Performing Power: Staging Group Identities in Post-Independence India
Chair: Sudipto Chatterjee, Associate Professor of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies; University of California, Berkeley

This panel examines the relationship between performance and power in the construction of group identities. Collectively, the papers explore how group identity is produced, circulated and consumed through performance. The panel argues that performance does not mimetically represent power but rather constitutes it; power is performative. The performativity of power is exemplified not only in aesthetic and formal stagings of power but in its ability to enact that which it displays. The papers collectively explore the performative production of caste, community and national identities that draw upon an apparatus of cultural performances. While Kristen Rudisill examines Cavi’s Washingtonil Tirumanam to consider the comic staging of upper-caste identities that attempt to re-consolidate social and cultural hegemony, Jisha Menon turns to the display of power at the India-Pakistan border by exploring the ludic in the hyperbolic enactments of nation that, paradoxically, undercuts militant attempts to institutionalize difference. Avishek Ganguly considers Utpal Dutt’s Teer (1967) that stages the beginnings of the militant Naxalite insurgency in a peasant uprising, and explores how to read performances of such collectivities in order to train the imagination for political work in the present. The papers attempt to make visible the ways in which group identities come into being through spectatorial practices and examine the subversive undecidability and destabilizing potential of all political performances. In this way, the panel explores the crucial role played by the performative public sphere in the contests of power and the shaping of national, caste and community identities.

“Performance of Culture, Performance of Self: The Perfect Tamil Brahmin Marriage”
Kristen Rudisill, University of Texas, Austin

The minority Brahmin population in 1960s Tamil Nadu dominated the majority population with their religious authority, economic power, political influence, and social prestige. The resulting resentment led to one of the most active anti-Brahmin movements in India. Brahmins were portrayed as foreign invaders, enemies, and hypocrites in the ideology of the Dravidian movement, whose rhetoric was spread far and wide through literature, drama, and film during the early post-colonial period. These attacks inspired Brahmins to respond by reaffirming their values. Instead of using mass media to justify to the majority population the worth and contributions of their community, however, they developed a live theater genre to affirm it within the community itself. This paper discusses one of the earliest full-length comedy plays in Tamil and its focus on the family values and ritual traditions of the Brahmin community. Cavi’s “Washingtonil Tirumanam” was published as a serial novel in the journal Ananda Vikatan in the late 1960s, done as a play, then later as a popular television series. The play, with its very detailed description of a perfect Brahmin marriage in Washington DC, is still performed by Goodwill Stages. The wedding is performed with the financial assistance of the Rockefellers so that they can learn about „Indian culture.‰ This play, with its combination of narcissism and cultural anxiety, clearly delineates the role of good Brahmins in society and proper family relations. It does this by demonstrating proper cultural performances, their transgression, and cultural misunderstandings in both directions with great comic effect.

“Out of Line: Performance and Politics at the Wagah Border”
Jisha Menon, University of British Columbia

This paper considers the flag lowering ceremonies performed daily at dusk, at the Indo-Pakistan border by Indian and Pakistani soldiers. This panicked performance of delineating boundaries ritually rehearses the antagonisms between the two nation-states, engendered by the Partition and sustained through foreign policy. Every evening, the retreat ceremony takes place at the border in Wagah, where soldiers from India’s Border Security Force and Pakistan’s Pakistani Rangers perform a ritual that reiterates the militancy and machismo of nationalism. A demonstration of martial prowess takes place, where they glower at each other while simultaneously stomping their feet and shaking their weapons in a highly stylized fashion. I argue that the drama at Wagah, though staged to highlight the production of national difference, inadvertently, evokes the identity between the two nations. I explore the multivalence and ambiguity in these performances that open up spaces for audience critique. Thus, by examining the ludic in politics, this paper looks at the theatrical display of power in the public sphere and argues that competing narratives of nation-formation fracture the unifying certitudes of official history.

“Staging collectivities: The political theater of Utpal Dutt”
Avishek Ganguly, Columbia University

If “the question of the formation of collectivities without necessarily pre-fabricated contents” has come to determine the contemporary political horizon, then, how can the reading of literary texts that stage the question of collectivity – necessarily undecidable – contribute to that effort? My paper proposes to read Utpal Dutt’s Bengali play Teer (1967) [‘The Arrow’] in order to chart out some possible trajectories. Teer dramatizes a militant peasant uprising at Naxalbari in 1967, that sparked off the Naxalite insurgency in other parts of India. Apart from the obvious and by now well documented problems of positing a teleological and essentialist narrative of historical change and political subjectivity that often informs such classic texts of political theater, the play, with its mix of Bengali and Santali dialogues, predictable quotations from Maoist doctrines, and critiques of revisionism and liberal democracy also raises many interesting questions about notions of agency and solidarity, subalternity, and the questions of revolutionary violence. It also became controversial when it was retracted by the playwright a few years later as a ‘monumental error’, by the time the parliamentary left came to power in the state of West Bengal. In setting up a conversation between the play and recent theoretical work on questions of friendship, collectivities and democracy undertaken with a view to reconceptualize the concept of the political, I will attempt to identify possible uses of such political performances in the present.

The ABCD Conundrum?: Alternative Formations of Power
Chair: Roksana Badruddoja, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

The influx of South Asian immigrants raises several scholarly questions, such as what changes occur in South Asian immigrant families when they move to the U.S., that a growing number of researchers are addressing (Fisher 1980; Gibson 1988; Agarwal 1991; Lessinger 1995; Mukhi 2000; Prashad 2000; Maira 2002; Purkayastha 2005). However, less visible in the media and scholarship are the children of these immigrants. The off-spring of the post-1965 immigrants began to come of age during the late 1980s and 1990s, but the stories of these South Asian-Americans have not yet been told and incorporated in the larger narratives of the United States (see Maira 2002). The children of these immigrants represent a critical generation determining patterns of race, ethnicity, culture, economy, and politics in the United States. Maira (2002) writes, “Immigrant youth culture raises questions about the relationships of immigrant communities to the nation-state in which they live and the one they ostensibly left behind” (21). A central question, therefore, is, what kinds of identities are these second-generation South Asian-Americans forging? In this panel, the following questions are asked: What are the meanings of ABCD or American-Born Confused Desi - a popular term for second-generation South Asian Americans - in the U.S. racial and ethnic imaginary? How do these meanings travel through class, gender, sexual, and cultural hierarchies, both in the United States and transnationally? This panel situates itself within intersecting coordinates of power – race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and nation – and historical circumstances.

“Indian, India, and Hindu: An Autoethnographic Account of a Second-Generation South Asian-American Woman”
Simmy Makhijani, California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS)

I am driving home with Veena, my Punjabi-American neighbor; she tells me about her grandfather’s participation in the Gadar Party - a revolutionary Indian nationalist movement initiated by Punjabi farmers in San Francisco in 1913. By the time we near our homes, I am struck by my ignorance of this early desi (im)migrant history. As a student of social and cultural anthropology and as a second-generation South Asian-American woman, I am compelled to ask, how does nationalism function in today's diaspora? Early literature on diaspora made significant efforts to theorize connections between diaspora and nationalism (Bhattacharjee 1992, Anderson 1994, Hall 1996). In the last ten years, ethnographic scholarship has moved away from this query. In this paper, I aim to re-engage with this question linked to today's South Asian diaspora by underscoring the struggle between maintaining an ahistorical past that asserts cultural power through elitist bourgeois values and the push for recognition as a national-racial group informed by a growing U.S.-based Hindu Nationalism. I accomplish this through an autoethnographic account of my life, not as a self-indulgent inventory, but rather as a register of political awareness. This talk contains personal narratives of being born and raised in the U.S. where "Indian" was not consigned to the place named "India" but rather implied being "Hindu" as an inscription of difference, as a formula for cultural pride. I ask here, what is it about patriotisms born in diasporas, romantic longings for a homeland passed on from the first- to the second-generation, that confuses and disturbs?

