Panels

Within a sociolinguistic framework, the panel looks at language policies across various political borders in South Asia to examine the interaction between policies and language use in society as well as in important functional domains such as education.

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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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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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The idea of this panel is that, on the one hand, there are those who translate or can translate from the respective languages. These are mostly people who teach South Asian languages and literatures at universities. It is a source of regret among South Asian scholars that South Asian authors are hardly recognized in the international book world. On the other hand, even though short prose texts and poems are much better suited to familiarizing students with original South Asian literature from a university didactic perspective, this does not correspond to the general publishing taste, which gives preference to novels. The younger reading generation has increasingly opened up new ways of reading (and writing) in social media and associated forms of communication. Against this background, only a few publishers are prepared to embark on the adventure of publishing South Asian literature. The general economic crisis, which has driven up costs, is making it even more difficult for publishers to get involved in this area. The discussion panel is intended to go beyond the circle of “the usual suspects” and bring together actors who are otherwise hardly aware of each other and, if possible, to provide an impulse to bring together the book market, readers' interests and new forms of the book industry and communication about books, such as book blogging, literary agents, e-books, virtual book clubs, e.a. This should encourage broadening the perspective in university teaching, which has largely overlooked these developments. It should also promote greater recognition of South Asian non-English literature in Germany and Europe, viewing this as an opportunity to understand the world beyond one's own backyard.

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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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