwork. How do researchers in South Asia grapple with being "home" while conducting fieldwork? To that end, our proposed speakers actively navigate this question through ongoing fieldwork in their home countries/communities. Speaker 1 is a third-generation Singaporean Indian researching on how people of South Asian descent inhabit the racial category of ‘Indian’ in Singapore. Focusing on the convivial and the sensorial, their fieldwork blurs the boundaries between home/field. For Speaker 2’s fieldsite in Maharashtra, the idea of ‘home’ comprises the continued presence of their loved ones. Their fieldwork encourages them to interrogate their positionality as a ‘native’ in their fieldsite. Speaker 3’s research investigates how Bangladeshi women suffer from environmentally induced hysterectomies. Being Bangladeshi themselves, they identify as both an outsider and an outlier to their fieldsite on the southern coast of Bangladesh. Speaker 4’s research focuses on the coastal zone of the Bay of Bengal and their multi-sited fieldwork in India spans courts, legal aid camps and other spaces of everyday legality. Being raised in Kolkata and being trained as a lawyer and anthropologist has meant that home is simultaneously a place, a discipline, and a certain affect. Speaker 5’s fieldsite in Eastern Assam is a small town only 32 miles from their home village. Working in such close proximity, yet distance from their home, they face questions of fulfilling familial observations and objective distance to their fieldsite.
New Studies in South Asian Spirituality - VIRTUAL PANEL
Panel Group
Session: Session 3: Thursday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Conference Room 2
Floor: Floor 2
.
Affective Economies: The Structures of Relationality within Guru Traditions
Choosing between Metonymy and Metaphor: Dvaitins and tat tvam asi
Shah Abdul Latif, the Sovereign of Spirituality from Sind-- presentation of the feminine paradigms of spirituality in the Risalo.
Rhetoric and Poetics in South Asia: The Seventeenth Century and Beyond
Panel Group
Session: Session 3: Thursday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Conference Room 3
Floor: Floor 2
The panel explores the development of rhetoric and poetics in South Asia during the seventeenth-century and onward. Based on current research across Persian, Sanskrit, Arabic, and Urdu material, the papers will highlight major interactions and issues in literary theory and practice, gauging continuity and change with a view to key considerations like philology, semantics, translation, interdisciplinarity, sound, socio-intellectual context. Whereas this period of Indian history is known for major intellectual and literary developments, the speakers will shed light on avenues still unexplored, noting the manifestation of change within continuous literary and scholastic frameworks, as well as between them owing to connective activity in Persian, Braj, and Urdu. The paper by Speaker 1 concerns the tenure of courtly patronage of exchange across traditions, especially with reference to the purchase and challenge of encoding the conceptual framework of Sanskrit poetics in its Arabo-Persian counterpart, and also addresses its intermediary backdrop in the Braj-Sanskrit interaction. Speaker 2’s paper deals with the poetics of authorship in Persian devotional retellings of the Ramayana from the late seventeenth century. Speaker 3 explores the place and legacy of Arabic rhetoric (ʿilm al-balāgha) in the region, taking as case study an influential seventeenth-century engagement with the theory of figuration (majāz). Speaker 4 will discuss the development of the notion of faṣāḥat as ‘resonance’ in late Urdu rhetoric as well as underscore, to this end, the assimilation of its Perso-Arabic inheritance.
‘The Gift of India’: Indo-Persian Poetics in Early Modern South Asia
Literary Experimentations and Ram-Bhakti in Mughal-Era Persian Rāmāyans
Majāz and the Place of Arabic Balāgha in South Asia
Euphony and Flow: The Inheritance of Urdu faṣāḥat in Late Colonial India
Music Sound and Protest in Contemporary India
Round Table
Session: Session 3: Thursday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Conference Room 4
Floor: Floor 2
From its very inception, Bombay cinema has been closely tied to the nation and its politics. It has played a key role in uniting the nation, by both acknowledging the internal differences of caste, class and religion and striving to present them as a unified national body through its songs, what Jyotika Virdi calls the “national popular” (Virdi 10). The rise of Hindu nationalism in contemporary India compels us to ask if today’s “national popular” aligns or disrupt the politics of the state. This roundtable investigates how music, song and sound are used to protest religious, caste and class inequalities and also to perpetuate such inequalities across a number of sound sites from the songs and soundtracks of Bollywood cinema to independent films and sound installation projects, public music education and performances. We consider the following questions: How do the filtration and adaptation of western musical genres such as hip-hop and bluegrass to Indian contexts create connections between racial discrimination and religious inequality? What filiations do they create between local and global contexts? How do critiques of class and race become embedded within soundscapes of caste and gender discrimination? This roundtable brings together junior and senior scholars from a variety of disciplines, ethnomusicology, gender studies, arts and aesthetics and media studies among others, to investigate these questions. Speakers: Speaker 1, Associate Professor of Literature, Director of Cinema Studies Speaker 2, Associate Professor of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University Speaker 3, Professor of Music Studies, SUNY Brockport Speaker 4, Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, Theater and Film, Sonoma State University Speaker 5, Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology, University of Pittsburgh Speaker 5, Associate Professor of Sexuality, Women’s and Gender Studies, Amherst College (Chair-discussant)
Caste and Indigeneity - VIRTUAL PANEL
Panel Group
Session: Session 3: Thursday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Conference Room 5
Floor: Floor 2
.
Caste, Race, and Critical Nostalgia in Vauhini Vara’s The Immortal King Rao
“We Belong Here”: Reclaiming Land and Space through Digital Performances by Budhan Theatre
The lived experiences of Indigenous women in addressing structural, gendered and sexual violence against Indigenous women in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT), Bangladesh
Tactility and Material Consciousness in Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable
The Labor of Caste/The Caste of Labor
Panel Group
Session: Session 3: Thursday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Capitol Ballroom B
Floor: Floor 2
.
“Machines Without the Certainty of Machines:” Caste, Religion, and Agency
Politicizing caste in labor struggle: caste and class in domestic workers’ movement in India
Informal Labor Blues: Gender, Caste and Resistance
Claiming shit, rejecting caste: towards an alternative Dalit subjectivity through urban infrastructural politics
Political and Philosophical Thought in Bengal: Reflections on Self, Freedom, and Solidarity
Panel Group
Session: Session 3: Thursday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: University A/B
Floor: Floor 2
The panel provides an account of the diverse trajectories and richness of political and philosophical thoughts in 19th- and 20th century Bengal. Despite their disparate concentrations, the papers are connected by their interlocutors’ concerns with self, freedom, and solidarity, among others. The papers also point towards the importance of Islamicate ideas and concerns about religious solidarity in political and philosophical reflections in the region. Two of the papers engage with Abul Hashim (1905-1974), an important but somewhat forgotten political leader and scholar from Bengal. The first paper presents Hashim’s Islamism as an example of decolonial thought, which seeks to envision the ideological foundations of the postcolonial state that would be able to produce equality, inclusion, progress, and, above all, freedom for its people. The second paper provides an analysis of Hashim’s theory of the ethical self, which advances a critique of liberal individualism by invoking Islamicate concepts of human nature (fitra). The third paper examines the political and ideological positions of Huseyn Suhrawardy (1892-1963), the last prime minister of British Bengal, and M.K. Gandhi in their response to communal division and violence between the Hindus and Muslims. The paper argues that despite Suharwardy’s initial differences with and resistance to Gandhi, he would eventually come to adopt a position similar to the model envisioned by Gandhi during his visit to Noakhali at the height of the communal riots of 1946. The fourth paper engages with the works of Fakir Lalon Shah’s (d. 1890), a philosopher-poet of Bengal, and argues that his philosophical formulations though informed by Vaishnavism, Buddhism, and Sufi Islam, offers his own conditions for the emancipation of the self. Taken together, the papers provide an understanding of the foundations of Bangladeshi political and philosophical thought.
Liberating Enslaved Humanity: Critiques of Modern Politics and Visions of Islamic Alternatives in the Decolonial Political Thought of Abul Hashim
Ethical Harmony: Fitrat as a Critique of Liberal Individualism
Suhrawardy Joining Hands with Gandhi after the Noakhali Riots in 1946
Lalon's Idea of the Spiritual
Sites of resistance, narratives of struggle: the politics of peace and protest in postwar Sri Lanka
Panel Group
Session: Session 3: Thursday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: University C/D
Floor: Floor 2
The protests that unfolded in Sri Lanka in 2022 ruptured the political fabric of the country and helped shape new narratives of what meaningful resistance can accomplish. Since independence in 1947, Sri Lanka has experienced prolonged periods of ethnic conflict, militarization, democratic transition, consolidation, and economic crisis. While there is a prominent history of resistance and protests in Sri Lanka, this panel examines postwar examples of resistance in the country as they intersect with gender, media, development, and political economy (on a macro and micro scale) to contextualize the current moment. From the cries of rural women protesters dispossessed of their savings and land to the cries of democratic protesters in Colombo faced with urban development projects in the midst of an unprecedented economic crisis ("Are we supposed to eat roads?"), these papers use interviews, participatory action research, and discourse analysis to examine how current tensions and themes in Sri Lanka intersect with the ongoing economic upheavals and failures of postwar justice and reconciliation. The panel, made up of interdisciplinary scholars, offers diverse insights to help better understand the current economic crisis and further highlight the rich history of dissent and resistance in the country.
Rejecting Development? Resistance, Reconciliation, and GotaGoGama Protests in Sri Lanka
Gender, land and resistance in transitional societies: An Examination of Land Rights Protests in Eastern Sri Lanka
Debt and Resistance: A Study on Agrarian Women’s Protests in Sri Lanka
Reporting to Resist: Practicing Peace Journalism in Sri Lanka
Public Sector Stories: Ethnographies of the Indian state
Panel Group
Session: Session 3: Thursday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Parlour Room 627
Floor: Floor 6
The Indian state has undergone profound transformations in the last few decades, including but not limited to liberalization. Our understanding of the state continues to be dominated by macro analyses and metrics like budgets and laws. While these approaches are important, they often overlook more processual and dynamic interactions that various actors have in the state. Ethnography, with its emphasis on observations and interviews, allows us to take a different view: one that collapses the macro, meso, and micro in the experiences and interactions that individuals have. What can ethnography tell us about India's public sector? Through studies of women community health workers in Punjab, students at a public university in Delhi, accountability reforms in Bihar, and private sector professionals promoting financial inclusion, this panel will discuss the everyday socialities engendered by and in the name of the public sector in India, as well as the methodological and theoretical value of ethnographic approaches to understanding the Indian state. In keeping with Laura Bear and Nayanika Mathur’s (2015) call to investigate the public good as part of a broader conduct of life, the panel will map diverse conflicts and collaborations involved in the pursuit of public goods in public institutions and beyond, thus following “policies into their complex social entanglements.”
Brokering marginality: The political brokerage of India’s ASHAs
At the crossroads of diversity and austerity: crisis of the public university in India
Claims, Complaints and Democratization of the local state in India
Financial Inclusion and the poverty alleviation mandate
The Political Ecology of the Anthropocene in South Asia
Round Table
Session: Session 3: Thursday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Parlour Room 629
Floor: Floor 6
Scholars in many disciplines are anxious about the dramatic environmental changes occurring around us today. Human action has evidently precipitated the earth into a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. In recent years, the academic community has united across disciplinary boundaries to agree with the scientific finding that the human species has become a planetary force, although scholars in the humanities and social scientists continue to insist that the undifferentiated category of human does not account for the ways in which race, caste, and other hierarchies shape exposure to and responsibility for ecological emergencies. South Asia (including Afghanistan) covers 5 million sq. km, or about three percent of the land area of our planet. But it is inhabited by one-quarter of the world’s population, hundreds of millions of whom are still heavily dependent on agriculture. Anthropocene environmental processes have occurred and are occurring there with an intensity unmatched in any comparable region. It is also a region that has witnessed a succession of major imperial and other state formations that also confronted continuous resistance to their hegemony. Finally, the political life of the region plays out in its environment, with antagonists using and modifying their lived settings and in turn, shifting environmental terrains causing social and political realignments. Human actions have changed flora, and among animals, have promoted and protected commensals and domesticates while suppressing or extirpating other species. Vital resources – vegetation, water, wood – have been contested between the many and weak and few but powerful. The participants in this round table session will address various facets of the processes outlined above in the context of the revolutionary (or catastrophic) changes that have gathered pace in the past millennium to bring the peoples of South Asia and the world to the crossroads where they now stand.
Exploring Labor
Panel Group
Session: Session 3: Thursday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Parlour Room 638
Floor: Floor 6
.
Pain in Creation: Examining the Experience of Dhaka Weaving in Eastern Nepal
Intimate Distance and Distant Intimacies: Hygiene, Intimacy, and the Making of the Urban Middle Class in the Domestic Labor Households of Karachi
Seeking Equilibrium: The Government of India and the Estate Labour Market in Malaya, 1927-1942
Gasping for Air: Dust, Silicosis and Risk in 20th Century India
Archaeological and Historical Cultural Heritage Documentation and Preservation in South Asia: Foundational Practices and Innovative Solutions
Panel Group
Session: Session 5: Friday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Assembly Room
Floor: Floor 1
The archaeological and historical cultural heritage of South Asia spans millennia, and reflects a diverse range of adaptive strategies, cultural traditions and political fluctuations. Four leading scholars, 3 men and 1 woman, with first hand experience excavating, documenting and conserving important sites or historical towns will highlight the various approaches used in different regions of Pakistan and India. Archaeological excavations expose a site to new processes of erosion and degradation that have the potential of destroying important evidence of the past. Conservation of excavated remains and standing historical monuments present the challenge of deciding what should be reburied, what should be conserved for public access and what needs to be reconstructed to avoid further degradation. Guidelines for conservation and preservation have been established by UNESCO and the International Committee on Monuments and Sites, but these approaches are guided by local conditions and availability of funds and resources. Presenter 1 will focus on the World Heritage site of Indus site of Dholavira, Gujarat, India to provide an example of how the Archaeological Survey of India has addressed the issues at a major site in a remote region. Presenter 2 will focus on the Indus type site of Harappa, Pakistan, which was badly looted of bricks in the 1850s. The site has been excavated on and off for over 100 years and numerous different approaches will be discussed, including the most recent efforts in 2023. Presenter 3 will focus on the modern port town of Gwadar, Pakistan to illustrate the approaches that use community involvement to conserve historical buildings in a rapidly developing modern port. Presenter 4 will discuss the conservation and rehabilitation of Varun Dev Temple, Manora, Pakistan, to show how conservation can play a role in supporting diverse communities and integrate local communities in preserving their shared heritage.
Preventive Conservation of a World Heritage Bronze Age Site in India: Learning Outcomes and Case Studies from Dholavira, Gujarat
Excavations and Conservation at Harappa, Pakistan:1986-2023
Conservation of Historical Monuments in Pakistan: Example of the Portuguese and Omani Period in Gwadar
Conservation of Varun Dev temple, Manora Island, Karachi
Evolving History, Evolving Functions: The Madrasah in South Asia
Panel Group
Session: Session 5: Friday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Caucus Room
Floor: Floor 1
As an institution that travelled to South Asia from western Islamic lands, the madrasah has undoubtedly played an important role in Muslim education over several centuries. Paradoxically though, in the South Asian context, madrasahs or Islamic seminaries where traditionalist Muslim scholars (the ‘ulama) are educated, assumed the normative status of bastions of ‘traditional Islam’ concurrent with and in imitation of the establishment of ‘modern’ colonial institutions of learning in the region. In the contemporary context, with the perceived alarm over political Islam and Muslim ‘militancy’, especially in the context of the rise and more recent reincarnation of the Taliban, madrasahs have come into particularly sharp focus in journalistic discourse and policy circles. But these dominant popular discourses on madrasahs, that often seep into scholarship as well, perhaps obfuscate and render further arcane, instead of clarifying and adding substantive analytical density to, our understanding of the precise educational functions and socio-political significance of madrasahs today and in history, within South Asia and in South Asian diasporic communities around the world. This panel addresses some of these lacunae from multiple disciplinary perspectives by considering the rich and complex heritage, as well as the contemporary salience, of madrasah traditions of knowledge in South Asia, among South Asian diasporic communities, and on virtual spaces. This is a gender inclusive panel that includes scholars based in South Asia and the US at different career stages.
How important were madāris really in producing the best ‘ulama? A view from studies of South Asia, c. 1100-1800 AD
Building Islam: A Micro-history of Islamic Education and its Economic Base in Multan
Regulating Madrasahs in Pakistan: Finally and Forevermore?
Navigating Tradition and Modernity in Muslim Girls’ Religious Education: A Tale of Two Institutions in India and Canada
Structure & Spontaneity in Sufi-nomics
Panel Group
Session: Session 5: Friday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Senate Room A
Floor: Floor 1
Sufism has often been described as the “mystical dimension” of Islam, suggesting a spiritual discipline unconcerned with worldly affairs. However, Sufi texts and practices are now recognized by historians and anthropologists as key sites for the articulation and resolution of spiritual and practical tensions around the role of money in Islamicate societies. Recent scholarship has shown how South Asian Sufi discourses both mirror and disrupt the logics of the economic systems within which they are inescapably enmeshed: from critiques of the corrupting inflows of new-world silver in late-Mughal India (Kaicker, 2022); to practices of “enchanted” entrepreneurship in colonial Bombay (Green, 2011); and anxieties produced by bureaucratic regimes of the neo-liberal state in contemporary Delhi (Taneja, 2017). This panel builds upon this scholarship to consider how money and economic forces underpin the ritualized and hierarchical structures of Sufi shrines, and the spontaneous entanglements of Sufi saints (alive or dead) and their devotees in such spaces. We focus on Sufi shrines as sacred sites representing hubs of robust economic activity, from patron-client relations that sustain shrines in Tamil Nadu (Speaker 1) to a graveyard-centered economy of “applied cosmological” services in Mughal Delhi (Speaker 2). At the same time, the tombs (actual or memorial) of the interred saints emit barakat, a sacred potency that transforms these shrines into a spiritual marketplace of healing in, for example, Gujarat (Speaker 3). Because these shrines paradoxically represent both sources of “worldly” economic productivity but also the spiritual economics of barakat, Muslims in Uttar Pradesh sometimes draw on Islamic frameworks—the distinction between dīn (life lived in accordance with God’s will) and duniya (“the world”)—to navigate this markedly modern paradox in everyday life (Speaker 4). These papers show that Sufi shrines are vital to understanding the shifting conditions of India’s political, social, and economic past and present.
Sahibs, Saints, and Money: Patron-Client Relations at a South Indian Sufi Shrine
Buried treasure: A graveyard economy in late-Mughal Delhi
Brokering Barakat: Sidi Women’s Mediation of Ritual Power in Ahmedabad, Gujarat
Money and Materiality: Making Sense of Sufism and Caste through the Dīn-Duniyā Distinction
Corridor Aesthetics: Hindutva on the Ground
Panel Group
Session: Session 5: Friday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Senate Room B
Floor: Floor 1
The last several years have seen—on the part of the Modi administration and its regional allies—the construction and heralding of “corridors” (so called in both English and Hindi) designed to link sacred centers and sacred rivers in major religious cities across north India: Ujjain, Banaras, Vindhyachal (2021-), and soon, apparently, Vrindavan. What is the power of the “corridor aesthetic” that unites them? In this panel we investigate the vectors of protection, destruction, and reconstruction that have shaped—and sometimes resisted—this phenomenon. Speaker 1 takes us to the most famous act of right-wing Hindu destruction, the demolition of the Babri Mosque, and shows how a new sense of physical horizons developed in Bombay in consequence—a string of “Muslim Mohallas” sought to be isolated as “problem areas.” Speaker 2 takes us to Ekta Nagar, the “City of Unity” created as the cultural and physical context for the Sardar Sarovar Dam in the valley of the Narmada River. It emerges as a textbook example of “chronophagy,” the anaesthetization and disavowal of the past through the constitutive violence of the state. Speaker 3 shows how the eminent domain claimed by the state in the creation of such corridors has sometimes been opposed by an equal and opposite force—deities whose place-based powers are called upon to enliven and protect communities the state sees as “encroachers.” The architecture is hardly uniform. Speaker 4 focuses on the “main line” of Corridors now extending from Gujarat to Banaras, showing how they are designed to project youth and development (vikas) on the one hand and a determination to rescue—and articulate—an endangered ancient Hinduness (jirnoddhar) on the other. Often the institution of the museum, suitably modernized, is employed as internal commentary on what a corridor should mean.
