Panels

As South Asia grapples with accelerating environmental crises, from severe air pollution to catastrophic climate events, the region also faces a surge in authoritarian governance. This panel explores the intricate dynamics of environmental activism in South Asia, examining how activists navigate the tightening political spaces, state repression, and socio-economic inequalities. We aim to highlight the strategies, innovations, and resilience of grassroots movements in South Asian countries, offering a comprehensive understanding of how local communities are striving to protect their environment against corporate encroachments (often mediated by political actors) and discuss the implications of these struggles for global environmental justice. Possible contributions include, but are not limited to, the following topics: • Authoritarian governments' manipulation of environmental policies for political gain and suppression of dissent • Innovative tactics utilised by activists to navigate and resist authoritarian restrictions in environmental advocacy • Threats faced by environmental activists in authoritarian contexts • Impact of civic space restrictions on environmental movements in South Asia • Disproportionate effects of authoritarian policies on marginalized groups • Case studies demonstrating environmental degradation as both a cause /effect of authoritarian policies • Exploring the intersections of environmental justice with social and cultural issues such as poverty, caste, gender, ethnicity • Showcasing successful campaigns and movements achieving environmental justice despite authoritarian challenges • Strategies for international organizations and regional alliances to support environmental justice movements in South Asia • Roles of international solidarity and digital advocacy in bolstering global environmental movements under authoritarian regimes

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This panel draws on ethnographies of education in religious minority institutions to focus on the creation of gendered subjectivities. It includes diverse educational settings across South Asia – education of Hindu minorities in Bangladesh, Sikhs girls in Sikh religious minority schools in India and Muslim students in all-girls madrasas in India. While scholarship on gender and education has established the relevance of complex structures and ideologies that impact young women’s experiences in educational settings, we do not know enough of gender’s complex interaction with heterogeneities of class, religion, region, and location in educational spaces. The understanding of women as transmitters of religion and culture deeply impacts the experience of knowledge in educational institutions associated with religious minorities. Papers in this panel illustrate how gender intersects with different notions of community identity that shape religious educational institutions and inform the dynamics of interaction with the state in which they are embedded. It zooms into the educational experiences of girls and young women to expand the understanding of gendered agency. The papers go beyond the binaries of active resistance and passive conformity to highlight the subtle ways in which girls challenge the prescriptive processes of schools that seek to restrict them to community and/or state sanctioned gendered roles. The panel brings out the context-specific challenges, ambiguities, negotiations of being a girl student in religious minority institutions. It also reflects on the larger politics of belonging to religious minority communities across South Asia today. The interplay between religion, education and state politics, and lived experiences of girl students is the focus of this panel.

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For much of the 20th century, ethnic conflict has shaped the history of Lanka, finally resulting in the civil war of 1983-2009. Central to these conflicts was the recognition and political exploitation of several officially recognized ethnic categories, especially those of the ‘Sinhalese’, ‘Sri Lankan Tamils’, and ‘Sri Lankan Moors’. The genealogy of these categories has often been traced back to the British colonial period, when political representation became linked to recognition of the ‘racial’ difference of a specific group. Deconstructing such colonial categories and the tensions produced by their reification has been an important contribution of scholarship against the often-violent effects of ethnic categorization in Lanka. Yet the history of ethnic categorization and ethnogenesis on the island cannot simply be reduced to a moment of colonial restructuring of social relations. The genealogies of the various categories that went into the making of the officially recognized ethnic groups of Sri Lanka can be traced deeper into the past and far beyond the island’s shores. This panel aims at bringing together scholars studying ethnic categorization in Lanka in the longue durée across different European empires – Portuguese, Dutch, British – and local polities, connecting ethnic categories and imaginaires with specific administrative practices, labor and property regimes, gender relations, or experiences of violence. We particularly invite contributions that work against the ‘islanding’ (Sykes 2018) of Lankan history by considering the island’s location in the wider Indian Ocean world.

