Panels

This panel features talks on various aspects of Avestan and Vedic ritual. It includes panel members of the project “Avestan Ritual in India” (AVINDIA), hosted at SOAS University of London and funded by the ERC with an Advanced Investigator Grant. The project focuses both on the ritual and on the linguistic aspects of the Avesta in India. It creates a film of the performance of one of the Zoroastrian core rituals, the Visperad, editions of the Sanskrit versions of the recitation text and of the ritual traditions in Gujarati treatises. The aim of AVINDIA is to detect, describe, visualise and analyse how the ritual is structured as systematically organised activity, and to reconstruct its genesis and historical trajectory. Taking the Visperad ritual as a case study, and using film and computational technologies, AVINDIA examines the ritual activities in the film it will record in 2024, in Gujarati language sources, and in the Sanskrit version of the Avestan recitation text in order to track the historical changes in how the ritual is practised and understood in India. The project design has taken inspiration from the work of Frits Stall on ritual structure. Staal’s theory of ritual formalism remains compelling as an account of orthopraxy, as does his view that rituals are in large part structured, or better constructed, according to rules that are self-referential. Without committing to Staal’s view on ‘meaninglessness’ and specifically his reliance on the language analogy, AVINDIA is based on the premise that Avestan solemn rituals are composites of simpler forms, and that there are rules which govern their composition. Contributions to the panel are invited especially by scholars of Vedic ritual to allow for a comparative perspective.

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Recent scholarship highlights a trend in which indigenous subjectivities reject the concept of human rights as universal. Largely, this rejection is based on data suggesting that ‘human rights’ language is foreign, Western, and irrelevant to local customs and concerns. This panel examines Buddhist and Hindu perspectives from South and Southeast Asia that counter this trend and, more significantly, suggest how dismissals of ‘human rights’ initiatives as products of Western imperialism fail to consider the myriad ways in which women have engaged—albeit in localized terms—in human rights activity. Through historical, anthropological and theoretical analyses, the papers in this panel will consider traditional worldviews and religious practices that inherently align with a ‘human rights’ ethos. Building on Wolterstorff’s analysis (2012), the panel argues that while certain religious traditions may not explicitly name fundamental human rights, this does not mean that these rights are irrelevant or contradictory to core religious beliefs. Presenting original, interdisciplinary research, this panel will show how religious individuals and communities not only integrate human rights into their religious and cultural norms but also offer alternative interpretations of their religions to counter prevailing narratives that portray religion and human rights as incompatible. Panelists critically examine the ‘who,’ ‘what,’ ‘where,’ ‘when,’ ‘why,’ and ‘how’ concerning the production and instrumentalization of religion and human rights rhetoric. Understanding who interprets religion and human rights for others is just as important as recognizing the immediate and long-term impact of these interpretations on the lives of underserved communities. Thus, the panel explores the challenges and strategies that Buddhists and Hindus face in connecting human rights to their religious beliefs and in recognizing them as inherent rights granted by divine will.

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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.

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Following the ‘global turn’ in history-writing, historians have shown how geographical mobility of South Asians opened up the possibilities of entanglements with other anticolonial struggles, creating global “webs” of political affinity. There have tended to be two significant lacuna in our understanding of these networks. Firstly, there has been an overwhelming spatial focus on the imperial metropolises of London and Paris, to the elision of the varied geographies of anticolonialism which encompassed non-imperial and neutral spaces like Switzerland or Mexico, as well as other parts of the colonial world beyond South Asia, like Indonesia, China or Trinidad. Secondly, there has been a relative absence of non-elite overseas Indian migrants, with research focusing predominantly on the individual educated émigrés. Very little is still known about the political worlds of the mass of Indians who emigrated - the traders, students, plantation officials and workers, sailors, soldiers, coolies, refugees, ayahs and prisoners of war who traversed long distances by land or sea, and were sometimes captured or otherwise immobilised. Even less is known about the role of South Asians in the emergence of tourism, globetrotting and similar forms of short term mobility. Some of the questions that this panel asks about travel and political transformation are: How did these South Asians on the move perceive – and participate in – these global political “webs”? In what ways were their perceptions mediated by their specific form of mobility, class, gender and other markers of social identity? To what extent can we understand these as projects of ‘world-making’? By asking these questions, the panel will address the lost political histories and geographies of Indian mobilities and migrations. Submissions to the panel are invited on non- and trans-imperial, neutral and colonial sites of non-elite migration, political encounter and transformation.

