Panels

The linguistic/cultural region of Garhwal stands in many different respects at the margins of contemporary India. Constituting one half of the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand, since Indian Independence in 1947, Garhwal has only fitfully and grudgingly assimilated itself to the modern Indian state. This panel will bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars from fields such as history, anthropology, and development studies to examine the trajectories that have sought to incorporate Garhwal into imperial and state projects at the same time as other forces have generated markers and performances of Garhwali difference. In the nineteenth-century, under British oversight, the centuries-old monarchy that had ruled the Kingdom of Garhwal began to erect the infrastructure for the appropriation of Garhwal’s natural and spiritual resources to the hegemonic aspirations of the modern state. As developments such as mass pilgrimage, forest extraction, and village outmigration altered the regional economy, local deities and rituals supplied Garhwali heritage and cultural revival movements as well as separatist politics with potent symbols for resistance. Today, fabled Himalayan tīrthas like Kedarnath draw ever more pilgrims from across India, spurred by a state heedless of the ecological crisis it invites. Long regarded as “Dev Bhūmi,” the land of the gods, Garhwal thereby sanctifies and authorizes the Indian state just as it supplies its power and water. Meanwhile, in villages and expanding small cities, devīs and devtās animate the ritual and social practices that reflect the antiquity and distinctiveness of Garhwali culture and underscore the region’s dialectical relationship to the Indian state.

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Awareness about climate change evokes a growing “planetary consciousness”. In South Asia, anthropogenic destruction and species extinction are causing widespread demands for conserving critically endangered environments. Both state and civil society actors regard declaring national parks as practical solutions to such problems. However, a good number of projects are implemented without considering the specific needs of indigenous residents and local species. At times, environmental protection agendas masquerade ploys to further marginalize subaltern groups, primarily through displacement, causing contestation across spatial, judicial and political terrains. This panel interrogates the social and cultural lives of South Asian national parks by exploring how different actors define, foster, establish and implement the conservation paradigm from a comparative perspective. We invite contributions based on empirical, theoretical or historical grounding that reflect on the (re-)making of national parks within South Asia. Contributions may focus on multiple sites of dispute, including contests over the right of use, human-wildlife conflicts and competing visions about sustainable conservation. Others may inquire into the social life of national parks as spaces of multi-species interaction, determined by different players and their notions of natures/cultures. Given the urban expansion, the interaction between urban peripheries and natural landscapes (agrarian, forest lands) also offers a fertile ground of inquiry. We seek to explore a set of related questions: In which ways do different actors produce knowledge about national parks and how do they negotiate the territorial, cartographic, physical, ecological, religious, economic and socio-cultural boundaries of parks? In which ways are conservation policies entangled with power relations? How can the quest for “naturbanity” be realized in future South Asian cityscapes?

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How do religious practitioners navigate tensions between sexuality, procreation and anti-natalism? This panel examines tensions and possibilities in lived religious experience arising from antinatalist religious discourse in India and South Asian-inspired movements. By foregrounding (non-)reproductive ideals we highlight adaptation and innovation with diverse implications for affective lives. Amy Langenberg troubles the assumption that, because early Buddhist teachings target sexual desire as a root cause of suffering, and because the avoidance of "village sex" is a central feature of Buddhist monastic discipline, Buddhist asceticism is asexual. A closer examination of vinaya read alongside ethnographic and historical data reveals a rejection of householder procreation coexisting with various sexual affects. Building on research on medieval haṭha yoga, Ruth Westoby problematises the easy dichotomy between antinatalist ascetics and pronatalist laypeople. Highlighting instead the diversity of both injunction and practice, this paper demonstrates breadth and adaptation in celibate yet affective and sexual yet (non-)reproductive practices. Amrita Nandy elaborates how, in highly pronatalist India, lay Buddhists can struggle between opposing ideals–parenthood, a cultural imperative and childfreeness, a cherished condition for nibbana. This paper explores their interpretations of Buddhist teachings to navigate their samsaric and spiritual lives. In contemporary guru-led movements, procreative sex among religious adepts (samnyasis and brahmacaris) is commonly understood to be either forbidden or a spiritual impediment. Amanda Lucia examines sexual strategies deployed to avert the crisis of procreation: homosexuality, pedophilia, abortion, and sterilization. The ubiquity of these sexual strategies reveals not only the mutuality of sex and asceticism, but also its bureaucratization. Additional papers that complement this discussion and further problematise practices of childfreeness are most welcome.