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This panel seeks to bring together researchers working on ‘Adivasis’/’Indigenous Peoples’/ ‘Scheduled Tribes’ in Jharkhand and central India on the one hand, and on Northeast India on the other. Although these communities have been marginalized in national imagination and in academic writings, researchers working in these different spaces have rarely, if ever, been in conversation; both the regions and communities inhabiting these imagined blocks have been studied differently. By bringing together divergent trajectories of historical thinking and exploring the ways in which the two regions and its peoples have been conceptualized, mapped, represented and governed, this panel will explore how comparative and intersecting histories of Jharkhand and Central India and of the Northeast can be written. Approximately 80–100 million people, ‘Adivasis’/‘Indigenous Peoples’/‘tribes’ are categorized as ‘Scheduled Tribes’ under the Indian Constitution. On the basis of their experiences, the geographical spaces inhabited by the Scheduled Tribes have been governed separately under the Fifth and Sixth Schedule. In order to explore how comparative and intersecting histories of these regions can be creatively written, this panel will reflect on the following themes: the history, politics and impact of scheduling both in the colonial and postcolonial period; the interdependence of landscapes and livelihoods that breaks down the binaries of hills/forests and plains, the mobile and the settled; the instability of boundaries and borders created by the state when confronted with everyday practices of communities; the politics of representation and classification that have led to the creation of categories and the idea of the ‘primitive’; the importance of religion in shaping identity; state practices of repression and surveillance in the name of development etc. Panelists are requested to reflect on some of these themes and add others relevant to the panel.

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Riverine, deltaic and coastal areas of South Asia are frequently affected by hydrometeorological hazards such as cyclones, floods and storm surges: these recurring events damage agricultural production and public and private infrastructure. As a result, erosion of the coasts and banks has led to the displacement of many villages. For this panel, we are seeking contributions examining the adaptive strategies deployed by different categories of stakeholders to cope and adapt to hazards. The effectiveness of public management of hazards through structural (extension of embankments, construction of shelters, etc.) and non-structural (awareness raising, support for adaptive strategies, etc.), individual and collective strategies based on agricultural adaptations and agro-ecological technologies used in rice or shrimp farming, nature-based solutions initiatives, coastal or river restoration practices and other alternatives are all being called into question. Overall, we aim to create a site-based knowledge exchange that critically addresses the issue of adaptation by examining power relations between public and private sector actors to highlight the limitations of strategies adaptation. We thus wish to examine the source of the problem that considers the hydrosocial cycle and the social, economic and ecological situations to support sustainable reconstruction in spaces exposed to multiple risks.

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In any social context, food is defined within a structure of sanction and prohibition, inherently linking the idea of edibility with its negation—items that cannot or should not be consumed. We propose the term “non-food” to mark this negative space that delineates the margins of edibility in a society. This panel seeks to explore how South Asian literatures imagine and represent this under-researched liminal zone of non-food and the interplay of desires and anxieties it embodies. By doing so, the panel aims to shed light on the distinctive patterns of food exclusions, inclusions, and validations in South Asia, as well as the unique value systems, economic structures, and ontological philosophies that accompany them. The proposed category of non-food is understood as encompassing matter that is potentially edible but is excluded, penalized, tabooed, restricted, or stigmatized. This labelling may arise from various factors, including dietary laws, character judgments, class and caste dynamics, religious beliefs, ethical or attitudinal standards, processes of modernization, or personal choices. The boundaries of food and non-food are fluid and often influenced by discourses surrounding modernity, puritanism, orthodoxy, and the supremacy of certain traditions over others. Building on the concepts of vibrant matter (Bennett) and the productive power of food (Foucault), this panel views the idea of non-food as an active agent of power shaping ethical values, bodily disciplines, and socio-political relations. Consequently, the rejection or avoidance of certain potentially edible matter transcends its literal meaning, engaging with questions of identity and social divisions. The panel will examine literary representations and testimonies from South Asia that illuminate this power of the idea of non-food in defining the boundaries of edibility and, by extension, one's sense of self-identity and of belonging within society.