“The Politics of Horizons: Contestations, Continuities and Destructions”
"The Temple in the Eminent Domain Regime"
“Ekta Nagar: Chronophagic Nature in an Eco-spiritual Corridor”
“Corridor Raj: From Ujjain to Kashi”
Un-Structuring the City: Encounters with Infrastructures, Institutions, and Belonging in Urban South Asia
Panel Group
Session: Session 5: Friday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Conference Room 2
Floor: Floor 2
This panel focuses on the “speculative” nature and promises of urban development projects and movements as they affect and are affected by everyday realities and marginalized experiences. It addresses the changing and selective jurisdiction of progress/dispossession, freedom/surveillance, national/local, nature/concrete in “multiple and competing knowledge producing and world making projects” amidst various actors and actions (Björkman 2021, 4). Instead of seeing the South Asian city shaped by policies alone, “worlding practices of cities” gesture us to the complex assemblages and ontologies of human and nonhuman agencies (McCann, Roy and Ward 2013). For Ong (2011, 12), “worlding” implies taking everyday practices as “constitutive, spatializing, and signifying gestures” that “creatively imagine and shape alternative social visions and configurations (or “worlds”).” It problematizes the ways that mega-infrastructure projects enforce a top-down nationalist understanding of belonging to the city without considering those most impacted and dispossessed in the process and aftermath(Sajjad, Javed 2022). At the same time, to unsettle the urban means to address the ecological and environmental transformations that join equivocal claims and meditations among institutional actors and local authorities. We invite panelists to consider the politics, practices, and imaginaries of/in urban space(s) to address the structured and spontaneous ways that institutions, infrastructure, development, and belonging shape the city in South Asia. In what ways does the processual nature of cities then help us to observe the quotidian “improvisation” of public spaces (Anjaria 2016) as it comes to confront universals of environmental conservation (Baviskar 2020) and aspirations for modernist plans (Holston 1989; Daeschsel 2011)? How are institutions, infrastructures, memory, and identity claimed and negotiated in everyday narratives and encounters with the urban space?
Public transport infrastructure: Understanding gender, class and environmental inequality in Pakistan
Securitizing the Pakistani University
Mapping Cities, Mapping Cinema
Foresting the City: Political ecology and climatic urbanism of the Miyawaki Urban Forests in Islamabad
Citing Canons, Contesting Contexts
Panel Group
Session: Session 5: Friday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Conference Room 3
Floor: Floor 2
In The Idea of Indian Literature, Preetha Mani argues that the modernist short story in Hindi and Tamil, "cites" specific character types as a means to create both connections to a certain historical canon, and conversely, to elaborate a new context in which those citations are enacted. Taking this argument as a point of departure, this panel asks how citation and citationary practices contest, conventionalize or contextualize canons and counter-canons across the expressive landscape of South Asia. While citation or the mention/use of pre-existing or pre-articulated ideas, thought, style or form, is a major part of scholarly work, less attention has been directed towards its theoretical applications in understanding and exploring South Asian expressive traditions, including but not limited to art, literature and performance. Exploring how citation both plays with tradition and locates a work in certain discursive genealogies, this panel aims to generate fresh dialogue about the nature of canon formation and its contexts in South Asia. For this purpose, the panel adopts an interdisciplinary approach, centering the concept of citation as a keyword, and negotiating the many manifestations of this concept as it applies across temporal, spatial and cultural geographies. The panel includes presentations from a range of disciplinary perspectives— literary and performance studies, religious studies, art history, reception studies, and emergent conversations in race and gender studies, that not only explore canonical structures, but also the deviations, divergences, convergences, and conditions that allow for their contestation, adding to the study of South Asia in dialogue with the major themes of the Annual Conference itself.
Ephemeral Citation: Landscape, Memory, and Sense-Making in Early Modern Tamil Performance
Mewar’s 18th century ‘European Concoctions’: Parody, Performance and Race
Partitioned by Politics, Sutured by Song - The border crossings of the Protest Song from Pakistan to Sri Lanka - Via India
Intertextual Transformations in Poetics Manuals
Qawwals in Hindustani classical music, c. 1720 to the present
Panel Group
Session: Session 5: Friday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Conference Room 4
Floor: Floor 2
Historical work by Katherine Schofield has traced the origins of khyal to a Sufi nexus and shows them to have been high status singers (2010). Neuman, in his 1980 ethnography also reports the major khyal gharanas to have been established by qawwals (1980). However, in today’s India, qawwals and the genre they sing, qawwali, are seen as having little to do with ‘classical’ music, and qawwals are of a much lower status than classical singers. Similarly in Pakistan, the greater ownership towards qawwali as a distinctly ‘Muslim’ marker of the Pakistani identity has further reinforced divisions from its classical music roots, particularly for its qawwal performers, many of whom have been hereditary performers of both khyal and qawwali. In this panel, we connect historical, ethnographic and oral historical work spanning today’s India and Pakistan to explore khyal as a legacy of qawwals, and its changing status, including with what became established and canonised as ‘classical’ music in India prior to Partition. We include what are now major centers and well-known lineages, notably the Delhi qawwal bacche, as well as musicians from other lineages in towns far from Delhi.
Khayāl and the qawwāls of Delhi, from Muhammad Shah’s court to the Gwalior gharānā
Beyond Qawwali - Listening to Songs of the Qawwal Bachche
The Constituent Lineages of the Qawwāl Bachche Tradition
Khyal in the Court of the Saints in Fatehpur Sikri and Salon
Of the Body Politic, For the Body Politic: Counting Embodiment, Making Data
Panel Group
Session: Session 5: Friday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Conference Room 5
Floor: Floor 2
This panel is Part 1 of 2 of the multi-series session ‘Of the Body Politic, For the Body Politic.’ Addressing embodiment through technologies of defining the body, such as certification, census, data, face recognition, this panel highlights the ways that statistics, definitions, and procedures that are often thought of as scientific come to shape bodily experience. The four speakers on this panel bring in multidisciplinary work from anthropology, the history of science, sociology and demography, drawing upon examples from clinical trials, disability data, public safety, and childbirth to discuss the ways in which numbers and definitions imbricate people and their physical and emotional needs in networks of citizenship, labor, and violence. The panel elucidates how science - particularly data and/when seen as science - creates new modes of exclusion, extraction, and surveillance which collide with and exacerbate existing hierarchies of race, class, caste, gender, and ability. It raises and responds to questions around who - and what - comes to be counted as data, asking: how does the body become data across differing sets of circumstances, and what might we learn as we put these examples in conversation? Which specific kinds of bodily experiences are seen as worth counting, and which others are ignored?
Datafied Bodies: Postcolonial Extractions and the “Globalization” of Clinical Trials
Infrastructuring Exclusion Through Data: Disability, Certification and Citizenship in India
Narratives of Stillbirth and the Production of Stillbirth Statistics in India
Facing off with the State: Producing Gendered Safety Subjects through Facial Recognition in Policing in India
South Asian Media
Panel Group
Session: Session 5: Friday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Capitol Ballroom A
Floor: Floor 2
.
Discursive Constructions of Emergent South Asian Deities in News Media During the Covid-19 Pandemic
Citizenship, Gender, and Entrepreneurialism on Indian Reality TV
Leapfrogging Modernity: Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE) and the Making of Cold War Developmentalism
Enchantment in Bengali homes: Kiranmala’s journey from fairytale warrior to TV heroine
Exploring Dalit Identity
Panel Group
Session: Session 5: Friday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Capitol Ballroom B
Floor: Floor 2
.
Loving & Writing Towards Liberation: Black and Dalit Women’s Radical Visions in the Black and Dalit Panther Parties
Challenging traditional Dalit Aesthetics: An analysis of structural elements in Ajay Navaria’s “Hello Premchand”.
(Un)guising casteism in Pakistan: Where are the Dalits in Pakistan’s literature?
Casteized Filth and Radical Affects in Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable
Of Wells, Premchand, and Dalit Feminism: Formation of Dalit Political Identity in Modern Hindi Literature
Female Labor: (Im)Mobility and Resistance
Panel Group
Session: Session 5: Friday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Wisconsin Ballroom
Floor: Floor 2
.
Outsiders in the City: Women in Informal Work and Everyday Resistance
Genealogies of Care: The Role of Women Handlers in School-Based Feeding Programs in Kolkata
Beyond Financial Success: Examining the Relationship Between Economic and Social Mobility Among Women in Islamabad, Pakistan
Making a Home Away from Home: Diasporic Experiences of Jumma Indigenous Peoples in Canada
The Rise of World Literature: Taking Stock of the Dominant Western Narrative and the Production of Counternarratives from the Global South
Panel Group
Session: Session 5: Friday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: University A/B
Floor: Floor 2
In this panel, women writers, translators, and scholars explore structures within established literature as set by the Western canon and spontaneity as improvisation which requires action. Action in the present moment itself is predicated on the past and it is our pasts within our specific cultural and literary contexts that we draw on to allow for new potentials in the future of literature. Panelists will discuss how non-Western literary practices inform their work. Their perspectives on literary traditions from around the world address how contemporary literature has long been informed by non-anglophone traditions, which have largely been erased, ignored or relegated to the “periphery.” Their conversation of the present nearness of these traditions raises questions about prolonged global inequities both on and off the page, perpetuated by the gatekeepers of narrative in the academic, media, and literary arts industries. The panel participants will offer perspectives concerning the literary forms, themes, and practices from South Asia (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan) that are ignored, erased, or pushed to a “periphery” within literature and creative writing programs as well as in literary production. Panelists include scholars, critics, and active producers of English literature. These panelists speak from within and outside of the academy and find themselves grappling with dominant Western narratives no matter where they are situated. The diversity of experience among the panelists offers a well-rounded perspective of anglophone literary production in the West while troubling that normative structure using non-Eurocentric literary practices toward a more equitable global literature.
Challenging Marco Polo’s narrative of the “Rotten Orient” and Unearthing the Revolutionary Narrative of Queen Rudramadevi
Afghan Literature Across the World, Getting Beyond Stereotypical Tropes.
Examining the need for more publishing opportunities for South Asian writers to share their complex narratives without succumbing to the “white gaze” as described by Toni Morrison
Inserting non-Western Literary References in the Anglophone Novel to Destabilize the Western Narrative: A Discussion of Shabnam, a Bengali novel about Afghanistan.
Voyage Out: Oceans, Genders, Histories
Panel Group
Session: Session 5: Friday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: University C/D
Floor: Floor 2
The past two decades have seen an explosion of scholarship on oceans, borders, and migrations across broader South Asian worlds. Unfettered by colonial mappings and histories, scholars have seen the “oceanic” turn as a generative sightline for complicating settled forms of citizenship, nation, race, language, space and so much more. Such expansiveness in geographies of contact and collaboration demands equally expansive histories of gender(s) across and within Oceanic networks. How do gender(s) translate, transact, and take shape within multiple Oceanic colonial and postcolonial worlds of profit and pleasure? How do we conjure gender(s) comparatively across temporalities, spatialities and disciplinary formations? What kinds of archives emerge from such a focus on gender(s)? Our panel is one attempt to think gender(s) as myriad Oceanic forms, mutating and migrating through various “methods” of inquiry: performance, religion, language, history and sexuality. From Rangoon to Colombo, from speculative histories of mid-twentieth century dowries and domesticity, Speaker 1 invites us to reimagine Oceanic cartographies of gendered occupation and settlement. Speaker 2 moves between Indian and Caribbean performers, where “cultural jamming” of women’s plantation songs, drag shows and filmic landscapes produces transregional flows, blockages and intimate improvisations of gendered bodies. For Speaker 4, songbook and music album dissemination and transliterated creolization of pre-Partition nineteenth-century qasida devotional, poetic praise songs brought across the kala pani of the Indian and Atlantic Oceans to the Caribbean by Urdu-speaking Indian Muslim indentured laborers, lay the groundwork for gender(s) as a lived vernacular world. Speaker 3 speaks to the broader epistemological quagmires of comparative thinking across and within oceanic spaces, asking what it means to think of ocean sex outside colonial categories? This panel is thus an invitation, an ambitious provocation (in the best sense of the word), and a voyage out of our settled histories of Oceanic worlds.
Accimar Panam: Transacting Gender Across the Indian Ocean
Transoceanic Jamming of Women’s Performance between India and the Caribbean
Les Indes Fabuleueses, or Oceanic Sex
The Indo-Caribbean Qasida: Muslim Songs and Gendered Performance
Problematizing Depictions of Female Temple/Hereditary/Courtesan Performing Communities vis-a-vis histories of Performativity, Sexuality, Subalternity, and Human Rights Frameworks in Colonial and Postcolonial India
Round Table
Session: Session 5: Friday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Parlour Room 627
Floor: Floor 6
In the past four decades, a number of scholarly discussions have centered around the body of the female temple and/or hereditary, and courtesan dancer in the context of South Asia and the classical dances of India. These discussions take into consideration the caste locations, colonial oppressions, gender, and performance cultures of the artists. However, most of the academic studies have been centered in the context of the female temple performers of the South of India (Kersenboom, O’Shea, Soneji, Ramberg, Thakore, Meduri, et all.). This panel presents scholars who bring to light perspectives of other regional courtesan, hereditary, and temple dancer communities in less researched areas such as Delhi, Maharashtra and Odisha. In doing so, it aims to present a heterogeneous picture and showcase a multiplicity of voices of the female performing communities in the context of the Indian subcontinent. It brings to light the multiple discourses surrounding the figure of the courtesan, hereditary, and temple dancers in late colonial and postcolonial India, ranging from the viewpoints of colonial to nationalist officials to classical dancers, and problematizes scholarly approaches in which the voices of the dancers remain largely absent. The discussion methodologically relies on the depictions of these artists in the colonial and postcolonial archives (18th, 19th and mid-20th century). It also includes a diversity of oral perspectives from across the Indian performing cultures. This roundtable includes researchers working on histories of female courtesans, temple, and/or hereditary dancers from across India, who will bring an applied perspective to the discussion. The roundtable presentations allocating 5-7 minutes for each speaker aims to bring to light a multiplicity of archival representations and ethnographic perspectives of female temple/ hereditary dancers, from across Southern, Northern, Western and Eastern India.
Affect, Ecology, and Interpretation in the Anthropocene
Panel Group
Session: Session 5: Friday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Parlour Room 629
Floor: Floor 6
.
Tejīmolā in Transition: Sounding More-than-Human “Becoming-with” in Assamese Songs and Poetry in Burhī Āir Sādhu
Notes on Decomposition
Wretched River? The Affectual Ecology of Urban River Lai in Punjab, Pakistan
Transcending Methodological Nationalism: Rethinking South Asia's History with Japan
Panel Group
Session: Session 5: Friday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Parlour Room 634
Floor: Floor 6
The rising power of the Japanese Empire in the late nineteenth century was viewed with both apprehension and admiration in South Asia, as it represented a symbol of non-Western and anti-Western modernity. This ambivalent attitude towards Japan continued throughout the twentieth century, as Japan's economic and technological prowess grew, and its political influence expanded. The interactions between South Asia and Japan have indeed played a significant role in shaping the history and development of modern South Asia. Unfortunately, these intersections have often been overlooked or understudied by scholars due to various reasons, including language barriers, lack of resources, and a limited focus on nationalist or regional perspectives. However, this panel aims to shed light on the various linkages and connections between (post)colonial India and Japan, exploring their political, intellectual, social, economic, and religious ties over the course of the twentieth century. By adopting a transnational approach, the panelists seek to move beyond the limitations of methodological nationalism in history writing, providing a new lens to understand the complex and multifaceted history of South Asia. Overall, this panel represents an important contribution to the study of South Asian history in relation to Japan, highlighting the significance of transnational linkages and connections in shaping the region's past and present.
India and Japan in the Nuclear Age: Post-War Pan-Asianism (1945-1967)
Indo-Pacific Entanglement: Japan and the development of Capitalism in Madras from 1904-41
Academic contact zones: educational institutions as sites of trans-imperial cooperation between Indians and Japanese
A Religious History of Pan-Asianism: The Case of Rash Behari Bose in Japan, 1915-1945
Local Practices
Panel Group
Session: Session 5: Friday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Parlour Room 638
Floor: Floor 6
.
The Impact of Rootlessness on the Indigenous Healing Practices of Rohingya Refugees: Analyzing health outcomes in refugee camp settings in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh
Transformation of the Relationship between Alpine Plants, the Body, and Tibetan Medicine: A Case Study of Tawang, Northeast India
The embodiment of virtue among traditional healers
Global Knowledge Networks and Native Lives in the Natural World of Western Ghats
Author Meets Critics Roundtable on SherAli Tareen’s Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship after Empire (Columbia University Press, 2023)
Round Table
Session: Session 6: Friday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Off-Site
Floor: Off-Site
I am proposing an author meets critics roundtable panel on SherAli Tareen’s new monograph Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship after Empire (Columbia University Press, 2023). Friendship—particularly interreligious friendship—offers both promise and peril. After the end of Muslim political sovereignty in South Asia, how did Muslim scholars grapple with the possibilities and dangers of Hindu-Muslim friendship? How did they negotiate the incongruities between foundational texts and attitudes toward non-Muslims that were informed by the premodern context of Muslim empire and the realities of British colonialism, which rendered South Asian Muslims into a political minority? In this groundbreaking book, Tareen explores how leading South Asian Muslim thinkers imagined and contested the boundaries of Hindu-Muslim friendship from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. He argues that often what was at stake in Muslim scholarly discourse and debates on Hindu-Muslim friendship were unresolved tensions and fissures over the place and meaning of Islam in the modern world. Perilous Intimacies considers a range of topics, including Muslim scholarly translations of Hinduism, Hindu-Muslim theological polemics, the question of interreligious friendship in the Qur’an, intra-Muslim debates on cow sacrifice, and debates on emulating Hindu customs and habits. Based on the close reading of an expansive and multifaceted archive of Arabic, Persian, and Urdu sources, this book illuminates the depth, complexity, and profound divisions of the Muslim intellectual traditions of South Asia. Perilous Intimacies also provides timely perspective on the historical roots of present-day Hindu-Muslim relations, considering how to overcome thorny legacies and open new horizons for interreligious friendship. This gender inclusive Roundtable panel brings together both senior and early career scholars, from multiple disciplinary persuasions including History, Anthropology, and Religious Studies, to probe and discuss the intellectual and political implications of this book for South Asian Studies and for contemporary South Asia more broadly.
"Fish, Flake, Food, and Forge: Advancements in the Analysis of South Asian Archaeological Materials"
Panel Group
Session: Session 6: Friday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Assembly Room
Floor: Floor 1
Archaeologists work closely with several different fields in the natural sciences to develop appropriate methods to analyze ancient crafts, technologies, and traditions in order to learn more about social structures related to power, production, exchange, and consumption in the past. The papers presented in this panel will focus the archaeological advancements through analytical chemistry, archaeometallurgy, archaeozoology, and mineralogy that have given further insights into the South Asian material record. This panel will bring together four scholars from both the United States and South Asia. Three of the panelists will present in person and the fourth will be a virtual presentation. The first paper of the panel will demonstrate how archaeometallurgy, in combination with experimental bloomery smelting and computer vision, can reveal the different kinds of incentives placed upon Early Historic Blacksmiths working on monumental religious architecture. The second paper of the panel will discuss the excavations at the Buddhist complex of Zar Dheri, Hazara, Pakistan and will demonstrate how X-ray Fluorescence (XRF) analysis of the mineralogy has been used to source raw materials used in the creation of stone sculptures. The sourcing of the raw materials may link the site to a wider tradition of evolving sculptural styles. The third paper presents the results archeozoological analysis and faunal remains of fish from the Indus Valley Tradition and Um-an-Nar Culture of Oman (c. 2500-1900 BCE). These results will demonstrate both the season of fishing occupation as well as the trade and exchange of fish between these two regions. The final paper will show how Gas Chromatography Mass Spectrometry (GC MS) can be used in the analysis of organic residues in terracotta cooking vessels in order to generate knowledge of ancient diets and cooking traditions in South Asia.
