64 – Regulating Behaviour, Governing Lives: Everyday Narratives about Decoloniality

October 2, 2025
4:00 pm
Triplex 1016
This panel invites papers drawing on empirically grounded socio-legal inquiries into imaginations of decoloniality in South Asia. What does decoloniality mean in the context of everyday regulation and governance? The architecture of India’s governance systems remains heavily influenced by its colonial experience. This panel enquires into reflections on meanings of decoloniality as they evolve through the way people navigate these governance structures. We seek to explore in what forms decoloniality manifests / would manifest for judges, lawyers, and bureaucrats as agents of the state and for teachers, village councils and religious heads as regulatory authorities in different semi-autonomous social fields and for citizens who remain in a continuous relationship with these different state and non-state systems of regulation. This panel seeks to explore the notions of decoloniality as they evolve through governance-in-action. More specifically, this panel invites papers enquiring into: - Decoloniality as a feature in the working of state authorities such as judges, police, commissions and government schools. How does it manifest? Or how do they imagine decoloniality in their respective contexts? - Narratives of decoloniality within spaces of non-state actors such as village councils, mediators, NGOs, religious tribunals and private educational institutions. - Impressions of decoloniality among vulnerable communities, including LGBTQIA++ groups, religious minorities, indigenous communities and individuals that stand at the intersection of all these axes.

Convenor

Prof. Anindita Chakrabarti

Presentations

Bureaucrats and the limits of decolonial imagination in Gujarat, India
Patel Puja-Arti - Department of Sociology, University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom
Secular governance and religious NGOs in India: A decolonial perspective
Larouche Catherine - Department of Anthropology, University Laval, Quebec, Canada
MOMENTS OF DECOLONISATION IN INDIAN WOMEN’S NAVIGATIONS OF INTERPERSONAL CONFLICT
Kokal Kalindi - Independent, NA, Pune, India
Religious governance of the everyday life: an ethnographic inquiry of Barpeta Satra in Assam
Hazarika Namrata - Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, New Delhi, India
Infrastructures and Discontent in the Garhwal Himalayas
Lokesh Ohri
Vernacular Mantras in Uttarakhan
SAX WILLIAM - South Asia institute, Heidelberg, heidelberg,