“Resistance and Accommodation in Indo-American Cultural Assimilation”
Nikhil Thakur, California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS)

In this presentation I explore five key postcolonial theoretical concepts - education; origin/tradition; nationalism; place/exile; and identity - within the framework of Indo-American cultural assimilation. In the context of education, I discuss how dualisms of "inferior" and "superior" are both reinforced and challenged by Indo-Americans (Gramsci, 1971). In origin/tradition, I explore Indo-American narratives of "homeland" (Adorno, 1973). I then move on to nationalism and interpretations of national culture (Bhabha, 1994). In place/exile, I discuss the schism between "home" and "away" and the resulting production of alienation (Sartre, 1989). Finally, I engage with Indo-American cultural identity through a re-evaluation of the logical principle of identity (Nietzsche, 1989). The purpose of this presentation is to simultaneously critique and affirm the "two-ness," the hybridity, of the Indo-American identity. In addition, I aim to problematize the process of assimilation in this talk. Assimilation can be a key strategy for survival but it also severs possibilities for thinking about different forms of subjectivity, identity, and becoming. This presentation, then, is a plea to Indo-Americans to challenge dominant forms of whiteness and embrace the status of “Other.”

“Queer Spaces, Places, and Gender: The Tropologies of Rupa and Ronica”
Roksana Badruddoja, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Much queer theory in America is based on white male experience and privilege, excluding people of color and severely limiting its relevance to third world activism. Within the last decade and a half, chronicles from Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender Inter-sex Queer (GLBTIQ) communities within the South Asian diaspora in the United States have appeared, but the richness and contradictions that characterize these communities have been stifled. Too often, the limitations due to undertheorized South Asian lesbian, bisexual, and transsexual histories, compounded with a queer canon overwrought with the East/West:tradition/modern equation, renders queer South Asian-Americans as a monolithic homogenous category with little or no agency. In this short but telling paper, I visit paradoxes, difficulties, unity, and diversity by unraveling the lives of two queer-identified second-generation South Asian-American women – Rupa and Ronica. This article addresses the ways in which an often invisible and marginalized group – queer second-generation South Asian-American women – accepts, manipulates, and resists hegemonic powers. I accomplish this by presenting partial data from a six-month long cross-national feminist ethnography conducted in 2004.

"Intimate History: Rethinking Diaspora Narratives"
Minal Hajratwala, Freelance writer

While scholarly diaspora narratives privilege socio-political-economic causes, migrants themselves rely on such factors as coincidence, impulse, and destiny (karma) to explain migratory choices and outcomes. The literary nonfiction approach (what I call "intimate history") juxtaposes these insider and outsider explanations, combining journalistic, historical, and ethnographic methods with literary techniques, but without resorting to fictionalizing. A more complex model of diaspora results, fluidly incorporating 1) women's, girls', and queer narratives; 2) multiple migrations, often marginalized in studies that assume Point-A-to-Point-B trajectories; and 3) "hidden" topics (e.g. sexuality, intrafamilial conflict) that rarely surface statistically yet may profoundly influence migration decisions. This talk draws on my forthcoming nonfiction book (Houghton Mifflin). Focusing on one Gujarati family's multigenerational travels since 1905 - from India first to Fiji, East Africa, and South Africa; then to Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Canada, England, and Hong Kong - I hone in on individual "moments of migration" to show how, in every case, personal and political forces combine to create crucial decisions that reverberate for generations. I argue that each leap makes the next possible, so that successive generations experience both greater displacement and expanded possibilities of self-creation.

Panel Session 2
10:45 AM - 12:15 PM -- Friday, February 16

Location: Homeroom

Roundtable session with:
- Sunaina Maira, Asian American Studies Program, UC Davis
- Brinda Mehta, Department of French and Francophone Studies, Mills College
- Gautam Premnath, Department of English, UC Berkeley
- Kasturi Ray, Department of Women Studies, San Francisco State University

Since the early 1990s “diaspora” has become a prominent new concern in the humanities and social sciences, and the research agendas connected with it have moved from the fringe to occupy a high profile in the academy. This rise in interest has registered profoundly in South Asian studies, which has witnessed an efflorescence of scholarly investigations both of specific diaspora communities and figures, and of broader questions of the place of diaspora in relation to ancestral culture and the system of nation-states. As diaspora studies has consolidated itself into an established and durable scholarly field, the time is ripe to critically evaluate its recent rise to prominence and speculate on future directions. This roundtable session on the field of South Asian diaspora studies aims to offer a critical exploration of the key questions, methods, theoretical frameworks, and ideological vantage points shaping the formation of the field at the present moment. Extending the conversation begun at a similar session at last year’s South Asia conference, the roundtable aims to interrogate the notion of diaspora and present varying ways in which scholars are engaging with, questioning, or redefining this concept and the field in general.

The panel will be an interdisciplinary conversation touching on themes from the presenters’ research such as: racialization and cross-racial affiliations, gender, sexuality, labor, religion, youth culture, popular culture, nationalism and the nation-state, citizenship, political movements, war, and dissent. We aim to generate a wide-ranging discussion that draws upon the voices and knowledge of audience members and raises issues such as:

Re-reading the Colonial Modern: The Case of Anglo-India
Chair: Sukanya Banerjee, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

Even as the modernizing impulses of the colonial state helped buttress its claims to cultural and political authority in nineteenth century British India, colonial narratives of modernity were, as scholars of South Asia have widely argued, fraught, uncertain, and often deeply contradictory. The “incomplete” project of modernity in South Asia has often been highlighted with reference to the irregularity, recalcitrance, or ingenuity of native subjects, who marked, often spectacularly, the limits of the modern and its normalizing regimes. This panel, by contrast, seeks to highlight the unevenness of the colonial modern by way of shifting the focus from “irregular natives” to a counter-intuitive reading of an Englishness that was produced through the colonial circuit. The panel focuses on the writings of and from Anglo-India, especially as they emerged as a relay of exchange between England and India in the period surrounding the Mutiny. By examining the curious figure of the “competitionwallah”; the unexpected phenomenon of colonial “caste envy”; and the uncertainties surrounding the regulatory colonial discourse of illness and medicine as they made their way into the metropolitan narratives of detection and surveillance in the aftermath of the Mutiny, the papers mark the ways in which it was a highly irregular trajectory that constituted the colonial and metropolitan claims to Englishness and the “modern.” Such an accounting not only underlines the vexed production of these categories but also allows for a genealogical reading of the crystallizing distinctions between modern and non-modern, colony and metropole, distinctions which of course charted the dissemination of colonial modernity but whose contingencies the site of Anglo- India throws into relief in ways that also question its own investment and status in the imperial project.

“Looking for a Suitable Boy: Bureaucratic Modernity and the Competitionwallah”
Sukanya Banerjee, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

The Indian Civil Service (I.C.S), which formed the backbone of colonial administrative authority, often finds mention as a symbol of colonial exclusivity and dominance. It is possible, however, to view the I.C.S. through another lens, one that examines it as a site representing the vexed trajectory of a colonial modernity. The Civil Service Commission in England had decided in 1853 to recruit candidates through a rigorous competitive examination rather than the earlier system of patronage, which was deemed embarrassing in an age of liberal reform. The official reports, though, gesture to the crisis that the newly reformed Civil Service faced as a result: while it envisioned a meritocracy that comprised the brightest of candidates, it was also unable to move beyond entrenched notions of aristocratic privilege, class prejudice, and racial anxiety. It is against this backdrop that this paper studies the emergence of the Anglo-Indian figure of the “competitionwallah.” While “competitionwallah” referred to the new civilian recruited through the examination system, who was meant to be proof of a modernizing bureaucracy, the term quickly gained currency, both in India and England, as one that mocked the aspirations and failures of the new generation of civil servants. Studying the figure of the competitionwallah, as it was represented in official reports, correspondence from India, and Anglo-Indian fiction, the paper analyzes how it was through the gendered, class, and racial anxieties embodied in the highly curious figure of the “competitionwallah” that the bureaucratic apparatus of a colonial modernity sought to consolidate itself and mediate its conundrums.

