Below you find the detailed list of accepted panels at our upcoming conference (sorted by number).
If you are looking for a specific panel, convenor or panelist use the search field below.
We invite papers on the under-researched narratives of violence against women in literature, cinema/TV, online and social media in regional languages of South Asia. We intend to identify, analyse, and theorise on these texts that narrate or respond to violence against women in the post-2000 period.
Resistance movements in contemporary South Asia have always been significant for their role in addressing pressing social and political issues – from bhakti to Quit India, from the Shaheen Bagh protests to the farmers movement, from Indian student protests against caste discrimination to feminist activism in Pakistan or ethnic agitations in Nepal. Movements like these, along with cultural expressions such as protest music and social media campaigns, play a crucial role in challenging injustices and advocating for a more equitable society. This panel will explore diverse forms of resistance in South Asia, by looking at both historical and contemporary responses to social, political, religious and cultural challenges. We want thus to contribute to an understanding of how individuals and communities have navigated and confronted forms of oppression and injustice or simply expressed their dissent with adverse discourses. What forms of activism are employed? How is resistance framed within certain narratives and how do these narratives feed into general discourses? What methods and tools are used for empowerment, identity formation, and fostering socio-political change? Examples may come from (but are not restricted to) the areas of anti-colonial movements, post-colonial and contemporary movements, feminist an LGBTQ activism, cultural and artistic resistance, or social media and cyber activism.
Māhātmya, lit. “greatness”, is a genre of South Asian narrative texts glorifying a particular subject. Sanskrit māhātmyas form part of the vast corpus of purāṇic literature. However, māhātmya-like texts were also composed in various other South Indian languages during the medieval and early modern periods. The māhātmya genre includes texts dealing with the origin stories of particular saced places, which are sometimes also called sthalapurāṇas, but māhātmyas also exists on a variety of other topics. Whereas previous scholarship has tended to disparage māhātmyas for their often local outlook and their perceived lack of literary qualities, there recently has been a surge in māhātmya studies. More and more scholars have realized the value of māhātmyas as sources for social and religious history as well as their continued relevance for contemporary traditions. Moreover, there has been an increasing awareness of the multilingual nature of the māhātmya genre, with texts in the transregional language of Sanskrit coexisting, in various different constellations, with similar compositions in various regional South Asian languages. This panel brings together scholars from different academic backgrounds working on māhātmyas, who will present their work on topics including, but not limited to, the following: 1) The relationship between local māhātmyas and transregional purāṇic literature, 2) māhātmyas as sources for religious history, 3) the relevance of māhātmyas for contemporary religious traditions, and 4) the relationship between Sanskrit māhātmyas and similar text in other South Asian languages.
In this panel we aim to initiate a conversation in the field of South Asian Studies combining two specific nodes of enquiry: the (re)conceptualisation of the archive and the question of interdisciplinarity. The South Asian archive has become a question of investigation from the perspective of postcolonial and queer-feminist theory, and, particularly in light of the most recent changes in the politics of history-making in South Asia, it has been rethought in relation to power, (state) institutions and access, who / what is visible and who / what is buried (under papers or words). At the same time, recent studies have shown how the archive itself becomes a site of contestations, bringing forth the questions of relationality, violence, marginalisation – leading to the formulation of counter-archives (Appadurai 2003), away from the traditional, hegemonic instrument of the state. From anthropologists using archives as an ethnographic object (Stoller 2009) to sociologists of gender using the archive as a tool to criticise power, the social and cultural life of these repositories of knowledge have attracted a wider audience, not restricted to historical sciences alone. By adding to existing literature (for instance Mathur 2000, Lal 2011, Lambert-Hurley 2013), this panel invites scholars to (re)conceptualise, problematise and methodologically locate the archive from an interdisciplinary lens, enabling a conversation amongst un/conventional, alternative and emerging forms of knowledge production in the canon of South Asian Studies. As early academics, the convenors also want to bring together presenters from different stages in their career to further spark the flame of a critical discussion.
For our panel titled “Orientalism's ‘Other’: Islamic Studies, European Thought, and South Asia”, we invite contributions that explore the interactions between South Asian Muslims and European scholarship on Islam from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries, with a focus on the impact and interpretation of Orientalism. Building on recent research, the presentations in this panel will examine the impact of European scholarship on Muslim discourses in South Asia, highlighting unexplored aspects of this intellectual entanglement and the categories of knowledge it produced, particularly in the construction of modern Islamic studies as an academic discipline. The papers assembled here investigate the shaping of knowledge production on Islam through interactions between European Orientalists and South Asian Muslim scholars, educators, reformers, and poets. Themes include, among others, contributions by South Asian thinkers to Islamic knowledge production with an emphasis on the translocal history of Islamic studies, careers of individual Muslim thinkers which highlight the blurry boundaries between Islamism, Muslim modernism, and other intellectual orientations in modern Islam, as well as the relationship between Orientalist translations of Sufi poetry and South Asian Muslim poets' responses during the colonial era, arguing for the discursive co-constitution of world religions and literatures in Islamic studies.
The continuous influx of South Asian migrant workers to continental Europe over the past few decades has made them visible in many countries where they used to be marginal groups with a mere “folklorical” presence. From the category of “recently arrived”, they are increasingly entering into settlement paths (through different routes and administrative ways, both legal and illegal), occupying or creating original economic niches, that are not anylonger confined to the transnational well-known figures of the IT consultants (Amrute, 2016), so-called exotic restaurants’ staff or nurses (Rajan, 2019). Such niches, hence their visibility, differ significantly according to their country of living, depending on the economic and educational conditions offered at the national level, that are also shaped by the state of the labour market, migration policies and demographics. There is a growing scholarship documenting these South Asians’ new professions – and new paths of integration - in Europe, but it is a relatively scattered literature usually describing such phenomena at the local or national level (e.g. Thapan, 2023). ECSAS would offer an ideal platform to reflect on a comparative perspective on these new economic niches, changing figures of South Asian workers in continental Europe and such original paths of economic integration, in spite of mounting xenophobic political forces.