Archaeometallurgy and Machine Learning: A Synthesis of Techniques using Early Historic Iron Artifacts from Bhamala and Badalpur Stupas (c. 100 – 400 CE).
Mineralogical Analysis of Schist Stone Reported from Zar Dheri Buddhists’ Complex Mansehra, Pakistan
New Perspectives on Maritime Trade and Seasonality between the Indus Civilization and Oman: A Fishy Perspective
Analyzing Organic Compounds in Ancient Pottery Residues: A Methodological Approach for Archaeological Samples from Badalpur Monastery in Taxila Valley, Pakistan
Law and Liberation
Panel Group
Session: Session 6: Friday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Caucus Room
Floor: Floor 1
In traditional South Asian thought and beyond, there is sometimes recognized a conflict between norms, which tend to define and restrict, and emancipation, which seeks freedom beyond the constraint of rules. This panel brings together four scholars to explore the dynamic, and often productive, tension between “law and liberation” in ancient and modern South Asian religions. Speaker 1 explores the coalescence in early dharmaśāstra literature between two distinctive ethical strands, one that is differential and based in inherited norms, and the other that is universal and emerging from contemplative renouncer traditions. Speaker 2 examines the conundrum of Yudhiṣṭhira in the Mahābhārata and the text’s different attempts to allow him to fulfill the norms of his worldly duties while pursuing the freedom sought by renouncers. Speaker 3 dives into inscriptions of the late first millennium to demonstrate how endowments to Brahmanical settlements were modeled on the exemptions granted to ascetic communities, and sought materially to put modes of religiosity focused on the fulfillment of norms on par with those that focused on emancipation from the world. Finally, speaker 4 challenges any easy dichotomy between the normative and the liberative by exploring how the rules and discipline of the modern Peace Grove Institute in Nepal afford “a culturally appropriate social framework that protects young women and girls from criticism while freeing them to self-manifest and self-cultivate.” Collectively, these papers contribute to our understanding of the productive tension in South Asian religions between renunciation and life in the world and take us into four places where law and liberation co-exist, sometimes intimately.
The Yogas of the Supreme Self: An Upaniṣad in the Dharmasūtras
Objections to Renunciation in "The Persuasion of Yudhiṣṭhira"
Agrahāra, Parihāra, Vihāra: Legal Criteria for Marking the Ideal Brahmin Household as a Quasi-Ascetic Space
Red Robed and Laughing: Monastic Discipline as Freedom for Young Female Monastics in the Terai
Religion, Gender, and Self-Cultivation in India
Panel Group
Session: Session 6: Friday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Senate Room A
Floor: Floor 1
.
Stridharma as liberation: The collective making of Tamil Brahmin womanhood
Ever in Need?: The Limits of Women’s Empowerment Programs at the Christian Medical College, Vellore
Shifting Norms Shifting Futures: Gendered Tarot Reading Practices in Mumbai
Nationalist Streets/Colonial Cities: Visualizing Disobedient Bombay
Panel Group
Session: Session 6: Friday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Senate Room B
Floor: Floor 1
This panel proposes a scholarly conversation on the distinct historical processes that animated and informed disobedient action and nationalist politics in colonial Bombay in the 1930s. The papers will analyze a collection of documentary photographs compiled in a rare historical album in the Alkazi Collection in New Delhi named Collections of Photographs of Old Congress Party—K.L. Nursey. Comprised of over 200 black and white captioned photographs, the bound album offers a visual account of Civil Disobedience Movement in Bombay from early April 1930 with the commencement of the Salt Satyagraha to Gandhi’s departure for London to attend the Second Round Table Conference on 29 August 1931. The rich and compelling images in this collection portray anticolonial action in the form of protests, processions, and propaganda played out on the cosmopolitan and crowded streets of colonial Bombay. But the historical and visual themes captured in this hitherto under-explored photo-archive go beyond engaging nationalist historiography. Recognizing that civil disobedience in the city was deeply embedded in its urbanized social, cultural, and economic milieu, this panel brings together scholars of urban, gender, consumer, and cinema studies of Bombay/Mumbai to contextualize the diverse histories visualized in the folios of this image-object. Speaker 1 examines forms of colonial masculinity embodied by the cross-racial, baton-wielding Bombay police in direct confrontation with anticolonial women volunteers and explores colonial gender relations. Speaker 2 presents key architectural sites and ‘street furniture’ as a stage to the unfolding disobedient drama. Speaker 3 juxtaposes stills from 1930s Bombay cinema with photographs of the crowd of spectators to explore urban mass politics. Finally, Speaker 4 traces how women-led boycott movement sought to moralize consumption in both Indian markets and European business districts. In doing so, the panelists rethink modes of historical scholarship derived from and driven by visual materials.
The Stage of a Disobedient Bombay
Visualizing the Urban Crowd: Disobedient Collective Spectatorship
Boycotting Women: The Street Politics of Consumer Activism in Bombay, 1930-31
Hybrid Men, Disobedient Women: Colonial Policing and Gender in 1930s Bombay
Citizenship, Constitution, and Economy - VIRTUAL PANEL
Panel Group
Session: Session 6: Friday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Conference Room 1
Floor: Floor 2
.
Partition, Evacuation and Citizenship rights in South Asia
The Global Circulation of Marxism through Calcutta 1920s-1970s
The Corporation, Colony and Constitution – examining the Corporation as a contemporary centre of power in the Constitutional post-Colony
Structure and Spontaneity in making of private cities in Pakistan
The Interplay of Private Capital and Techno-fixes: An Ethnographic Study of Agtech Firms in India
Contemporary Social Issues of South Asia - VIRTUAL PANEL
Panel Group
Session: Session 6: Friday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Conference Room 2
Floor: Floor 2
.
Local State, Patronage and Social Movements in Post-colonial India
From Interspecies Conflict to Multispecies Politics: Narrating Human-Elephant Entanglements in Hambegamuwa, Sri Lanka
Covid-19 and the informal economy: A longitudinal study of the street food vendors in Delhi
Andāza: Of Land, Survey and Measurements
Thinking through Crisis: Dynamics of Immunity and Suspicion in India during COVID-19
Between hallucination and divine knowledge: Theorizing Māyā’ in middle Bangla literatures
Panel Group
Session: Session 6: Friday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Conference Room 3
Floor: Floor 2
Scholars have recently started to reconceptualize the geography of the production and consumption of middle Bangla literatures. Works remain to be done, however on understanding why certain stories traveled across time. Closely following the theme of this year’s conference on the dialectics of structure and spontaneity, this panel focuses on the enduring motif of ‘‘māyā’ in middle Bangla literatures. Since Bijaya Gupta’s fifteenth century Manasā-maṅgala, Cāṇḍ Sāḍagar, Behulā and other successive protagonists on quests have witnessed māyā’ or had inexplicable experiences. Since Mukunda’s sixteenth century Chandi-maṅgala, the apparition of the kamale kāmini— a young woman seated on a lotus at the center of a spectacular landscape in the middle of the ocean ingesting and regurgitating an elephant with ease—became a classic trope of narrating ‘māyā’. Focusing on the liminality and paradox of the episode, Speaker 1 shall show how the truth value of the vision is adjudicated in the narrative and becomes a model for subsequent retellings. Subsequent authors and audiences of middle Bangla literature expanded the subjunctive horizons of the trope. Focusing on an illusion by which human sacrifice is performed and reversed in Rūparāma’s seventeenth century Dharma-maṅgala, Speaker 2 tracks how this trope now is reversed to narrate a sign of villainy. With Speaker 3, the action shifts to the Mughal court in Annadā-maṅgala, where none other than Jahangir is subjected to Annada’s māyā to narrate novel historical concerns of property and sovereign will. Finally, moving beyond Hinduyāni sources, Speaker 4 interrogates the retellings of the trope in Musulmāni texts. Were these ‘māyā’ stories autotelic parodies, performing crucial cultural work or consumed purely for aesthetic enjoyment or perhaps acting as long-established narrative containers to negotiate new historical problems? In addressing these questions, this panel seeks to bring different approaches to the trope into conversation.
Magic and Maya in Rūparāma’s Dharma-maṅgala
Kamalā-kāminī-kuñjara as Māẏā
Goddess as wakil? Annada and the maya of property in Jahangir’s court.
FANTASY, HOAX, OR REVELATION? LITERARY TREATMENTS OF EXTRAORDINARY VISIONS IN EARLY MODERN BENGALI LITERATURE
Neither Courtly nor Local: Merchant-Patronized Painting and Literature in Early Modern Western India
Panel Group
Session: Session 6: Friday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Conference Room 4
Floor: Floor 2
The study of early modern literary and painting production in western India has long been bedeviled by discussions that tend to be framed within a binary distinction between royal, courtly, cosmopolitan or elite production on the one hand, and folk, local, or vernacular on the other. Artistic practice sponsored by courtly patrons partakes in pan-South Asian currents. The writers and artists come from elite status and training. The other is found in the bazaars and villages, and is characterized by regional and local styles. Its contours of practice are often considered untrained and lesser in value. Such classifications and historiographic bias are shared across wider areas of South Asian studies. Recent studies of literature and painting in early modern Rajasthan and Gujarat have problematized this binary model. Many non-courtly authors and artists were well-trained in their traditions; they were not “illiterate folk” performers. Nor were their patrons unsophisticated as they expressed preferences for literature and painting that spoke to the regions and elite worlds they inhabited, even though they may not be members of the inner courtly circles. The papers in this panel address this problem of “neither courtly nor local” with four finely tuned case studies. Two deal with literature patronized and written by members of merchant castes. Two address illustrated manuscripts and elaborate illustrated invitation letters patronized by members of Jain merchant castes and produced by a mix of Jain and non-Jain makers. We wager that looking at artistic traditions in two media in the same time and region will help us see beyond disciplinary boundaries. The respondent, an historian of early modern western India, will help bring into focus larger and new questions about patronage and artistic production, and political and intellectual claims of varied social groups and influential individuals.
Merchants: The Renaissance Men of Early Modern India?
Letters from the Local Bazaar: Unfurling Unseen Memories, Mobilities, and Maps of Udaipur, c. 1795
The Muddle in the Middle: Digambar Jain authors in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Jaipur
Visible Painters, Invisible Patrons: Eighteenth Century Jain Painted Manuscripts from Western India
Morality and Discursive Constructions of the Body in South Asia
Panel Group
Session: Session 6: Friday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Conference Room 5
Floor: Floor 2
This panel is Part 2 of the multi-series session ‘Of the Body Politic, For the Body Politic.’ Bringing historical, anthropological, and literary methods together this panel highlights how human and non-human bodies, and the relations between them, became sites for enacting and extending a variety of moral political projects in 20th and 21st century South Asia. The panel emphasizes the historical specificity of moral discourses surrounding care and corporeality and demonstrates how discursive and material constructions of the body are deeply intertwined with casted and gendered making of the empire, nation, and citizenship. Case studies range from the metaphorical and symbolic role of the “leprous” body in nationalist and welfare politics, discursive constructions of animal cruelty and suffering in the late colonial period, caste and desire in postcolonial literary imaginations, and moral altruism and surrogacy legislation in postcolonial India. Some of the questions this panel aims to raise include: What role does spectrality play in moral constructions of the body? What is the relationship between care, desire, and practices of policing? How do discourses of altruism and welfare end up solidifying social and material hierarchies? And finally, how do the bio-moral and bio-political intersect in the history and anthropology of the body in South Asia?
Policing Phooka: Bovine Bodies and the Governance of Animal Cruelty in Colonial India
Unclean Minds and Moral Lepers: Examining Rhetorics of Service and Morality in Gandhian Welfare in India from the 1930s to the 1970s
Death, Desire and Decay: Unpacking the Brahmin body in U.R Ananthamurthy's Samskara and other texts
Corporeal (In)Justice: Surrogacy Work and the Law in India
Indian Cinema and Its Publics
Panel Group
Session: Session 6: Friday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Capitol Ballroom A
Floor: Floor 2
.
Minor Stories Micro Communities: Indian Jews in Bollywood
Women Filming Bollywood: How Directors Actively De-Gender Film Sets
Of lifeless humans and animate idols: towards an atlas of death and dying in Hindi cinema
"Unimagined Communities": Women and the nation in early Partition cinema
‘Marvelization’ of Bollywood?: The emergence of shared cinematic universes in post-pandemic Hindi cinema
Articulations of Identity in South Asia
Panel Group
Session: Session 6: Friday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Capitol Ballroom B
Floor: Floor 2
.
Establishing Identity in a Globalized Context
Ram, Raj, and Rage: Projected Ideologies of Indigeneity in Rajamouli’s RRR
Indigenous historian(s) writes back: Reclaiming authorship and decolonizing state narratives on Kaptai dam, Bangladesh
Politics of Native and Non-Native Anthropology of South Asia
Thinking with Sexology in South Asia: Science at the Boundary
Panel Group
Session: Session 6: Friday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Wisconsin Ballroom
Floor: Floor 2
This panel mobilizes the semantic compass of the concept “boundary” to rethink the post/colonial and global histories of sexual science in and from South Asia. Dominant accounts of sexology have concentrated on its origins in the Western, primarily German, context as a distinct “Sexualwissenschaft” or institutionalized science of sex. But sexology was often itself a marginal form of knowledge-making that emerged at the edges of more well-established disciplines like biomedicine, psychiatry, anthropology, and zoology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and itself propelled technologies of endocrinology, population control, and eugenics across the globe. Underfunded, overextended, and barely “respectable,” sexology’s portability across disciplines depended on its apparent liminality as a para-scientific idiom—one which could threaten to become a constitutive principle for the organization of those disciplines. In turn, sexology itself partook in the creation of boundaries between global/local, colonial/national, literature/science, language/vernacular, savage/civilized, science/pornography, normal/deviant, elite/popular, and modernity/premodernity. Recognizing these tensions, recent scholarship like Sexology and Translation (2015) and A Global History of Sexual Science (2018), “Sexology and its Afterlives” (2021), and “The Science of Sex Itself” (2023), as well as more specifically South Asian histories of sexology like “Translating Sex: Locating Sexology in Indian History” (2020), Indian Sex Life (2020) and Sex, Law, and the Politics of Age (2021) have focused on the regional and multi-directional linguistic flows, translations, and networked capacities of sexology. Building on the urgency of this scholarship, this panel brings together papers that leverage the unstable status of sexology as a science in and across South Asia. Panel papers consider the concept-metaphor of boundary through debates about geopolitics, circulation, and translation in terms of centers, peripheries, metropoles, colonies, and alternative circulatory nodes; disciplinary and methodological boundaries between sexology and allied or antagonistic forms of knowledge; and distinctions between expert and popular modes of sexual knowledge production.
Cultivating ‘Modern’ Intimacies: A Study of Vernacular Sexual Consumerism in Late Colonial South India (1890-1947)
Sexology as a Popular and Proliferative Field: Exploring the Methodological and Historical Significance of Sexology in Early to Mid- Twentieth Century India
“S” Certification and Sex-Education Films in India: Archiving Slippages Between State Narratives and Pirate Histories
Fiction as History: R. D. Karve and the Vernacular Politics of Sexology in Post/Colonial India
Debating ‘Development’: Planning Economies and Societies in Mid-Twentieth Century South Asia
Panel Group
Session: Session 6: Friday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: University A/B
Floor: Floor 2
In the lead up to and following decolonization, South Asian societies embarked on programmes of economic growth and social transformation. In recent years, much scholarship has returned to focus on the international history of developmentalism, particularly its Cold War context, while another strand has consistently emphasized the folly of ‘high modernist’ projects that led to enormous unintended consequences. This panel instead asks how South Asian thinkers interpreted, debated, and acted upon understandings of society and economy through an engagement with their own histories, modes of production, geographies, and political projects. As all four papers demonstrate, these engagements were substantial and sought to ascertain the particularities of South Asian developmental challenges, while still drawing on western and global currents. The papers draw on archives that reach far below the top levels of the state or of international organizations to bring out the crucial intellectual and practical roles played by mid-level bureaucrats, activists, politicians, academics, and ulema, among others, in shaping the meanings of ‘development’ in South Asia, both as concepts and material realities. Speaker 1’s paper, for example, examines how some Indians looked to Chinese land reforms as a model of a particular ‘Asian’ type of rural society that they could emulate, while Speaker 2 analyzes how Muslim intellectuals in Pakistan, writing in Urdu, situated global Malthusian ideas about population growth within an Islamic tradition. Speaker 3 examines the state’s attempt to transform mineral-rich eastern-central India into an industrial region, and to create a new kind of developmental pathway in the process. Finally, Speaker 4’s paper explores population politics in another light, considering how efforts to control human population growth in postcolonial India became enmeshed with efforts to manage non-human primate populations. This panel thus reveals a subcontinent fully engaged in grappling with the major developmental questions of the mid-20th century.
Mutual Aid, Mutual Learning: Sino-Indian Friendship and Economic Development, 1949-1960
Islamic Modernism and the Moral Economy of Birth Control in Pakistan, c. 1951-71
Forests, Rivers, and Cities: Attempts at 'Regional Development' in Mid-20th Century India
Security, Territory, Primate: Rhesus Monkeys, Racial Imaginaries, and the Politics of Population in Postcolonial India
Writing Women’s Worlds: Gender, Representation, and its Limits
Panel Group
Session: Session 6: Friday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: University C/D
Floor: Floor 2
Feminist scholars have long been concerned with the question of how to write women’s worlds, yet there are relatively few occasions to discuss articulations of gender and identity across disciplinary and methodological boundaries. Therefore, this panel engages enduring questions about gender, power, and representation in South Asia across disciplines including anthropology, art history, history, literary studies, and religious studies. The papers reflect on the possibilities and limitations of different methodological approaches, including archival research, ethnography, and literary and visual methods. Panelists directly engage the conference theme of “structure and spontaneity” by considering how gender and identity have been articulated by women in relation to broader structures of power, including those of race, class, caste, kinship, religion, and the state. Overall, the papers in this panel develop an appreciation of gendered identities as neither natural nor essential, nor simply imposed. By approaching gender as performance and positioning, the papers recover some of the ways that women have actively situated themselves in diverse contexts – whether as artistic agents at the Mughal courts; as aspiring actresses in the film industry of late colonial Bengal; or as protestors mobilizing the idiom of motherhood during the 2022 uprising in Sri Lanka. At the same time, the papers complicate any straightforward conclusions about the emancipatory possibilities of representing women’s lives and experiences. Rather, as the account of colonial and vernacular representations of the women victims of the 1908 Muzaffarpur bombing attests, scholars must retain an attentiveness to how women and their practices can be interpellated within broader frameworks of exclusion in contemporary South Asia. Through a multi-faceted engagement with the possibilities and limitations of representing women in South Asia, the panel aims to generate new insights into what it means to write about women and their worlds.
Possibilities and Limits of a Spontaneous Movement: Women’s participation in Sri Lanka Uprising
Muzaffarpur 1908 Today: Victimhood, Race, and Martyrdom as Determinants of an Archive
The Social Lives of Actresses: Bengali Women’s Autobiographies as Archives of Friendship and Ostracization
Aesthetics as Archive: Rediscovering Female Voices in Mughal India
Structural Histories of Femininity in Colonial India and Britain, 1857-1980
Panel Group
Session: Session 6: Friday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Parlour Room 627
Floor: Floor 6
This panel explores how the British shaped South Asian femininity through structural violence and regulation in both the 19th and 20th century. These papers examine the gendered constructs of sex and reproduction circulated in British legal and medical structures, exploring how particular notions of femininity were crafted and enforced. Through investigating commonly taboo subjects, including prostitution, abortion, virginity, and menstruation, these papers illustrate the centrality of reproduction and sex in colonial structures of power that continue to influence contemporary institutions and cultural perspectives. However, the means through which colonial powers assert control varies, with the regulation of prostitution through exile for undesirable or troublesome behavior, to a conspicuous lack of legal and social engagement with abortion. By putting studies of prostitution, abortion, virginity, and menstruation into conversation, we explore patterns of disciplining the subjects at the margins of the empire and note the aspects of divergence in responses, creating a nuanced and thorough depiction of colonial structures. Some papers focus on the colonial projects and their infrastructure, while others center on acts of resistance. As such, this panel explicitly identifies structural means of regulation and control of gendered, sexualized and medicalized bodies, while also attending to the alternative modes of South Asian femininity produced concurrently or in its wake.