“Empire and the Alimentary Canal: Filth, Pollution, and the Anglo-Indian Body”
Parama Roy, University of California, Davis

Panic over greased cartridges, rumours of food supplies contaminated with blood and bone dust, chapatis circulating mysteriously in North Indian villages, taunts launched by bazaar whores about the failed masculinity of Indian sepoys – these are some of the most prominent tropes of the event known as the Indian Mutiny of 1857. They have been glossed by many colonial commentators and historians (as well as by some postcolonial Indian ones) as symptoms of a deeply reactionary, feudal, and outmoded social order struggling against the doctrines of social equality and material progress embedded in the reformist impulses of the East India Company in mid-century. Most typically, these details have been read in terms of a clash of civilizations that finds its most expressive form in the institution of caste, the most striking and non-negotiable sign of a Hindu/Indian difference from that of the subcontinent’s colonial rulers. An examination of the texts that detail the Anglo-Indian experience of the Mutiny, though, suggests that such a schematic rendition might overlook certain shared idioms and tropes that bound Anglo-India and India in cognate experiences of appetites, aversions, and intimacy. What we have in the moment of Mutiny, I propose, is not so much the well-rehearsed face-off of caste and modernity as an encounter between caste anxiety and something that I will denominate as “caste envy.” This renders a new twist to the meanings of the hyphen that separates but also conjoins the “Anglo” and the “Indian” at the level of the phenomenological body and at the level of ritual and moral/cosmological ordering.

“Illness, Medicine, and the Therapeutic Empire: Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone”
Sandhya Shetty, University of New Hampshire

This paper will focus on Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) as a post-Mutiny literary response to the problem of imperial (self) possession. I argue that the novel articulates a certain medical or pathological understanding of this problem. The Moonstone is of course best known as a novel of detection. Scholars have demonstrated how the discourse of criminality tapped by detection assimilates the troubling realities of imperial violence and guilt to a notion of the ultimate beneficence of imperial law. My paper aims, however, to foreground the novel’s under read medical discourse in relation to the law and colonial ethnography, knowledges that have historically authorized Anglo-Indian empire. Precisely because the novel is too acutely aware of the nature of medicine as pharmakon, medicine (opium, mesmerism) and medicine men solve the case yet ultimately appear too unstable and unreliable as remedies or “tools of empire.” In fact, they tend to erase the founding binaries that structure empire by their association with the foreign, the magical, and the occult. If, as certain critics have argued, the tone of empire is first and foremost juridical, then Collins’s novel suggests we must re-inflect the post-Mutiny imperial project in India as therapeutic. What is perhaps most radical about this “therapeutic suggestion” however is its domestic or metropolitan address and drift. Medicine, in the novel, eludes strict taxonomical distinctions between science and magic, good and evil. In this event, to think of empire as/and medicine as its legitimating discourse is to render the former utterly delirious and indefensible. Although medicine does trump both law and ethnography in the narrative solution of the case, the text’s ambivalence about medicine as imperial justification or solution to the problem of empire remains.

Session 3
1:30 - 3:00 PM -- Friday, February 16

Screening Nostalgia, Picturing the Present: A Century of Cinephilia
Chair: Anupama Prabhala Kapse, University of California, Berkeley

Recent discussions of cinephilia have noted the danger that new technologies pose for older film cultures. Questioning this assumption, this panel foregrounds the ways in which new technologies have in general created more rather than less venues for film viewing. We foreground circuits of film experience and viewing that are particular to the Indian subcontinent, but in ways that go beyond paradigms of national culture, identity formation or globalization. Thus we attempt to highlight those contexts of reception that have emerged on the periphery of concepts of nation, genre, period, locale and medium.

Anupama Prabhala Kapse focuses on a series of rare Indian silent films from the 1920s and 30s. She analyzes films that picture a mobile, pleasurable but fraught everyday world that in films that travel beyond the ‘realistic’ space of both colony and nation to create a visually animated media-sphere as opposed to a belle-lettrist public sphere. Dale Hudson probes a futuristic, manic cinematic pleasure as experienced by young Indians who reinvent themselves as John and Jane (2005) at local call centers in Ashim Ahluwalia’s film. Monika Mehta’s paper shows how Raj Kapoor’s nineteen sixties melodrama Sangam/Confluence (1964) is retrieved, enacted and mourned within the fraught contemporary nation-space of Israel. In sum, this panel examines how cinema going within and outside a national context enhances the space for viewing and imagining a present as much as it manifestly re-imagines and memorializes the past.

"After Phalke, Before Sant Tukaram: Imagining a Present for the Silent Era"
Anupama Prabhala Kapse, University of California, Berkeley

Early Indian cinema has almost always been viewed through a mythic lens that situates it within a historical past. Invariably this creates modes of nostalgia that ensue from a fixed historical perspective. A non-linear critical approach would help to illuminate obscure periods of early Indian cinema. How did this cinema capture the present in its time? What new formal, technological and intellectual means did it have at its disposal?

This paper examines a wide range of silent films to observe the methods they used to display and narrativize the present: Shiraz (1925) and Light of Asia (1926) proceed on the basis of an older notion of a timeless mystic orient; Whirlwind Vintalio (1927) on the other hand is a film that deploys cinematic thrills and stunts to itemize dynamic action for a new audience. Similarly Jamai Babu (1931) takes a comic look at the bewildering chaos of the modern city. Finally, Ghulami Nu Patan (1931) is a gritty and starkly realistic film that thinly disguises its anticolonial thrust. Using extant clips and ancillary publicity material, the paper will show how these films combined melodrama, cinephilia and a flourishing star system to produce an indigenous industry with its own line of sophisticated genre films.

"Documenting Dream and Dystopia: Cinephilia, Consumerism, and Call Centers"
Dale Hudson, Amherst College

If cinephilia in postwar France described an excessive love of cinema, then cinephilia in “the new India” describes more than nostalgia for flickering celluloid in a darkened cinémathèque. Indian cinephilia (or “filmi” culture) has always included an excessive love of stars, song, dance, comedy, melodrama—an excessive love of excess itself. Favorite song-and-dances are imitated at weddings and other gatherings. Cinephilia enables a sense of belonging, whether to nation through cultural bond or to trans-nation through consumerist citizenship.

In this paper, I examine transnational “American dreams,” fueled by “Bollyworld” as much as by Hollywood, as an extension of cinephilia. Specifically, I suggest that Ashim Ahluwalia’s John and Jane (2005) documents identity formations among young, university-educated, multilingual Indians in relation to the “America” that indirectly employs them and where they virtually work as customer service operators (CSOs). For many Indians, the American dream is produced by Hollywood and Bollywood films, advertising, cable television, visiting and returning immigrants. Neo-liberal economic policies permit young Indians, North Americans, and Europeans to pursue the American dream in Mumbai, Bangalore, and New Delhi as they are rapidly being transformed into “global cities.” Just as these cites are being transformed, so too are Indians who work in the outsourcing market. CSOs must “neutralize” their accents, work at night, perform affective labor of telesales etiquette, and even adopt new names. Call centers become “brave new worlds” that are both appealing and frightening.