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Food and food relations hold multiple meanings, stir emotions and mediate social dynamics, reflecting and shaping the messiness of everyday life. While the lenses of economics and governance have elucidated the varied politics of food production and consumption, they lack perspectives on the role of embodiment and affect. This omission risks homogenising how people feel about social inequalities embedded in eating practices, processes of socio-ecological change, or the bundle of relationships that make food production, preparation and collection practices possible. In South Asia, multiple food cultures coexist with the intersections of class, indigeneity, caste, gender and religion co-constituting one’s access to and experience of food. For instance, food offers a sense of home, comfort and community for migrants across India. Yet, their food practices often transgress the social order, producing discontent expressed as disgust and exclusion. Moreover, affective boundary-making in relation to the practice of caste and anti-Muslim sentiment, impact marginalised communities, particularly in relation to meat consumption. Focusing on the embodied experiences and affective relations of food this panel aims to ‘think from the feeling body’ about the entangled politics of food. We are therefore interested in approaches from the anthropology and sociology of food, as well as feminist political ecology, which revolve around issues of power, subjectivity, in/justice, affect, emotion, marginalisation, belonging and (dis)connection, among others. Hoping to build on this existing scholarship, we seek contributions on, but not limited to, the following areas of concern: • embodied inequalities in agri-food networks • intersecting structures of oppression in everyday food and eating relations • embodied knowledge politics of subaltern food cultures • the everyday politics of Adivasi land, food and intangible heritage • embodied experiences of toxicity in food and farming • marginalised food provisioning practices such as marine and terrestrial foraging or honey collection.

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This panel explores the trajectories of subaltern religions of India over the past decades in the face of assertive Hindutva politics. Some of these movements have been portrayed in mainstream media as victims of Hinduization, joining the ranks of pro-Hindutva political parties—allured by a “fascinating Hindutva” (Narayan 2009). Others have continued to deploy their traditional tool-box of strategies—amphibiousness, concealment, deception, metaphorization etc. —to maintain an ambiguous stance. In this panel, we bring together several case-studies to address the relationship between subaltern religious groups and the state in contemporary India. How did Dalit religions, Adivasi traditions and minor religious sects respond to, oppose, or accommodate right-wing Hindu nationalism? Many of the religious movements followed by the Dalit and tribal communities in the Indian subcontinent had deliberately moved away from dominant religions to form breakaway sects of their own or had been practiced as indigenous to the group. Over the last few decades, with the rise of the Hindu Right in many parts of India and a general hardening of religious identities, some of these sects have moved closer to or into the fold of Hinduism. This has meant the rewriting of indigenous epics or myths in some cases, or the transformation of the community-specific gurus or deities to include other gods taken from the Hindu pantheon. In some cases, the stories have undergone changes to make it possible for a dissenting sect to be identified as a Hindu sampradaya. This panel will bring together specific case-studies of Dalit, Adivasi and subaltern religious communities to understand how their faith, narratives and ritual practices have responded to the pressures and the promises of right-wing Hindu nationalism.