“This Woman is a Most Undesirable Person”: Tajo versus Frontier Crimes Regulation in the Balochistan Agency
“Pregnancy and Abortion in Colonial India”
Re-contextualizing the Virginity Testing Scandal in Global South Asia
Tracing the Menstrual Taboo from British India to Modern-Day Pakistan
Reconfiguring Worlds around Human-Elephant-Conflict: Relationships Between Government, People, Elephants, and Geography
Panel Group
Session: Session 6: Friday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Parlour Room 629
Floor: Floor 6
In this panel, undergraduate students will discuss how they conducted discipline specific research on Human-Elephant Conflict (HEC). As part of a grant funded project, students from the humanities and STEM fields will go to Sri Lanka to conduct research with the Sri Lanka Wildlife Conservation Society (SLWCS) on HEC. They approached the study of HEC from different disciplinary perspectives while also working with mentors and SLWCS researchers. HEC is defined as conflict between humans and elephants, where both are affected negativity. Elephants have cultural and economic importance in Sri Lanka, so their government contributes to their well-being. However, with population and farmland growing, there is less space for elephants and this sharing of space leads to conflicts. Students will present their research and experience as participants in an international research project around Wasgamuwa National Park in Sri Lanka. The natural environment and rural communities around the national park are an assemblage of government sponsored irrigation projects, humans and towns and their agriculture fields, and elephant herds and their grazing land. Working as a group, each student approached the study of HEC from their own disciplinary perspective, while working with on-campus mentors and SLWCS researchers to conduct research on HEC. In this panel, students will discuss their individual research and how their findings contribute to the overall knowledge and solutions surrounding HEC in Sri Lanka.
Reconfiguring Worlds around Human-Elephant-Conflict: Relationships Between Government, People, and Elephants.
Counter-Mapping the Human-Elephant Conflict in Sri Lanka: Sri Lankan Perceptions of Human-Elephant Space and Territory Near Wasgamuwa National Park
A Cost-Benefit Analysis: Electric Fences as a Human-Elephant-Conflict Mitigation Strategy
Reconfiguring Human Narratives: Relationships Between Humans and Elephants
Philosophical and Political Discussions Across South Asian Literature
Panel Group
Session: Session 6: Friday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Parlour Room 634
Floor: Floor 6
.
Love for masters or desire for death: The Biopower and Necro-politics of loyalty in colonial India.
Changez as Underground Man: The Link between Hamid and Dostoevesky
Insights into the Fusion of Feminism and Progressive Politics in Urdu Literature: A historical Summary
Locating the ajeeb in aesthetics
Structures and Infrastructures of Urban Religious Life
Panel Group
Session: Session 6: Friday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Parlour Room 638
Floor: Floor 6
.
Neo-Brahminical Infrastructures: State and Roads in Dolpo, Nepal
Neither Structured nor Spontaneous? Neighborly Interactions in Mixed-Religious Urban Contexts
Stone bead analysis in South Asia and surrounding regions: Evidence for regional and long distance trade networks
Panel Group
Session: Session 7: Friday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Assembly Room
Floor: Floor 1
Innovative changes to the archaeological study of stone beads from South Asia and surrounding regions has resulted in new perspectives on the regional and long distance trade networks that were present in the prehistoric and historical period. Using standard morphological studies of shape and size, beads can be classified and compared across regions and over time. However, new approaches using chemical sourcing of raw materials, and experimental reconstruction of ancient manufacture, allow for detailed reconstructions of economic distribution networks as well as possible cultural and ideological links. Presenter 1 will discuss the long-term study of carnelian bead sourcing that has revolutionized the ways in which archaeologists can link resource areas in South Asia to workshops in various parts of the Indus Valley as well as consumers of finished beads in distant Mesopotamia. Presenter 2 will discuss the results of a different long-term study of steatite beads made that were made in many different Indus sites using raw materials that can be sourced to specific regions in Northern Pakistan or Rajasthan. Speaker 3 will examine the movement of distinctive carnelian beads with white bleached designs in China that have been traditionally sourced to the Indus Valley in South Asia. The comparison of bead designs and bead shapes with production areas in South Asia provides a new model for understanding the links between these important world regions and how they changed over time. Presenter 4 will discuss how the study of beads from poorly documented secondary deposits in far off Jerusalem can be linked to South Asia using stylistic and technological analysis. These beads can still provide valuable information on trade links and changing ornament styles over long periods of time. The manufacture, trade and use of stone beads provide unique insights into the history of ancient and historical South Asia.
Using LA-ICP-MS to trace agate-carnelian trade networks across the Indus region and beyond
Reconstructing the circulation of Harappan steatite beads using INAA analysis
Bleached Carnelian beads In Early China: Tracing the Links Between South Asia and East Asia
South Asian Connections Among Beads from the Temple Mount Area in Jerusalem
Hinduism and Climate: Topophilia, Ayurveda, Theater, and Divine Ecologies
Panel Group
Session: Session 7: Friday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Caucus Room
Floor: Floor 1
This proposal investigates how different theories and practices in Hinduism interact with anthropogenic climate change through four disciplinary lenses (Anthropology, Medicine, Theater/Performance, and Environment). These four papers are rooted in Hindu-centered practices embodied with topophilia, Ayurveda, theater, and divine ecologies. Combining both textual and ethnographic research strategies, they try to better understand the critical ways in which Hinduism can assist, alienate, and undermine conceptualizing responses to climate chaos. From the melting glaciers of the Himalayas in the Kedarnath Valley in northern India to the flooding Sundarbans in eastern India, from medieval medical texts in Ayurveda to the goddess Bhudevi in the sthala purana of a Tamil village and the god Samudra among Tamil women seaweed gatherers in southern India, this panel proposal presents four research papers which set out to question our previous certainties of ecological-friendly understandings embedded within Hinduism. Whether Hindu ecological-friendly understandings can translate into climate-chaos reducing Hindu practices, or whether Ayurvedic medicine gives insights into faulty climate causal awareness, or whether cultural theatrical practices in the Bengali delta contribute to changing behavior whether at the individual or collective levels, or whether the Hindu imagination of the sea among a union of women seaweed gatherers can shift awareness of warming ocean waters, all remains to be seen, but these four papers do ground-breaking work to begin to figure these questions out. These four papers are, indeed, theoretical and ethnographic forays into the seeming structure of what we think of as “Hindu traditions” and yet, their mingled, capacious ability to respond to the changing world around us, not necessarily spontaneously, but with a kind of cultural alertness to deeply shifting currents of our collective well-being, to the work of curbing carbon emissions.
Religious Resources vs. Necessary Conditions: The Challenging Landscape of Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation in the Uttarakhand Himalaya
Ayurveda, Karma, Dharma and Anthropogenic Climate Change
Staging Moral Pollution: Hindu Enactments of Climate Change in the Sundarbans Delta
Wonder and Terror in Climate Perception: Bhudevi and Samudra in Tamil Nadu, India
Religion, Experience, and the Architectures of Identity
Panel Group
Session: Session 7: Friday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Senate Room A
Floor: Floor 1
This panel focuses on how religious architecture is experienced, understood and mediated by tracing the relation between material, culture and identity. Speaker 1 uses concepts like haptic space and visual piety to explore forms and functionalities of public imāmbāṛas by taking the case of three imāmbāṛas- Sibtainaband, Meeran Saheb and Ghufran Ma’ab to analyse the multiplicity of meanings, bodily sensations and affects these imāmbāṛas generate as an embodied haptic space. The second speaker with look at the relationship between the material culture and identity of the pattar-agrahārams (villages) by taking up an architectural analysis of the temples in the agrahārams of Kerala Brahmins in Tamil Nadu. The third speaker will talk about folk art and vernacular architecture of Santhals, a tribal community in Eastern India. Her paper showcases creative synthesis and hybridity as a defining feature of contextual modernism in art and architecture thereby contesting the dominant narrative of modern architecture as ahistorical and universal. The fourth speaker will talk about architectural discourses of mid-twentieth century Kerala, using archives to study the figure of the ‘vastu’ expert. The fifth speaker revisits the structural and symbolic relationship between the seventeenth-century Sarangapani Temple that houses the image of reclining Vishnu, and the temple’s twenty-first-century wooden chariot that annually processes the metallic icon of Aravamudhan. The paper argues that the architectural envelope of Sarangapani’s procession chariot is a polysemic structure that annually reconciles Sarangapani’s site, temple, the stone image of Vishnu, and the bronze image of Aravamudhan.
Rethinking Shi’i Religious Life through Devotional Spaces- The Lucknawi Imāmbāras as Embodied Haptic Spaces
The Temples of Kerala's Tamil Agrahāram: An Element of Continuity and Change. A case study of the Nurani village in Palakkad, Kerala, India.
Mud architecture of Shantiniketan, India
Sculpting an Archive for the ‘Silpi’: Notes on the Textualisation of Thachusastram in Twentieth Century Print Malayalam
Not a Temple-Chariot: Reframing the Architectural Envelope of the Sarangapani Procession Chariot
Entangled Empires in the Early Modern Indian Ocean/South Asia: Networks, Diplomacy, and Warfare
Panel Group
Session: Session 7: Friday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Senate Room B
Floor: Floor 1
In the mid and late 18th century, Asians and Europeans alike experienced India as an arena of considerable uncertainty but often, also, of opportunity. Our panelists focus on actors—merchants, diplomats, bankers, soldiering professionals, translators, princes, and Company officials—who nurtured ambitious visions of transformed political and economic geographies in the subcontinent and across the Indian Ocean. Towards that end, they crafted diplomatic missions, lent and received credit, and leveraged their alliances in order to navigate “entangled empires” in southern India, island Southeast Asia, and North India, making use of administrative instruments developed in both Mughal and post-Mughal contexts as they attempted to forge these futures. Our first speaker asks: What can we learn from a Hyderabadi succession war that attracted a panoply of eager investors, all hoping to position themselves for a future already shifting under their feet? Speaker 2 asks: What were the vocabularies, performances, and practices through which French Company officials gauged the creditworthiness of South Indian courts? Speaker 3 asks: In what ways did the priorities and interests of Asian passengers who set sail on French Company ships between Indian Ocean ports transect with those of Company officials–and in what ways did they not? Speaker 4 asks: How might an Afghan Durrani diplomatic intervention in Mughal politics shed light on the perceived likelihood of a subcontinental future that was not dominated by the British East India Company? Shifting away from teleologies of incipient colonization, our panelists seek to recover a world characterized not just by precarity, but by possibility.
Betting on a Winner: A Hyderabadi succession war in the Coromandel hinterlands, 1749-1751
Courting Credit: Gesture, Diplomacy and Debt in Early Modern South India
Negotiated Passage: French Diplomacy and Asian Passengers in the Bay of Bengal, 1738-1763
New Wine in Old Bottles: The Final Call for a Muslim Emperor in India
River Life and the emergence of ‘nature-as-itself’: Rethinking our frames of reference beyond the nature/culture divide.
Round Table
Session: Session 7: Friday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Conference Room 1
Floor: Floor 2
Naveeda Khan’s ethnography, River Life and the Upspring of Nature in Bangladesh’s riverine ecosystems, offers us a provocation. Nature is not to be overcome and mastered, or to be reconciled, but that which springs up within us and to which we offer our attention, receptivity and passivity. This provocation invites us to engage the thematic of ‘Structure and Spontaneity’ by revisiting a classical debate in the social sciences and humanities, i.e., nature/culture. Our panelists respond from diverse vantage points of art history, history, environmental studies and anthropology. Echoing River Life’s exploration of riparian motion as relation (as sociality and landscape), we discuss how reframing an 18th century artwork in European art theory opens out a surfeit of dark matter generative of multiple forms of life beyond enlightened, self-actualization. Another mode situates the book within the field of Bangladesh and riparian political ecology studies to engage the more-than material dynamics of water. We examine the ethnographic mapping of struggles for habitation and habitability in the face of the unpredictability of the river that threatens to outstrip residents hard earned knowledge of adaptation. We juxtapose two additional binaries - wild/domesticated and care/violence, to the nature/culture dyad, to understand how these are braided into the life of water and those who live alongside it. Finally, we ask, how might the picture of kinship conflicts in India’s land acquisition process be influenced by rethinking the potential of land to express tendencies and people to apprehend and actualize them, exceeding existing frames of reference (state, property). River Life, thus invites participants into an environment to think in, with and through our own empirical/theoretical questions on riparian motion as relation, more-than-material dynamics of water, habitation and habitability, how archetypal oppositions braid themselves into the life of water, and the movement between land, property and mental labor.
Theorizing the Urban from South Asia: Methodologies and Practices
Round Table
Session: Session 7: Friday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Conference Room 2
Floor: Floor 2
In the last two decades, urban studies has emerged as a discipline of critical inquiry and theory-building in and on South Asia (Coelho and Sood, 2022). Inspired by the agenda of subaltern studies collective, urban studies scholars have questioned ‘North’-centric urban theorization and attendant continuities of empire. On one hand, introducing analytical frames such as agrarian urbanism (Gururani, 2020), occupancy urbanism (Benjamin, 2008), subaltern urbanisation (Mukhopadhyay et al., 2020), spatial adhocism (Ray, 2021), and caste-based racialization of urban space (Ranganathan 2022), they offer new conceptual understandings of South Asian urban conditions. On the other, they contribute to wider theoretical framings in partnership with other scholars working on the global South to theorize ‘Asian urbanism’ (Roy and Ong, 2011), ‘Southern urbanism’ (Bhan, 2019; Palat Narayanan, 2021), and the ‘Southeastern’ turn in urban theory (Yiftachel and Mammon, 2023). In the background of these contributions – and by placing ourselves within the confines of scholars working primarily on urban India – we seek to inquire: How do urban studies scholars (re)frame and/or mobilize South Asia? What does a South Asian lens offer to urban studies? What practices emerge from these discussions? What new methodologies do these conceptual reworkings offer? And finally, what dialogues could urban studies strike with other disciplines working on South Asia? This roundtable offers an alternative theorization and methodological framework that is iterative and establishes incompleteness as an important theoretical category to understand South Asian urbanism. It proposes a conversation between a group of early career scholars with exposure to urban praxis across South Asia. The speakers come from diverse backgrounds, genders and experiences. They currently hold positions ranging from assistant professor, lecturer, postdoctoral fellow, to Ph.D. candidates and students. This hybrid event shall predominantly promote in-person participation with two virtual attendees and proposes adding a discussant from ACSA attendees.
Translation and its Limits
Round Table
Session: Session 7: Friday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Conference Room 3
Floor: Floor 2
The proposed roundtable will bring together scholars engaged in the study and practice of translation across multiple disciplines, languages, and time periods to discuss how strategies and techniques of translation shape the ways in which we imagine the objects of literary, religious, and cultural knowledge. How does the practice of translation, across South Asian and non-South Asian languages, help to constitute a shared concept of eros, imagine a tradition as an independent religion, or produce readers with distinctly ‘modern’ subjectivities? How might reflecting on the effects of translation inform the ways in which we research and teach South Asian literary and religious traditions? Speakers 1 and 2 will address the tangled relationships between love and sex, eros and allegory, in devotional poetry and narrative. While Speaker 1 will reflect on contemporary translations of the erotic lyrics of the Telugu poet-saint Annamayya, Speaker 2 will outline the history of Orientalist translations of erotic Krishna narratives. Speakers 3 and 4 will discuss how translation practices, coupled with emergent print culture, defined or redefined religious traditions in the late colonial period. Speaker 3 will explain how Jainism was defined across languages and in the context of legal disputes and publishing initiatives around the turn of the 20th century; Speaker 4 will examine how the translation of literary and religious texts in Arabic and Persian in colonial South Asia reveal the co-constitution of ‘religion’ and ‘Islam’ by British translators and South Asian reformers. Speaker 5 will round out the discussion by explaining why translations—including scholarly translations—reflect ongoing cultural negotiations involving not only literary conversations but also religious ideologies, social agendas, economic relations, and power structures. Consequently, translators must take stock of the fraught nature of their work and its role in the (re)production of knowledge and power.
Improvisational Practices
Panel Group
Session: Session 7: Friday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Conference Room 4
Floor: Floor 2
.
Ahankara to Astitva: Improvisation and Selfhood in Kathak Dance
“Mapping Jazz in India and India in Jazz: Improvisations and Encounters”
Verbal Structure / Vocal Spontaneity: Improvisation in Ghazal Performance
Bodies in Space: South Asian Visual Culture and Affective Intensity
Panel Group
Session: Session 7: Friday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Conference Room 5
Floor: Floor 2
This panel will discuss affect and spatiality through several forms of visuality: cinematic space, spaces of cinematic exhibition, and the built spaces of public architecture. Approaching affect as that which breaches structuration, opening a line of flight into “alternative plots” (Berlant), we argue that if the cinematic image structures a kind of hegemonic common sense (Keeling), it is also that which marks a path beyond it, towards the radicality of spontaneous efflorescence. The papers in this panel argue that this exorbitance or excess-beyond-sense is routed precisely through the (somatic and irregular) pathways opened by affective visuality. For South Asian visual culture, this has meant that affect serves as the experiential bridge between the body and its representations (whether in the form of cinematic mise-en-scène, built public spaces, or nationalism’s rational schema.) Despite its unrationalized nature, affect makes abstraction–of the nation, of the city, of mass society–tangible, and is thus a key concept for South Asian scholars studying physical and cinematic spaces. Speaker 1 reads cinematic iconography as a form of contact between the image and physical space in transnational genre cinema. Speaker 2 problematizes the generation of patriotic affect during contemporary cinematic exhibitions in movie theatres in India, while Speaker 3 considers how a spatial topography of Bombay is produced through the movement of the body in action on-screen. Finally, Speaker 4 speculates on the affective claims made by an un-reconstructed capitol complex in New Delhi. By emphasizing affect, we draw attention to the effervescent, intense, and unstable registers of human experience, and think about the various iterations of “structure” and the generative moments of “spontaneity” that rupture them, even momentarily. This panel brings together political and aesthetic appraisals of South Asian visual culture as primarily affective: a register of intensity that connects the body to its representations.
Slashing through Genre: Zibahkhana, Affect, and Transnational Style
Sounding the Anthem: The Nation and its Theatre
Bombay’s Contemporary Action Film and its Urban Cartographies
Monumental Claims: Affective Intensity and New Delhi’s Central Vista Redevelopment
Challenges Faced by Pakistan's Transgender Community: Addressing Stigma, Discrimination, and Human Rights Abuses
Panel Group
Session: Session 7: Friday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Wisconsin Ballroom
Floor: Floor 2
Panel Abstract: This panel discussion will explore different aspects of the challenges faced by the transgender community in Pakistan. Speaker 1 will discuss the discrimination and abuse experienced by the transgender community in various aspects of life, including healthcare, education, and employment. This discussion will highlight the need for the government to take steps to address the underlying social attitudes that perpetuate this discrimination and to provide medical care sensitive to their needs. Speaker 2 will explore the impact of transnational forces on the direction of transgender activism in Pakistan. The discussion will highlight how transgender activists resist ideas that do not resonate with them and negotiate with transnationalizing forces to represent gender nonconforming people in a culturally and religiously appropriate manner. Speaker 3 will discuss the negative and stereotypical portrayal of transgender people in the Pakistani print media. This research highlights the need for accurate and respectful representation of transgender people in Pakistani print media, the responsibility of media organizations to combat transphobia and promote social justice, and increased liaison between print media representatives and the transgender community. Speaker 4 will focus on the social barriers faced by the transgender community in Pakistan and their impact on mental health. This discussion will emphasize the need for special attention to support the education of transgender individuals, provide healthcare facilities without discrimination, and improve legislation and laws for their protection. Finally, Speaker 5 will address the barriers to education for transgender children in Pakistan and suggest solutions to these challenges. The discussion will highlight the need for inclusive policies, teachers' training, and awareness campaigns to promote an environment that is safe and supportive of transgender children's education. Overall, this panel discussion aims to raise awareness and suggest solutions to the issues faced by the transgender community in Pakistan.
