Panels

This panel intends to bring together scholars working on colonial and postcolonial South Asia to explore the ideas and activities of experts in the fields of development and welfare work with the adoption of gender as the main analytical lens. This approach enables us not only to foreground the expertise of women experts but also to investigate if and how gender assumptions and biases influenced the expertise of women and men and their interactions. Keeping in mind this framework, the focus of this panel is on two thematic issues. The first one is the role of expertise in colonial and anti- and postcolonial national projects with an eye on the imperial, international and local discourses, concerns and agendas that fed into them. The second one is the scientisation of expert knowledge along with the exploration of the multidirectional flows of exchange of such knowledge for which experts were an important conduit. By focusing on these themes, the papers presented in this panel intend to 1) examine how did experts mobilise different social hierarchies in order to legitimise their authority and undermine their rivals; 2) explain how did the process of ‘scientisation’ impact upon different social groups that were targeted by the work of the experts, including women, labourers, low castes, children, ethnic minorities. The panel builds on a growing body of literature on experts in South Asia which has yet to fully leverage the potential of gender as an analytical category and to adopt a transnational perspective.

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Scholars of Colour” (SoCs) is not an academically established term despite significant literature (Al-Taher and Younes 2023, Martin and Dandekar 2022, Gabriel 2017) on how SoCs, specially migration scholars navigate western academy, finding and losing their voices within intellectual discourses about their regions. The political visibility of SoCs from South Asia is relatively low in Europe, this vacuum exacerbated by the attenuation of migration scholars, including women from emerging economies like South Asia. The residual power of coloniality continues to reinforce obsolete and fragmented hegemonies that once had industrially-advanced societies objectify the cultures and societies of emerging economies. Within European academia, despite the resistance facilitated by reflexive storytelling, SoCs continue to struggle to make their voices heard, their work published and cited, and their research funded. The difference in the experience of SoCs in Europe is informed by “migratism” (Tudor 2017) that annotates the race of migrants to reified “good” and/ or “bad” images. Within the heuristics of decolonization, migratism offers research a lens to how SoCs increasingly agent tangible and intangible resources, making themselves visible in the European academic ecosystem. Using the oral histories of SoCs, some questions our panel asks are: can SoCs study their erstwhile colonies across racial divides and class regimes? Or should SoCs only study their “own”? Given the assembled-over-time, cumulative nature of upward social and economic mobility in Europe, what is the nature of knowledge production that takes place for both South Asia and Europe when carried out by SoCs?

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Ever since its inception in the 1990s, the field of Partition Studies has continuously expanded to explore the history of this foundational and traumatic event. Leaving aside high politics, historians have explored the lived experiences of violence and displacement, paving the way for alternative methodologies (oral histories), new fields (material history), and new material (fiction and memoirs). The “Partition Turn” underlined the absence of national memorialisation policies and the consequent absence of actual sites of memory which were repeatedly called for. Whereas certain aspects of Partition (communal or gender violence) were examined in depth, others remained surprisingly underexplored. Despite their strong effects on the urban (Kingsway in Delhi, Walton in Lahore) and rural (Kurukshetra in Punjab) landscapes, refugee camps remained historical grey zones that embodied the persistent effects of the “Long Partition”. How to understand the invisibilisation of Partition refugee camps? What new methodologies are required to document this glaring amnesia in the history of the new nations? This panel proposes to inaugurate a “Camp Turn” to fill in a research gap in Partition Studies. It invites original contributions from various disciplines, dealing with the “Long Partition”, with the following objectives: to identify existing and potential sources for the study of camps; to document the political, institutional, social and intimate lives of the camps and its inhabitants — if possible with a caste and/or gender lens; to critically examine rehabilitation policies, their implementation by the States, and the social work of (communal) NGOs; to understand the lingering presence of the camp on a city’s fabric; to develop comparisons between camps in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, between large and small cities, and within cities, between official and informal camps; and to understand the politics of their invisibilisation and memorialisation.