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The study of emotions in the context of South Asia has been established as a significant line of enquiry in exploring precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial contexts (Bilimoria and Wenta; Heim, Chakravarthi and Tzohar; Pernau; Schröer; Tignol). Highlighting the increasing significance of emotions as a methodological approach, this panel focuses on moments of conflict, crisis, or failure. The recent and rich body of scholarship has shown the importance and productivity of studying human and nonhuman feelings across disciplines including history, anthropology, literature, or (human) geography. Key concepts such as emotional regimes (Reddy), styles (Gammerl), communities (Rosenwein), or practices (Scheer) have been coined and adopted to describe how emotions and affects “work”. But what about times when they don’t work, when things don’t go smoothly or as intended? This panel argues that such moments of friction and failure, crisis and conflict, reveal much about underlying social, political, and cultural structures and their mechanics. Furthermore, such crises can also expose the structures of inter/intrapersonal relations and relations between humans and nonhuman subjectivities. We invite contributions focusing on moments of friction and failure in understanding and responding to emotions. What does it mean to fail at feelings? What feelings shape experiences of crises? What can friction in feeling tell us about emotions and societies? Bringing together scholars working in and on South Asia across (humanities) disciplines, the panel seeks to create a space – including individual presentations and a round-table discussion – to discuss fresh perspectives in the study of emotion and to emotions as method. It aims to re-examine existing domains of enquiry through the lens of feelings, explicitly drawing on the abundance of vernacular emotion concepts and affective knowledges beyond persisting Eurocentric accounts and approaches.

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It is still largely unexplained in scholarship how the now hegemonic view that Advaita Vedanta is the central philosophy of Hinduism came about. In addition to Vivekananda, the influence of European Orientalism is usually cited. Otherwise, research concentrates on the pre-colonial period and mostly on the supposed classics. The reception of Advaita Vedanta in colonial India by traditional Indian scholars has received only limited attention. This applies on the one hand to Brahmanical Sanskrit scholarship, but at least as much to "vernacular Vedanta" (Michael S. Allen), i.e. the diverse scholarly discourses in the so-called "vernacular" languages. The panel aims to shed more light on this neglected aspect by focusing on different regional and vernacular contexts.

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This panel aims to study the Himalayas as a geo-political ecosystem, focusing on the diverse causes and implications of risk and disaster in the Himalayas. Extreme environmental events that are on the rise in scale and frequency in the Himalayan region are mired in human and more-than-human causes. The fragile topography of the young mountains and colonial legacies of ‘development’ in the region interact to create multiple geographies of risk. For a comprehensive understanding of the Himalayan landscape, this panel aims to initiate a conversation between environmental history, political ecology, anthropology and human geography. The panel aims to explore questions such as: how have the diverse meanings of what constitutes ecological risk in upland ecologies evolved historically? How do we map the diversity of lived experiences and complexity of disaster vulnerability that emerge in Himalayas, owing to the geographical, social and economic diversity within the Himalayan ecosystem? Papers are particularly welcome that delve into lesser-known spatial/thematic case-studies of the Himalayan landscapes of risk. Potential themes could include: • Colonial legacies of ecological intervention in the region • Nature of interaction between state and non-state methods of disaster risk mitigation • More than human causes and implications of climate change • Transborder geographies of risk and migration • Conflict, militarisation and ecological implications

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The panel proposes to focus on regional dynamics, exchange networks and cultural exchanges in the ancient and medieval Indian subcontinent. It explores how trade routes and networks facilitated the movement of commodity, people and economic transactions leading to significant cultural interactions. These exchanges in turn played a crucial role in shaping regional identities across the subcontinent. Each region had distinct social, economic and cultural practices, including commodity and credit exchange, movement and mobility, as well as art and ideology. In most cases, these regional practices were linked to extensive transterritorial macro networks through various nodes of interaction. By looking at diverse sources, this panel invites paper proposals to stimulate discussions on the voyages undertaken in early South Asian history from the regional to the trans-territorial spaces, weaving them together within the multi-scalar networks of commodities and communities.

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This panel calls for papers that explore how histories of anticolonialism might be informed by integrated multisensory perspectives and methodologies. Since the ‘visual turn,’ the discipline of history has undergone seismic shifts in terms of moving away from its earlier reliance on texts as archives. There is now a surge in interest in sound as a method, evidenced by several definitive monographs in South Asian Studies in the last five years. Taking such texts as inspiration and provocation, we submit that historical understandings are substantially enriched by an awareness of how sensory inputs such as smell and touch shape, preclude or enable anticolonial politics. This panel invites scholars to reflect on how multisensory approaches to historical phenomena are enriched by sensitivities to the interplay of visual, textual, aromatic, and haptic experiences in anticolonial contexts. In doing so, we hope to expand the horizons of knowledge, reflecting upon historical challenges, opportunities and importance of embracing the sensory turn.

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