Panels

Literary and performative expressions have been sites of resistance and celebration for the many marginal communities in South Asia. Through genres like oral songs, poetry, short stories, life narratives, and performative cultural practices like plays, rituals, etc., they have attempted to re-present themselves. Their relegated status in terms of caste, gender, religion, language and indigeneity is represented and contested through creative modes of articulations, thereby reshaping their selfhood at both individual and communitarian levels. An important analytical tool in this context is memory, with its capacity to connect past and present and to incorporate diverse materials/mediums. Concepts like “Public Memory” (C. L. Novetzke) and “Cultural Memory” (J. and A. Assmann) have helped us in understanding the communitarian phenomena with newer insights. This panel invites works engaging with the literary and performative expressions of marginal groups in India and South Asia. It brings to the fore and deliberates upon the rich bodies of literature and cultural practices deployed as critical sites of dissent by various individuals and “publics”. We seek to explore the intersectional politics of aforesaid marginals and the way they lead to community formations relying on literary and cultural memories, thereby defying structures of power and repression. We invite papers exploring the following and related themes: 1. Memory as an alternative archive 2. Orality and writing as emancipatory expressions 3. Language hierarchies and contestations 4. Caste and communitarian assertions 5. Indigenous articulations 6. Gender and agency 7. Contesting geospatial imaginaries 8. Devotional/ritualistic practices of the marginal

Show details

While Roman property law continues to inform modern legal systems, its counterpart in classical Hindu jurisprudence (Dharmaśāstra)—which shaped legal practice across premodern Southern Asia—remains primarily the domain of historians and philologists. Despite significant transformations under colonialism, concepts from Indic property theory, such as svāmin (owner), adhikāra (authority), dhana (wealth), bhoga (possession), and svātantrya (independence), have continued to shape vernacular political and religious discourses over time. This panel aims to delineate the historical trajectories and local inflections of this Indic vocabulary of ownership across diverse historical, regional, and linguistic contexts, particularly through the dialectics of scholastic norms and local legal practices. For the purposes of this panel, property is broadly conceived as a discursive field where relationships between people (authority, rights, claims) and between people and their environment (things, places, non-human agents like deities or animals) are negotiated—a process through which fundamental ontological and cultural categories such as personhood, lordship, autonomy, gender, sovereignty, wealth, and objecthood are articulated or produced. The panel invites contributions exploring these embedded notions of property and ownership, engaging with, but not limited to, the following themes: • Theoretical formulations on ownership and property in scholastic traditions such as Mīmāṃsā, Nyāya, or Dharmaśāstra. • Property regimes and documentation in regional legal cultures from the medieval and early modern periods. • The interaction of property theory with socio-economic structures, including household, gender, caste, labor, and religious institutions. • The criteria determining ownership: who is entitled to own, what is considered subject to ownership, and the ideologies underpinning these distinctions. • The transformation of Indic property theories through changing modes of production or encounters with Islamicate or Western legal traditions.

Show details

The objective of this panel is to look at how gender and sexuality are portrayed in postmillennial South Asian graphic novels and comics. With a focus on works created in the past 20 years, it will investigate how modern South Asian graphic storytellers subvert and reimagine sexual identities and conventional gender conventions in the sociocultural setting of the area. Through an analysis of significant texts from Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India, this study demonstrates the creative ways in which writers and artists use the visual arts to address problems like gender inequality, LGBTQ+ rights, and identity intersections. The stories examined contribute to a larger conversation on social justice and human rights in South Asia by giving marginalised voices a forum and offering critical criticism on cultural norms. This study underscores the significance of graphic narratives as a powerful tool for advocacy and change, reflecting the dynamic and diverse perspectives of postmillennial South Asian societies.