"Kikar Ha-Halomot/Desperado Square’s Longing for Sangam/Confluence"
Monika Mehta, SUNY Binghamton

For the most part, studies of globalization and media presume that globalization is a phenomenon limited exclusively to the expansion of Hollywood. In an effort to re-orient this discussion and to interrogate the theoretical grounds through which we comprehend globalization itself, I examine Benny Toraty’s Kikar Ha-Halomot/Desperado Square (2001). A remake and provocative elaboration of Raj Kapoor’s extremely successful Hindi film, Sangam/Confluence (1964), Kikar Ha-Halomot skillfully deploys the concept of cinephilia to represent the national and the transnational. Through a reading of Kikar Ha-Halomot, I examine an alternative history of cinephilia , namely, Israeli audiences’ love of Hindi films. In Kikar Ha-Halomot cinephilia cites acts of memory, as the characters nostalgically recall an old neighborhood theatre and a lost sense of community through Hindi films. This longing gestures to a transnational relation and becomes a strategic device for engaging with pressing present concerns such as ethnicity, class, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and national culture.

Producing the Public: State and Public Space in Postcolonial South Asia
Chair: Genevieve Lakier, Harvard University

Though Jürgen Habermas imagined the modern public sphere as distinct from both state and society, his ideal model did not prevail, either in Western Europe or elsewhere in the world. Indeed, in South Asia, the emergence of the modern public sphere was entangled with first the colonial project of civilization, and later the postcolonial project of development. Partha Chatterjee has recently argued that for this reason the public sphere in South Asia is not constituted exclusively through the orderly practices of civil society but instead by an energetic “political society” fixated on democracy rather than modernity. Public spaces in South Asia can be seen therefore as crucial sites in which the relationship between civil and political society and the state is today negotiated and contested. This panel examines the political significance of the public as a set of spaces as well as, and instead of, an ideal-typical sphere. The papers explore the nature of South Asian publics, asking such questions as: How does the state use particular public sites in its performances of power? How do people respond to the state’s policing of the practices and uses of public space? If, as some argue, the public/private dichotomy is displaced or transformed in postcolonial societies, what does this mean for our understanding of postcolonial publics? Through ethnographic explorations of public practices in Nepal, Maharashtra, and Andhra Pradesh, the panelists aim to critically engage the ongoing debates on South Asian publics.

“The city as symbol, the city as site: Kathmandu in the context of the Maoist insurgency”
Genevieve Lakier, Harvard University

This paper examines the symbolic importance of Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital city, to the production, and defiance, of political power in Nepal. Specifically, it examines efforts by Nepal’s government to rationalize urban public space, and the circulation of bodies and commodities through it, in the context of the rapidly intensifying Maoist civil war. Trivial as the attempts by the administration in 2001- 2002 to impose helmet laws on motorbikes and to regulate the organization of traffic may appear to have been at a time of endemic political violence and instability, this paper argues that they in fact were a central means by which the government defended, its legitimacy and power. Attempts to produce an orderly Kathmandu therefore reveal, I argue, not only the symbolic potency of the capital city as a theatre of state power, but also the heterogeneity and theatricality of governmentalist authority itself. Indeed, it was precisely because of the importance of Kathmandu to the government’s larger political legitimacy that even symbolic challenges to its everyday spatial order became potent means of carrying on the revolutionary struggle by other means than that of war.

“Crowds on the Platform: Public Space/State Space in Indian Railway Stations”
Lisa Mitchell, University of Pennsylvania

ndian railway stations have been both social and political gathering places--places for the exchange, dissemination, and discussion of news, and crucial locations for nationalist and anti-government mobilization and political protest, and as such, important sites for the formation of modern publics. Yet the importance of stations within networks of both transportation and communication carries with it a corresponding history of attempts to restrict and regulate access and to manage representations of the desires and opinions of the crowds who form within, particularly at times of crisis and uncertainty. Although debates over defensive construction and fortification of railway stations emerged during the first decade of the railway’s presence in India, immediately following the widespread revolts of 1857, the idea of platform tickets to restrict entrance was not introduced until 1883. This paper examines the implementation of platform tickets, and, using petitions, newspaper reports, and editorials from the late nineteenth century, examines representations of popular opposition to this new policy. The paper explores both state anxieties over the crowds that form within Indian railway stations, as well as attempts to control the meanings and representations of these same crowds by community and political leaders.

“Book Dances and Bus Depots at a Marathi Gathering”
Clare Talwalker, University of California, Berkeley

This paper engages the debates surrounding the concept of an Indian public through a focus on a particular site: the annual Marathi literature gathering, or Marathi Sahitya Sammelan. The first sammelan was held in 1878 and in recent years this annual gathering has attracted over a 100,000 participants. On the one hand, the sammelan satisfies many criterion of a modern public, as variously theorized by Jürgen Habermas and his legatees: the participants are strangers and constitute an imagined community; their participation invariably parallels their ongoing immersion in a circulating discourse on Marathiness and Marathi writing; and, the event is in principle open (for a small fee). On the other hand, the sammelan can also be viewed as a distinctively Indian/Marathi public – a distinctness that can be seen usefully as derived from the perceived place of Maharashtrians in India’s patchy capitalist transformations. Drawing on one key South Asianist revision of public sphere theory, this paper explores how the inside/outside dichotomy (alongside the public/private dichotomy) animates the sammelan and informs people’s experience of it.

Panel Session 4
3:15 - 4:45 PM -- Friday, February 16

Marriage, Divorce, and Rape: Personal Law and Claims to Authority in India and Beyond
Chair: Prachi Deshpande, Assistant Professor of History, UC Berkeley

Contestations over the question of what body of law should be invoked, as well as interpretations of agreed-on laws, can be a site for claiming, and thus constituting, the authority or boundaries of specific elites. In that sense, all three papers in this panel engage what could be called crises of authority over issues engaging intimate matters of everyday life, specifically marriage, divorce, and violent incest. Claimants include branches of the state itself, nationalists, spokesmen for “communities,” Islamic scholars, lay activists speaking for transnational human rights, and others. Debates about law are thus shown to have significant opportunities and implications for constituting a range of national/sociological boundaries. The three papers on this panel represent debates in three successive periods: one at the turn of the 20th century high point of empire; one in the final decade of colonial rule in British India; and, finally, one in the early 21st century in the Republic of India. Who, under what law, ultimately, decides the fate of the second wife of an Indian migrant at the turn of the 20th century seeking admission to South Africa; a married woman seeking to terminate a marriage under Anglo-Muhammadadan law at the end of the colonial period; or a village woman in the Upper Doab in 2005 alleging rape by her father-in-law?

“Indian Customary Marriage in the Empire: A South African Case”
Riyad Koya, Department of History, UC Berkeley

In February of 2006, the Supreme Court of India issued a judgment that required the registration of all marriages with the state. The ruling brings into relief the paradox that the Indian state has lacked certain administrative and legal means for the equalization its distinctive religious communities and for intervention into the intimate sphere of the family. The contemporary debate on the status of marriage has antecedents in debates concerning the status of Indian indentured laborers in the 19th and early 20th century. Colonial governments were confronted early on with the problem of defining Indian marriage for purposes of adjudicating disputes with respect to inheritance, parentage, and so-called crimes of passion, including spousal abuse and wife murder. How might the personal law of the migrants be used to recognize and define marriage? As Indian populations expanded in various parts of the Empire, merchants also migrated abroad to conduct trade with ex-indentured communities. The paper focuses upon an effort by the newly formed Union of South Africa to obstruct such “free” Indian immigration by refusing to recognize the “plural wives” of migrants. Ostensibly an attempt to regulate Hindu and Muslim polygamy, the South African state also attained, through negotiated settlement of passive resistance with Gandhi, a mechanism for the civil registration of Indian marriages. The paper explores the broader significance of this settlement for the durability and portability of the personal law of Indian migrants in the British Empire.

