Panels

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

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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.

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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.

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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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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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