Show details

This panel examines the processes of Hinduisation and Sanskritisation in the Himalayan region, with a focus on Nepal’s distinct legal and cultural history in contrast to (British) India. It explores the intricate relationship between Brahmanical norms and local customs (deśācāra), particularly through the integration of Hindu legal scriptures (dharmaśāstra). The Himalayan region presents a unique context, where the application of these laws has sparked ongoing scholarly debate about the balance between Dharmaśāstra and indigenous practices. A key focus is the Mulukī Ain (MA) of 1854 CE, Nepal’s first codified legal code introduced by Prime Minister Jaṅga Bahādura Rāṇā. This legal reform sought to enforce Brahmanical norms across Nepal’s diverse communities, including Buddhist and non-Brahmanical groups. It was not only a legal initiative but also a political strategy to solidify Nepal’s identity as a Hindu kingdom and resist external threats, especially from colonial forces. The process of Sanskritisation and Hinduisation served to bring together Nepal’s various cultural groups under a common legal framework while preserving its Hindu ethos. The panel will explore the interaction between state-imposed laws and local traditions, analyzing how these frameworks shaped religious practices, social norms, and community identities in Nepal and the broader Himalayan region, including Tibet. Comparative studies of Nepal, India, and Tibet’s legal histories are encouraged, offering insights into how states with different colonial experiences addressed similar challenges. Scholars are invited to use archival and anthropological methods to investigate these transformations, shedding light on the dynamic relationship between state law and local customs in shaping the legal and cultural landscapes of the Himalayas.

Show details

This panel explores the retelling of stories through theatre and performance in early modern and modern India. We are interested in the analysis of texts, but also of performances of theatre plays or other texts. The retelling of stories in different contexts, forms, languages and genres has been a feature of South Asian literature since ancient times. While preserving traditional stories, this process is also a way of creating new narratives and adapting to new social and cultural concerns. Through translation, adaptation, re-creation, stories are retold, following new idioms, new contexts, adapting again and again. This panel concentrates on how stories are retold within the theatre genre and on the stage. How are classical plays adapted by early modern authors? How are texts and stories performed on a modern stage? How are certain characters given new roles to respond to new concerns? How are heroines recast? We invite papers examining early modern and modern theatre plays. We are particularly interested in the processes of retelling, through translation, reinterpretation, adaptation, reworking of non-theatrical sources, adaptation to the economics of the theatrical genre. We are also interested in the performative adaptation of texts in a broader sense and encourage the analysis of understudied theatre plays. This panel aims to provide a forum for discussion between scholars working on different languages, but also on historical periods that are too often studied in isolation, in an attempt to identify cross-cutting processes of retelling and to contribute to the history of South Asian theatre.

Show details

The panel investigates the multilingual dimension of religious writing in South Asia between 1600 and 1850s CE, challenging the notion of a monolingual archive that confines religious identities to a single linguistic and cultural framework. Thus, it seeks to highlight the diverse, polyvocal nature of religious literature in the region and beyond. Contrary to the view that faith is bound to a single linguistic and cultural community, the multilingual world of early modern South Asia (Orsini 2024) exhibited a vibrant ‘religious marketplace’ (Sheikh 2010), where religious and devotional texts crossed linguistic and cultural boundaries, facilitated by the mobility of religious and intellectual figures (e.g., sheikhs, gurus, sants, jogis). In the Mughal environment, texts were rendered from Sanskrit to Persian and vice versa, as well as into vernaculars (e.g., Brajbhāṣā, Avadhī, Dakhnī, Urdu), as adaptations to cater new audiences. Since the 14th century, Sufis expressed their mystical teachings through vernacular narratives (Digby 1975; Behl 2016), seeking 'equivalence' between their own conceptual repertoires and those of other traditions, rather than proposing direct translations (Stewart 2013). We invite papers examining ways of appropriating any religious text and ideas for distinct linguistic and cultural readerships through adaptation (interlinguistic, intercultural, and intertextual) between ca. 1600 and 1850 CE. We especially welcome studies examining the impact of such adaptations on the transmission and accessibility of texts across multiple genres—devotional poetry, religious narratives, musical compositions, spiritual manuals, and texts with commentaries or interpolations, in both handwritten and printed form. Contributions should emphasize the interplay between languages and religious semantics. The panel encourages approaches from fields such as literature, philology, history, and religious studies to reconsider the multilingual and multicultural dimensions of devotional practice within and beyond South Asia.