“Maintaining Scholarly Authority While Redefining Women’s Right to Divorce: India, 1931”
Fareeha Khan, Department of Near Eastern Studies, University of Michigan

In 1931, Ashraf ‘Ali Thanawi (the renowned Indian Hanafi scholar and Sufi of the Deoband school) composed an important fatwa entitled “A Successful Legal Device for the Helpless Wife”, which was essentially a treatise on the need to reform divorce laws. Since Indian Muslim women had no religiously sanctioned option for divorce, their only alternative was to renounce Islam, a step which would automatically nullify their Islamic marital contract. Thanawi decided to confront this issue head on, so that “a more direct route of salvation” could be provided for women who become so “desperate and distraught” that they are forced to leave Islam in order to
escape their marriages. While assisting oppressed women was a primary concern, an equally pressing need informed the entire modus operandi: that of maintaining the legal authority of the traditional fuqaha. This was not a text that was meant to be accessible to the masses. It was not meant to be a rallying call for women in hard-pressed situations. Instead, the Hila was primarily a call to internal dialogue within scholarly circles. The fact that the Hila was meant for legal specialists is clear due to the complexity of the language and legal jargon used. Limiting the pool of interpretive resources to within the four madhhabs is yet another device used to make sure authority does not leave the hands of traditional jurists. While modernists had already begun radically redefining Islamic legal norms to defend women’s rights, Thanawi would make sure to avoid their methodological weakness by maintaining legal continuity, and therefore interpretive authority.

“Imrana: Rape, Law, and Islam in India”
Barbara Metcalf, University of Michigan

In 2005 a Muslim village woman, Imrana, alleged that she had been raped by her father-in-law, an event that unleashed national and even international controversy. Imrana sought justice in a criminal court and did not take into account either Islamic or community judgments about her proper course of action. The formal system of Muslim Personal Law played no role in this episode. Nonetheless, the public debate that ensued engaged both Islamic community norms and the continuance of MPL, which, in India, continues to be a site for debates that ultimately are about identity. Salman Rushdie used the Imrana episode in a piece in the New York Times to denounce the purported rigidity and medievalism of “Islamic law,” and, not surprisingly, a similar set of arguments were articulated (as they had been before in the well known Shah Banu case of 1986) on the part of Hindu nationalists. More interesting, however, was the debate among Muslims, men and women, Islamic scholars and others, adducing both traditionalist approaches as well as transnational human rights norms in order to make arguments about the correct moral action in this case. Conventionally, observers have assumed that the embattled Muslim community in India clings to a rigid version of MPL as a key symbol of identity, but this debate showed the multiple voices now active in debate as well as the deployment of approaches from within the historic tradition for making Islamically-based arguments

5:00 PM - Reception in the Great Hall

6:30 PM - Keynote Lecture by Sanjay Subrahmanyam
Sanjay Subrahmanyam is the Navin and Pratima Doshi Chair in Indian History at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Saturday

Panel Session 1
9:00 - 10:30 AM - Saturday, February 17

Comparatively Speaking: On the Referentiality of South Asia (CANCELLED)
Chair: Anjali Arondekar

This panel reads the sign of "South Asia" against the shifting referentialities of geopolitical encounters and entanglements. Each panelist traces the burden and/or "gift" of hegemonic referential paradigms in at least one of three areas: legal reform, popular culture and film, to explore the following questions: What might we learn by juxtaposing area studies and cultural studies - academic domains that seem segregated but whose genealogies and continued emergence are all closely tied to the sedimentation of what we read and articulate as "South Asia"? How do objects of area studies scholarship fade, recede, sharpen or deepen when considered from the perspective of other disciplinary formations such as literary studies, sexuality studies, or media studies?

"Referential Loops and Area Studies"
Bishnupriya Ghosh, English, University of California, Santa Cruz

Where area studies commands a situated cultural analysis, the study of modern South Asian public culture -- an especially publicly contested cultural acts -- demands other frames of reference. These frames might be considered "comparative" but only in a substatially recalibrated sense: they involve a kind of "traveling referentiality" increasingly critical to popular cultural, literary or media studies today. I investigate contemporary icons attached to the sign of "South Asia" that often are sites of struggle over becoming public, becoming modern. Considering their iconicity from the perspectives of South Asia studies imparts a genealogical depth and nuanced reading of their social and material lives; yet the full purchase of these can be grasped only when we look at how the iconic sign is looped back (in translated and transmuted form) into South Asian localities through global circuitry. This referentialisty where one takes into account different local and translocal publics that make "icons" -- a "traveling referentiality" -- complements and disturbs the situated-ness of the area studies model. Taking the media spectacle of Mother Teresa's funeral as my primary example, where "making Mother Teresa" for global audiences functioned as an advertisement for Kolkata's face-lift as a city "opened" to foreign investment, I argue that the referential looping of Mother Theresa through the Vatican (positioned as a regressive state in the government-sponsored funeral discourse) is essential to understanding her local iconicity. My paper will analyze the friction of "situated" and "traveling" referentialities as it impacts the disciplinary boundaries of South Asia Studies.

"Comparatively Queer: In the Case of Sex"
Anjali Arondekar, Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz

Invocations of time and space are central to legal theorizations of homosexuality in India. From colonial sodomy statutes, to post-colonial anti-sodomy legal reform, homosexuality is recuperated through its attachments to a temporal elsewhere. It is and is not of the "East"; it is and is not of the "West", a legal spectre that resides ambivalently in time and space. In this paper, I examine the critical labor of temporality and spatiality ("in whose time and space?") within legal theorizations of homosexuality, and the genealogical pecularities that such turns bring. Some of the questions I will raise are: If homosexuality is scripted as paradoxically familiar and unfamiliar, relational and remote, what are the challenges for legal codification? What significance does the overwhelming legal focus on native pederasty during the nineteenth century have for the representations and struggles of contemporary legal reform?

"Bollywood" and that Hoary Question of Influence
Bhaskar Sarkar, Film and Media Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara

This paper explores the locational and referential problematic of South Asia by focusing on the intersection of area studies and film studies. The latter, with its own set of constitutive categories and concerns (auteur, genre, technology, star, film movement), exists in uneasy, if potentially productive, friction with the South Asia studies paradigm. This tension arises in a large part from the paradoxical historicity of the formation of distribution and exhibition, and its cosmopolitan pretenses, has always been a global medium. On the other hand, the national remains a central and persistent category of film studies: the national designation (e.g., Japanese Cinema) marks a body of films out in an international circuit as having a particular national origin, and also indexes the modes in terms of which national characteristics are enunciated in these films (language, gesture and morphology, collective myths, language, spatial settings, etc.) If we focus on the South Asia behemoth "Bollywood Cinema," then from an area studies perspective, two main concerns emerge: the underlying conflation of South Asia and India, and the problematic of an Indian national culture. The regional and national hegemony of "Bollywood" is not natural: it is a hard-earned cultural hegemony established by engaging differentiated publics through industrial practices and endless representational negotiations. At a global register, Bombay cinema's derivativeness remains a vexing question. It is this question of the "influence" of Hollywood-encapsulated in the oddly celebratory moniker "Bollywood" -- and other cultural formations that I interrogate here.

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Religious Experience in Saiva Literature
Chair: Christopher Wallis, Graduate Student, UC Berkeley Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies

Religious experience in early and medieval Saivism is a subject that has received far too little scholarly attention. This is partially due to the technical nature of much Saiva literature, and partially to the dearth of scholars working with the largely unedited manuscript corpus. This panel will present the fruits of some preliminary forays into this forest of primary material. Mr. Slouber has critically edited a section of an important and early Saiva text and will present his findings on the provocative deity Khadgaravana. Mr. Wallis will delve into the technical meaning of the term samavesa and its transformation of meaning from simple "possession" to an immersion of the practitioner's awareness into non-dual Siva consciousness. Ms. Chiarucci will talk about references to early Saivism in the Sattasai (ca. 2nd-4th centuries).