Breaking Barriers: Examining the Challenges Faced by the Transgender Community in Pakistan
Negotiating Transnational Influences: The Complex Realities of Transgender Activism in Pakistan
Reassessing Media Representation of Transgender Community in Pakistani Print Media
Social Barriers and Mental Health of Transgender Individuals in Pakistan
Barriers to Education for Transgender Children in Pakistan: Challenges and Solutions
Nationalist Movements
Panel Group
Session: Session 7: Friday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: University A/B
Floor: Floor 2
.
United in war at home and abroad: The Bengalis call for Liberation in Bangladesh
The Gender-Based Structural Violence in Contemporary Nepal: An Ethnographic Case Study of Social and Political Exclusion against Nepalese Single Mother
Transitional Justice in Sri Lanka: The Role of Civil Society in Pursuit of Accountability and Durable Peace
Democratic Deepening in South Asia
Panel Group
Session: Session 7: Friday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: University C/D
Floor: Floor 2
This panel brings together papers that examine how state institutions were built in South Asia and examines the role of institutional rules, party strategies and norms in explaining the differences in development and democratization. The papers cover a range of topics, that looks at the role of religious institutions, political selection and behavior, party strategy and societal norms that help us understand democratic deepening in South Asia.
Crowds as Content: Party Campaign Strategy during the Digital Age in India
Term Lengths and Legislative Performance: Evidence from India
The Impact of Ballot Access Laws on Candidacy in India’s Village Councils
Not All Migration is Made Equal Family Structure and Female Political Engagement in Migrant-Sending Communities
Long-Run Effects of Religious Institutions on Development
Coming of Age in South Asia: Exploring the Event and the Everyday
Panel Group
Session: Session 7: Friday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Parlour Room 627
Floor: Floor 6
What kind of historical and affective threshold is “coming of age”? Who or what is it that we come of age in relation to? Anthropological theory has explored “coming of age” as a mode of becoming in gender-based initiation rituals (Mead 1928, Rosaldo 1980), as an important arc in the structures of kinship and exchange (Levi-Strauss 1971, Strathern 1988), and as a question of embodied growth within national and transnational economies of desire and aspiration (Chatterjee 2018, Khoja-Moolji 2018). In a parallel inquiry, sociologists have evoked social and temporal categories of generation, age, and cohort (Alanen 2001, Riyley 1987, Edmunds & Turner 2005) as ways of delineating social transformation across domains of identity and descent. In this panel we explore coming of age in South Asia via the entangled temporalities of the event and everyday lived experience. We ask, in particular, what it means for women to narrate moments of knowing and becoming in relation to neighboring renderings of life history, cyclicity and newness; and how these narratives pose contending logics of adaptation, aspiration, and aftermath. Our panelists explore the issue of coming of age through different vantage points: feminist activism in Lahore; everyday erotic education in rural West Bengal; menstruation as a gendered rite of passage in Karachi; and youth stories of making life livable in post-disaster Bhopal. By attending to multiple and overlapping temporalities of becoming in Pakistan and India, this panel offers an opportunity to reflect on how a gendered coming of age manifests in the subcontinent. To what extent is it definable by singular, historical moments of rupture? How do these moments sediment and repeat themselves within milieus of domesticity, religion, and nation? Through reflexive ethnographic explorations, this panel attends to coming of age as both a methodological question and theoretical framework for understanding South Asia.
Coming of (r)age: Three generations of women’s rights activists in urban Pakistan
Music as Erotic Education in Rural West Bengal
The Political Period: Discourse and Materiality of Menstruation in Pakistan
Catastrophic Coming of Age in Khaufpur: Bildungsroman, Bhopal, and Beyond
Environmental Issues in South Asian Indigenous Communities
Panel Group
Session: Session 7: Friday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Parlour Room 629
Floor: Floor 6
.
“We Seek to Wean the Next Generations Away from Poaching.” Control and Conservation in Ranthambore National Park
Tentative Title: Dams, Displacement, Dispossession: Reading Risk and Development
"Our politics is related to erosion": Land based autonomy in the Brahmaputra floodplains
Marginalization, Migration and Urban Futures
Panel Group
Session: Session 7: Friday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Parlour Room 634
Floor: Floor 6
.
'Thinking Locally, Acting Globally' : Migration and Sustainability in Nepal
Navigating Violent Infrastructures: The Everyday Experiences of Hazara Taxi Drivers in Quetta, Pakistan
Srinagar Smart City Mission: Analysis of the impact of this project on spatial, temporal, and food sovereignty in the Indian-Occupied-Kashmir
The ethical challenge of rot, waste and wastepickers in fiction and generative AI
Conceptualizing and situating the notion of “everyday” in South Asian Urbanism
Textual Worlds and the Worlds of Texts
Panel Group
Session: Session 7: Friday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Parlour Room 638
Floor: Floor 6
.
The Mānava Dharmaśāstra as a Conservative Accommodation of the Innovations of the Mahābhārata
Jains and their Interconnected Worlds: Vanijya(Commerce), Tirtha(Pilgrimage), Vidya (Education) in Early Modern Benares c.1600-1800
A Survey of the Meaning of prapañca in the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra
Everyone Speaks Pali if Left Alone: The Buddhist Language Ideology in the Pali Commentaries Around 500 CE
Current Perspectives on Indus Seals and Writing: Investigating Structure, Standardization, and Style Style
Panel Group
Session: Session 9: Saturday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Assembly Room
Floor: Floor 1
Since the discovery of inscribed seals heralded the announcement of the Indus Civilization (2600-1900 BCE) over a century ago, they have received considerable scholarly and public attention, and rightly so. In addition to being the primary medium of Indus writing, inscribed seals also represent some of the best material examples of administrative behaviors, technology, mobiliary art, ideology, and exchange. Recent studies also suggest that seals and writing were not standardized throughout the Integration Era of the Harappa Phase. Multifaceted studies of seals and writing are useful for identifying meaningful patterns and variability that reflect broader cultural practices and systems that were crucial in integrating large, diverse populations and places for hundreds of years. Current research on these issues brings international scholars together, applying diverse methods, approaches, and interpretations. This panel highlights some recent investigations focusing on structure, decipherment, production methods, and seal-based administrative practices in the Indus Civilization. Such studies are necessary to advance our knowledge of the organizational dynamics and unique character of one of the world’s earliest urban societies.
Signs of the Indus script and their variants: structure, standardization and style.
Ancient Script Recognition with Machine Learning
Seal-based administrative technology and procedures in the Indus Civilisation: The Lothal clay sealings archive
Searching for Seal Carvers: Comparative Analyses of Iconography and Inscriptions to Investigate the Organization of Indus Seal Production
1991, 2008, 2014: The State and Techno-Illiberalism in India
Panel Group
Session: Session 9: Saturday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Senate Room A
Floor: Floor 1
Since 2008 the Indian state has initiated projects of digitalization centred on the Aadhaar unique identity project alongside a host of allied platforms. These aggregations of state and non-state actors delivered a host of neoliberalising tendencies we trace back to the 1980s and the reforms of 1991. Today, this techno-political transition cannot be interpreted without its most recent iteration under Narendra Modi’s BJP after 2014, which operationalizes these technologies as part of a discursive and material project to “Transform India”. We take as our object of study the triad of liberalization, digitalization and Hindutva. The years 1991, 2008, 2014 serve as a minimal genealogy and a shorthand for this broad conjuncture we tentatively title “techno-illiberalism”. Digital infrastructures like Aadhaar and the Unified Payments Interface are both a set of media infrastructures that contribute to very material neoliberal restructurings as well as projections of desirable Hindu nationalist futures. Our framing of Hindutva ties the fulfillment of ethno-nationalism and grassroots communalism to a shifting hegemonic order. The underlying logic of this re-ordering is a replacement of "state, science and technology" with another promise: if big science once provided what Ashish Nandy has called the “reason of the state”, today that role is played by computer engineering, with concomitant shifts in institutions and expertise. The rise of database-based technical systems provides the state with new capabilities to target both undeserving beneficiaries of welfare and underperforming employees as well as migrants and Muslims. This panel attempts to respond to this conjuncture with methodological pluralism that combines an account of shifts in economic systems, class structures, and labour relations; hegemonic ambitions and imaginaries of Modi’s brand of Hindutva; and the techno-material realignments afforded by technical infrastructures.
Databasing India – Slow Violence in/of Digital Governance
Maximum Governance as Technocratic Populism
Sensing Home: Security and Social Reproduction in Smart Nagpur
Digitizing Difference: Aadhaar and 21st Century Techno-nationalism in India
A Comparative Analysis of Civil-military relations in South Asia: the case of Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh
Panel Group
Session: Session 9: Saturday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Senate Room B
Floor: Floor 1
This proposal analyses and compares civil-military relations in Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh within the framework of civil-military relations. In Pakistan, the military has been a dominant political force, justifying its political involvement as the protector of national security and Islamic values. India's civil-military relationship is relatively stable, with the military playing a subordinate role to civilian authority and being shaped by the country's democratic traditions, secularism, and professional ethos. Bangladesh's civil-military relations are complex and influenced by the country's struggle for independence, the legacy of military rule, and the military's economic interests. Comparing these three countries under the theoretical approaches of civil-military relations, it is noticed that Pakistan reflects the “praetorian” model, where the military plays an active role in politics and national security. India reflects the “western” model, where the military is subordinate to civilian authority and follows the principle of civilian control. Bangladesh reflects the “developmental” model, where the military is involved in politics to promote economic and social development. Hence, each country has developed its own unique model of civil-military relations. Understanding these models provides insights into the military's role in politics and the challenges of managing civil-military relations in these countries.
Khalid Iqbal - khalidiqbalmalang337@gmail.com ()
A Comparative Analysis of Civil-Military Relations in South Asia: A Case of Pakistan, India and Bangladesh
Shehla Rahim - shehlarahim7@gmail.com ()
Civil-Military Relations in India and Pakistan: Common Legacy and Different Trajectories
Mian Ahmed Kabir - mianak3988@gmail.com ()
The Political Role of Pakistan's Military Establishment in State Affairs: A Case Study of Regime Change
Rahat Iqbal - rahat-iqbal@hotmail.com ()
Civil-Military Coordination in Bangladesh within the context monopolizing state and society by Awami League
Tracking Non-Elite Figures in Early Modern South Asia.
Panel Group
Session: Session 9: Saturday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Conference Room 1
Floor: Floor 2
This panel showcases new approaches to non-elite figures in early modern South Asia, aiming to highlight how such figures navigated complex systems of coercion and dependence. Recent work on the early modern period has increasingly brought into focus the importance of examining historical actors beyond elites as well as social milieux beyond imperial centers, even as it has emphasized the very real challenges posed by archives that are persistently centered on ruling elites and their closest associates. This panel will build on this prior work in a range of ways, through bringing attention to specific social categories such as enslaved domestic servants, performers, and convict labor, to consider the spectrum of locations and forms of asymmetrical social relations attested to in sources including court chronicles, documents, correspondence, and inscriptions. Papers will explore the representation of these relationships as well as the complex realities of dependency and service, with an eye to how they may have shaped the ability of non-elite figures to navigate and negotiate the worlds in which they lived. In the process, the panel will seek to bring out the differences as well as potential parallels across distinct locations, languages, genres, forms of labor, and historical contexts. Working with both the much-discussed problems of silence and omission of non-elite voices, as well as the limits introduced by elite bias and genre, papers will present specific case studies for thinking through the possibilities and challenges to understanding the social worlds inhabited by non-elite figures, as reflected in archival sources in languages including Sanskrit, Persian and Marathi.
Rajamati’s World: Placemaking, Patronage and Performance in Hindustan, c.1479.
To Be Heard But Not Seen: Musical Labor in Sixteenth-century North India.
Harem Guards on Strike: Negotiating Asymmetrical Relations in the Imperial Household in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Delhi.
Punishment, Mobility and Coercion: Western Deccan, c. 1700-1818.
Textual practices and Scholarly Communities in Early Modern South Asia
Panel Group
Session: Session 9: Saturday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Conference Room 2
Floor: Floor 2
The early modern period in South Asia has been described as a period of extraordinary change, particularly in the realm of textual practices. Yet, contemporary scholarship has focused mainly on textual practices which demonstrate schisms between the premodern and the modern. The papers in this panel examine different ways in which premodern scholars often looked to past textual canons to address moral, political, and literary questions. They interrogate the different ways in which strategies of exegesis participated in shifts in the understanding of texts and language. This panel aims to ask: how did scholars in early modern India employ specific textual strategies and genres to address or reflect contemporary textual and social concerns? The papers in this panel raise questions around the ways in which textual genres and scholarly protocols participated in processes of social and historical change, while staying attentive to the particular intellectual contexts that they developed in. The papers address texts ranging from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, and speak to a range of important genres during this period, from dharmaśāstra and philosophical commentary, to poetic and philological works. How does South Indian Sanskrit poetry reflect its authors’ gradual independence from patronage networks? How did eighteenth-century Persian philological treatises negotiate seemingly conflicting notions of newness and ahistoricity? How did Sanskrit commentators employ novel formal strategies to address contemporary concerns and pedagogical priorities? What was the role of Sanskrit exegetical tradition in defining a new moral order in the colonial period? What can these different genealogies tell us about historical, textual, and linguistic change as related in early modern South Asia?
On poetic and economic 'independence' of seventeenth century Sanskrit poets.
Grounds of change: the stabilization of language in 18th century Indo-persian texts.
Form, Structure, and Narrative in Madhusūdana Sarasvatī’s Gūḍhārthadīpikā:
Modern Biographies, Feudal Anxieties: a Prehistory of the Hindu Widow Remarriage Debate in Bengal
‘Subtle, Elusive and Pervading’: The Languages of Language Movements in Modern South Asia
Panel Group
Session: Session 9: Saturday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Conference Room 3
Floor: Floor 2
In 1958, at the height of language-based movements in India, the Times of India described speech as “subtle, elusive, and pervading like the air.” Even as radical linguistic change was often at the core of these political movements, this statement emphasizes the intractability of language itself. Taking this observation as a starting point, this panel examines intersections of language and politics in mid-twentieth century North and Northeast India. Bringing together literary history, caste studies, linguistics, and the history of emotions, individual papers map the changing modes of political and cultural belonging, collectivity, and identity that impinged on the politics of language. The panel deploys diverse disciplinary perspectives to examine how different South Asian languages enable and limit new political and cultural projects throughout the twentieth century. Working with archives in English, Hindi, Urdu, and Manipuri, individual papers ask: What competing vocabularies do Indian languages offer to social movements during rapidly changing political and economic circumstances? How is language mobilized to imagine new political futures in postcolonial South Asia? In what ways do non-elite articulations of linguistic concerns contest elite conceptions? By answering these questions, we examine hitherto unexplored political vocabularies in Indian languages posed by archeologists, intellectuals, poets, journalists, and political figures, and trace the overlapping literary, political, and professional contexts in which they are produced. Through highlighting the unanticipated ways in which these political vocabularies are mobilized by new social movements, this panel indicates the critical role of language as an axis for uncovering new relationships between caste, region, religion, and politics in South Asia.
Sarkāri vs Samajvādī Hindi: Languages of Democracy in Postcolonial India
Democratising Urdu: Muslim Peshewar Birādarīs’ engagement with the Urdu Public Sphere in Colonial India
The Language of Integration: W. Yumjao Singh’s Political Reimagination of Manipuri Linguistic History
The Perception of the Dominance of English as a Moral Harm Among the Hindi Intelligentsia
Performing Identities
Panel Group
Session: Session 9: Saturday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Conference Room 4
Floor: Floor 2
.
Notable and Un-noted: Gujarati luthiers and Hindustani musical patronage in the Baroda Gaekwad Court (1873-1939)
Dancing to Diplomatic Tunes: Dancers as Cultural Ambassadors in Postcolonial India
Theatre and Identity formation in Colonial Western India: A case of Parsi and Hindu Gujarati Theatres
Peripheries of Excess: Gender, Transgression and Performance in Punjab
Panel Group
Session: Session 9: Saturday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Conference Room 5
Floor: Floor 2
This panel explores the manifold ways in which Punjabi women have marshalled themselves through song, shifting rigid temporal, social, and political structures through the spontaneities possible in ephemeral moments of performance. Panelists tease out the tension between public and private in a range of performance geographies through time: from late 19th century Lahore and Amritsar, to various diasporas in mid-twentieth century and contemporary California (Yuba City and Stockton), and from weddings in late twentieth century west Punjab (Faisalabad and Sargodha) and east Punjab (Jalandhar district) to the contemporary digital sphere. In seeking out the porosity between public and private, each paper deconstructs the gendered nature of performance genres in Punjab, by foregrounding moments of spontaneity and transgression, e.g., the exceptionalism of women performing masculinised genres like bhangra and their instruments like the dhol. Such questions also allow us to consider the participatory element of audiences–which can vary from large global constituencies to the formal stage and from familial/ kin-based circles to microcosms of women’s spaces to no audience at all. These peripheries of reception extend to cultures of listenership, reader response, and digital comments. We also examine liminal spaces of female sociality as caught in glimpses, interruptions, and intervals such as siyaapaa (women’s mourning songs), wedding songs, and digital media forms. The panel is especially focussed on the notion of ‘excess’, in terms of excessive female sexualities and excessive affect, and the various contexts and cultures of suppression and reform that mobilize against them, citing/ creating norms of appropriate behaviour in public settings.
From Spontaneity to Digital Structure: An Autoethnographic Account of Women’s Songs & Folklore in West Punjab
Rivers of Desire, Oceans of Separation: Women’s Musical Improvisations and Transgressions in California, 1940s-1980s
Of Pleasure and Piety: Women’s Songs and the Arya Samaj in late 19th century Punjab
Queening Pink: Trinjan Audiotopias & Punjabi Women’s Bhangra in the Work of Jasmine Sandlas
Queening Pink: Trinjan Audiotopias & Punjabi Women’s Bhangra in the Work of Jasmine Sandlas
Pedagogy and Politics of Language
Panel Group
Session: Session 9: Saturday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Capitol Ballroom A
Floor: Floor 2
.
Multimodality to Address Linguistic Nationalism in a Hindi-Language Class
Katharine Adeney - katharine.adeney@nottingham.ac.uk ()
Linguistic Nationalisms in South Asia: Is India becoming a linguistically majoritarian state?
Towards a More Inclusive Language Curriculum : Case of Hindi-Urdu
New Explorations of Caste
Panel Group
Session: Session 9: Saturday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Capitol Ballroom B
Floor: Floor 2
.
Caste and Islam for Citizenship: Arains in early independent Pakistan
Atheism and Rejection of caste among atheists in India
The “Intention to Live as Man and Wife:” Marriage and Colonial Legal Practice in Late-Nineteenth Century South Asia
Performing Critically: Performance, Pedagogy, and Caste
Adaptation, Translation, and the Politics of Gender
Panel Group
Session: Session 9: Saturday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Wisconsin Ballroom
Floor: Floor 2
.