In her analysis of aging as it relates to Indian families, anthropologist Sarah Lamb (2006) critiques the assumption that young people are the “only or primary site where globalization inserts itself into culture and society,” while older people are taken to be “quintessentially representative of ‘tradition.’” She argues instead for recognizing how elders construct, participate, and innovate in globalizing contexts as a way of understanding global modernity. This panel takes Lamb’s insight as a point of departure, extending it to consider the ways in which emerging shifts within and between generations of South Asian families and communities push us to reconsider how we identify innovations in cultures, practices, and identity formations. Building on studies that focus on the enormous and diverse youth population (Chakraborty 2016; Jeffrey 2010; Lukose 2009) of South Asians globally, this panel attends not only to the progress of and novel approaches to worldmaking enacted by younger generations, but also to the innovative work initiated and continued among older ones. Considering these dynamics in tandem will help us to analyze a wide range of South Asian cultural practices and identity formations, including potential new and changing contexts related to caste and class, interreligious relationships, migration and transnational communities, gender roles, the economy, technology, politics, community-building projects, and the arts, among others. Together, we want to ask not just what generations can learn from each other, but also how they may—or may not—be learning from one another in productive new ways
This panel deals with a triad of interwoven and mutually influencing concepts: History, heritage and the nation. As part of the process that entails the construction of a normative understanding of collective history, the politics of heritage has played an important role throughout the development of the postcolonial Indian state. It is proposed to investigate the processes underlying the construction/identification/preservation of heritage as an arena where conflicting notions of state and nation come into confrontation, where the value ascribed to heritage objects is debated for its potential to promote forms of collective identification or, conversely, to carry divisive notions of the historical past into the present. This panel will address key issues that characterise the cultural, social and political history of postcolonial India: ideas of state and nation, secularism, inter-communal balance and religious intolerance, casteism will be discussed, as they have all been under constant renegotiation. Such a conceptual framework helps also to comprehend the rise, in the past three decades, of an increasing emphasis on narratives that promote a static vision of the subcontinent’s history, while curbing forms and experiences of dissent. These narratives conform to a homogenising mainstream view of Indian culture and society, and attempt to rewrite the foundations of national discourse through the production and re-signification of sites and tangible symbols of public memory. What happens when one is confronted with highly divergent and contradictory ideas about what the nation and the state are or who they should include? What places, practices, buildings and monuments become emblems of these contradictory ideas? This panel welcomes contributions that address these questions through specific case studies, sites, heritage-orientated policies, or in critical engagement with a methodological perspective of critical heritage studies.
This panel explores retellings and refractions of Indian traditional narrative forms in modern literature and other media (movies, theatre, comics, music, social media) to see how these are repurposed for new audiences in modern and contemporary South Asia. The phenomenon of translation and adaptation of classical texts in India has been a longstanding one in the multilingual literary ecosystem of South Asia: throughout modernity, transmission-through-translation in the vernacular languages has been a distinct trait of India's literary culture, reflecting the multilingual economy of this region. Emblematic in this sense is the rewriting of the Hindu epics, starting from their vernacular recensions to modern transpositions in literature (Stasik 2009), comics and graphic novels (Chandra 2008, McLain 2009), movies and post-millennial mythology fiction (Varughese 2017), all witness to the pervasive and continuous practice of adaptation in modern India. In this panel, we wish to investigate how popular genres, narratives and folk themes are “refracted” (Lefevere 1982) in new languages, public spaces and media cultures in today's South Asia, with a focus on satirical and comic deviations from the classics. We welcome papers exploring Indian classical texts, genres, and popular themes – not limited to Hindu epics but also extending to Perso-Arabic and regional narratives – to discuss their transmission and reception by new audiences through literature, movies, TV, theatre, comics, music and social media. We particularly encourage proposals on different languages of South Asia to highlight the transregional and transcultural character of the panel.
Our panel studies the evolution and transformation of vernacular scriptorial practices in South Asia, 600 CE-1950 CE. Recent scholarship has problematized the concept of both pre-modern and modern vernaculars and vernacularization for constituting South Asian vernaculars as always-already subordinate to other ‘cosmopolitan' languages like Sanskrit and later English in assumed literary and linguistic hierarchies. The papers in this panel eschew hierarchical theoretical frameworks and instead ask: Is there a vernacular idiom in South Asian scriptorial practices? If so, what continuities and/or ruptures does it exhibit over the longue durée? Rebecca Darley’s paper addresses multilingual inscriptional and numismatic material from the seventh century CE in southeastern peninsular India. Priyamvada Nambrath examines linguistic evolution vis-á-vis use of mixed-language vocabulary in Yuktibhāṣā, a sixteenth century mathematical manuscript from medieval Malabar (southwest India). Two papers then turn to the religious and consumer-driven scriptorial economy of print in late colonial South India. Savita Ananthan analyzes Peṇ Putti Mālai, an advice manual for Muslim women first printed in c.1870s in the linguistically complex mixed-language of Arabu-Tamil. Finally, Anannya Bohidar delves into how advertisements employed multilingual aesthetic registers to capture and shape localized consumer behaviors in early twentieth century Tamil print advertisements. Together, our papers seek to trace a genealogy of vernacularity which questions not only language hierarchy but also the ways in which language divisions are conceived and manipulated.
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