“The Cult of Khadgaravana: Origin, Development, and Dissemination”
Michael Slouber, Graduate Student, UC Berkeley Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies

The figure of Khadgaravana has been all but forgotten in modern Hinduism. He represents a provocative fusion of the epic Ravana with Bhairava, and according to the textual evidence, was widely invoked to cure possession. On account of the liminal nature of both archetypes, Khadgaravana's cult must have been somewhat secretive. But we know that it once spanned the subcontinent and beyond, from Kerala to Nepal, Kashmir to Bali. Michael Slouber will discuss his new critical edition of the Khadgaravana section of the Kriyakalagunottara, as well as several other unpublished Nepalese manuscripts treating Khadgaravana's cult. In doing so, he will explore the question of the development of this unique figure and the dissemination of his cult.

“Samavesa: The Hermeneutics of a Semantic Shift from Possession to Immersion”
Christopher Wallis, Graduate Student, UC Berkeley Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies

The case of samavesa, a key term of the theological discourse of Tantric Shaivism, provides a good example of hermeneutical strategies used by educated exegetes to both legitimate problematic terms and reconfigure those terms in a new religious context where they may serve new agendas. In early Tantric (Sakta) texts, samavesa clearly means 'possession', that is, the entry into one's body of yoginis and other sorts of demigoddesses. Such possession is indicated by a variety of physiological and psychological 'symptoms' that are thought to demonstrate its reality. In the later 'high' Tantra of the Kashmiri exegetes, samavesa is used to refer to a variety of religious experiences, with the same symptoms being taken to indicate the immersion of the practitioner's awareness into nondual consciousness, that is to say, the 'entry' into his real Self through the suppression of false identification with the contingent and impermanent levels of his being. This sort of semantic shift is a typical move on the part of the exegetes in the process of the sanitization and aestheticization of early transgressive popular or magical forms of Tantra into a refined and interiorized spiritual practice. This kind of a diachronic look at the development of the cluster of concepts expressed through a technical term, it will be argued, allows the historian of religions as well as the textualist/philologist insight into the organic longitudinal processes of religious and linguistic change.

“Evidence for Satavahana Religion in the Sattasai”
Berg Chiarucci, Graduate Student, UC Berkeley Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies

The Sattasai, a collection of prakrit poems composed between the 2nd and 4th centuries CE, takes for granted a certain religious background. The poems refer to dharmikas, abandoned temples, temple renovations, goddess temples, a kapaliki and more. Yet to what extent can these poems inform those who are looking for religious evidence of the Satavahanas, the dynasty with whom these poems are associated? Tracing some of these terms over time shows the extent to which they are reinvented and newly interpreted.

Discussant: Michael Slouber, Graduate Student, UC Berkeley Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies

Panel Session 2
10:45 AM - 12:15 PM -- Saturday, February 17

Community Folk Performances as Sites of Dialogue and Social Change in India (CANCELLED)
Chair: Devendra Sharma, California State University, Fresno

This panel discusses the contributions of indigenous performances traditions in India as participatory routes to create community dialogue. The panel highlights the need to explore more the role of performance traditions such as Kayaka Bhakti, Rasiya, and Nautanki in social change processes. The panel participants focus on how these performance genres have fought oppressive social traditions such as caste system, provided dignity to labor in India and helped community members to create social cohesion by connecting to their cultural roots. This panel also examines how folk performance traditions are highly useful today as communication channels and how they can facilitate the entry of new information from the outside world into a rural community while respecting and, more importantly, involving the local communication wisdom. The panel brings performance scholars from Indian and American universities. Panel presenters will not only discuss their scholarship on performance genres but will also demonstrate these genres by performing representative pieces.

“Performing Kayaka Bhakti: Opening Doors for Social Change”
Alka Tyagi, Department of English, Dayal Singh College, Delhi University, Delhi, India

This paper focuses on the Bhakti performances of saints in medieval India who used their station in the society and the means of their livelihood as an allegory for the spiritual and social evolution. The paper examines how Bhakti performances that spread throughout the south Asian subcontinent were movements of reformation at many levels. At the social level, bhakti voices resounded against the caste system. Bhakti performances, for the first time, opened the doors of salvation or moksha to the so-called lower castes. On the political front, philosophy of bhakti defied the feudal economic base that apotheosized the feudal lord or the king as God and divided the society into categories of the naturally privileged and naturally deprived. Specifically, this paper will discuss the contributions of bhakti saints poets who were part of the movements based on the twin concepts of Kayaka and Dasoha. Kayaka is a philosophy that confers dignity and divinity on any kind of physical labour used for honest means of sustenance in the world. The word Dasoha denotes the idea of sharing as well as service. It is this idea of sharing that connects the community members together despite of their differences of caste, class and gender.

“Performing Rasiyas for Community Connection”
Indu Sharma, School of Telecommunications, Ohio University

This presentation highlights the role of Rasiyas to create community connection and cohesion in the community on various levels. Rasiya is a popular folk song genre of northern India. The presentation discusses how Rasiya performers often use their influence to end social animosities in a public space and how Rasiya performances have been used on a wide scale to raise money for socially ameliorative projects such as constructing schools and shelters for the poor. Rasiya performances demand a lot of participation from its audience. Audience members may influence what Rasiyas will be performed, on the spot, at the time of performance. Audiences not only watch the performance but also engage in various other social activities such as community feasts, meeting relatives and friends, discussing their problems and participating in local fairs. Some people also use this occasion to picnic with family and friends. Thus, Rasiya as a performance tradition supports and enhances the feeling of community among its audiences. Finally, the presentation talks about how Rasiyas are used by its audiences as a tool to connect with their cultural roots. Rasiya, as a folk form genre, is perceived by rural audiences as an important part of their cultural heritage. This presentation will involve actual performance of excerpts of some popular Rasiya numbers.

“Using Nautanki Performances to give Health Messages in Uttar Pradesh, India”
Devendra Sharma, California State University-Fresno

This presentation argues that folk performance events are critical sites of interpersonal and group communication that can be effectively used for development in rural and semi-rural areas in collective cultures such as India. I analyze the communication process that takes place during a folk performance from a theoretical perspective by drawing upon the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, Dwight Conquergood, and Safdar Hashmi, among others. I then exemplify the effectiveness of folk performances to communicate health messages by discussing the folk media campaign that is going on currently in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh to give messages about Family Planning (FP), Reproductive and Child Health (RCH), and HIV- AIDS. Nautanki is a popular folk operatic tradition of Uttar Pradesh. This campaign has been designed by Brij Lok Madhuri (BLM), a local Non Government Organization (NGO) for State Innovation in Family Planning services Project Agency (SIFPSA), Uttar Pradesh with technical assistance from Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Communication Programs (JHU/CCP). Brij Lok Madhuri is using Nautanki, an immensely popular folk theatrical form of Northern India, and other folk forms to give messages on the abovementioned issues. The campaign is supported by Government of India, and United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The author of this presentation has been intimately involved with the training and implementation of the project working closely with the folk experts of Brij Lok Madhuri.

Encountering the State in South Asia: Interdisciplinary and transnational approaches
Chair: Ulka Anjaria, Modern Thought and Literature, Stanford University

The nature of individuals’ everyday encounters with the state in South Asia precludes theoretical approaches that take for granted an abstract government along the liberal, European model. Varied systems of meanings and diverse histories inform the everyday functioning of the state and the ways it asserts its power, just as people bring to their encounters with the state subjectivities that far exceed that of the abstract, rights-bearing individual.

