Panels

At a time of rising corruption, crime, and criminalization in South Asia, it is especially important to consider what role crime plays for economic growth and state apparatuses. This panel explores the ways in which the realms of crime, politics, and business get deeply entwined in South Asia, and what inequalities emerge from these intertwinements. Scholars of crime have moved away from narrow definitions of criminal organizations as autonomous, internally cohesive, and bounded systems (Levien 2021; Martin and Michelutti 2017; Michelutti et al. 2019), to take seriously how crime works in coalition with rapid economic growth and strengthening state institutions. However, the question of how and through what kinds of relations crime, state, and capital are being intertwined in worldly encounters is still open and deserves further attention. Without an adequate analysis of how informal, criminal networks actually permeate the formal realms of state and capital, we overlook the inner workings and exacerbating inequalities that continue to make these entwined coalitions possible in South Asia. This panel addresses these issues by considering the social embeddedness of crime and corruption. We build on anthropological studies of Italian mafia that have pointed to the relevance of the concept of intreccio (interweaving), literally a “plaited hairdo of tightly woven braids” (Schneider 2018: 16), to grasp the entanglements between crime and the social contexts in which it operates. Our key aim is to probe and adapt this conceptual framework to reflect the role criminal political economies play in South Asia today, with an eye to the emerging inequalities in India and in nearby South Asian contexts. The panel aims to offer a comparative perspective of intreccio in different South Asian contexts, and ultimately ask: what are the implications of intreccio for the forms the political can take?

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This proposal proposes a double panel to explore questions of knowledge production and international ties in colonial and postcolonial India by bringing together eight scholars across US, UK, and India. Its goal is to unravel the complicated processes of knowledge constitution and underscore connections in diverse spaces and contexts. Drawing on Nehru’s letters from prisons, Banerjee highlights Nehru's use of world history to educate Indira and the burgeoning youth in late colonial India. Topdar examines letters among nuns in India and Australia to unveil how global Catholic networks shaped female education. De Sarkar focuses on Presidency College of Kolkata to explore the relations between the world and students during and between the two World Wars. Nair delves into the California textbook controversies where the portrayal of ancient India led to distortions in representations of caste and ethnic minority groups in India. Kannan focuses on multiple Christian evangelical groups and their racialized and hierarchical constructions of childhood, differentiated by age and gender. Chatterjee addresses the process of collecting Indian folklores by British and native experts and the multifaceted ramifications of Victorian domesticity in construction of feminine ideals in children’s literature. Kumar explores the construction of mathematical sciences through an examination of peasant indebtedness, money-lending manuals, and indigenous and colonial government schools. Sen contextualizes the transcontinental European ties of Bengali trade unionists in Germany, Italy, and France for (re)constructing a global intellectual history of decolonial socialist networking.

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This panel seeks to explore the trajectories of networks built in the divided Cold War city(ies) of Berlin by its South Asian visitors/tourists and residents alike. The aim is to examine how the divided city became a spatial resource for South Asians to actively build networks with the cities’ local residents as well as to craft transnational ties. Of particular interest are actors from other postcolonial contexts in Africa. Present in the two cities for various reasons as journalists, academics, diplomats, students, activists, traders/shopkeepers, writers, artists, filmmakers etc., actors arrived in West and East Berlin through differently organized trajectories. Whereas traversing to the other side of the Wall was discouraged, and largely problematic for their East German cohabitants, Asian and African actors were often able to cross the border bringing back music, books, newspapers, coffee, cigarettes, spices etc. Objects were kept, but also traded, sold on and exchanged locally. How were actors from African and South Asian nations embedded in and, in turn, how did they shape the ‘global’ Cold War locally? What was the scope and extent of South-South entanglements in the divided city and how were they crafted through material, symbolic and everyday practices during the Cold War? By focusing on networks, organizations, unions, cultural events and technologies, papers should examine how Cold War scenarios were utilized by South Asian and African diaspora to navigate geopolitical situations and simultaneously craft local agendas. Invited are papers which delve into how actors utilized the city and each other as a resource for personal mobility and how their presence informed the making of political, social and infrastructural spaces in their neighbourhoods in the two Berlins? Entanglements are not approached as a set of romanticized solidarity networks but rather also as historically informed interconnections, which do not always obliterate discourses of otherness.