Show details

Elisa Freschi and Philipp Maas (Adaptive Reuse: Aspects of Creativity in South Asian Cultural History, 2017) emphasise that the relationship between innovation and the perpetuation of earlier forms is a specific aspect of creativity in South Asian literatures. The same can be observed in the case of contemporary Sanskrit production. Some authors still draw on traditional sources and genres explored by their predecessors, while others introduce new forms and themes into the creative practice of writing in Sanskrit. The tradition of life-writing never developed fully in earlier Sanskrit literature with ākhyāyikā and few other genres showing some traits. Contemporary authors, not bound by any literary convention or protocol between the author and the celebrated recipient, are free to express their own opinions and views. Among such works are Radhavallabh Tripathi’s diary, Kshama Rao’s biography of her father and Satyavrat Shastri’s autobiography. An unusual form to narrate a life story has been adopted by the contemporary writer Asha Gurjar, who composed a play describing her father’s life. V. Raghavan in three one-act plays presented the scenes from the imagined lives of three Sanskrit poetesses using the verses ascribed to them by the tradition. Thus, he approached closely the biographical prabandhas of the second millennium but changed the form to a theatrical one. As Philippe Lejeune has stated, “The object of an autobiographical text is the truth of the past, and its contract implies both the possibility and the legitimacy of verification.” (On Diary, 2009, p. 215) The same concerns biography. Obviously, surveying these works is surveying culture and history The genre of life-writing is an innovative form in modern Sanskrit. This novelty and the scarcity of contributions on modern Sanskrit literature emphasise the need of such avenue of research to be conducted by scholars.

Show details

The links between migration, religion and political mobilizations have been widely studied, often by focusing on either transnational political-religious movements or the “politics of recognition” of religious leaders in diasporic contexts. This panel aims to bridge these two fields of studies by looking at the connections between religious and political mobilizations in transnational South Asian contexts. We approach South Asian religious networks in a broad sense, including relations emerging among migrants threatened by religious persecution, religious organizations formed around the worship or leadership of a divine, saintly or guru figure, and nationalist movements, among others. The objective will be to understand how the religious and political diasporic fields intersect. What role do members of religious structures (Hindu temples, gurdwaras, mosques, sects) play in political movements like Hindutva, Khalistan, Tamil or Kashmiri nationalism? If connections exist, are they open, obfuscated, contested from within or without the diasporic population? How are the recognition politics of religious groups and transnational political mobilizations intertwined? How do the politics of exclusion and inclusion come together when examining the relation between local diasporic contexts and global movements? This panel invites contributions on diverse case studies to think jointly about South Asian transnational religious and political mobilizations.

Show details

As the academic study of non-religion progressively moves beyond the western foci that dominated the early days of this dynamic field, South Asia has emerged as a particular locus for the study of non-western forms of secularism, atheism, humanism and rationalism - not only in organised variants but also less organised ones. While secularism and detachment from forces of religion are of course longstanding concerns in the sociology and anthropology of South Asia, earlier scholarship on the region, as elsewhere, frequently invoked secularism as an abstract intellectual doctrine or in terms of its legal-constitutional status: South Asian secularisms have mostly been analysed with the people left out. Newer approaches, however, have sought to move beyond intellectualised debates to access the lived experiences and practical dimensions of secularism and non-religion. Further, South Asian studies of non-religion have formed the basis for conceptual advancements that have informed the study of non-religion more broadly. This panel attempts to be both summative in reflecting on the recent extremely productive literature on non-religion in South Asia and programmatic in identifying emergent scholars as well as themes and instances of the phenomenon that require more detailed analysis at present and in the future. For instance, it seeks contributions on hitherto neglected regions such as Sri Lanka and Nepal and on non-religion and lived secularity among the South Asian diaspora.

Show details

Politico-social and economic life is often seen to be determined by structures and institutions that determine behaviour patterns and consequently outcomes. Scholarly analysis is thus focussed on how the various actors – superordinate or subordinate – are located in the distribution of power and wealth and what processes and mechanisms are deployed to interrogate such locations. However, both domination and its contestation are located in the world of ideas and memories whose narrativization first invents a cognitive autonomy that may be mobilised for purposes of contestation. Similarly, domination is also a product of a master narrative that seeks to supress, subsume, deny or forget alternative stories and articulations. Mechanisms and tools of such ideational domination and constatation are varied: storytelling, symbolic and physical memorialisation, printed material, folklore, sociocultural traditions, literature and drama, and so, extending up to new and ontological epistemological challenges by the dominant. Finally, these processes are deeply implicated in construction of worldviews and framing questions of social justice, identity and give meaning to almost all politico-social phenomenon.

Show details