The diverse systems of meaning that inform the functioning of the state in South Asia and individuals’ encounters with it is the starting point for this interdisciplinary and transnational panel. The three papers in this panel share a methodology that 1) privileges the meaning of the state at various points in its postcolonial history and, 2) approaches the state through individuals’ everyday encounters with it, rather than through its formal institutions. In this respect, the first two papers use various examples gleaned from intensive, on-site ethnography to show how the complexity of the state cannot be reduced to a normative citizen-state binary in the context of changes identified as ‘neoliberal’ in contemporary India and Pakistan, respectively. The final paper considers the changing meaning of the state in India since Independence, tracing the impact of failed developmental ideals on the logic of literary representation. Larger, methodological goals of this panel include discussion of the complementary possibilities of different disciplinary approaches to the state, and the development of a comparative, transnational, model for studying the state in South Asia.

“'Married to the BMC': Living with the state in Mumbai, India”
Jonathan Anjaria, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Cruz

Much recent scholarship on Indian cities has assumed that the workings of the municipal government can best be understood as combining strategies of surveillance with a devolution of power to private entities. However, attention to the everyday practices of the municipality in Mumbai (the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation [BMC]) problematizes this view. For instance, the ways in which urban development projects, studies and policies are discussed, planned, debated and finally implemented (or, as is often the case, ignored)—which often end up supporting a wide range of interests other than that of capital—defy easy characterizations of the Mumbai local government as ‘neoliberal.’ Likewise, the BMC’s practices of urban planning and regulation, such as the deliberate municipal strategy of not mapping large parts of the city, contravene commonly accepted understandings of the Indian state as one that exerts power through practices of surveillance and regulation.

This paper draws from long-term field research in Mumbai with street vendors, street vendor union leaders, architects, citizens’ groups and BMC officials, to complicate conventional understandings of the state in Mumbai. For instance, the centrality of the BMC in hawkers’ everyday lives—to the extent that one man joked he was ‘married to the BMC’—points to the importance of mundane, even domestic, encounters in the workings of the state. Through accounts of street vendors’ varied interactions with the BMC—including daily casual conversations with officials and long-term surveillance of BMC ‘godowns’ (warehouses) to spot corruption—as well as of debates among street vendor activists, upper class residents’ association leaders and an anthropologist in the BMC headquarters, this paper highlights the varied manifestations of the ‘state’ in Mumbai, contradicting the assumption that the state has a unified strategy, perspective and aims. These ethnographic moments complicate the idea of a prefigured state whose coherent ideology, governing strategy and meaning can be read off its outward structure, and instead point towards a more dynamic understanding of the working of the state in contemporary Mumbai.

“The Governance Game and the Elusive Citizen in NWFP, Pakistan”
Zeb Rifaqat, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Cruz

The current state in Pakistan is attempting to improve its governance structures and practices by implementing radical transformations through the Local Government Ordinance, instituted in 2001. By attempting to replace the administrative structure of governance inherited from the British, this policy aims to change state-citizen relations, which despite half a century of independence have retained their colonial structure. Studying this moment of transformations in the southern belt of the North Western Frontier Province (N.W.F.P), this paper shows that the simplistic binary of state versus citizen does not capture the complexity of governance practices as they are mobilized in their everyday encounters. The everyday domain of governance is constituted by a diverse set of actors along with the state and the citizens, such as NGOs, multi- and bilateral donor organizations, religious and secular political parties, and Jirga. This paper, based on extensive fieldwork among the lowest rungs of the state in N.W.F.P., shows how the realm of governance, far from constituted only by the state and the citizens, is in fact characterized by the mobilization of multiple pre-colonial, colonial, and postcolonial discourses that appear in its various encounters.

“'Strange Inversions': Satire and the postcolonial Indian state”
Ulka Anjaria, Modern Thought and Literature, Stanford University

As a technique of representation developed in nineteenth-century Europe, literary realism depended to a significant extent on assumptions about the ontological makeup of the state and its relationship to those whom it, for its part, claimed to represent. Just as the liberal state became the paradigm along which India’s own anti-colonial nationalism would realize itself, a century later, so literary realism played a role in ideological consolidation of the statist, nationalist ideal in the decades leading up to Independence. But what became of literary realism once the sovereign state was actualized and began to fall short of its expectations? What happened when the state lost its assumed ontology and began to be characterized more for the perverse logic of its functioning than for the cold logic of its rule?

This paper argues that literary realism underwent a ‘strange inversion’ into satire in the postcolonial years as the state was revealed for its intrinsic corruption and the increasingly perverse logic of its experience on the ground by India’s new citizens. Through a reading of two satirical novels that span the postcolonial era, Shrilal Shukla’s Hindi novel Raag Darbari (1968) and Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English novel English, August (1988), I will argue that in each case a tradition of satirical writing is mobilized to make a biting critique not only of the failings of the postcolonial state in their respective eras, but of the deep corruption of the modern ideals that had driven India’s nationalist movement. This is reflected in the violence wrought on the novels’ very form, and witnessed in the inversions of the descriptive and representative logic of realism as their characters struggle to make their way through a corrupted political landscape. In this way, both novels address the abstract disillusionment with which the postcolonial state makes itself felt in a post-idealist world.

Panel Session 3
1:30 - 3:00 PM - Saturday, February 17

Hyderabad Between Empires
Chair: Kavita Datla, Assistant Professor, Dept. of History, Mount Holvoke College

As a successor state to the Mughal empire or the premier princely state of the British Raj, Asaf Jahi Hyderabad is key to any understanding of the politics of eighteenth and nineteenth century South Asia. Taken together, the papers in this panel will argue that Hyderabad’s past can shed light on the major themes of modern South Asian history, namely the constitution of post-Mughal successor states in the eighteenth century; political relationships between the British and Indian rulers that consituted the glue of the British Raj; and the gendered, racial, and imperial imperatives framing colonial Indian society.

In his paper on the foundational decades of Hyderabad, Munis Faruqui attends to the politics of the Mughal imperial court, as well as the difficulties and challenges faced by a newly emergent state in order to re-examine our current narratives of political fragmentation in the eighteenth century. Over a hundred years later, the Asaf Jahis were negotiating with a different paramount power. Kavita Datla explores the nature of British intervention in Hyderabad politics through the education they provided for Hyderabad’s ruler. Also working from 19th century archives, Benjamin Cohen examines the structures at play in Hyderabad society and in colonial Indian society at large; his focus is on a scandalous trial that brought the relationship between a Hyderabadi noble and his English wife in to the public eye. By focusing on Hyderabad state and society, these papers hope to bring new insights to our understanding of India and its transformation under two great empires, the Mughals and the British.

“Power, Patronage and Violence: State Building on the Deccan Fronter, 1724-1748”
Munis Faruqui, Assistant Professor, Dept. of South and Southeast Asian Studies, UC Berkeley.

Nizam-ul-Mulk (d. 1748), one-time Mughal nobleman and founder of the princely state of Hyderabad, had a large impact on the politics of 18th Century India. This is attested by the rich historiography on the man and the state he helped found over the past couple of centuries. Unfortunately, much of the scholarship has been confined to a narrow band of questions having to do with: the Nizam’s role in the post-1707 destruction of the Mughal Empire, Hyderabad’s Islamic character, and Hyderabad’s external relations with the Marathas and the British. This has left large areas of potential scholarship mostly unexamined. This paper will seek to address some of these lacunae. Thus, how can an understanding of political dynamics during Emperor Aurangzeb’s reign help us make sense of the Nizam’s decision to abandon the imperial system in the 1720s? Was the Nizam’s resolve to set himself up in Hyderabad in 1724 a choice that was readily or reluctantly engaged? How is the Nizam’s story different from that of founders of other post-Mughal “successor” states? What sorts of challenges did the new state of Hyderabad face? How did it overcome them? How did it go about creating structures of rule that favored its political and economic objectives? Answering some of these questions will be a significant part of this paper’s brief. Ultimately, however, even as this paper intends to force a re-evaluation of the Nizam and early Hyderabadi history, it seeks to complicate our understanding of larger 18th Century Indian history.

