Panels

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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In their concern to bolster domestic capital and attract foreign investments, governments across South Asia give high priority to skilling workforces. In this panel, we aim to critically engage with practices of skilling and their underlying ideas of skill in different industrial milieus across South Asia. We take a bottom-up approach on the topic that explores how the abstract textbook, techne knowledge of industrial skills is disseminated in engineering colleges, vocational training centres, and company in-house training processes, how it relates to the concrete, practical mêtis knowledge that workers apply, produce and circulate in their everyday practice at industrial worksites, and what forms of consent or dissent to industrial regimes this effects. Drawing on classical insights from the sociology and history of labour as well as recent interventions from phenomenological anthropology, we conceive the experience of industrial workplaces, labour processes, and the skills required for them as embedded in wider economic, political, social, and cultural structures. And we invite participants to address – grounded in their own, original ethnographic and/ or historiographic data – one or more of the following questions: How do specific junctures in the capitalist development of particular places and/ or industries shape the experience of work; how are notions and categorizations of different skills (or their lack) established in everyday encounters at work, in union politics, in labour colonies, and how are they renegotiated and contested in these contexts; how are categorizations, contestations, and renegotiations of un/skilled work and workers informed by likewise renegotiated and contested notions of gender, age, and caste; and how far do these processes entrench divisions among workers or momentarily transcend them.

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Critical pedagogy framework (Freire 1970, 1998, 2007, 2014) exposes and critiques the power structures, inequalities, and injustices embedded in educational systems and practices and provides a lens to understand the efforts of marginalised groups to challenge dominant educational regimes. This panel aims to explore how the ideas of critical pedagogy resonate within the South Asian context, which is still marked by the postcolonial condition where uneven intellectual influence and division of labour: West as 'theories' source, Rest as ‘data mine,’ has shaped pedagogical tradition (Takayama et al., 2016) and as well as various forms of social inequalities, both traditional and contemporary. We will examine the complex issues of discrimination, exclusion, and humiliation based on educational structures and practices in such settings as schools, colleges, universities and associated institutions. Our endeavour is not only limited to critical aspects but also highlights positive alternative pedagogical practices and policy frameworks. South Asia has a rich tradition of intellectual movements that have been challenging oppressive educational regimes and proposing alternative societal visions. We seek proposals that address caste, gender, ethno-religious, and other relevant social inequalities observed in South Asian educational contexts, as well as historical and contemporary practices of alternative critical pedagogies. This panel will propose novel ideas on how cases from the South Asian educational-intellectual landscape can enrich global debates. This framework will also be applied to analyse pedagogical practices within the field of South Asian studies in Western academia.

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This panel invites presentations that investigate the role played by religious organisations in providing infrastructures that sustain social, cultural and economic life in cities with long-standing histories of civic instability, disorder or state incapacity. These forms of ‘religious infrastructure’ might include administrative and residential arrangements; mechanisms for resource allocation, procedures for dispute resolution and financial transactions; and networks for providing educational, health and social services. In the absence, disruption or collapse of state-led activity, numerous traditional and new religious organisations have played a significant role in establishing vernacular forms of governance, government and governmentality across cities in South Asia (and, indeed, in the Global South). Infrastructures of these kinds supplement and, sometimes, replace those of the state, providing succour and sustenance under stressful conditions of postcolonial urbanism. What does urban religious infrastructure tell us about forms of sociality, governance and religious and everyday life on South Asian cities?

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Minority provisions in South Asian legal regimes provide protection to religious groups but often ignore in-group inequality. In recent years, several collective mobilizations have taken place in India and Pakistan to address this problem. In India, the demands by marginalized Muslim caste groups under the ‘Pasmanda’ label depict minority provisions as a tool for Ashraf Muslims to maintain their dominant position. At the same time, the rise of Hindutva challenges both minority rights and the inclusion of Muslims in preferential quotas meant for marginalized castes. In Pakistan, the identification of “Scheduled Caste” as a religious category separate from Hinduism has sparked debate about further “minoritization” in an overwhelmingly Muslim country. Against this backdrop, this panel aims to examine the effects of minority provisions on caste inequality among religious minorities in South Asia. We hope to interrogate how the legal regimes in the region address social stratification within minority groups and to investigate the responses of marginalized caste groups within religious minorities to mitigate the double exclusion they suffer. We particularly welcome contributions that bring together a legal focus on minority rights and preferential quotas, with a socio-anthropological investigation into the responses to intersecting exclusions and state categorization. These responses include the multiple ways in which marginalized groups seek social mobility not only through political mobilization, but also, for instance, through welfare associations, new narratives of self-identification, or religious practices. We also hope to bring together cases from different South Asian countries, allowing for a comparative discussion on dynamics of double exclusion among religious minorities.

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What does it mean to live the life of a child ascetic in historical and contemporary South Asian Svetambara Jain and Theravada Buddhist communities? What capacities are attributed to children and what eligibility criteria are used to assess a child’s readiness to join an ascetic community? What does it mean, in practical and theoretical terms, for minors who join such communities? What disciplinary practices regulate the lives of child ascetics? How do the religious practices of children relate to the needs and concerns of lay people, including the parents and close relatives of child ascetics? Papers in this panel explore these questions. Using a culturally flexible definition of childhood that allows for different understandings of maturity, panelists investigate the lives of child ascetics in historical and contemporary South Asian Jain and Buddhist communities. The presenters on this panel employ historical, textual and contemporary sources to discuss the variegated lives of young ascetics, past and present. Nalini Balbir uses textual and ethnographic lenses to focus on child initiation among Svetambara Jain communities, past and present. Abhishek Jain analyzes early through late medieval textual materials to answer questions about how Svetambara Jain authorities construe children’s eligibility and assess their motivation for mendicant life as mendicants. Nirmala S. Salgado addresses questions about how disciplinary practices are cultivated and established in the lives of contemporary novice Theravada Buddhist nuns. Liz Wilson compares laity-serving life-management practices within modern Theravada Buddhist monastic and modern Jain mendicant circles, using textual and ethnographic sources.

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