03 – Moral Politics in South Asian Publics

October 4, 2025
8:30 am
H02
This panel aims to explore the moral dimensions of public communication and politics in contemporary South Asia. The panel aims to bring together anthropological and humanities research that focuses on sources of the ethical self, moral contestations, and frictions experienced in practicing public communication in India and Pakistan in the languages Kashmiri, Hindi, Urdu and English. The panel will generate conceptual conversations to discuss three main points: first, the ways in which actors form ethical notions of themselves that allow for certain styles and habits of public communication; second, the moral protocols of public communication in both digital and other public spheres; and third, moralization that translates claims to hurt sentiments into public efficacy. Our panel aims to bring together scholars from the fields of media, literature, and religion to discuss the often-overlooked vernacular moral registers that are implicitly or explicitly present in public communication. These moral discourses and moral self-understandings, negotiated and textualized in vernacular South Asian languages, often have a different affective pull than the English registers. In this sense, we will specifically explore the relation between language, mediality, and morality in an interdisciplinary frame. The discussions generated aim to contribute to the scholarship on South Asian moral cultures and ethics.

Convenors

Max Kramer
Sarbani Sharma

Presentations

Student Activism and the Moral Politics of Declassing/Un-bodying in Contemporary India
Martelli Jean Thomas - Central European University, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary
The Ethics of Evidence: Indian Muslims, Truth and Online Politics
Kramer Max - Institut für Ethnologie, LMU Munich, München, Germany
Self, sovereignty and politics in modern Kashmiri poetry
Bazaz Abir - Ashoka University, Ashoka University, Sonipat, India