“Teaching Native Sovereigns: The Education of Nizam Mahboob Ali Khan”
Kavita Datla, Assistant Professor, Dept. of History, Mount Holvoke College

With the death of Nizam in February of 1869, and the succession to the masnad of the infant Mir Mahboob Ali Khan, the British for the first time asserted their desire to have a hand in the education of the leader of their premier Indian princely state, Hyderabad. This paper investigates the program of education instituted by the British for the young Hyderabad prince. It argues that what was at stake in the schooling of the Nizam were not just the academic subjects which he was taught, but also his daily behaviors, how he spent his time, money, and energy. The superintendent of this education made decisions about where the Nizam would live, what kind of access he would have to the harem, and who would surround the young prince. All of these matters had to be reconciled with the British attempt to maintain a precarious balance between assuring that the Nizam became a modern, and liberal ruler, while at the same time he remained a traditional Muslim sovereign – what they imagined to be the twin sources of his political legitimacy. Ultimately, this paper argues that during the course of negotiations within and between the Foreign Department, the Residency at Hyderabad, and noblemen at the native court over the details of the Nizam’s education, the authority of the Nizam, the power of this Deccan sovereign, was itself fundamentally refigured.

“Scandal and Nineteenth Century India”
Benjamin Cohen, Assistant Professor, Dept. of History, University of Utah

In the late nineteenth century, a sex scandal shook Hyderabad city and was the talk of much of India. The scandal involved a high-ranking Muslim noble within the Nizam's administration and his English wife. Beginning with a libelous pamphlet, shifting to a lengthy court case, the scandal dramatically concluded with the noble's dismissal from the Nizam's service and exile from the state. The entire event subsequently disappeared from narratives of Hyderabad's history. This paper will explore the sequence of events that comprised the scandal, and then in a second part, shift to an exploration of "scandal" itself in India. Using the lens of "event" or "incident" analysis, the paper will examine the scandal as an event that ruptured the flow of everyday life. In doing so, the event exposed numerous structures at play both within Hyderabad, and more broadly within the Raj. The scandal revealed issues of race, questioned gender identities, exposed class rifts, and revealed deep colonial and imperial motives at play within India's largest princely state.

Discussant: David Gilmartin, Professor, Dept. of History, North Carolina State University

National Economies, Transnationalism, and the New Logics of Capital
Chair: Thomas Asher, University of Chicago

Studies of neoliberalism presume that this new economic form betokens an economic, cultural, and political logic that produces subjects, social and cultural forms that replicate the logic of the market. Our panel investigates this presumption in a variety of ways by addressing South Asians caught up in periods of economic liberalization. Rather than examining abstract economic principles, this panel makes specific policies, workers, social and religious practices its object of study. As a result, it attempts to do more than encapsulate a single governmental rationality that has emerged in the past decade. Instead, the panel examines efforts by social actors to transform the economic logic of which they are a part even as each paper suggests that neoliberalism structures social life in continuously surprising and often dire ways.

"The Living Wage, the Minimum Wage, and the Displacement of Politics in Twentieth-Century Bombay"
Thomas Asher, University of Chicago

My paper will examine perverse and unintended consequences of the minimum wage laws that were born out of colonial debates and adopted by the Nehruvian government. I will suggest that these laws relate to efforts to stem the rising tide of internationalism and that the national economy envisioned by Nehru was fundamentally conservative in nature. Along the way, I develop an approach to Indian political history informed by Hannah Arendt and examine rarely noticed colonial policies that were intended to blunt the development of an active political space in India that was later taken up by the postcolonial government of Congress. I also look at another possible future suggested by an abandoned series of debates surrounding the idea of adopting a living wage in the Bombay City cotton mills that might have permitted a more robust political future for industrial India.

"Flexible Belonging: Social Services and Community Ideology in Neo-liberal Delhi"
Omar Kutty, University of Chicago

In Delhi, middle class neighborhood associations are playing an increasingly important role in the administration of local sanitation. In the process, they are profoundly changing the nature of labor relationships. As these groups attempt to implement a “hire and fire culture,” they are also disciplining local sanitary workers to a new, rationalized norm of conduct. Given their emphasis on rationalization, the individual subject figures very differently in their rendering of neoliberalism than in that of its primary ideologues and architects. Instead of understanding the individual as a genius innovator who flourishes in the absence of rules and regulations, these associations are interested in neoliberalism precisely because of its capacity to regulate and discipline. This alternative cultural experience of neoliberalism, I argue, is due to Delhi’s status as an emerging world city situated in an otherwise underdeveloped nation-state. In addition to providing ethnographic data regarding one aspect of contemporary sanitation in Delhi, this paper also illustrates how social actors domesticate transnational discourses according to their position within the global economy.

"Hindu Ethics, the Information Economy and the Spirit of Capitalism?"
Sareeta B. Amrute, Rutgers University

How do religious practices inform the work discipline of Indian Information Technology workers? This paper investigates the practices of Hindu prayer and meditation among Indian Information Technology workers in Europe. I argue that these religious practices emerge from and inform the situation of short-term work regimes and migration requiring periods of intense, abstract labor and flexibility of time and location. The practice of religion equally is instrumental to the demands of the European workplace and strategies for participation in a transnational Indian public sphere. The use to which these practices are put suggest—contra Weber—that ‘ethics’ other than Christian ones produce acquisitive subjects. Finally, I argue that religious practices are used to engage in discourses on the correct practices of the Indian nation-state, while religion itself becomes a locus of reform of the state for a transnational Indian middle class.

Panel Session 4
3:15 - 4:45 PM -- Saturday, February 17

Man of the Heart
Sudipto Chatterjee, Associate Professor of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies, UC Berkeley

Performer and scholar Sudipto Chatterjee will present the compelling vocal music of the Baul tradition with excerpts from his acclaimed theatrical production Man of the Heart (The Life and Times of Lalon Phokir). Combining musical performance with commentary, Chatterjee introduces us to the Baul-Phokir tradition--a prominent subcultural sect that is a parallel, marginalized counterpart to mainstream religious life in Bengal.

	Friday, February 16		Saturday, February 17
	Homeroom	Ida & Robert Sproul Room	Homeroom	Ida & Robert Sproul Room
9:00-10:30 AM	Performing Power: Staging Group Identities in Post-Independence India	The ABCD Conundrum: Alternative Formations of Power?	Comparatively Speaking: On Referentiality of South Asia (CANCELLED)	Religious Experience in Saiva Literature
10:45-12:15 PM	New Routes in South Asian Diaspora Studies	Re-reading the Colonial Modern: The Case of Anglo-India	Community Folk Performances as Sites of Dialogue and Social Change in India (CANCELLED)	Encountering the State in South Asia: Interdisciplinary and Transnational Approaches
L U N C H
1:30-3:00 PM	Screening Nostalgia, Picturing the Present: A Century of Cinephilia	Producing the Public: State and Public Space in Postcolonial South Asia	Hyderabad Between Empires	National Economies, Transnationalism, and the New Logics of Capital
3:15-4:45 PM	Marriage, Divorce, and Rape: Personal Law and Claims to Authority in India and Beyond		Man of the Heart
5:00-6:15 PM	Reception in the Great Hall
6:30 PM	Keynote by Sanjay Subrahmanyam