The Housewives of the Uvāsagadasāo: Adaptation and Appropriation of Brahminical Patriarchy in the Early Śvetāmbara Jaina Canon
Sita the Sati: The Politics of Gender in Jain Versions of the Ramayana
Translation as Critique: "Sita's exile" and the women's question in colonial Bengal
Agents of Aesthetics, Defilers of Disciplines: Proscriptions for the Buddhist Nuns
Intimation of Revolution: Global Sixties and the Making of Bangladesh
Round Table
Session: Session 9: Saturday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: University A/B
Floor: Floor 2
This round table engages with the recent book of Subho Basu on the making of Bangladesh. Departing from the traditional view of seeing the birth of Bangladesh through the prism of India Pakistan war, Subho Basu’s recent book Intimation Revolution: Global Sixties and the making of Bangladesh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) explains the rise of Bengali nationalism in East Pakistan in 1950s and 60s in terms of interaction between global politics and local social and economic developments. It traces how the rise of the military bureaucratic junta in Pakistan politics and their developmental priorities were influenced by modernization dogma among US policymakers and their cold war understandings. Simultaneously, facing internal colonization by the Pakistani military-bureaucratic regime, Bengali Muslims developed their own ideas of a new nation borrowing from decolonization in Asia, Africa, and Latin America in the 1950s and 60s. Powerful students and labour movements in East Pakistan were inspired by anti-colonial movements in the global sixties ranging from the Algerian anti-colonial war, Cuban revolution, Congolese national liberation struggle and peace movements supporting Vietnam. Similarly, the Sino-Soviet rivalry of the sixties deeply impacted student radicals and labour activists. The revolution of 1969, culminating in the national liberation struggle in 1971 was informed and influenced by the global sixties. Thus, the global sixties transformed the political landscape of Pakistan and facilitated the birth of Bangladesh. This round table locates the book in the context of the global sixties and the politics of unified Pakistan and moves beyond the confinement of the book.
Identity, Politics, and Citizenship
Panel Group
Session: Session 9: Saturday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: University C/D
Floor: Floor 2
.
Qawm and ethnicity in eighteenth -century Afghanistan: a study of Mughal Beg’s Sayr al-Bilad
Dirty Edges: Space, Purity, and Belonging in Nepal’s Nation-State
The Origins, Genesis, and Outcomes of the Islamic Socialist Discourse in Pakistan Between 1947 and the 1990s: A Critical Analysis
In the Wake of Partition: Navigating Post-Amnesia through Visual Art
After 1947: The Politics of Decolonization
Panel Group
Session: Session 9: Saturday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Parlour Room 627
Floor: Floor 6
.
BREWING NATIONALISM: PLANTATION TOURISM AND LABOR IN CONTEMPORARY SRI LANKA
The Students and the States: JP Movement in 1974-1975
Rethinking the evolution of international society: India, sovereignty, democracy, and the international order in the 20th century
Constructing (Post)colonies: Race, Gender, and Nationhood in the Subcontinent
Panel Group
Session: Session 9: Saturday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Parlour Room 629
Floor: Floor 6
Colonial and postcolonial literary, material, and cinematic artefacts reflect contested notions of community, both as nations and as racialized and gendered groups. This panel explores complex categories such as race, gender, and nationhood within fractured communities in the subcontinent. Via conversations about early Muslim Urdu novels, Bengali children’s literature and films, as well as public and private Bangladeshi sites commemorating the 1947 Partition, this panel interrogates how these vectors carve and construct consciousness of new postcolonial nations. Speaker 1 explores public and private sites of communal and generational memories in Noakhali, Bangladesh – including Gandhi’s monument and Hindu and Muslim residential sites – to excavate the various ways in which these commemorative sites invite reflection on the communal as well as national pasts after 1947. Speaker 2 examines pervasive images of Africa in Satyajit Ray’s Jai Baba Felunath (The Elephant God, 1979) to interrogate how print and visual cultures aimed at younger audiences in the subcontinent contribute to rhetorics of national self-making while simultaneously circulating colonial ideals of race and nationhood. Speaker 3 traces the pioneering figure of the female detective in Kolkata publishing house Dev Sahitya Kutir’s series fiction titles during the 1940s-50s. Delineating the kinds of hybrid modernities Prabhabati Devi Saraswati’s female detectives inhabited, this paper analyzes the aspirational feminist figures that embodied all the possibilities that a patriarchal middle class 20th century Bengali society denied its women. Speaker 4 compares early Urdu fiction –Sultana’s Dream (1905), Mira-tul-Uroos (1869), and Umrao Jaan Ada (1899) – to ask: How does education inform and form women’s idealized role within Muslim communities? This paper examines the various ways in which Muslim women’s education with its promissory feminist prospects contributes to the projects of community making as well as nation building and extends beyond that.
The Commemorative Landscape and the Post-Memory of the 1947 Partition of India in Noakhali
Finding Africa in Benaras: Postcolonial Citation in Jai Baba Felunath (1979)
A Series of Her Own: Pioneering Female Sleuths in Bengali Children’s Literature
Promissory Feminism and Women’s Education: Modes of Community Making in Early Urdu Novels
THE CAREERS OF THINGS: INFRASTRUCTURAL RECURSIONS AND REINVENTIONS IN SOUTH ASIA
Panel Group
Session: Session 9: Saturday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Parlour Room 634
Floor: Floor 6
This panel explores the multiple lives of infrastructure: the unexpected, untold, and rogue journeys of infrastructural objects, technologies, instruments, and sites. Infrastructure studies has opened up “the politics and poetics of infrastructures” in their first incarnations—what they were built for—and at the end of their lives—as the ruins of technical and cultural engineering as well as questions of access. Building on this scholarship, this panel explores the material, social, political-economic, and discursive transformations that reconstitute infrastructures over time, thereby illuminating the latencies and excesses within infrastructures that allow for their multiple lives. What stories are told – or spin out of control – about these transformations are as important as the materiality and political economy of the transformations themselves. The four papers explore the heterogenous entanglements that are produced and relied upon as political actors, environmental conditions, and creative use transform the meaning, technical capacity, and aesthetic force of infrastructural sites and entities across historically and geographically varied contexts in South Asia. These are the careers of infrastructures, or biographies beyond, beneath, and across the surface of things that move us past the oft-commented on dialectics of bounded visibility and invisibility towards the distribution of effects that are social, sensory, political, and perceptible. Varied in scale, from the devices of global financialization and subcultural production to the sites of national development and security, careering infrastructures is the method and object of this panel.
Infrastructures of Gathering in RRR
Soldiers, families, and Housing Intimacy
Infrastructural Embodiments: Labor to Steel
“Bring your foot one step forward! Yes, now you have one foot in Pakistan and one in India!” Sharing a shrine, water, and hate
Political Theologies of South and East Asia
Panel Group
Session: Session 9: Saturday, 8:30 am - 10:15 am
Room: Parlour Room 638
Floor: Floor 6
This panel explores the varied political theologies of South and East Asia over the long durée. Recent years have seen an influx of scholarship re-examining the relation between religion and the construction of political authority in pre- and early modern Asia, treating subjects ranging from sacred kingship to the role of messianic religious movements in buttressing claims to political authority. More than uncovering overlooked facets of the past, these studies have underscored the theoretical fecundity of Asian history and political theory in the present. If “all historical knowledge is knowledge of the present,” as Carl Schmitt once asserted, these efforts reflect a burgeoning awareness of the inadequacy of Liberal theorizations of sovereignty, subjecthood, religion and the political in the face of new challenges. In keeping with this emphasis on theoretical engagement, the four panel participants all address the challenge of “political theology” from diverse but complementary vantage points. Moving chronologically: Speaker 1 treats subject formation and governmentality in the course of a contrast between Jain and Vedāntin modes of monastic government over the period of the 14th to 17th centuries; Speaker 2 interrogates the political myth of Jalāl ud-Dīn Akbar as a secular sovereign by proposing a political theology of the South Asian secular in the form of an Islamicate “theology of religions,” given expression in the “Mughal translation movement” and its multivalent treatments of Krishna as a sacred king; Speaker 3 examines early modern Buddhist Tibetan attempts to distinguish and relate human and divine aspects of political power through an elucidative contrast with Schmitt’s political theology and emphasis on the concrete nature of the political; and, last but not least, Speaker 4 examines “Buddhist milleniarianism” in Sri Lanka over the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, probing the leitmotif of political prophecies of a restorer king.
The Triumph of the Vedas in the Language of the Jains
Buddhist Millennialism and Political Prophecy in Sri Lanka
The King's Remains: Political Theology in Early Modern Tibet
Kṛṣṇa the Emperor
Quantitative and qualitative approaches to the study of craft technologies in ancient South Asia
Panel Group
Session: Session 10: Saturday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Assembly Room
Floor: Floor 1
This panel presents a range of refined approaches to the archaeological study of ancient craft technology using quantitative analytical and experimental approaches to infer socio-economic patterns and trade networks in ancient societies. Qualitative studies of material structure and design that address aspects of technology that cannot be examined using precise scientific methods will also be discussed. Both approaches to the study of craft technology provide insights into an ancient social hierarchy, the organization of craft production and ideological aspects of both urban and rural communities in the past. Presenter l focuses on the cultural and temporal affiliation of pottery sherds found in the Kaghan Valley, northern Pakistan using the X-ray fluorescence technique. This technique is the first application in studying ceramic traditions that link the intermontane and plains regions during the Early Historic Period. Presenter 2 examines the iconographic representations of possible ritual structures of the Indus Civilization and compares these to ethnohistoric and experimental reconstructions of ephemeral ritual structures of South Asia. Presenter 3 provides a detailed regional analysis of ancient Indus faience technology, focusing on the morphological styles of faience beads from Indus sites in Gujarat, India. New methods to analyze and interpret the regional aspect of faience production in the wider Indus interaction sphere will be discussed. Presenter 4 looks at new ways to analyze ancient textiles rarely preserved in the archaeological record. Studies of ethnohistoric textiles and experimental modern textiles will be used to identify new techniques to study and interpret archaeological textile remains when they are discovered. Together the papers focus on new approaches and comparative analyses of a variety of craft technologies to develop better methods and interpretive frameworks for understanding ancient economic, sociocultural, and ideological practices in South Asia
Provenance Study of Pottery from Kaghan valley Pakistan using Xray Fluorescence Spectroscopy (XRF) and its Linkages with Ancient Indian Pottery Industries
Ephemeral Temples: Exploring Indus Valley Ritual Space
Regional styles of Indus faience technology and bead production (2600-1300 BCE): A view from Gujarat, India.
Tracing textiles in the Indus Valley Civilization and Surrounding Regions: Ethnoarchaeological and experimental approaches to materials analysis
Polemic Structuring and Restructuring in Eighteenth-Century India
Panel Group
Session: Session 10: Saturday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Caucus Room
Floor: Floor 1
The eighteenth century is usually not perceived as a “golden age” of Sanskrit intellectual production. The vast majority of scholarship has focused instead on the classical and medieval periods, and although recent work has called attention to the early modern period, this scholarship has mostly centered on figures from sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This panel attempts to address this gap in scholarship, arguing that the 18th-century intellectual domain was no less dynamic and worthy of study than preceding centuries. Drawing from multiple texts and traditions, this panel identifies the eighteenth century as another critical moment of strategic and spontaneous structuring and restructuring of intellectual traditions. The first speaker focuses on Upaniṣad Brahmayogin, a Nondualist Vedāntin who wrote commentaries on 108 Upaniṣads. This speaker argues that his commentarial project helped to authorize this expanded Upaniṣadic canon and to redefine Vedānta as a “big-tent” category including teachings drawn from Yoga, Tantra, and Bhakti. Looking at both Nondualist and Dualist Vedānta, the second speaker investigates a discussion of Nondualist Vedānta by Aiyyaṇa, a follower of Madhva, in his Matatrayaikyaprakāśikā. The argument is that Aiyyaṇa’s views on authorial intent, including the freedom to attribute positions that authors did not hold to their texts, offer important insights into Sanskrit intellectual practice during the period. Tracing the modern soteriological debate of Qualified Nondualist Vedānta, the third speaker shows how Gopāladeśika, in his Nikṣeparakṣācintāmaṇi, reframed the soteriology of self-surrender, which was well established in the medieval period by Vedāntadeśika, as the site of contention in his circle and later by synthesizing Vedāntadeśika’s views across different texts. Finally, the last speaker preliminarily examines Viśveśvara Paṇḍita’s scriptural exegesis in defense of Nyāya and against Nondualist Vedānta in his Tarkakutūhala, arguing that Viśveśvara’s counter-hermeneutic reading of the Upaniṣads is an innovative method and offers the first Nyāya Upaniṣadic exegesis.
Expanding the Upaniṣadic Canon: The Commentaries of Upaniṣad Brahmayogin
Strategies for ‘Reconciling’ Rival Views in Aiyyaṇa’s Matatrayaikyaprakāśikā
Reframing Soteriology: The Modern Śrīvaiṣṇava Debate on Self-Surrender
Rational Reading: Nyāya Scriptural Exegesis in Viśveśvara Paṇḍita's Tarkakutūhala
Vernacular Worlds in the Arabic Cosmopolis
Panel Group
Session: Session 10: Saturday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Senate Room A
Floor: Floor 1
The presence of Arabic script production in a large number of South Asian languages remains an understudied phenomenon. Even as Indian Ocean scholarship has attempted to abandon the study of such literary communities from diffusionist or dichotomous models, the sheer diversity of language groups in coastal, littoral, and distant inland communities has resisted easy theorization. Within the scholarship on South Asian languages, the naming practices that demarcate Arwi Tamil, Arabi Malayalam, Shahmukhi Punjabi, Dakhani, and Gojri from literary histories of Tamil, Malayalam, Punjabi, Urdu, and Gojri signal the uneven attention paid to Arabic-language regional production in literary histories often troubled by the cross-cutting claims of religious, ethnic, regional, and linguistic nationalisms. This panel brings together three papers that offer a fresh attempt to read these materials from the perspective of specific regional experiences without attempting to force such texts into the origin stories of nations, communities, or languages. By remaining open to the complex agentive processes that informed the genre, themes, and literary devices in each work, the papers also pay attention to the literary choices of authors. This close reading of texts and contexts thus invites scrutiny of previous critiques that such texts lack literary features and were mostly simple didactic works. The panel puts forward larger questions about how scholarship adjudicates the question of literary quality and worth, and how techniques of communication and clarity perhaps deserve as much attention as literary flourish and ornamentation in these debates.
Sufism in the Indian Ocean: Arabic Hagiographies and Arabicized Vernacular Translations in South India
“Risen from Satan’s Urine”: The Trial Against Tobacco in Sām Ṣihāputtīn’s Tampāk Mālai
Vernacular Poetry for the Momin: Everyday Ritual and Tawḥīd in the Mughal Empire
Discussant Comments and Feedback
Hearing and Seeing Media Histories Across the Indo-Pakistan Border
Round Table
Session: Session 10: Saturday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Senate Room B
Floor: Floor 1
This roundtable discusses the contribution of two new publications to South Asian studies, anthropology, art history, and film and media studies. Evaluating Iftikhar Dadi’s Lahore Cinema: Between Realism and Fable (2022) and Isabel Huacuja Alonso’s Radio for the Millions: Hindi-Urdu Broadcasting Across Borders (2023) together, this panel situates cinema and radio’s distinct, but overlapping role in the making and unmaking of borders and identities during the twentieth century. Bridging history and sound studies, Radio for the Millions argues that despite British, Indian, and Pakistani politicians’ efforts to usurp radio for state purposes, the medium enabled listeners and broadcasters to resist the agendas of the British and subsequent Indian and Pakistani governments. Huacuja Alonso traces how people engaged with radio across news, music, and drama broadcasts, arguing for an expansive definition of what it means to listen. She develops the concept of “radio resonance” to understand how radio relied on oral communication such as rumor and gossip and to account for the affective bonds this “talk” created. Iftikhar Dadi’s Lahore Cinema probes the role of language, rhetoric, lyric, and form, and the Urdu cultural universe to midcentury Lahore (and Bombay) filmmaking. Dadi explores how Lahore films allowed their audiences to navigate an accelerating modernity and tense politics by anchoring social change across the terrain of deeper cultural imaginaries. By constituting publics beyond regional, ethnic, and sectarian divides, Dadi has argued that commercial cinema played an influential progressive role in twentieth century South Asia. Both studies are distinctive in foregrounding the significance of media form and aesthetics. Both books also understand mass media as being transnational in its formal address and actual reception, in constituting new publics, and contributing to imagining South Asia as a connected space despite the rise of nationalism from the mid twentieth century onwards.
Shah Rukh Khan, Stardom, and Neoliberal Politics in Contemporary India
Round Table
Session: Session 10: Saturday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Conference Room 1
Floor: Floor 2
This roundtable unpacks the figure of Shah Rukh Khan (SRK) as a socio-cultural phenomenon that speaks to the workings of stardom in the Bombay film industry and operates as a site for political negotiations in globalized India. The panelists approach SRK through his star persona, articulated across his cinematic oeuvre, as well as through an examination of his latest release Pathaan (2023). The panelists studying the long-durée of his stardom, trace the motivations for why SRK picks certain films, the labels ascribed to his characters, his changing body, politicized responses to his Muslim identity, and how he performs his stardom, both on and offscreen. Each of these panelists examine multiple films to demonstrate how these film-texts produce the star in both professional and political capacities. They also demonstrate Khan’s investment and active, self-conscious involvement in curating his own star text. The panelists focused on Pathaan (2023) investigate how it marks new directions in SRK’s stardom and captures a historical conjuncture where the popular-political stakes of a film far exceed its internal plot-points. The spectacular success of Pathaan has been read as a resounding response to, and defeat of, the right-wing’s orchestrated attacks on Shah Rukh Khan. The film and SRK’s engagement with its paratexts (Instagram reels, Twitter posts, post-release press-conference) self-consciously encourage the audience’s affective-political investment in the film’s meta-textual discourses: SRK’s real-life family-drama with the Indian state; the trend of censoring high-powered celebrity films by embroiling them in Hindutva-driven controversies; the revival and reclaiming of Bollywood; announcing a Muslim-brotherhood between top film-industry celebrities; arrival of a new-age cinematic secularism and a trio that represent “Amar-Akbar-Anthony.” At the same time, the film also allows us to register the limits of neoliberal stardom as an adequate foil to religious authoritarianism.
Decolonizing Equity-Diversity-Inclusion Discourses and the Neoliberal University: Lessons from South Asia
Round Table
Session: Session 10: Saturday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Conference Room 2
Floor: Floor 2
The neoliberal university in the global North has set the template for an understanding of higher education in our times. However, the higher educational landscape in South Asia with a mix of public and neoliberal private university and continuing struggles around the liberal university as a space of dissent in the context of the onslaught of authoritarian regimes and neoliberalizing discursive onslaught from the northern academia, requires careful consideration. One of the central paradoxes of the neoliberal university is the centrality afforded to equality-diversity-inclusion discourses and practices. Several critiques of these have emerged from within the northern context, including pointing out how these efforts remain limited to employment equity and multicultural diversity. However, despite critiques these often become the models to be exported into the global south and its higher education ecosystems. In this context, race is seen to be coterminous with caste and other complex intersections often disappear. As higher education in South Asia comes to be marked by gender inclusion and parity, what does social justice and equity mean requires urgent reflection. In a context of newer state policy on higher education in South Asia pushing towards greater integration into the neoliberal paradigm in the name of ‘internationalization’, the central question to ask would be- what can the experience of integration and possible resistances to that integration as they come up within the South Asian context, open up for a conversation around the neoliberal university and its futures. What would pedagogies of dissent look like? This roundtable seeks to bring together diverse voices who have been researching higher education in South Asia and in the USA, in the context of neoliberalism to understand the hegemonizing structures and ways in which different stakeholders are offering resistance and working with contingent spaces to stem this tide.
Multilingual Interaction in South Asian Spaces of Pedagogy and Practice
Panel Group
Session: Session 10: Saturday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Conference Room 3
Floor: Floor 2
South Asians traverse multilingual spaces regularly. In the subcontinent and the diaspora, they negotiate linguistic differences and navigate environments by translanguaging, whether in formal academic arenas or daily life within their communities. The term "linguistic landscape" was initially used to refer to the various languages spoken in an area, region, or political entity; more recently, it has been used to describe the presence of visual language in built environments. This panel seeks to investigate how studies of linguistic landscapes can contribute to understanding sociolinguistic dynamics and power relations in cities in South Asia and its diasporas. We take a multimodal approach to analyze how different languages and scripts are used in educational institutions, government signboards, textbooks, advertisements, flyers, banners, magazines, and newspapers, and how public signage is connected to online worlds through URLs, hashtags, and QR codes. Overall, we use the concept of linguistic landscape to reflect upon how linguistic choices, whether in public signage or interactions in classroom and homes, can index ethnic, religious, and class differences, and function as salient forms of political action, whether on the part of the state or minoritizeed groups seeking authority.