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Scholarship on the intersections of law and democratic politics in India is extensive but frequently operates at the levels of theory or history. By contrast, this panel provides a venue for scholars studying the law-democracy nexus at the level of lived realities. Panelists use methods that include but are not limited to interviews, participant-observation, media analysis, surveys, and other forms of qualitative social science. We are particularly (but not exclusively) interested in understanding how widely studied frameworks like autocratic legalism, democratic decay, democratic backsliding, and illiberal democracy manifest in everyday ways. How are they constituted through and reflected by changes to speech practices, behaviors, interpersonal relationships, community networks, activist strategies, legal strategies, institutional and regulatory praxis, and other granular forms of social life? We are also interested in unearthing insights about law and democracy in India that are only or are primarily accessible through these types of ground-level qualitative study. By engaging with the social life of law and political transformation in contemporary India, the presentations in this panel help to move the conversation from the “ideal” (what ought to be) to the “real” (what is). Among other issues, we seek to explore the following in the Indian context: 1. The use of legal concepts or institutions to resist or reinforce longstanding or emerging socio-political hierarchies; 2. The everyday nature of violence and mob action as mediated (or not) by law; 3. Intra- or inter-religious disputes pursued through formal law; 4. Legal institutional transformations that are driven by or responsive to political transformations; 5. Shifting experiences at lower-level (judicial or administrative) legal institutions; 6. Shifting relationships between religious legal systems and state legal systems.

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While sensory history is a rapidly growing field, scholars of South Asia have only recently begun to incorporate the sensate into their historical analyses. This panel seeks new avenues for the study of early modern and modern South Asia (16th to 20th centuries) by approaching the subcontinent’s past via the history of the senses. Emphasizing the interdisciplinary nature of sensory history, it facilitates discussions across multiple fields, including history, art history, ethnomusicology, literature, religion, gender, and material culture studies. Inspired by a ‘sensory turn’ in the humanities, this panel investigates how people situated in various social, political, religious, and linguistic contexts made meaning of their everyday sensory experiences. It highlights ways in which embodied sensory experiences and ideas about the sensorium were entangled with questions of caste, class, gender and sexuality, aesthetics, affect, religious rituals, kingship, and the state. How does sensory history help us understand the continuities and changes that accompanied the onset of modernity in South Asia and the transition from pre-colonial to colonial regimes and sensibilities? In what ways did protocols of the senses engender and articulate difference, thereby complicating cross-cultural encounters? How did elites and non-elites, different religious communities, and European travelers and colonizers theorize the sensorium? We welcome papers from diverse disciplinary backgrounds that explore the above-outlined themes. This could entail longue durée and trans-regional approaches to sensory history or case studies and microhistories focusing on a particular community and a specific sense (sight, smell, hearing, touch, or taste).

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Isma‘ili Muslims in South Asia are guided by tightly-knit transnational institutions that represent diverse communities spread across urban, rural, and mountainous reagions. Under the leadership of their living preceptors, the ‘Aga Khan and the Da‘i al-Mutlaq, Isma‘ilis are mercantile communities that boast distinctive cultural and rich literary heritage and sacred and economic institutions that promote ethical standards for living. The immediacy of present concerns, from economic prosperity to the morality of living among secular and religious others, dominates the kinds of questions that Isma‘ilis’ preceptors offer answers. Scholars have made significant strides in exploring the history, sacerdotal institutions, and literature of Isma‘ilis, with far-reaching implications for the study of Muslim communities and the religious history of South Asia. However, Isma‘ilis continued to be on the margins of the scholarship on Islam in South Asia, mainly dominated by a focus on the Khoja caste. Primarily divided into two camps, scholars have highlighted the continuity of a unified Isma‘ili Tradition vis-à-vis historical changes, while others have presented Isma‘ilism as a local tradition, composite tradition, or an institution without territory. Building on previous scholarship, this panel offers new perspectives on the study of Isma‘ilism in South Asia, including a wide range of themes. These include the epistemological redefinition of the Imamate as a divine institution, the character of Isma‘ili commercial institutions, legal genealogies of authority, the entangled histories of migration and literary tradition, and the lived character of ethical pluralism.

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Abolitionist feminisms teach us to not depend on the logics or the institutional structures of the carceral state to keep us safe; and instead to build networks of care, solidarity, accountability to protect ourselves and one another. In this panel, we reflect on building these networks in the midst of increasing nationalist, transnationalist, and imperialist violence in South Asia. These racialized and gendered violences take legal and extra-legal forms – from extrajudicial abductions and lynchings to legalized deportation, citizenship statutes, sedition charges and loss of employment, inflicting psychic, economic, epistemic, and relational harm. In this panel, we draw on our experiences as both feminist academics and activists researching authoritarian violence and locate moments of emergence within protests and social movements in South Asia that are either fleeting in nature or more enduring. We invite case studies of recent protests and social movements from Pakistan, India, Kashmir, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. We invite panelists to ask how these movements might reimagine what is possible by theorizing people’s capacity to exercise their creativity and create new kinds of egalitarian politics, precisely at the moment when increasingly authoritarian and fascist regimes seek to shut them down. Then, shifting our gaze from the movements that we study to our own movements inside and outside the field, we reflect on our own practice as academics from the Global North to the South, and what it might mean to nurture our solidarities beyond their moment of emergence.