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This panel examines women's language use through the lens of performance in premodern South Asia. We explore how, and to what effect, staged women figures used language across various mediums, including literature, performative arts, scholarly discourses, and other traditions. We define performance broadly as any enactment of cultural norms, social roles, or individual expression. We approach these voices as representations of womanhood, considering how predominantly male artists and audiences interpreted and imagined women's voices. By focusing on linguistic use, we aim to uncover the tensions between lived experiences and cultural constructions of femininity in premodern South Asia. This approach allows us to move beyond textual norms and emic conventions, considering the contextual, emotional, and embodied aspects of women's language use while examining the filters through which these performances have been received and recorded. Collaborating with scholars versed in diverse South Asian languages, regions, and literary and performative traditions, we seek to elucidate overarching patterns and interconnections within the South Asian context while also highlighting distinctive cultural expressions. By exploring the complex interplay between performance, representation, and social reality, we aim to provide methods and insights regarding the dynamic nature of gender construction in South Asian history. This multifaceted approach hopefully enables a better understanding of the nuances of gender representation and the role of language in shaping cultural perceptions of womanhood during this period.

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The intersection of anti-caste perspectives with environmental humanities in South Asia remains a crucial yet underexplored point of inquiry. This panel seeks to illuminate the intricate connections between caste-based social structures and environmental issues, particularly within the South Asian context. Historically, caste has profoundly shaped access to and management of natural resources, influencing land use patterns, water distribution, human-animal interactions, and ecological practices across the region. Within this caste-based rubric, Dalits have been subjected to systemic discrimination and untouchability (Sharma, 2018). This framework has been sustained by the epistemic silencing of Dalit visions of environmentalism, exemplified by B.R. Ambedkar's leadership in the Mahad Satyagraha. Conceptually, applying the lens of caste to environmentalism unveils the tension between the communal rhetoric of natural resources as ‘global commons’ and caste-based policing of the use and ownership of these resources. This panel aims to unravel the dominant caste narratives underlying environmental policies and practices in South Asia and show how anti-caste perspectives can provide critical insights into contemporary environmental challenges. Drawing on interdisciplinary research and activism in the field of environmental humanities, this panel looks to explore the mutually constitutive relationship between caste and environmentalism, unpack the contributions of anti-caste social movements to new visions of environmentalism, and find alternative imaginaries of stewardship, sustainability, resilience, and environmental justice.

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From its sporadic and diverse occurrences in pre-colonial textual traditions (Goldman 1997; Lutgendorf 1991) to its consolidation as a marker of “orthodox” resistance in the 19th century (Zavos 2001), sanātana dharma has been increasingly mobilized in contrasting ways by several groups, including traditionalists, reformists (Kasturi 2010; Dimitrova 2007), tantric practitioners, and theosophists (Strube 2023). Hindu nationalist organizations have successfully co-opted it, seemingly solidifying sanātana dharma into a formula that links their version of Hinduism to notions of eternity and truth. However, even within hegemonic discourses, sanātana dharma is reworked and adjusted to new agendas (such as social justice and environmental crisis) and its meanings continue to shift. Throughout history, critiques of sanātana dharma often stress the concept's entrenchment of inequality and caste discrimination and are nowadays increasingly likely to provoke outrage and legal actions. Yet, at the margins, social and religious groups creatively adopt sanātana dharma to negotiate their place within the South Asian religious landscape (Howard 2017) and even use it to address global challenges. The concept of sanātana dharma thus resounds like a mantra across time and socio-religious, political, and legal spheres both locally and globally. But what is sanātana dharma? How and why is it appropriated by various groups to inform the (re)definition, expansion, limitation, or transcendence of religion, specifically Hinduism? Despite its broad reach, a comprehensive and critical account of its historical and contemporary uses, as well as its potentialities, is still lacking. Our panel invites contributions grounded in philological, philosophical, historical, and ethnographic methodologies to pluralize this pliable yet contentious concept vis-à-vis past, present, and future negotiations of Hinduism.

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In the last seventy years, research on caste and gender in South Asia has evolved into a rich field of study. In the humanities and social sciences, scholars and practitioners of music, dance, theater, and film in India, the U.K., the E.U., Australia, and the United States, positioned in various disciplines like sociology, anthropology, dance, theater and performance studies, religious studies, history, and ethnomusicology have examined how performance cultures uniquely reveal the braided legacies of European (especially British) colonialism, postcolonial nationalism, and caste apartheid in social life. In this interdisciplinary panel, scholars and performers interrogate the continuities of imperialism in the Indian nation-state. Specifically, they focus on practices and knowledge projects of empire, methodological trends and innovations, and the epistemic legacies that emerge from various academic settings and access points. This panel seeks to conceptualize the wide range of historical actors and communities, whose contributions to performance cultures have been selectively undervalued across national and international contexts. Guiding questions for this panel are: how have statist formations shaped performance cultures as well as the study of performance? How do such formations emerge and extend from previous forms of colonial governmentality? How have imperial gender politics influenced the usage of the body in neo-classical dances? How do archival and ethnographic methods converge and diverge in research on performance? What are the limits of such methods, especially in research on gender, sexuality, and performance? What might be some alternative paths for interrogating occluded narratives of music and dance in the historical record?