Linguistic Landscapes and the Trans/national Politics of Language Loyalty in Little Jaffnas
Teaching English in Jaffna Tamil Classrooms
The Linguistic Landscape of a Trilingual Protest Movement in Colombo, Sri Lanka
The University, Coaching Institute, and Cafe: Reflections on Advertising in North Delhi
Waiting for the People: A Book Roundtable
Round Table
Session: Session 10: Saturday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Conference Room 4
Floor: Floor 2
This roundtable focuses on Nazmul Sultan’s forthcoming monograph, Waiting for the People: The Idea of Democracy in Indian Anticolonial Thought (Fall 2023 with Belknap Press/Harvard University Press). It is the first book-length account of Indian answers to the problem of peoplehood in political theory. The claim that Indians were unfit for self-rule was a shibboleth of British colonial rule. Behind this ubiquitous assertion lay a foundational claim about the absence of peoplehood in India. Indian anticolonial thinkers grappled with the developmental assumptions built into the modern category of peoplehood, scrutinizing contemporary European theories of popular sovereignty and the assumption that a unified peoplehood was a prerequisite for self-government. Sultan’s book demonstrates how the anticolonial reckoning with the ideal of popular sovereignty fostered novel insights into the globalization of democracy and ultimately drove India’s twentieth-century political transformation. Speaker 1 is a specialist in the history of the British Empire and Indian anticolonial history with a special emphasis on gender. Speaker 2 is an intellectual historian of moral thought in colonial India; he will speak on the book’s contributions to the study of modern South Asian intellectual history. Speaker 3 is a specialist in early modern Indian history and a scholar of popular sovereignty who will reflect on the book’s reframing of the question of peoplehood in modern South Asian history. Speaker 4 is a historian of decolonization and practices of historical knowledge and will comment on the the intellectual-historical transformations underlying the age of decolonization discussed in the book. Speaker 5 is a specialist on Indian cultural history and caste. Speaker 6 is the author who will respond to the comments and engage with the audience. The roundtable is chaired by an anthropologist of popular politics whose work is in conversation with the thematic preoccupations of the book.
Violence of Memories: Reclaiming Spaces and Lost Voices from South Asia.
Panel Group
Session: Session 10: Saturday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Conference Room 5
Floor: Floor 2
This panel seeks to put forward literary texts, films, visual aids and other forms of cultural productions as counter-memory to dominant historical narratives of the nation. Our current understanding of violence in South Asia is shaped by a legacy of several historical and unresolved geo-political crises, which is further underlined by the hierarchy of what can and cannot be narrated as part of the nation’s history. In such circumstances, it becomes a matter of urgency to reclaim and retrieve those voices, spaces and incidents that have been under-represented or suppressed altogether in the face of continual state-sanctioned violence. The panel will look at this act of retrieving and reclaiming through the lens of reviving or challenging memory – cultural, historical, public. The panel will investigate if literature and aesthetic representations can work as alternate, future archives of lost voices that can challenge hegemonic nationalistic discourses. To that extent, how can these alternative cultural productions help us in redefining the ways we remember a particular historical event or phenomenon in the context of modern South Asia? Topics and themes include, but are not limited to: • Remembering wars and emergency situations in South Asian popular culture • Memories of sexual violence and nationhood. • Identity and nationalism. • Class, caste and gender violence. • Narratives of resistance and agency during times of conflict.
Misremembering Macdonald: Sexual Violence against Children in Ceylon
Imprisoning the ‘Enemy’ Citizen: Inversion of the ‘Migrant Crisis’
K-pop as a cultural capital: Understanding the performativity of race and nationalism among Northeastern students in India
Effaced Memories: The Bangladesh Liberation War and Unpacking the Silence on Wartime Sexual Violence.
Technological (Mis)Appropriations
Panel Group
Session: Session 10: Saturday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Capitol Ballroom A
Floor: Floor 2
.
Acting Secular: Prefigurative practice, making it, and young people in a North Indian theatre group
Bytes of Blessings: Examining Digital Technology's Influence on Pakistan's Na'at Culture
Computational Misogyny: The Networked Redistribution of Hate in Digital India
Agit-Press: Film India, Interventionist Journalism and its Counterpublics
Other Worlds, Other(ed) Spaces: Domestic Structures and Queer Heterotopias in Nagarkirtan
Contemporary Caste and the State
Panel Group
Session: Session 10: Saturday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Capitol Ballroom B
Floor: Floor 2
.
To Be or Not to Be a Minority: Recognition and Misrecognition in Pakistan
Reetu Pradhan - reetu.pradhan15@gmail.com ()
Conflict in Spatial Paradigms: Indigenous Newa Movement against the Nepalese State
Elephants, Adivasi Communities, and the Neoliberal State
Crafting constitutional structure from below: Federalism, bureaucracy and the Tharu self-governance in Nepal
South Asian Political Movements
Panel Group
Session: Session 10: Saturday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: University A/B
Floor: Floor 2
.
Populist Rhetoric and Counter Rhetoric: The Farmer as “Annadaata”
Unraveling the Threads of Politics, Identity, and Transformation in Sindhi Ajrak
Dis-/Order Machines: The Action-Centered Organization of Left and Ambedkarite Student Politics in Delhi and Hyderabad
The Politics of Militarization, Citizenship, and Neighborliness Across South Asia
Round Table
Session: Session 10: Saturday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: University C/D
Floor: Floor 2
What does it mean for people across caste, gender, religious, and national lines in South Asia to be good neighbors? Whether in urban neighborhoods or in diverse borderlands, fraught and fluid questions of neighboring and belonging animate exclusionary forms of citizenship across contemporary South Asia. This roundtable uses a recently published book - A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security across the Bangladesh-India Borderlands by Sahana Ghosh - as a springboard for a discussion of the intimacies and exclusions of citizenship and neighboring. The book chronicles the slow transformation of a connected region into national borderlands and shows the foundational place of gender and sexuality in the meaning and management of threat and security in relation to mobility. This roundtable brings together feminist scholars working in diverse contexts across India (Speakers 2, 3, 5), Pakistan (speaker 4), Bangladesh (speakers 2, 5, 6), and Sri Lanka (speaker 1). It invites them to speak of their work in relation to the theoretical, ethical, and methodological themes/questions raised by the book (all speakers)- e.g. the domestic as a site of the political (Speaker 1, 3), geopolitics and citizenship (Speaker 2, 4), policing gendered mobilities (Speakers 3, 5) visuality and the violence of protracted surveillance and militarization (Speakers 4, 6). As such, the roundtable seeks to highlight the productive directions taken by transnational feminist approaches to the study of militarization, mobility, and citizenship beyond national frames in contemporary South Asian studies.
Constitutional Considerations of Society and Religion
Panel Group
Session: Session 10: Saturday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Parlour Room 627
Floor: Floor 6
.
The Queen's Urdu: Translating Colonial Secularity in Victoria's 1858 Proclamation
The Battle for Sabarimala: Fluidity and Flux in the Debate Over Women’s Entry
They, the People: The Absence of the People in the Indian Constituent Assembly
Documenting Protest
Panel Group
Session: Session 10: Saturday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Parlour Room 629
Floor: Floor 6
.
Memorializing the Pakistani Student Movement: Sites of Memory and Commemoration
Stranded: CAA-NRC, Mobility Narratives and Disenfranchisement in chars of Assam, India
The politics of solidarity and resistance: Indian women in the British suffrage movement
The sacrificial victim: The figure of the Pathan in the 1928 Bombay strike
Migrations of Modern Spiritualities
Panel Group
Session: Session 10: Saturday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Parlour Room 634
Floor: Floor 6
.
Parsi Avatar: Meher Baba (1894-1969) Between Iran, India, and the World
Power of Performance: Shia Ritual Practice at home and at the pilgrimage
Commodification of Religion, Sacredness, and Neoliberal Subjectivities in India: Inequality and Heritage Touris
What Matters and Why?: Fusing the Secular, the Spiritual, and the Religious to Develop a Pragmatic Ethos
Public Health in South Asia
Panel Group
Session: Session 10: Saturday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Room: Parlour Room 638
Floor: Floor 6
.
Public Health Policy and Governance during COVID-19 – Results from a Natural Experiment
Type 2 diabetes management in Trinidad: A question of scale
Md Asaduzzaman - masaduzz@asu.edu (Arizona State University)
Rabeya Khatun - rabeyarabu83@gmail.com (Comilla University)
Impact of social dynamics in adolescent Girls’ reproductive health Issues: Analyzing factors of illness causation in Bangladesh.
Eranga Galappaththi - eranga@vt.edu ()
Policy Responses to COVID-19 in Sri Lanka and the Consideration of Indigenous Peoples
Quit India! Decolonizing South Asian archaeology in theory or practice?
Round Table
Session: Session 11: Saturday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Assembly Room
Floor: Floor 1
Arising from the history of Orientalist knowledge production in South Asia, colonial structures have long permeated archaeological practice, from field and collection methodologies to publication, preservation, and education. This history continues to shape the production of historical narratives and professional opportunities in the discipline today. Moving on from the arguments of postcolonial analysis, we acknowledge the many different definitions of decolonization. We will discuss different approaches to decolonized archaeological work and consider how they might differ from international collaborations, nationalist or postcolonial archaeologies, and multidisciplinary scientific approaches that seek to apply comparative methods. To what extent is it possible to achieve a decolonized archaeology given the structures and constraints of academia and the colonial origins of the discipline? What are some potential pathways for implementing the ideals of decolonization, and what strategies can be used to acknowledge and mitigate the related challenges and contradictions of these ideals? Through the discussion, we expect to identify the potential effects of decolonization, resistance to decolonization, and the impact of ignoring decolonization efforts. The 6 speakers are practicing archaeologists and heritage experts from institutions in the US and India who have engaged with issues of decolonization in their scholarly work. Speaker 1 focuses on Islam and secular-national historicism in India. Speaker 2 examines empires in early historic south India and colonial cartographic representation. Speaker 3 focuses on embodiment and warrior representation in J&K. Speaker 4 is an architectural historian who examines the terrain between popular knowledge, the state, and disciplinary self-critique. Speaker 5 examines third millennium communities in north India and collaborative field practices. Speaker 6 investigates small scale complexity and archaeologies of Hinduism and equitable practices in academia.
(Re)Structuring Śaivism: The Śivadharma and its Tamil Transmission
Panel Group
Session: Session 11: Saturday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Caucus Room
Floor: Floor 1
Recent research suggests that an anonymous corpus of early medieval Sanskrit texts collectively known as the Śivadharma (“the religion of Śiva”) played a crucial role in the emergence of Śaivism as an organized religion and the dissemination of its institutional and religious culture across the various regions of South Asia. Unlike the initiatory Śaiva traditions that have been at the center of several pathbreaking studies over the past few decades, the Śivadharma literature focuses on lay religious life, including the duties of laypersons toward Śaiva temples, monasteries, ascetics, and preceptors. Drawing on a range of textual, epigraphical, and archeological evidence, this panel explores the significance of the Śivadharma for Indian religious history, especially in the Tamil-speaking south, where creative adaptations of these texts appear to have had an especially strong and enduring effect on the formation of local religious identities. Speaker 1 introduces the Śivadharma literature, focusing in particular on the ways in which the Śivadharmaśāstra (“Treatise on the Religion of Śiva”) and the Śivadharmottara (“Supplement on the Religion of Śiva”), both circa sixth to seventh century CE, imagine an ideal Śaiva society anchored in lay support for Śaiva institutions. The remaining speakers discuss the south Indian transmission of the Śivadharma via an influential sixteenth-century Tamil-language translation of the Śivadharmottara entitled Civatarumōttaram. Speaker 2 considers how this work participated in the renewal of the early modern Śaiva monastery. Speakers 3 and 4 then turn from questions of institutional history to those of doctrines, values, and theology. Thus, the penultimate paper examines the Civatarumōttaram’s embryology in relation to its project of constructing a universal lay Śaiva ethics. Finally, the panel concludes with a paper on the seventeenth-century reuse of the Civatarumōttaram for the purpose of enculturating new audiences dwelling on the margins of major agrarian population centers.
The Śivadharma as a source for the early history of Śaiva institutions
The Śaiva monastery in the Civatarumōttaram (16th century): Translation, donations, and social order in the Tamil country
Divine Humiliation: How the Śivadharmottara’s Embryological Treatise Concludes the Transmigratory Narrative of Heaven and Hell
Despicable Meat: Vegetarianism in the Civatarumōttaram
Contextualizing Christianity
Panel Group
Session: Session 11: Saturday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Senate Room A
Floor: Floor 1
.
Bridging Identities Through Interreligious Relationships at Marian Shrines in South Asia: Mariamabad and Vailankanni
"From charity to justice": Political transformation and ethical self-cultivation among Tamil Catholics in Southern India
From the Movie Theatre to the Church: A Study on the Vernacularization of Liturgical Music and Cassette Culture Among the Syrian Christians of Kerala
Pakistan: A Devil’s Brew of Political, Economic, and Natural Disasters.
Round Table
Session: Session 11: Saturday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Senate Room B
Floor: Floor 1
By early 2023, soon after the devastating floods of late 2022 that displaced some 15% of its population and caused about $30 billion worth of damage and lost GDP, Pakistan ran dangerously low on foreign exchange (FX) to pay for vital imports of food, medicines, machinery, raw materials, petroleum, and natural gas. In February 2023 Pakistan’s FX reserves declined to about three weeks of import coverage, the rupee hit historic lows, inflation hit fifty-year highs, and speculation was rife that it was going to default on its US$ 125 billion external debt. In January 2023 the Indian government announced that it intended to ‘renegotiate’ the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty, Pakistan’s water lifeline. As if the economic and natural disasters weren’t enough of a devil’s brew to plague Pakistan, in April 2022 PM Imran Khan lost a vote of no-confidence in the National Assembly and his government was replaced by the Pakistan Democratic Movement coalition of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif. Khan immediately claimed that he was the victim of a Pakistan Army Chief and US-led conspiracy and instigated demonstrations to force an early general election that would bring him back to power. A botched assassination attempt on Imran Khan in November 2022 further raised the political temperature in Pakistan. The panel, all eminent experts on different aspects of Pakistan’s politics, economics, and environmental features, will discuss how Pakistan, the world’s fifth most populous state and one of nine declared nuclear weapons states, wound up in such a precarious state, and possible ways out of the current morass. Given the urgency of the crises facing Pakistan, this panel will be both timely and illuminating. Speaker-1 will talk on Pakistani politics and political parties, Speaker-2 on political-military relations, Speaker-3 on economic issues, and Speaker-4 on US-Pakistan relations.
Structures and Spontaneity of Economic Life in South Asia: Corporations, Cooperatives, Communities
Panel Group
Session: Session 11: Saturday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Conference Room 1
Floor: Floor 2
The narrative of neoliberal capitalism subsuming diverse people and places within its all-encompassing fold has been accorded a peculiar finality in recent scholarship in the humanities and the social sciences. This panel seeks to unsettle this teleological framework – both its affirmations and lamentations – by exploring the social imaginations, political negotiations, and legal disputes that have continually shaped economic life in South Asia. Our ideas take inspiration from the work that has complicated the relationship between “capitalism” and “non-capitalisms” (Birla 2009; Tsing 2015) as well as from earlier calls to attend to the “cosmologies of capitalism” (Sahlins 1989). This panel thus explores the structures and spontaneity of economic life in contemporary South Asia by taking a closer look at various kinds of corporations, cooperatives, and collectivities which could not be characterized simply as economics-driven units. We propose this panel as South Asianists who share the conviction that capital continues to be shaped by social, political, and legal logics that exceed economic rationale – whether this be in the ways the distinct political and legal history of Kashmir has shaped the circulation of capital and credit through the state-owned Jammu & Kashmir Bank (Speaker 1), the ways the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act of 1973 made a corporation like Fabindia mobilize interests and relations rooted in kinship to finance and expand their investment in India (Speaker 2), how cooperative financial institutions in western India have become firmly entangled in vernacular articulations of community and politics (Speaker 3), or how regional politics and stakeholder actions have reshaped the Indian oil and gas industry in Assam (Speaker 4). In this way, the panel examines and shows the dialectic between structure and spontaneity in economic life and presents a dynamic world of entanglements between law, economy, and community in South Asia.
Kashmir, Inc.: Credit, Collateral, and the Making of the "State Subject"
Becoming an “Indian” Company: Collectivity and the Corporate Form After the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act
Between Association and Community: Cooperatives and Social Life in Maharashtra
Porous Social Orders of the Corporation: Historical and Ethnographic Notes on an Indian Oil Company
Concepts of the Psyche: Ontological Traversals
Round Table
Session: Session 11: Saturday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Conference Room 2
Floor: Floor 2
What are our concepts of the psyche at present, if these are not entirely dictated by the categories of psychiatry or psychoanalysis? In this roundtable we invite participants to discuss how concepts of psychic life enter their work, whether through ideas of mental health and illness, as philosophical concepts of mind or consciousness, as concepts of psychopolitics and other ways of thinking about subjectivity or subjection in contemporary social and political theory, as concepts of the soul or that which exceeds embodiment, and as conceptions of human and non-human forms of sentience. Rather than a strict demarcation of western or non-western, or religious and secular formations as providing the boundaries of concepts of the psyche, we are particularly interested in ontological traversals, where scholars encounter a concept in one domain, which may (or may not) be legible or transposable into other times and places, and across distinct bodies of knowledge, and regions of thought and life. As such, rather than a critique of Eurocentric universals, we are interested in how particular concepts of the psyche may offer forms of illumination within and beyond the regions of thought in which they emerged. Our speakers include anthropologists, classicists, philosophers, and political theorists, in order to facilitate an exploratory, interdisciplinary discussion on what constitutes the “new” and the “old” in relation to concepts of the psyche in South Asia.
Emerging Studies in South Asian Literature and Poetry
Panel Group
Session: Session 11: Saturday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Conference Room 3
Floor: Floor 2
.
Hunger on the Margins: Food and Violence in Fiction from Northeast India and Bangladesh
Dark Scars of the Heart: Ghalib, the Body, and Vibrant Matter
Exploring the Intersection of Structure and Spontaneity in South Asian Poetry
Women’s Voices and Voices of Women in Early Modern South Indian Poetry
Panel Group
Session: Session 11: Saturday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Conference Room 4
Floor: Floor 2
This panel connects women's voices and the voices of women from early modern South India across various languages and genres of poetry to understand the implications of gender, religion, power, and performance in creating lasting narratives written by and about women. We interrogate the transformative, imitative, and performative aspects of textual analysis to question whether an authentic "women's voice" is discernible given the conventions and tropes of early modern literary genres. The papers engage Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu primary sources spanning from a fifteenth-century Shrivaishnava Tamil retelling of the Mahabharata to the Urdu masnavi of a nineteenth-century courtesan from Hyderabad. Our first panelist examines the fifteenth-century Tamil Paratam of Villiputtur and how a male Shrivaishnava brahmin poet transforms the voice of the powerful Mahabharata heroine Draupadi. Our next presenter focuses on the figure of Tallapaka Annamayya (1424-1503 C.E.), a brahmin male poet who engages in the longstanding poetic convention of taking on the voice of the female lover to speak to his god. Focusing on the shrngara (erotic) songs of Annamayya’s corpus, our panelist traces the workings of bhakti-gender-power articulated within the text and by the descendants, performers, and devotees who interact with the text. The third panelist examines three hagiographies of the 18th c. Telugu poet Vengamamba who challenged brahminical norms for widows by refusing to participate in rituals of widowhood. Our presenter analyzes the hagiographies to make sense of this challenge to patriarchal practices, and to argue that they each operate to curtail Vengamamba’s voice of critique by exceptionalizing her. Our final speaker reads the Urdu masnavi of Lutf un-Nisa Imtiyaz, a 19th c. courtesan, as an alternative autobiography in an effort to reclaim a voice that is otherwise dismissed by patriarchal narratives written about the courtesan, with examples from the 17th c. genre of rekhti poetry.
