Panels

Often described as “India’s first dictatorship” (Jaffrelot and Anil 2020) and “Indian democracy’s darkest hour” (Prakash 2017), the National Emergency (1975 – 1977) is one of the most controversial and debated moments in modern Indian history. Imposed by then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, the 21 months-long period was marked with suspension of political procedures, civil liberties, media censorship and violation of human rights. The Emergency has left a lingering impact on Indian politics, and its afterlife has been especially scrutinized with reference to the current political landscape and the rhetoric of a “second undeclared emergency” (Ganguly 2024, Prakash 2019). And yet, for decades the Emergency has remained at the margins of the collective memory of India, finding a reflection as a “counter-memory” (Merivirta 2019, Tarlo 2003) primarily through the creative sphere. Since the vast majority of research on the representation of the Emergency focuses on literature, a broader interdisciplinary approach is necessary to fully understand the impact and effect of this period. Therefore, marking 50 years since the beginning of the Emergency, this panel proposes to expand the discussion on representations and memories of the Emergency and its aftermath through various cultural forms. The panel aims to put in dialogue research on how different forms of cultural production and media (including film, television, literature, music, visual culture, performative arts etc.) both from India and the diaspora, have dealt and continue to deal with the long shadow of this traumatic period of modern Indian political history, as well as its impact on creative expressions.

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As technology proliferates in South Asia, even remote areas are digitising, transforming daily life. This panel explores the use of emerging technologies (VR, AR, gaming, AI) in re/creating, re/circulating, re/presenting, and re/conserving South Asian histories and cultures.

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The 1943 Bengal Famine was one of the 20th century’s most calamitous man-made events, resulting from hoarding, resource extraction and unchecked inflation during the Second World War. Rice harvests that had sustained the population were in part appropriated by the British during the Second World War, leaving no provision for local needs. Rice stocks and local boats - crucial for transporting food from one part of rural Bengal to the other - were destroyed. Bengal’s economy could not withstand the immense pressures placed upon it and collapsed. The famine then echoed an image of a region unable to provide for, or care for itself, when in fact this was the product of disastrous colonial mismanagement. This panel brings together scholars working on the famine from a cultural and labour history lens. Diya Gupta’s research on photographs and wartime censored letters on the famine from the colonial archive speaks productively to Urvi Khaitan’s examination of the lives of rural women affected by famine, which made them turn to hazardous working conditions in coal mines by day and sex work by night. Artist and activist Sujatro Ghosh and curator Sona Datta consider the process of transforming academic research into creative remembrance through artwork and soundscapes, while BBC presenter Kavita Puri reflects on her latest Orwell-Prize nominated Radio 4 podcast series ‘Three Million’ to understand the legacies of the famine today in the UK. The panel, then, brings together a diverse range of perspectives on the famine, both from South Asia itself and from researchers and practitioners based in the UK, and examines how each can engage in fruitful dialogue with the other to generate fresh layers of meaning, and shed new light on private and collective memory.

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This panel examines three sets of trials spread out over different time periods and contexts but ones with larger historiographical connections. The first paper by William Pinch is on the infamous parliamentary impeachment trial of Warren Hastings (1788-1795) which scrutinized the actions taken by him as Governor General in India in the 1770s and ‘80s that were deemed not only criminal but tyrannical and immoral—and, hence, unbefitting a Briton—by his Whig accusers, especially the philosophically inclined Edmund Burke. The second paper by Aparna Vaidik examines the history of the revolutionary conspiracy case trial - the Lahore Conspiracy Case (1929-1931). Set in British India the trial lit up the nationalist night sky for three years and continued to reverberate in the public memory thereafter. The third paper by Shalini Sharma examines the caste-discrimination case in California, USA 2000 of Lakireddy Bali Reddy, the wealthiest individual landlord in the city of California who was sentenced to 97 years in jail (he served 7) for trafficking 99 Indian nationals into the United States using false visas and sexually abusing minors. These three trials are very different in their function and affect. They are separated by 300 years, center around three contrasting sets of historical actors and presided in three different jurisdictions. Yet they all are remembered, not for the complex legal issues that arise in the trials but for how they contribute to conventional narratives of what was deemed to be quintessentially ‘Indian’ or ‘Oriental’- the political asceticism embodied in Gita, the caste system or the idea of a mendacious native.

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Defining indigeneity in India is rife with terminological confusion. There is no universal definition. An apocalypse like colonization- central to the definition of indigeneity in other parts of the world- cannot be applied to South Asia. As Virginius Xaxa argues, what temporal disjuncture marks the beginning of indigeneity in the unique South Asian context of ceaseless migrations? Further, anthropologists, historians, art historians, cultural and performance studies scholars, and scholars of literature have attempted to ask how disciplines have variously subjugated the indigenous groups. In such a scenario, a move beyond is imperative- a discussion of Adivasi empowerment and resistance in the face of continuing disenfranchisement is helpful. We are interested in how performance, storytelling, art across media, and literature have been strategized by indigenous communities and individuals to stake a subversive claim in the national cultural discourse. Our panel is intentionally broad, keeping in mind the breadth of a subject like Indigenous art, performance, and storytelling in India. As indigenous including Adivasi art and cultural productions are increasingly appropriated and adapted, interlocked binaries are at play- art/craft, art/ ritual, rural/urban, classical/folk, folk/tribal. The artist and their art must negotiate with multiple forces –colonialism, casteism, religious nationalism, to name a prominent few– to render themselves audible. We welcome paper proposals that discuss indigenous storytelling and performance, including literature and culture. This panel seeks to understand how indigenous groups communities and individuals are mobilizing their art and context to intervene in the limiting discourse of Indian indigeneity. We invite paper proposals to consider how indigenous art and performance practices intervene in the praxis of aesthetics.

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This panel explores challenges in managing South Asian photographic materials in European collections. Key topics include ethical dilemmas in online publication, digital media competence, AI's role in data privacy, and addressing discriminatory content. The panel seeks case studies and strategies for inclusive, responsible archival practices.

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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 explores purāṇa as a distinct mode of cultural production in South Asia. Focusing on materiality, it investigates how purāṇic narratives shape communities and historical memory. It invites scholars for imaginative, transdisciplinary discussions on purāṇa as a material media.

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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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