Below you find the detailed list of accepted panels at our upcoming conference (sorted alphabetically by title).
If you are looking for a specific panel or convenor use the search field below.
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?
Show details
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.
Show details
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.
Show details
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
This panel presents a new information system for a systematic study of Buddhist bronzes with Sanskrit inscriptions from historical Northwest India (now Pakistan). The information system was built with the database management tool Heurist, an open-source database management system with a web-front end. Heurist allows researchers without prior IT knowledge to develop data models, store search, and publish data on a website. The Buddhist bronzes information system contains on 50-60 ancient bronzes from the 6th-8th centuries, sponsored by the royal family Palola Ṣāhis. The royal family Palola Ṣāhis belonged to a dynasty of Buddhist kings in the Gilgit kingdom in the northern part of the Indian subcontinent in the 6th-8th centuries. The inscriptions of the bronzes are written in Sanskrit using two types of “Gandhāra-Brāhmī” handwriting. The research aims to link different data sources, including epigraphy and philology, to understand the history of these bronzes and their significance.
The challenges in reconstructing e.g. the genealogy of the Palola Ṣāhis family include the limited number of scholars with expertise in old-Indian epigraphy who have studied the inscriptions, and the need for cooperation between disciplines such as Sanskrit Philology, Paleography, Archaeology, Early History of Buddhism, and Buddhist Art. We demonstrate the challenges to reconstruct the genealogy of the royal family Palola Ṣāhis dynasty by combining Large Language Models (LLMs) with traditional database systems. LLMs can process and analyze large amounts of textual data, including historical records and scholarly publications, to extract relevant information and identify patterns. Traditional database systems can store and organize e.g. structured data, such as archaeological findings and epigraphic details. By combining LLMs with database systems, researchers can use the strengths of both approaches to enrich historical research on the Palola Ṣāhis dynasty and the Buddhist bronzes.
Show details