Panels

This panel will bring together emerging and advanced scholars of Muslim identity in South Asia in the context of the nation-state public sphere. We wish to explore the deep history and contemporary imaginings of Muslimness from the vantage point of songs, music and sound, literary studies, history, anthropology, dastangoi, oral historiography, and cinema. We aim to shed light on the multiperspectival and pan-national Muslim identification process as it also intersects with ideas of ideological homogenisation, modernity, and religious revivalism. We wish to foreground Muslim lived-experience narratives across disciplines to discuss the Muslim in South Asia as a category of practicing, subverting and reclaiming agency. Our panel is also envisioned as a growing space for registering, archiving and centralizing Muslim voices. This is at a time of immense precarity affecting a community which not only suffers from internal fragmentation but is also in dire need of a unified, coherent and all-inclusive political consciousness. Proposed papers in our panel will thus explore junctures, events, overlaps, and nodes, situated across time and space, which act as vestibules between the idea of “Muslimness” and its various unfurlings in the public and counterpublic sphere. Therefore proposed papers in this panel will explore linkages of Muslim identification with religiosity, class, caste, gender, hegemonies, place making, pioneership, and rootedness. The aim is to move beyond problematizing authority, representation and mis-representation to invest in narratives which are first-person, self-reflexive, agency specific and advance critical foresight.

Show details

The establishment, appropriation and contestation of heritage takes different forms that reify, politicize, curate or diversify identificatory ideas. Recently, we have seen a sharp rise in the promotion of South Asian cultural heritage for national, ethnic, diasporic and other communal purposes, that shape and divide interest groups. This panel examines how cultural heritage is both the product and consequence of civic engagement and political mobilization. Social cohesion, ideas of solidarity and the recognition of commonalities are essential for the processes of creating cultural heritage. But defined through the creation, its uphold or its destruction of cultural heritage, commonalities are also instrumentalized and mobilized for political means. We thus suggest considering heritage and activism in their dynamic relationship to each other. Activism as a practice shows how intersectional and diverse social actors negotiate the meaning of places and access to them. Activism as an indicator of meaning shows how collective ownership is understood and renegotiated in times of disaster or difficult social, economic or political times. With this panel, we hope to assemble contributions that critically illuminate and explore the subtleties and nuances of the relationship between a “culture-bearing community” and identity-forming cultural heritage across a range of relations, from “tribal” to “shared” to “post-migrant” to “transcultural” dynamics of heritage making in, across and beyond (yet connecting with) the South Asian region. We invite contributions that explore: • questions of democratic an undemocratic consultation processes, • state/non-governmental-led prescriptive heritagisation • iconoclasm, heritage erasure • provenience and restitution • Heritage as a political mobilisation device • Social coherence and social divergence as a reflection of cultural heritage • politics of recognition (e.g. UNESCO, World Heritage) and local communities' relationship to their heritage

Show details

When the Mughals conquered Bengal in the 1570s, north Indian elites tended to look upon the region with a mixture of suspicion and disdain. During the reign of Shāh Jahān, one Mīrzā Ṣafī Sayf Khān was appointed governor of Bengal, and among his retinue was a rising star of the Persian literary scene, Abū al-Barakāt “Munīr” Lāhorī, who wrote a 1000-line poem about Bengal, titled Manifestation of the Rose [maẓhar-i gul]. Through a close reading of the poem, this paper examines the role of ‘wonder’ as a modality of sensory perception for Munīr. Written over a period of just two-weeks, Manifestation of the Rose documents Munīr’s river-faring journey from Agra to Bengal in 1639/40. With smatterings of humor, psychological realism, and multilingual puns, the poem describes in vivid technicolor the array of flora, fauna, and natural phenomena Munīr perceived in Bengal, rendering the peripheral province legible and fantastical to Persian readers of the imperial center (and beyond). Reading sections in description of the mosquito, the rhinoceros, the myna, and the Bengali climate, I interpret the poem as a literary “catalogue of wonders”, evoking the same structures of feeling and genre with which readers of popular Islamicate cosmographical texts would be familiar. In doing so, I consider the significance of wonder to both Munīr’s poetics and modalities of the Mughal sensorium more broadly.

Show details