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This panel explores everyday manifestations of hate against religious minorities in South Asia; we are especially interested in how hate interacts with and/or affirms majoritarian politics. We seek to understand: how hate can be conceptualised and theorised in relation to power and majoritarian politics, analyse the relation between hate and violence and make sense of what it conveys to/about the politics of the day. We also ask if manifestations of hate result in or cause changes to social relations and legal regulations in an increasingly ideologically polarised society. These manifestations are observable in multiple sites: streets, court rooms, police stations, social media platforms or in the microcosms of family relations. Different displays of hate may be seen through physical performative acts (like lynchings) or verbal speech acts which needn't necessarily make explicit the intention of hateful sentiments. In everyday life, this hate can be seen through casual marginalisation like blasé derogatory comments against minorities, both online and offline, contributing to the normalisation of hate. We will thus delve into questions concerning the varying interactions between hate, violence, power and majoritarian politics. What do different intensities of hate-violence which are so prevalent in the everyday lives of religious minorities tell us about societal realities and politics? How do we understand its normalisation in the current context of South Asian politics? What does this tell us about the relations motivated by power or otherwise between institutions, like police and courts and minorities in the region? And how does this power (im)balance then translate into everyday ‘banal’ hate?

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South Asian print cultures shaped reading publics and modern identities across British India. This panel turns to the literal margins of regional periodicals to explore what paratextual elements may tell us about the formation of not only national, but also (trans)/regional and global networks formed through advertisements. Many South Asian periodicals of the early twentieth century carried numerous advertisements of print materials, services and goods. When they are not stripped-off prior to being archived or digitized, they form a rich archive to scholars studying nation-formation and the fashioning of religious, caste, class, gender and other identities. This panel is directed at researchers who engage with periodicals in various South Asian languages published in colonial India. It seeks to explore the role advertisements may have played in shaping socio-economical, socio-political, religious-cultural, domestic, national and transnational identities and sensibilities. Advertisements also provide information about marketing and potential reader consumption habits and preferences. They testify to the establishment of local, regional, national and in a few instances imperial and international networks between the literary and economic spheres. Academic reasons to consult advertisements in periodicals are varied. Some scholars do so to delve into the history of a (brand-name) product or company, others do so to intervene in larger discourses on health, medicine, capitalism and consumption practices as well as the self-fashioning of the emerging middle classes. This panel aims to initiate an epistemological and methodological conversation on the form and economy of the periodical with advertisements at the center. To meet that objective, it invites presenters to reflect on the relationship of editor-publishers’ marketing interests and need to finance their publishing ventures in relationship to their respective periodicals’ supposed larger agendas.

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This panel explores the evolution of politics-business interaction in India in the light of the growing costs of election campaigns. Over the past two decades the fusion of economic and political power has intensified, with significant implications for the nature of Indian democracy. Politicians have become wealthier and more likely to have business backgrounds, suggesting the oligarchization of India’s democracy. This panel delves into various aspects of this phenomenon, bringing together scholars from different disciplines studying different aspects of this important trend. The panel will involve analyses of the causes of this oligarchization process, such as analysis of the drivers of increased campaign spending. Contributions will look at how economic conditions - such as the dominance of the state in providing or withholding economic opportunities - foster the intertwining of business interests with political power. We also invite contributions about the rise of prominent business conglomerates, the role of state intervention, and the broader economic and political risks associated with these dynamics. Drawing together theoretical insights, fieldwork-based studies as well as quantitative analyses, this panel aims to discuss the implications of evolving business-politics interaction for economic policy, democratic accountability, and social equity.

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The ability to foretell future events has held widespread sway across cultures. Knowledge systems that portend on the basis of prognostication or divination, oneiromancy (dream interpretation), augury through plants and animals, divination by the means of dice, omens, numbers, remedial and palliative skills, horoscopy, etc. have been widely practiced traditions. Since these traditions dealt with abstruse yet popular ideas and practices that were beyond the limits of normal human understanding, these offer unique entry points into analyses of the social, cultural, political, economic, and intellectual backdrops of societies. The functional aspects of these forms of knowledge, such as the reasons and circumstances for their origin and development, and their utility need to be explored. How the practitioners viewed themselves, their divinatory practices, and their reasons for practicing it; and conversely, how they were perceived by the society are some pertinent questions. However, these practices were not always accepted within their own religious framework, i.e., the so-called “pure” form of religion. Consequently, these became the spaces for interactions and integration, as well as contestations. At the same time, religious traditions accorded varied value or moral judgements to similar practices in other traditions, thereby making these practices sites or tools for othering. Given that these knowledge systems and practices are sites of contesting values of identities and differences, can these be used as categories for comparative analyses across a wide socio-cultural range and varied geographies? A broader understanding of the import of these practices within their respective context can become a point of enquiry/scholarly category. The panel will attempt to explore these traditions in order to understand religious doctrines and social practices.

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Many years ago, an Indian publication wrote that ‘dynasties die nasty’, referring to the violent end of two generations of the Nehru–Gandhi family. The statement could have equally been made about the Bhutto family in Pakistan, or several other prominent political families in South Asia. Yet, political dynasticism, especially at regional or local levels, remains a rarely-interrogated phenomenon in contemporary South Asia. There is a dire need for theoretical conceptualisations as well as single/comparative case studies across the region. In this panel, we aim to explore both. We seek to conceptualise dynasticism in South Asia as trust networks based on reciprocity centred on a politically adept player, which is a qualitatively different phenomenon from that which we associate with prominent pre-democratic ruling class families. Such new dynastic-networks and their founders are rather part of a new democratic elite and are found in virtually all political parties, occupying not just elected offices but spread across representative institutions at multiple levels, with strong local roots and influence over regional politics. One theme we are particularly interested in is the ‘dynastic dilemma’ at the moment of succession, i.e. the challenges when a new dynastic heir actively seeks to ensure the dynasty’s reproduction. This dilemma consists of the following: how to reconcile (1) the need to project emerging dynastic heirs as extraordinary beings that embody the special qualities of the original dynast and his or her extraordinary capacity for effecting change in the world, with (2) the need to downplay inherited dynastic ties that leave the heir open to public accusations of nepotism and illegitimate privilege. In this panel, we also seek to understand how this dynastic dilemma is negotiated in practice. We invite papers that explore some or all of these issues, at both national or regional/sub-regional levels in contemporary South Asia.

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‘Self-improvement’ is an idea that has mobilized a whole host of actors and agents in its wake in contemporary South Asia. From the expanding bookshelves under the ‘self-help’ category to private and government institutions offering coaching in technical and soft skills, there is a proliferation of discourses on skilling, self and professional development. Soft or interpersonal skills is the ubiquitous language that dominates the self-development discourse. The service sector is particularly invested in an already-improved skilled subject. Against a milieu of new spaces of employment and consumption, youth want to be professional and negotiate new modes of being and belonging as cities expand. But there is also rising unemployment and increasing socio-economic inequality. We are interested in the everyday practices and grammar of self-improvement, that is not restricted to employment. We explore the work on/of the self, understood as multisensorial, embodied and affective labor, through which individuals become employable, socially mobile and develop the ‘capacity to aspire’ (Appadurai, 2004). This panel brings together papers focusing on some of the following questions: how are the idioms of self-improvement understood by differently positioned actors in South Asia? What are the registers of self-improvement? What moral economies are tied to practices and imaginations of soft skills? What does the rhetoric of self-improvement do to urbanization and neoliberalism? How does the language of self-improvement (re)produce the politics of caste, labor, ethnicity and gender in its fold? Ultimately, what does the desire for self-improvement indicate for South Asian futures?

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