Transforming an Epic Heroine: Draupadi in Villi’s Tamil Paratam
Vocal Guising in the Shrngara Songs of Tallapaka Annamayya
Vengamamba’s Rejection of Widowhood: Distortions of Hagiographical Prisms
Courtesans and Counter-Archives: Decoding Gendered Language in Pre-Modern Urdu Poetry
Regional and the Transnational: Specificity, Suffusion, and Resonance
Panel Group
Session: Session 11: Saturday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Capitol Ballroom A
Floor: Floor 2
This panel engages non-Bollywood cinemas of India to argue for their structural and thematic resonances beyond borders, both historically and in contemporary times. If Ritwik Ghatak's films are more visible now in academia and elsewhere because of the topicality of partitions, borders, and the predicament of the displaced, contemporary Dalit cinema in Marathi and Tamil draws attention to the parallels between caste and race as systems of oppression. Ritwik Ghatak films make available a re-located political field in which the local idioms of revolution and protest that marked these films find a new modality. This new relocation can be mapped, on the one hand, onto films that emerge from and speak to these cinematic traditions, and on the other, in the intellectual interest, these films have generated outside of their reformist social-realist mandate. While Dravidian cinema of the past, particularly during the Madras Studio era, interrogated the hegemony of the North in containing and subsuming the South, contemporary Tamil cinema engages instead with the globalizing world through its celebration and critique of consumerism. New/Wave cinema from the “regions” share the foregrounding of marginal voices and addressing and articulating a constellation of people historically left out, and in doing so, are gaining global and “pan-Indian” recognition. In addition, films like RRR present regional heroes to appeal to pan-Indian sensibilities, furthering the nationalist agenda, sometimes in dangerous ways – also a globally resonant topic. These impulses towards national and global resonance and recognition are also seen in the changes to the narrative, thematic, and aesthetic structures of cinema: relocating modalities of local idiom, the emergence of caste as a major investment, changing landscapes, and shifting paradigms of popular music are part of this drive. This panel examines how cinema translates and re-codes the untranslatable regional specific into new intelligibility.
Landscape as a Narrative of Resistance in Regional Cinema
Dabba Beats and Hiphoppari: Local Cine-music and Global Resonances in South India
Think, Practice Thinking: Ritwik Ghatak today
Contemporary Tamil Cinema and Cops: Agents of (Social) Injustice
Global Caste
Panel Group
Session: Session 11: Saturday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Capitol Ballroom B
Floor: Floor 2
In her book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020), Isabel Wilkerson argues that the United States operates under a caste system, one in which race is merely “the primary tool, and the visible decoy” for caste. Wilkerson writes, “If we have been trained to see humans in the language of race, then caste is the underlying grammar that we encode as children, as when learning our mother tongue” (18). However, her study makes little mention – and sheds little light – on the historical, political, and aesthetic interrelationship(s) of race and caste both in the U.S. and South Asia, as well as the nuanced philosophical, political, and narrative traditions of anti-racism and anti-casteism in both places. This panel seeks to explore the presence of race, caste, and colorism as they are made visible – and interrogated – in literary and cultural production across the United States and South Asia. What kinds of solidarities – and what sorts of disjunctures – do we find when we explore how writers, artists, intellectuals, and activists seek to knit the globally oppressive structures of race/racism and caste/casteism together, while also accounting for the historical, religious, regional and cultural differences between them? What is the role of narrative form in the construction of consciousness? What are the critical questions that emerge when we shift our gaze away from the rhetorical comparison of race and caste to specific sites where they intersect, overlap, or diverge? How might we develop a methodology that looks to a variety of sources – poetic, political, popular – across time and geography to move away from false equivalences and instead build a global lexicon of caste?
The Consciousness of the subordinated: Kabir, the prophet of the outcastes
Brahmanism and Guru Fictions: Ekalavya to Ambedkar
A Global Caste Lexicon
The Comparative Logics of Race and Caste in 19thC African American Writings
Literary Criticism and Languages in South Asia
Panel Group
Session: Session 11: Saturday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: University A/B
Floor: Floor 2
.
‘Ek Bhasha, Do Lipi’: Sayyid Insha Allah Khan’s Rani Ketki ki Kahani (1803) and the politics of Hindi/Urdu in North India
Structural Duality: The State from the Language(s)
From ṭīkā and śāstra to ālocanā: The birth of close reading and literary criticism in modern Hindi
Muslim Lives at Home and Abroad
Panel Group
Session: Session 11: Saturday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: University C/D
Floor: Floor 2
.
Islam-neoliberalism and suicides in young Bangladeshi-Canadian men in the Greater Toronto Area
Muslim Women on Japan, 1930-1940
The Politics and Aesthetics of Love in Home Fire and Dil Se: An Intertextual Reading
Protesting hate: Muslim women and citizenship in post-colonial India
Female Refugees’ Economic Empowerment: A win-win solution for all
Reconstructing the Decolonial Discourse: Critical Examinations of Theory and Praxis of Decoloniality
Panel Group
Session: Session 11: Saturday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Parlour Room 627
Floor: Floor 6
A rising body of academic literature on decolonization has demonstrated that the production of knowledge is largely subjected to imperial and colonial designs across the world. While “invisibilizing” and “subalternizing” other epistemes, the geopolitics of knowledge universalizes European thought as scientific truths (Walsh 2007, 224). The hegemonic geopolitics of knowledge is even present in the ideological and theoretical orientation of many recognized academics who are considered as the proponents and producers of critical theory (Walsh 2007, 224). This panel aims to critically engage with the discourse(s) of decoloniality across its multiple theoretical strands that attempt to decenter the Eurocentric hegemony and reorient the self and the other from the anthropological, historical, theological and pedagogical perspectives. This decentering will invariably deal with the “epistemic disobedience” (Mignolo 2020) that is crucial to a reimagining of a pluriverse of gnoseologies that go beyond their theoretical rhetorics. The authors involve a restructuring of the hegemonic ways of knowing and being along with a renegotiation of the “accepted” canons of theorizing. Overall, this panel examines the (discursive) limits of what it means to decolonize our minds along with an analysis of its ontological praxis in lived realities within South Asia and beyond. The examination of the decolonial theory and praxis will include its manifestation in the scholastic and literary context, in the diversal ontologies in South Asia that can enable a contemporary unlearning of the neocolonial matrix of power, in the feminist politics of care and activism in conflict areas of South Asia, and through the examination of decolonial theory and its praxis in academic and non-academic spaces.
Tracing Pluriversality: Unlearning the Colonial Matrix of Power in South Asia
Politics of Care in Times of Neo-colonization: Women’s Activism in Kashmir
(De)coloniality and the School: Lessons from Postcolonial Literature
Coloniality of Knowledge to Grammar of Knowledge Production: The (Im)Possibility of Decoloniality within Modern Academia
Environmental and Sustainability in South Asia: Past, Present, and Future
Panel Group
Session: Session 11: Saturday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Parlour Room 629
Floor: Floor 6
.
Traditional houses of Munshiganj : A local response to river erosion reality of Bangladesh
Forests between Empires: Sawmills, Kathmahal, and Sales of Sleepers
My Grass is Greener
Rice Fields in the Anthropocene: The Topology of Elephants and Institutions in Sri Lanka’s Breadbasket
Living Through the Meanwhile
Panel Group
Session: Session 11: Saturday, 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Room: Parlour Room 634
Floor: Floor 6
Extending the notion of the liminal, the meanwhile in the title of the panel refers to what feels like the never-ending time laden with crises in the global South. Within this context, this panel brings together voices from South Asia (Pakistan, Bangladesh and Kashmir); to underline the forces, factors, processes, and actors behind what seems to have become a state of permanent crisis (Berlant 2011). The panelists ethnographically lay out how the (post)colonial power structures - in liaison with the neoliberal globalized capitalist and other socio-political processes - continue dismantling the previously relatively ‘stable’ and co-constitutive relationships between people and the place they call home. Looking at/into the processes of "creative destruction,” we focus on the 'tectonic shifts' or the ongoing social and economic changes - be it in the Bengal delta, in Indian-held Kashmir, or in Pakistan. If one paper examines how large-scale infrastructure projects under CPEC - roads, energy production units, and economic zones- are producing “a liminal epistemic regime in Pakistan”; another panelist shifts our attention to how “the former armed bandits [in the Bengal delta] are navigating complex social and environmental landscapes, seeking to expand their social possibilities and life chances.” The third panelist looks at how the people in Indian-controlled Kashmir are dealing with the situation on the ground and navigating everyday life as the security infrastructure “institutes an affective social and spatial order.” The fourth panelist outlines not only how the long-term residents of the Inner City of Lahore, Pakistan are living through the historical and socio-economic, and political forces behind the ongoing cultural gentrification of the historic district but also how the non-touristic material-cultural built is acting out as the infrastructure of proximal care for the inhabitants by refusing to cave in before the present of the global capital.
CPEC infrastructure, technologies, and the liminal epistemic regime
Navigating the (Un)certain Landscape: Accounts of Former Armed Bandits in the Sundarbans Region of Bangladesh
Camp on the Move: Security and Everyday Life in Kashmir
Heritage Ordinaire as Infrastructure of Proximal Care
Conservation and Archaeological Survey Across South Asia
Panel Group
Session: Session 12: Saturday, 3:45 pm - 5:30 pm
Room: Assembly Room
Floor: Floor 1
.
Musa Khel & the Indus Tradition of the Northern Punjab
Preserving the Past for Future Generations: The Excavation and Development of Rewat Fort, Islamabad.
Taxila in Pakistani Languages: An Analysis of Indigenous Archaeology
Gilgit Manuscripts Collection at National Museum of Pakistan, Karachi: A Documentation and Study of Calligraphy
In Search of Sakala, the Lost Capital of Indo-Greeks: An Introduction to the ongoing research work Based on Archaeological, Environmental, and Genetic Evidences in District Sialkot
Performing the Divine: Lived Lives of Bhakti
Panel Group
Session: Session 12: Saturday, 3:45 pm - 5:30 pm
Room: Caucus Room
Floor: Floor 1
The tradition of devotional worship – Bhakti (especially that which focuses on the Hindu god Krishna) - has produced an array of cultural texts ranging from hagiographies, poems, plays, to musical and performative genres across South Asia. Drawing on this legacy, this panel assembles four papers that underscore distinct articulations of the performance of bhakti that show the dyadic relationship between form-repetition and innovation, structure and spontaneity. The practice of Krishna bhakti is steeped in the cultivation of an active imagination of leela - Krishna’s play, involving Yashoda, his foster mother, Radha - his primary consort, or gopis - the village belles with whom he had dalliances in the Braj region. The papers showcase how performers and authors from across north, east, and northeast India draw on, innovate, and transform the idea of bhakti and its attendant concepts in music, lyric, theatre, and dance. Speaker 1 focuses on nata sankirtana from Manipur to understand how its performance becomes a ritual expression, especially of collectivity, of the Meitei and Manipuri peoples. Speaker 2 draws on ethnographic research in Vrindavan to shed light on the collective singing traditions across temples known as samaj gayan, showing musical logics of repetition, break, and innovation in an oscillation between structure and spontaneity. Speaker 3 draws on an understanding of the Braj region as a theater of Krishna’s leela to suggest that the continuing process of celebrating Krishna in temple rituals and ceremonies as well as music, dance, and other kinds of performances strengthens the belief of devotees that leela is eternal. Speaker 4 focuses on the trope of biraha to examine its deployment in the works of Rabindranath Tagore, Radharaman Dutta, the baul-poet of Sylhet, as well as other Bengali folk songs to show its creative use in devotional as well as worldly registers.
On the Heels of Musicians: Moving through congregational Manipuri Nata Sankirtana
Structure, Sign, and Play: On Musical Discipline in Vrindavan
Braj: A living Theatre of Krishna Leela
Performing biraha: The Cultural Lives of a Theological Concept
Structure, Spontaneity, and Transmission in Tantra
Panel Group
Session: Session 12: Saturday, 3:45 pm - 5:30 pm
Room: Senate Room A
Floor: Floor 1
.
Chaos from Structure: Secret Yoginī teachings in the Triṃśaccarcārahasya.
Words of God in the Books of Men: Śaiva Commentators and their Manuscripts
The Wheel of the Navel and Lotus of the Heart: Metaphor, Medical Knowledge, and the Early Tantric Body
The Goddess Kurukullā and her Rituals of Subjugation
Book Roundtable: Colonizing Kashmir: State-Building Under Indian Occupation (Stanford University Press, 2023) Hafsa Kanjwal
Round Table
Session: Session 12: Saturday, 3:45 pm - 5:30 pm
Room: Senate Room B
Floor: Floor 1
This roundtable brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to respond to Colonizing Kashmir: State-Building Under Indian Occupation, published by Stanford University Press (2023). Based on a study of state-building practices during the decade-long rule of Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad, the second prime minister of the state of Jammu and Kashmir, the book historicizes India's occupation of Kashmir through processes of emotional integration, development, normalization, and empowerment to highlight the new hierarchies of power and domination that emerged in the aftermath of decolonization. Roundtable participants, ranging from Kashmir Studies, Pakistan Studies, anthropology, Sikh Studies, and Modern South Asian history, will discuss the relevance of the book for their respective fields as well as the study of South Asia at large, and the author will provide a response. Speaker 1: Anthropologist of Sikh Studies who will discuss how the book complicates the study of secularism in India. Speaker 2: Anthropologist of Pakistan who will discuss varying technologies of rule in the (post)colonial period. Speaker 3: Historian of Modern South Asia (Punjab) who will respond to questions of modern state sovereignty. Speaker 4: Anthropologist of Kashmir, who will discuss the contribution of the book in the field of Kashmir studies. Speaker 5: Historian of Modern Kashmir, who will situate the book in Kashmir historiography and the study of Muslim South Asia. Speaker 6: Historian of Modern South Asia (development, empire, decolonization) who will discuss the significance of the book for Modern South Asian historiography, especially during the period of decolonization. Speaker 7: The author of the manuscript, who will respond to comments and questions raised by the speakers, and the broader significance of the book for South Asian Studies.
Emerging Perspectives in South Asian Political Studies - VIRTUAL PANEL
Panel Group
Session: Session 12: Saturday, 3:45 pm - 5:30 pm
Room: Conference Room 1
Floor: Floor 2
.
Narratives of Legal Consciousness: What is law for Bangladeshi people?
Education and voting tendencies: Evidence from rural Bangladesh
Electoral Politics and Violence: Rise of Therik-e-Laybbik Pakistan(TLP
The Birth of Nationalist Planning and the Shape of Sri Lankan Postcolonial Spatial Identity
Media representation as politics constructs subjects in the new India
Indian Literary Worlds
Panel Group
Session: Session 12: Saturday, 3:45 pm - 5:30 pm
Room: Conference Room 3
Floor: Floor 2
.
Ghost Stories: The Coolie in World Literature
A Spirit of One’s Own in an Ocean of Languages: Reading Kamala Das’s ‘An Introduction’ and Arundhati Subramaniam’s ‘To the Welsh Critic Who Does Not Find Me Identifiably Indian’
Economy, Affect, and Equality in Late-Colonial Hindi Print
Imagining India as Bharat
The Work of Grief, Sorrow, and Lamentation in South Asian Poetry, Epics, and Ritual
Panel Group
Session: Session 12: Saturday, 3:45 pm - 5:30 pm
Room: Conference Room 4
Floor: Floor 2
This panel will explore emotions associated with grief and longing in love and war across a variety of time periods and contexts, with language ranging from Sanskrit, classical Tamil, and Greek to early modern Rajput narratives on loss in battle. The speakers will look in particular at how loss disorders and reorders people and places, giving way to lamentation in texts and in person, and the reconfiguration of spatial arrangements in temple ritual. The panel will begin with the figure of the heroine in Old Tamil poetry, and will examine how this character voices loss in love in ways that lack artifice, thereby making her emotions far more stark and acute. We will then turn to a comparative study of grieving in Homer and the Ramayana, followed by a study of hidden emotions of grief in Rajput martial narratives, which at face value display a triumphant tone. Our exploration will end in the spring of 2022 in a Vishnu temple in Tirunelveli, Tamilnadu, when deaths of a priest and a participant interrupt the careful choreographies of major temple festivals.
What the Women Said: Poems of Loss and Lamentation in a Third-Century Tamil Anthology
The Work of Tears: Lamentation, Particularity, Ethics
Glimpses of Grief in Heroic Histories: Mourning Death in Early Modern Rajput Narratives
Death in the Time of Spring: Space and Mourning at the Vishnu Temple in Tirukkurungudi
The Production of News in the Digital Age: Implications for Public Perceptions of Globalization, Citizen Journalism, and Minorities
Panel Group
Session: Session 12: Saturday, 3:45 pm - 5:30 pm
Room: Capitol Ballroom A
Floor: Floor 2
This panel will explore the evolving nature of news production and its impact on public perception. The presentations will examine the shift from traditional news production to more authentic and spontaneous approaches in the public sphere. The panel will also consider the role of citizen journalism in the digital age and how it is changing the way news is produced and consumed. Additionally, the globalisation of news production will be discussed, with a focus on its implications for local media and its impact on global public discourse. Finally, the role of news framing in shaping public perceptions of minorities in Pakistan will be analysed using a content analysis of news coverage. Through these presentations, the panel seeks to shed light on the changing landscape of news production and its impact on society. The first presentation will explore the shift from traditional news production to more authentic and spontaneous approaches in the public sphere. The second presentation will examine the growing importance of citizen journalism in the digital age. The third presentation will explore the globalisation of news production and its impact on local media and public discourse. The final presentation will analyse the role of news framing in shaping public perceptions of minorities in Pakistan.
From Spontaneity to Authenticity: Rethinking News Production in the Public Sphere
The Role of Citizen Journalism in the Digital Age
The Globalization of News Production and its Implications
The Role of News Framing in Shaping Public Perceptions of Minorities in Pakistan: A Content Analysis of News Coverage
Trauma and Care
Panel Group
Session: Session 12: Saturday, 3:45 pm - 5:30 pm
Room: Capitol Ballroom B
Floor: Floor 2
.
Silent Sufferings in US Health Care: A study on health seeking behavior of Bangladeshi immigrants in South Florida
Precarious Modalities and Testing Empathy: Karan Mahajan’s Shaping the Canon in The Association of Small Bombs
Anxiety as a Technology of Rule: The Violent Crafting of Subject and Territory in Balochistan
Putting People Back Together”: War Medicine, Trauma, and Care work in V.V. Ganeshananthan’s Love Marriage and “Hippocrates"
The Psychogeographical Terrain of the Global South: The Case of Indian Occupied Kashmir
Reading Agrarian Transition Through the Lens of Raymond Williams
Panel Group
Session: Session 12: Saturday, 3:45 pm - 5:30 pm
Room: Parlour Room 629
Floor: Floor 6
South Asia today is at the center of concerns surrounding the challenges of living with climate change. As wet regions get wetter, dry regions face severe droughts, and temperature fluctuations become more irregular, changed environmental conditions pose unprecedented challenges to agriculture across the region. Depleting returns make farming one of the most speculative endeavors under such circumstances. Agriculture is laden with risk, and its burden falls disproportionately on those with the least capacity to take on risk. This panel seeks to reframe the challenges posed by these agrarian transitions. In particular, we take up themes of the “city and the countryside” and “structures of feelings,” as articulated in the work of Raymond Williams, to engage with ongoing agrarian crises in South Asia and examine the implications of its formations and disruptions. How do people bodily experience the close interaction between humans and their environment in the agrarian context under such conditions? What affordances do these crises allow people? And how do they restrict and liberate them? To answer these questions, we look at how discursive categories like the city and countryside attend the formation of private property as real estate and agrarian estate, remaking affective relationships to the soil and cultures of work and social reproduction. We also reflect on what these changes signify for the politics of dignity that dispossessed laborers engage in to break free of rural bonds of community and caste, considering specifically the gendered effects of climate migration. Finally, we consider how human responses to climate change offer an occasion to reconsider agrarian relations of production.
Reading Raymond Williams in the Himalaya
Recalcitrance: Co-labouring Histories of Humans and Plants in the India-Bangladesh Borderlands
The Growers’ Addiction: Structures of Feeling in the Tobacco Growing Regions of Andhra Pradesh
Beyond Country and City: The Politics of Universalism in Rural Pakistan