Panels

While much research has focused on how states use the law to reinforce its power and achieve unstated ends, little research has discussed the unintended ways that ordinary citizens utilize the law against each other. To address this gap, this panel focuses on the everyday politics of case-making. In particular, it will consider the widely noted phenomenon of so-called ‘fake cases’ in South Asia, employed systematically in some contexts, whereby citizens file bogus legal cases, not to achieve a favorable verdict but to influence power dynamics or to gain a political advantage. For example, people may begin criminal cases to apply pressure on others, to win an election, resolve long-pending civil cases, force divorce proceedings, or resolve land disputes. We suggest that common narratives of a lack of state capacity or ‘weak state’ are not sufficient to explain why people appeal to the law and state institutions – albeit often in ways not envisioned by lawmakers. By comparing case studies across South Asia, we aim at a deeper theorization of the role of law in the region and how legal gray zones are utilized to pursue political goals in unintended, but often systematic, ways. What role do factors such as gender, class, caste, ethnicity, or political affiliation play in such politics of case-making? To what extent do the dynamics of state law reinforce existing power inequalities? Under what circumstances might the law be used to empower marginalized groups? How do the different actors (e.g., plaintiffs, defendants, police officers, lawyers, judges, and politicians) involved in such ‘fake cases’ view the state and formal law?

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Migration has been a longstanding feature of people in the Bengal Delta. Records of migrating to the adjacent areas in the subcontinent and far away countries in the South Pacific and West Indies islands are available since the British colonial administration in the early 19th century. So, it is unsurprising that Bangladesh – the independent country comprising the largest share of geography and population in the Bengal Delta – has emerged as a significant source of international migration and a top remittances-receiving country in the contemporary world. This session explores migration in South Asia by looking at the Bengal region in general and Bangladesh in particular. While a discussion of the causes and consequences of migration in the Bengal Delta and South Asia will be covered, this session will primarily focus on the non-economic dimensions of migration. Keeping up with the growing interest in understanding migration by going beyond an economist bias, this session invites papers that explore, for example, how the governments in South Asia approach migration, how the native population treats non-citizens (including racialization, discrimination, etc.) in the receiving countries and cities within countries, how migrants experience the state and society in their destination countries, how migrants engage in transnationalism, what role does the media and communication technologies play in shaping migration in this region. Besides the regional focus, this panel invites papers on the positionality of the researchers to understand knowledge production about migration in and from South Asia.

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Recent scholarship on Islamicate South Asia has increasingly understood courts as fundamentally social spaces of both self-assertion and negotiation. This panel builds on this prior work to explore the different layers and forms of connection characterizing courts and courtly spaces in Sultanate and Mughal South Asia. Panelists will explore the creation and reconfiguration of connections between courts with contested and rival claims to vested resources, between imperial and sub-imperial courts, and between courts and a range of political, social, intellectual, and mercantile networks. In tracking these diverse entanglements, the panel will seek to reflect the dynamic and complex enmeshment of courtly spaces with their larger contexts. This will entail considering the many forms courtly connections could take, from mutual exchange and reciprocity to contestation and negotiation to the exertion of force. This panel particularly invites contributions that consider definitions of the court beyond the conventional static locations within the royal palace or camp, through incorporating examination of a variety of settings and practices which could form courtly spaces. It also encourages reevaluating the epistemologies and conceptual frameworks brought to bear in studies of the dynamics of courtly relations, cultural production, and patronage networks. Contributions will in the process reflect on how the specific languages, archives, authorship, intended audience, and genre of the sources both help and hinder modern scholars in reconstructing these linkages.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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During the COVID-19 pandemic, the extreme predicament of the South Asian migrant workers, many of whom died on their way home, has gained unprecedented global attention. The images of large number of people marching towards their homes vividly illustrated the scale and precarity of labour migration in the region. However, this public attention faded as quickly as it flared, while the situation of the migrant workers stayed the same. For many South Asian migrant workers, living and working conditions remain precarious as they continue to be exposed to varying degrees of premature death from weather extremes (such as heat), unsafe working conditions, overwork, and poor health facilities. Motivated by the above observations, some of the leading questions in this panel are: What does it mean to live and die as a migrant worker? How do migrant workers reflect on their everyday workplace circumstances? What happens to migrant workers who die at work, and what leads to their death? How do employers, colleagues, and family members deal with these deaths? This panel seeks to expand the knowledge on South Asian labour migration by focusing on both the living and dying circumstances of migrant workers. We invite original ethnographic studies analysing the situation of migrant workers not only from a classical Marxist perspective of domination and exploitation, but also from an existential standpoint, shedding light on the living and dying conditions in the context of labour migration.

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