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This panel seeks to examine violence as a major ground and determinant of social experience in South Asia. Whether seen at the macro level—as an instrument of state and majoritarian control or as a liberatory tactic by racialized, minoritized, and subaltern groups—or at more micro levels of society and the body politic, violence as a social phenomenon remains conceptually intractable. Yet, it is invariably connected to multiple, often conflicting, systems of valuation and judgment. The panel will investigate varied articulations of violence that mark the social space in South Asia and shape the dynamics of both human and interspecies relations in the subcontinent. Could we think of violence as constitutive of life-forms or are the uses and experiences of violence always spatiotemporally contingent? Do particular historical conjunctures engender particular forms of violence? For example, has the global expansion of industrial capitalism produced qualitatively novel forms of violence? How does violence relate to questions of corporeality, sentience, (inter)subjectivity, and individual and social consciousness? Are there degrees or intensities of violence that correspond to varying thresholds of pain, and if so, how? What kinds of expressive means and resources do people garner to render lived encounters with violence visible? Questions like these necessitate examining violence as a relational ground that mediates human experience with economic, sociopolitical, and ecological spheres of life. This panel proposes to explore how the presence of violence in South Asian social milieus is/has been perceived, understood, analyzed, defined, and represented and using what kinds of conceptual, moral, epistemological, or aesthetic frames. We welcome contributions that analyze violence as both sociological fact and phenomenological experience, while also considering the possibilities and limitations of representing violence.

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The history of decolonization in South Asia is one of solidarity and disjunctions. On one hand, decolonization made possible polyvocal exchanges of ideas, texts, and translations registered across international conferences, literary magazines, and political rhetoric across the Global South. On the other, it was characterized by political agitation and resistance movements, fuelled by the dissatisfaction with the postcolonial bourgeois’ uncritical adaptation of the structures of the colonial state. Despite their participation in anticolonial struggles, Adivasis, caste-oppressed, women and minorities were marginalized. Despite these contradictions, decolonization was a visionary project that sought to carve out new ways of imagining the future. In view of the renewed historical, political, and intellectual concerns about decolonization fuelled by postcolonial and decolonial theory, this panel revisits the repertoires of anticolonial thought from South Asia in its various polemical, philosophical, aesthetic, and literary articulations. We invite papers that imagine decolonizing South Asia in comparative ways and highlight new geographies, imaginaries, and intellectual traditions marginalized by nationalisms. Possible topics and questions may include– 1. What did anticolonialism mean in the South Asian context? How radical was it? 1. Anticolonialism through South-South connections: South Asia, West Asia, and North Africa. 2. Responses to the failures of decolonization. 3. Subaltern critiques of mainstream decolonization. 4. Political, intellectual, and aesthetic afterlives of decolonization. 5. Ontologies and lived experiences of anticolonialism

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This panel will delve into the persistence of caste-based violence in postcolonial South Asian countries, moving beyond mere empirical data. It aims to explore why caste continues to influence Indian society and frequently manifests in violence. How is caste shape and reshape other South Asian states compared to India? Is violence an inherent aspect of casteism and the caste system? If so, how should this violence be understood within the context of caste? Invited papers will not only analyze caste but also investigate how violence seems to reinvent casteism in practice. Citizens at the margins of society are often at risk because of exploitation and power relations. The hegemonic triad of caste, class, and gender deserves further analysis and attention in the context of violence. While marriage and gender relations emphasize the social aspects of caste, they may also reflect a patriarchal power dimension crucial for analyzing the state in practice. How do these relations affect society and the state? Finally, how do perpetrators justify violence despite constitutional democratic principles and laws? A new trend in this context is the use of new media to expose violence to a broader audience, echoing the old practice of using violence to “teach a lesson.”

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