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Di􀆯erent aspects of sexual and gender diversity in South Asia have garnered increasing attention from a range of actors in recent years, including LGBTIQA+ activists and community members, academics from disparate disciplines, literary writers, journalists and filmmakers, and artists. An emerging theme from these various analytical and disciplinary lenses is the recourse to cultural heritage and contemporary cultural practices, often referencing a recorded or imagined past that reflects a diversity-friendly attitude. Historical or cultural precedents may support contemporary non-binary, non-heterosexual identities, subjectivities, and practices. Such cultural traces may be found in the rich written, material, visual, auditory, verbal, and performative traditions of South Asia. This panel seeks to explore the historical and living cultural heritage of di􀆯erent regional, ethnic, tribal, caste, or religious origins that are or might be engaged in advocacy for South Asia's minoritized sexual and gender diverse communities. Who is engaging them and how, and how are these e􀆯orts and actions received by LGBTIQA+ activists and members of the LGBTIQA+ community, source community members and the public more broadly, and the state? This panel invites contributions from scholars, amongst others, in gender studies, transgender studies, queer studies, history, art history, transcultural studies, heritage studies, literature, religious studies, anthropology, sociology, linguistics, and law, across di􀆯erent regions of South Asia to explore and expand upon such considerations.

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This panel invites papers drawing on empirically grounded socio-legal inquiries into imaginations of decoloniality in South Asia. What does decoloniality mean in the context of everyday regulation and governance? The architecture of India’s governance systems remains heavily influenced by its colonial experience. This panel enquires into reflections on meanings of decoloniality as they evolve through the way people navigate these governance structures. We seek to explore in what forms decoloniality manifests / would manifest for judges, lawyers, and bureaucrats as agents of the state and for teachers, village councils and religious heads as regulatory authorities in different semi-autonomous social fields and for citizens who remain in a continuous relationship with these different state and non-state systems of regulation. This panel seeks to explore the notions of decoloniality as they evolve through governance-in-action. More specifically, this panel invites papers enquiring into: - Decoloniality as a feature in the working of state authorities such as judges, police, commissions and government schools. How does it manifest? Or how do they imagine decoloniality in their respective contexts? - Narratives of decoloniality within spaces of non-state actors such as village councils, mediators, NGOs, religious tribunals and private educational institutions. - Impressions of decoloniality among vulnerable communities, including LGBTQIA++ groups, religious minorities, indigenous communities and individuals that stand at the intersection of all these axes.

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This panel examines the often overlooked continuation of casteism within South Asian diasporic communities globally. As Dr. B.R. Ambedkar noted, "The caste problem is a vast one, both theoretically and practically" (Ambedkar, 1979, p. 6). Recent research shows that caste's divisive constructs such as hierarchy, patriarchy, humiliation, deprivations, exclusions, and economic disparities persist, even as social and temporal contexts change (Waghmore, 2023). One key concern that remains underexplored is how casteism changes and reproduces itself as it crosses national borders, maintaining a dynamic and fluid presence in diasporic communities (Hardtmann, 2023). Moreover, the resistance to casteism and efforts to dismantle caste structures in diasporic communities are similarly understudied (Modi, 2023). Even with their physical distance from South Asia, diasporic communities carry cultural, social, and political legacies, with caste being a significant and contentious element that surfaces at the intersection of host countries and migrant communities (Reddy, 2023). This panel aims to address this research gap by examining how caste discrimination appears and is challenged in new socio-cultural settings. It seeks contributions that explore the (im)material causes and effects of casteism in South Asian diasporic communities and look at the social, cultural, political, and legal paths to freedom from casteist practices and beliefs. Dr. Ambedkar emphasised that "Caste has killed public spirit. Caste has destroyed the sense of public charity" (Ambedkar, 1979, p. 56). By focusing on how casteism moves and changes and how diasporic groups confront it, this panel contributes to broader discussions on caste discrimination and its intersection with race and ethnicity. It emphasises the agency of diasporic communities in handling and redefining their caste identities, contributing to the discourse on migration and transnational identities.

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