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Studies on social movements and the public sphere often presume an inherently democratizing impact. However, empirical evidence suggests that social mobilization and contentious politics have a complex, ambivalent relationship with democracy. On the one hand, they facilitate democracy by promoting accountability and fostering social cohesion by offering citizens space and means to address concerns, advocate for rights and influence public policy. On the other hand, some movements engage in contentious politics, employing tactics such as disinformation, violence, and hate rhetoric, which can undermine democratic norms and exacerbate polarization. This panel explores the multi-faceted and complex roles that non-state actors play in shaping democratic decline and resilience in South Asia. Existing scholarship has predominantly focused on state-centric mechanisms in driving democratic erosion, analyzing how government policies, legal frameworks and institutional practices undermine democratic norms and consolidate power. In contrast, the influence of non-state actors—particularly civil society organizations, religious groups, and social movements— often operating at the intersection of civic engagement and authoritarian resistance remains underexplored. Utilizing a comparative case study approach across South Asia, the panel aims to identify both commonalities and unique variations in how non-state actors shape the democratic landscape, challenging existing generalizations and refining theoretical frameworks. Each paper will analyse specific actors and the mechanisms by which they impact the democratic fabric of their respective states, elucidating the varied and evolving relationships between these actors and the state. By unpacking these intricate dynamics, this interdisciplinary panel seeks to contribute to a deeper understanding of how non-state actors can either bolster or challenge democratic institutions in South Asia. In doing so, it aims to advance broader theoretical discussions on the role non-state actors play in processes of democratization and autocratization.

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This panel would explore anti-caste experiments in cinemas of India by particularly foregrounding figures (filmmakers, artists, and technicians), aesthetic figurations, and the embodiment of technology as experience and practice. Who are the intervening figures in Indian Cinema—its production, representation, distribution, and publicity—against caste as a regime of culture? What are their major contributions towards an anti-caste cinematic experience? How do they engage with caste-gender questions? Do they subscribe to a dominant aesthetic, or do they radicalize? What is the role of technology in its production, dissemination, and reception? Keeping these questions in mind, this panel would examine emancipatory aesthetics at the level of visuals, sound, and haptics through the intervention of technology. While caste works as a cultural norm in many films, it is important to study how film narratives also treat caste as a problem and engage with it. Instead of focusing on the absence and erasure of caste oppressed communities in cinema, it is indeed pertinent to highlight alternative productions by Dalits and other caste oppressed communities which ‘reject the rejection’ (Guru, 2009), offering affective and embodied registers of resistance and engagement. This prompts us to examine not only the representational questions that haunt the present, but also seek answers to the questions on presence in the historical practice of cinema. From early silent cinema to contemporary digital cinema, didn’t cinema as a medium of entertainment and a socio-cultural institution engage with the unsettling questions on caste across forms (documentary, popular films, art films), genres, languages, and cultures in India? This panel would particularly reflect on how filmmakers, artists and technicians (including junior artists, production workers, background dancers and musicians etc.), especially from the caste oppressed locations; negotiate, resist, and break the caste structures of cinematic practice.

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This panel provides a forum for new thinking on the history of constitutionalism in South Asia across the 1947 divide. In particular, this panel seeks to connect recent work on South Asian political thought and intellectual history to new interpretations of constitution-making, the law, and imaginations of the future. The papers thus interrogate both the force of ideas and the contingent ways in which they were put into action in mid 20th century South Asia. In doing so, the panel situates twentieth-century South Asia as a key global site of ideological innovation and constitutional contestation.

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Households in early modern and modern South Asia, either as physical sites or imperial microcosms or as sites of production and reproduction, have usually been treated in relation to power, sovereignty, kingship, domesticity, and patronage. They have largely been pitched in the debates on the contested and changing meanings of the public and the private. Taking this as the point of departure, the panel proposes to shift the usual focus of household in existing historiography and explore how the social construction and experience of time are linked to the changing organization, rhythms, and dynamics of households. Usually, the effects of public institutions on households (including temporality) are assumed rather than historicized. We invite contributions to test these assumptions and also detail how households have alloted, organized, and managed time and how these temporal orders have informed patterns and practices of social, cultural, and economic life. We are therefore interested in foregrounding the interconnectedness of time, space, and social organization within the household across historical periods and cultural contexts. We specifically invite contributions that seek to understand how temporal orders within households have shaped and also been influenced by factors such as market institutions (credit and debt), practices of mobilities (marriage, travel, migration), work (paid and care work), customs and rituals (agrarian cycles, rhythms of auspiciousness), and technological changes (electrification, kitchen gadgets, energy use, piped water supply, and sewage disposal). We further propose that a temporal lens could prove productive to rethink the caste and gendered histories of household and domesticity. Contributions including these concerns and approaches are particularly welcome.

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