Papers – ECSAS 2025

Vernacular Publishing Houses in South Asia: A Biography of Manohara Grantha

Publishing houses have played a crucial role in shaping intellectual cultures across the globe, but when it comes to the representation of their presence, English-language publishing houses make a lot of sound and fury, and the voices from non-western or non-English publishing houses are not heard though their commitment to build, for example, literary cultures […]

Wild encounters? – Animal omens in three of Varāhamihira’s works

Varāhamihira’s Bṛhatsaṃhitā is a well known and valuable source for the investigation of divination. In order to come to a better understanding of animal omens this paper will consult in addition to the Bṛhatsaṃhitā also two of Varāhamihira’s lesser known works. Comparing the Bṛhatsaṃhitā’s, the Bṛhadyātrā’s and the Yogayātrā’schapters on śakuna this paper’s endeavor moves […]

“A World Devouring Thirst for Knowledge”: The ‘Global’ in the Presidency College Student Magazine

Referring to the students at Presidency College in Calcutta, historian Tapan Raychaudhuri said that their curiosity was akin to a “world devouring thirst for knowledge” (Bangalnama,113). This paper reads the student magazine of the Presidency College in colonial Calcutta to unpack the engagement of a section of the Bengali youth with their contemporary world. From […]

Vernacular Mantras in Uttarakhan

This paper explores vernacular mantras, including “Muslim” mantras, from a wide range of written and oral texts from North India, particularly the Indian federal state of Uttarakhand in the Western Himalaya. […]

Infrastructures and Discontent in the Garhwal Himalayas

Uttarakhand, especially the region referred to as Garhwal, is usually referred to as Devbhumi, land of gods. This would be, one would imagine, because of the four centres of pilgrimage, the Char Dham, three of which – Kedarnath, Badrinath and Gangotri are situated at the source of Himalayan rivers that constitute the Ganga, the fourth being […]

Rise of the Monumental Spinning Wheel: The Charkha and Its Meanings after Gandhi

A giant spinning wheel measuring 17 feet tall was unveiled at the international airport in New Delhi, India, in 2016. Three things are noteworthy about this spinning wheel: First, it decouples the spinning wheel from Gandhi, who is neither featured as part of the sculptural installation, nor mentioned on the placard. Yet it was Gandhi […]

Contesting Mobility: Trans-led Cinema and Gendered Representations of Movement in South Asian Media

This paper examines how trans-led cinema, particularly Leena Manimekalai’s Is it Too Much to Ask?, contests restrictive socio-political and cultural ideologies by highlighting the struggles of trans women navigating urban spaces in India. Against a backdrop of neoliberal postfeminist discourse and rising right-wing influences, this film centers on the lived experiences of two transgender women […]

Hegemonic capture of the aspirational religious demos: Role of Akhada and Sadhu politics in bottom up Hindu Right autocratisation

The Spring of Hindu Right has been largely studied as an abrupt phenomenon and a product of Modi’s charisma, but this paper intends to trace that neither this saffron spring was abrupt nor top-down alone. Hinduism, differentiated from hindutva on various grounds by liberals and the hindutvavadis both, associates with spiritual-theological aspects of the religion […]

In the Shadow of Space and Time: The trajectory of Dalit refugees

The 1947-Partition was a traumatic event, often remembered through refugee narratives in popular culture. Yet these narratives overlook the Dalit perspective. This paper will focus, historically and ethnographically, on generations that did not experience Partition but grew up in its shadow to establish an understanding of memory transmission. The paper shows the interplay between silencing, […]

A Memoir, A Hometown, and a Khatri Way of Life

At the age of fifty, and a little over a decade after Punjab’s Partition and Indian independence, Prakash Tandon published his popular memoir Punjabi Century in 1961.The iconic status of this life-writing comes from the manner in which Tandon was able to capture his family history, amalgamating it with the nostalgia of the dislocated Punjabis […]