Papers – Page 3 – ECSAS 2025

Child ordination among South Asian Svetambara Jain and Buddhist communities

My paper uses textual and ethnographic sources to explore life-management practices amongchild renunciants within pre-modern and contemporary South Asian Theravada Buddhistmonastic circles and contemporary South Asian Svetambara Jain mendicant circles. I explorehow modern Svetambara Jain child initiations provide Jain laity with opportunities foraccumulating merit through appreciation of what the child is able to achieve and […]

Narration as Disruption: Yoni ki Baat, Shailja Patel’s Migritude, and Caste Discrimination in Silicon Valley

In his decades-long work on mindfulness, Jon Kabat-Zinn’s reminder that “wherever you go, there you are” can have unfortunate manifestations. In September 2023, California became the first state in the U.S. to pass a bill banning caste discrimination. So much for new beginnings in new worlds. Working at a University in the heart of Silicon […]

#BringOurGodsHome: Political mobilization and civic engagement in reclaiming India’s stolen cultural heritage“

India is currently engaged in a concerted effort to bring back artifacts that were illegally exported or traded from the country, aiming to reclaim and preserve its cultural heritage by actively campaigning for the repatriation of those historical pieces. This includes working with other nations to recover stolen antiquities, often sacred icons once in worship. […]

Creating a Reading Public: Advertising books and magazines in Hans (1930-1936)

Books and magazines were commonly advertised in Hindi periodicals of the colonial and post-colonial period. This presentation analyses advertisements of books and magazines in Hans (1930-1936) under the editorship of Premchand. At times, a single issue of Hans (January 1933 issue) advertised more than fifty books, ranging from full-page advertisements to titles of individual books. […]

Changing Agrarian Relations and Rural Livelihoods: A Comparative Analysis of Eastern and Western Uttar Pradesh, India

The incorporation of the Indian economy into the global capitalist system has led to the growth of the informal sector within the agricultural sector, which is largely involved in the petty commodity production of both agricultural and non-agricultural commodities. This means that agrarian transformation, in general, and surplus appropriation, in particular, can no longer be […]

A ‘great leveller’? Class, gender and activism in Bengali colonial prisons through the accounts of bhadramahilas inmates

Though these efforts can be seen as a facet of women’s solidarity, they were received with hostility by lower-class detainees. Kalyani Das blamed this on the colonial government, which granted better conditions to ‘respectable’ prisoners; Bina understood the tensions as caused by the patronizing attitude of bhadra prisoners: when they acted as teachers of other […]

Post-War Carceral Spaces: Affective Dimensions of Tamil Masculinities in Kuna Kaviazhagan’s The Poisoned Dream

This paper critically examines how prison masculinities are constructed in this setting, framed through the lens of embodied memories and affect. The novel presents male prisoners who once occupied various ranks within the LTTE hierarchy, now stripped of their roles and subjected to forms of torture that target their bodies, masculinities, and identities. Drawing on […]

Locating Carceral Heritage in the Indian Independence Saga

In recent years, there is renewed attention on India’s freedom struggle by the Indian stateand its people alike. This paper, focuses on two particular ways this is happening. Firstly,there are concerted efforts by diverse actors towards the (re)discovery of lesser-known orerstwhile unacknowledged revolutionaries with a bid to give them their due place in theever-growing pantheon […]

Incarceration and the Political: A Convict’s Words and the Postcolonial Afterlives of Kālā Pānī

This paper presents a case study of the shifting historical contexts in which the discourse of the “political” emerged in relation to the imagination of incarceration, focusing on a text written by a convict. Muḥammad Ja‘far Thānēsarī (1838–1905) was sentenced to penal transportation to the Andamans between 1865 and 1884. His book, Tawārīkh-e ‘Ajīb (1884/85), […]

Political Prisoners or Ordinary Criminals? Defining the Category of ‘Political’ in the Hunger Strikes of Lahore Conspiracy Case Prisoners, 1929-1930

This paper will explore how different penal, legal, and moral realities were constituted in the late colonial period around the perennial question of ‘what it meant to act politically’. To interrogate this question, I will focus on the Lahore Conspiracy Case prisoners, who went on a hunger strike to subvert the significative powers of the […]