67 – Marginal Memories: Resistive Expressions of the marginalized in South Asia

October 1, 2025
1:45 pm
H10
Literary and performative expressions have been sites of resistance and celebration for the many marginal communities in South Asia. Through genres like oral songs, poetry, short stories, life narratives, and performative cultural practices like plays, rituals, etc., they have attempted to re-present themselves. Their relegated status in terms of caste, gender, religion, language and indigeneity is represented and contested through creative modes of articulations, thereby reshaping their selfhood at both individual and communitarian levels. An important analytical tool in this context is memory, with its capacity to connect past and present and to incorporate diverse materials/mediums. Concepts like “Public Memory” (C. L. Novetzke) and “Cultural Memory” (J. and A. Assmann) have helped us in understanding the communitarian phenomena with newer insights. This panel invites works engaging with the literary and performative expressions of marginal groups in India and South Asia. It brings to the fore and deliberates upon the rich bodies of literature and cultural practices deployed as critical sites of dissent by various individuals and “publics”. We seek to explore the intersectional politics of aforesaid marginals and the way they lead to community formations relying on literary and cultural memories, thereby defying structures of power and repression. We invite papers exploring the following and related themes: 1. Memory as an alternative archive 2. Orality and writing as emancipatory expressions 3. Language hierarchies and contestations 4. Caste and communitarian assertions 5. Indigenous articulations 6. Gender and agency 7. Contesting geospatial imaginaries 8. Devotional/ritualistic practices of the marginal

Convenors

Pauline Schuster-Löhlau
Yogitha Shetty

Presentations

Matrilineal Memories:Performativity and the Matrilineal Social System among the Marginal Communities in Tuḷunāḍ in South India
Shetty Yogitha - Government First Grade College, Saragur, University of Mysore, Mysuru, India
From “doing religion” to “doing memory”?: The South Indian Vīraśaiva saint Maṇṭēsvāmi becoming an icon of regional Dalit culture and identity
Schuster-Löhlau Pauline - Chair of Indology/South Asian Studies, Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany
Embodying the non-human: Ritual Possession and the Performance of Bhūtakola in Karnataka and Kerala
Puliyedath Adityan Arya - Florida State University, Florida State University, Tallahassee, United States
Transfemininity, the Divine and Community: Practices of Memory among the Jōgappas in rural South India
Merkle-Schneider Sarah - Chair of Indology, University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany
Language Contestation and Hierarchies: Lost Presences of Kathi Language in Bihar
KUMAR DEEPAK - DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, UNIVERSITY OF DELHI, DELHI, India
Contradictions of being modern: Memory, performativity and caste
Chotteyanadamada Chengappa Sowmya Dechamma - University of Hyderabad, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, India
Expression, Agency, Identity: Studying Dhaalo, A Gender Exclusive Folk Dance of Goa
Bambolkar Tanvi - Government College of Arts, Science and Commerce, Quepem Goa, Goa University, Quepem, India
Khaunte Gauravi - Government College of Arts, Science and Commerce, Quepem Goa, Goa University, Quepem, India
Mundhumi Natak – The Limbu Oral Tradition in Contemporary Nepali Theatre
Shrestha Julia - Institut für Südasien-, Tibet- und Buddhismuskunde, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria