Panels

This panel examines lost works of Indian literature, religion, and philosophy. It focuses not only on the use of traces — whether fragments, abridgments, or translations — to recover lost works and thereby to gain a greater understanding of Indian traditions, but on the methods and concepts that scholars working in different disciplines and subfields bring to these questions. We are therefore interested in starting a productive dialogue to compare the clues and methods used for studying "lost texts" between participants who work across a range of languages and specializations. Examples might include works presumed lost in their original form but available in summaries or adaptations, some of which have subsequently been recovered (e.g., Taraṅgavaī, Ṇivvāṇalīlāvaī, Suhr̥llēkha); works that are incompletely preserved (e.g., Rukmāṅgada, Pārataveṇpā); works that include portions of texts otherwise lost (e.g., Tridaṇḍamālā, Śr̥ṅgāraprakāśa, Yāpparuṅkalavirutti); or works that are totally lost and known only from either brief quotations or paraphrases (e.g., Mukuṭatāḍitika, Ṣaḍḍhātusamīkṣā, Vyādi's Saṅgraha). We hope that the comparative and synthetic results of this panel will aid in future research, and in view of publishing those results, we ask for original papers.

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This panel will explore the diverse modes of cultural production in South Asia encompassed by the term purāṇa (a Sanskrit word denoting things 'ancient' or 'primordial'). Populated by deities, sages, and a host of other more-than-human agents, the purāṇic past has been disseminated through a wide range of media and forms of embodied knowledge. As a narrative discourse, purāṇa has played a crucial role in shaping history and cultural memory in early South Asia. In the contemporary world, this discourse continues to (re)create the past as a social, political, and affective force. This panel invites contributions that focus particular attention on the materiality of narrative production and the ways material texts—such as manuscripts, maps, narrative images, inscribed objects, printed books, etc.—shape the communities in which they circulate. In what ways are texts' meanings conditioned by the material assemblages and social infrastructures in which they are created, used, sold, seized, stolen, traded, discarded, or treasured? How do the lives of material texts become enmeshed with those of their makers and keepers over time and across space? This panel seeks to attract scholars interested in innovative, transdisciplinary approaches to the intersection of material culture and narrative, encouraging a broader discussion on the impact of purāṇic media in both historical and contemporary contexts. Through these explorations, we hope to shed light on the enduring significance of purāṇa in the cultural landscapes of South Asia.

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South Asian scholarship’s new interest in song can be seen as marked by absorbing concepts from anthropology, musicology, sound and media studies. The mutual transfer of ideas opens chances to explore afresh the relationship between “literary” and “folk”. Both have long history of incorporating song as matter and form. India's far South, with its multitude of diverse lived-in song cultures, offers a uniquely rich area of study. Its emerging vernacular literary cultures grew by absorbing, adapting and transforming expressive forms developed within largely understudied song cultures of the subaltern. They themselves changed profoundly producing a variety of hybrid (trans-medial) cultural forms. One archipelago within broader patterns of literary cultures is made by pāṭṭu-songs: local stories of inequality, devotion, and transformation. Other archipelagos equally deserve closer study. The panel explores song cultures as complex cultural objects and unique knowledge systems. It relates the lived-in song traditions with forms recognized as literary across the ecologies of Southern vernacular idioms and languages of prestige. We welcome papers adopting new approaches including such concepts as sensorial and sonic epistemologies, embodied knowledge, media-archaeology while looking at the archipelagos of South Indian song cultures in ways that question basic assumptions about oral and written, centre and periphery. Papers on specific singing and literary cultures asking questions about their patterns of circulation, communities of practice, performers, audiences and patrons, as well as social practices that shaped their sensorial, discursive, historical or political bodies.

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Recent scholarship (Harder; Majchrowicz) has pointed to the explosion of travel writing in vernacular print in colonial India and the importance of new archival methods and practices of reading that might bring lesser-known voices in travel writing to attention. This panel extends these lines of inquiry and invites papers studying travel narratives from late colonial and postcolonial South Asia that move beyond orientalist writing and native responses to focus on the polyphonic nature of this hybrid genre and its articulation of selfhood and identity. We are particularly interested in how South Asian travel writers have tried to reorient the world by writing about regions beyond Western Europe, thus forging alternative global imaginations. How do we understand travel writing as performing an important social role in the contexts of anti-colonial struggles, indenture, global communist networks, pilgrimage, pleasure, pan-Asian and Afro-Asian conferences, exile, conflict, and war? What theories of movement, coercion, time, labour, and leisure emerge from these narratives? Instead of engagements with alterity, might we also consider travel writing as experiments with subjectivity and selfhood? Additionally, how do caste, religion, gender, and sexuality become central to the writers of such narratives even as the narratives offer a site for transcending them in writing? What are the material networks of production, circulation, and consumption that constitute such writing? We are keenly interested in papers that are attentive to the generic instability and hybridity of travel writing outside the traditional print travelogue in twentieth and twenty first century South Asia in any language.

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Different policy priorities across the India-Bangladesh border, and the state borders within India significantly impact the promotion, preservation as well as marginalisation of the languages in this region. The panel will examine the language policies across various borders in the South Asian context. (a) Santosh Kumar discusses the role of the intervention of colonial language policies through the project of writing grammar of Indian languages notably by Gilchrist (1796) and Halhed (1778). These colonial projects suggest the hegemonic apparatus adopted by the colonial regime to command the language and the language of command (Cohn, 1997; Viswanathan, 1989) that shaped the present-day linguistic landscape in the educational policies of the target areas. (b) Asifa Sultana examines language-in-education policy as a critical mechanism for preservation of marginalized languages (e.g. Hornberger, 2008; Skutnabb-Kangas & Phillipson, 2010). She works with Kurukh-speaking communities in Northern Bengal in Bangladesh and India to explore the policy provisions available for education of the community members, and to understand whether or not they impact the language use among the community members. (c) Ritu Santh looks at the dominance of multiple standard languages and their negotiation with the minoritised vernaculars across the border of the states of Karnataka and Kerala with a focus on the northern Kasaragod region of Kerala where several languages including Malayalam, Kannada, Tulu, Konkani and Marathi are prevalent. (d) Dripta Piplai (Mondal) discusses the hybrid languages of Bengal-Jharkhand-Odisha border where multiple named and unnamed hybrids are made (Krammer et. al, 2022) following the structures of dominant languages (Bangla/Odia) which reflect how the policies shape the language use in the ground.

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This panel re-examines the limitations posed by the temporal and disciplinary compartmentalization of area studies, through a longue durée analysis of the concept of kingship and commemoration at a trans-regional and sub-imperial level. The authors scrutinize a variety of visual, architectural, and textual sources (hagiographies, poetry, Sufi literature, and commemorative texts) in Braj, Punjabi, Persian, Arabic, and Urdu and bring together social, religious, political, and literary studies in South Asia between 1400 and 1800. The papers strive to shed light on distinct but interconnected notions of kingship whose development, reception, and dissemination have not received sufficient attention. They examine the dynamic relationship between Persianate culture, kingship, and Sufism in South Asia, focusing on how these forces shaped political and religious discourses. The panel explores how the Sufi orders contributed to distinct and often contested ideas of kingship through their writings, as seen in medieval and early modern sources such as malfūẓāt, Sufi treatises, and hagiographies. Additionally, this panel broadens the discussion to explore how imperial ideologies shaped the evolution of Hindu kingship in early modern South Asia. The papers trace the changing relationship between political authority and cultural identity in Hindu contexts by analyzing religious texts and architectural developments. Furthermore, the panel examines how the commemoration of earlier rulers and poets shaped literary and cultural transformations across South Asia, with a particular focus on the revival and circulation of earlier traditions under Mughal and Safavid rule. In this sense, we think of court or darbar as not just a politically significant space. Instead, we argue that the court plays an active social and religious role in society, especially by encouraging and patronizing the performance of literature and art. We encourage participation from individuals whose work explores themes of commemoration and performativity in pre-modern South Asia across languages and methodologies. This panel offers a multidisciplinary perspective on the intersections of kingship, Sufism, and Indo-Persianate culture, providing new insights into their impact across medieval and early modern South Asia.

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This panel explores the political, cultural, and intellectual formations of socialism in late colonial and early postcolonial South Asia. Socialism indicates here the broad constellation of the proto-, non- and/or anti-communist left that emerged in the course of the 1920s to the 1940s via the “salvoes of the October revolution” and encompassed organizations as diverse as the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, the Congress Socialist Party, and others. As a political ideology, socialism is understood by scholars as comprising various left-of-center streams in the political spectrum of twentieth-century South Asia (Nehruvian, Gandhian, radical humanist, “oppositional” etc.). This panel wishes to examine the range of ideas that underpinned socialist thought and discourse in the period of the long decolonization in the subcontinent, probe their global and domestic backdrop, and analyze the kind of political agenda and practices they came to ground. Equally interesting to us are the various inroads into the literary and cultural field the socialists made and the effects of such interventions in shaping the contours of intellectual discourse in postcolonial South Asia. The broad themes the panel seeks to address include, but are not limited to the following: • The significance of anticolonialism in Indian socialist thought • Socialist internationalism in India from the interwar period to the Cold War • The place of language, class, caste, gender, and religion in socialist discourse and practices • Institutional presence and organizational efforts of the socialists • Political-economic vision(s) of the socialists • Socialist thought on environment, natural resources, land, and economic redistribution • Ambivalent relations between the socialists, communists, the Congress, Ambedkarites, the Hindu Right and others • Socialists in the wider cultural, literary, and intellectual milieu

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This panel, led by Dalit women from South Asia, aims to identify, analyse, and theorise the lived experiences, narratives, and movements of South Asian women from a feminist perspective. Dalit women are positioned at the intersection of caste and patriarchy, enduring multiple layers of oppression. They are subjected to Brahmanical patriarchy, specifically public patriarchy, as detailed by literary figures such as Baby Kamble, Bama, Meenakshi Moon, and Urmila Pawar. This intersectionality means that Dalit women face discrimination in both public and private spheres, limiting their access to opportunities and marginalising their voices within mainstream knowledge production. With increasing migration, the issues faced by Dalit women and queer individuals are no longer confined to South Asia; they have become global concerns that demand international attention. The discrimination they face has migrated with them, manifesting in diasporic contexts and requiring a transnational approach to justice. This panel seeks to bring these issues into the global spotlight, challenging caste and gender oppression in both South Asian and international contexts. In recent years, Dalit women have increasingly entered higher education, challenging both caste and patriarchal structures. Shailaja Paik’s work underscores the significance of this shift, as Dalit women in academia are reclaiming their narratives, centering their experiences, and asserting their knowledge as vital to feminist theory. Their entry into formal knowledge production disrupts not only caste hierarchies but also broader structures of patriarchy, asserting the global relevance of Dalit feminist discourse. This panel brings together interdisciplinary insights from Dalit and queer women who resist oppressive frameworks, creating a more inclusive feminist discourse. It is a radical and transformative space where Dalit women's experiences are validated and centered. By addressing the global dimensions of caste and patriarchy, we aim to reshape feminist theory and praxis, challenging both local and international structures of dominance and ensuring that feminist discourse genuinely reflects the diversity and complexities of all women's lives.

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2027 would mark 80 years of the Partition of the Indian subcontinent of 1947. For South Asia, independence from over two centuries of British rule in 1947 was accompanied by a violent and bloody partition of British India into India and Pakistan separated by new international borders in 1947, which eventually led to the formation of another nation Bangladesh in 1971. This was a pivotal and foundational moment of postcolonial nation-making in South Asia, ushering in paradigmatic shifts in the configurations and ramifications of nation, place, identity, community, state, citizenship, borders, belonging and home for the subcontinent. For the millions of people caught in that historical moment as well as bearing its long-lasting legacies, the Partition of 1947 marked a particular epochal moment, (re)organising the foundations of national and cultural identity construction and political and community formation. While, the Partition of 1947 has by now led to a wide range of scholarship on a diverse range of issues, on the eve of the 80th anniversary of the Partition, this panel aims to look at new and hitherto under explored dimensions in Partition studies which would contribute towards new scholarship in the field. Topics may include but are not limited to: The Partition and material memory • Narratives of the non-human in the Partition • The Partition and Indian Ocean Studies • The Partition, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and the Lakshwadeep Islands • The environmental ramifications of the Partition (land, rivers, ecologies, memory) • Children’s experiences of the Partition • Caste in the Partition • Gendered experiences of the Partition not limited to women’s experiences • The Partition, health and disease • Sindhi narratives of the Partition • Partition narratives/histories from north-east India • Representation of the Partition in newer cultural forms like graphic narrative, web series • The Partition and foodscapes • The Partition and cultures of performance • Partition museums

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South Asian science fiction, addressing colonial epistemologies, dystopian anxieties, and ecological futures, has increasingly attracted critical acclaim and scholarly attention. Lively production across South Asian languages has been joined by anthologies ranging from the 19th century to the present (Chaube 2022; Saint 2019, 2021), as well as scholarly monographs (Chattopadhyay 2019; Banerjee 2020; Mukherjee 2020). While the hype is recent, South Asian SF is not; first specimens avant la lettre date back to the first half of the 19th century. More recently, positivist fantasies of development and extra¬terrestrial exploration have given way to scenarios of ecological and political turmoil. This panel seeks to engage with the study of science fiction within global and comparative contexts of speculative fiction and in conversation with modern South Asian literatures, both of which are entangled with histories of realism and colonialism (Suvin 1979; Mukherjee 1985; Rieder 2008; Anjaria 2012). Examining the emergence of South Asian science fiction in the nineteenth-century ecosystem of popular fiction; its relationship to discourses of scientific progress in the post-independence period; and its recent efflorescence as an Anglophone genre of “global SF” can intervene in a range of problems in South Asian literary history and theories of world literary systems. What are the futures projected by South Asian science fiction? How does SF production relate to other literary and extraliterary fields? In what way does recent SF function as a counter-discourse to modernist narratives of progress? And how can we produce a multilingual history of South Asian science fiction? This panel, which aims to address these questions, invites papers dealing with South Asian science fiction, its historical antecedents, or related genres, as well as their intervention in fields including the environmental humanities, the study of popular fiction, and the history of science.

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