Panels

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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Having previously served as a cheap reservoir of raw material and “unskilled” labor, contemporary India in its neoliberal avatar serves as an infrastructural node in the global tech industry. No more is India typified by the image of the poor peasant riding a bullock cart, it now exemplifies skilled IT labor. We bring together multiple disciplinary approaches to unpack this transformation in India’s relationship with technology in the post-colonial period. We examine how globalized technological regimes are embedded in local socio-technical systems and material ecologies of casted/gendered labors as well finance capital in the context of urban India. India functions as a crucial site for the global network of backend (infrastructural and reproductive labor) as well as high-end technological production (manufacturing, engineering, and software). We begin with a historical enquiry of Bangalore’s tryst with Nehruvian science and technology, wherein high tech manufacturing and urban infrastructure planned around the figure of the model citizen-worker, often imagined as a ‘caste-less modern’, ultimately shaped a politics of work rooted in regional political economy. Next, we unpack the casted and gendered temporality of invisibilized labors performed by “on demand” gig workers who service Bangalore’s contemporary tech workforce, which in turn is part of the global supply chain of cheap third world labor. This is followed by a socio-economic analysis of the transformations in India’s municipal waste processing industry to ponder the relationship between stigmatized labor and technology. We end with a comparative analysis of India’s traditional export-led software industry with India’s rapidly expanding domestic platform economy, focusing on how their different network infrastructures mediate distinct relations between labor and capital. Our panel contributes to the growing body of South Asian scholarship at the intersection of infrastructure studies, STS, and labor.

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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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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.

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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

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