Organizer: Kumkum Chatterjee, Pennsylvania State University
Chair: Sugata Bose, Tufts University
Discussant: Sudipta Sen, Syracuse University
The construction of history and its political/cultural significance have emerged as important topics of interest for South Asianists.
This panel has been designed: (1) to explore the complex and diverse ways in which history, or the enterprise of recording the past, was conceptualized and manipulated in early modern South Asia; (2) to engage with a growing body of historical literature (mostly relating to the later 19th and the 20th centuries) [see note 1] in which the genre of history for the pre-colonial periods in South Asia has been frequently represented explicitly and/or implicitly as being of a mythic-Puranic mode which prevailed unchanged for centuries—almost until the advent of a "colonial modernity"—or, in cases, the existence of history in these periods is practically denied.
The cluster of papers comprising this panel seeks to engage with these characterizations of history and its uses in 18th-century South Asia. These papers seek to analyze the multiple meanings and functions of history in the 18th century, to demonstrate its complex relationships with custom, law, various literary and narrative traditions and significantly, to establish specific socio-political contexts which molded and shaped the kinds of historical narratives that were produced. Finally, the papers in the panel point to shifts occurring within various modes of historical discourse in this period (in terms of concepts of temporality, narrative styles, material notions of power etc.), thus questioning and modifying some of the implicit assumptions in the literature referred to above, about the pre-colonial discourse of history in South Asia.
1. The reference here is to the work of scholars such as Ranajit Guha (1988), Partha Chatterjee (1993) and others.
The "Persianization" of Itihasa: History and Mughal Political Culture in 18th-Century Bengal
Kumkum Chatterjee, Pennsylvania State University
The aim of this paper is to engage with certain explicit and implicit characterizations that have been made recently by certain scholars about concepts of history or itihasa prevailing in general in pre-colonial South Asia. This paper focuses on the immediate pre-colonial era—i.e. 18th-century Bengal—and seeks to analyze notions of history/itihasa within certain narrative traditions of the region. It also seeks to demonstrate that unlike some recent scholarly characterizations in which historical or itihasa traditions in pre-colonial South Asia have been in a sense generalized as "Puranic" or mythic, historical/itihasa traditions in 18th-century Bengal were actually registering significant and dynamic new changes.
The substance of this paper will examine the multiple meanings and functions associated with the concept of history/itihasa, specifically in 18th-century Bengal. Secondly, the paper will analyze a cluster of texts produced in Bengal during this period to show that while most of them continued to be garbed in the traditional narrative conventions, significant shifts had taken place in terms of their historical/itihasa consciousness. These shifts include an altered sense of temporality, a much sharper awareness of the configuration of political power in late Mughal India and in Nawabi Bengal and a much stronger imprint of Mughal political and intellectual culture. Finally, the paper suggests that these developments in historical/itihasa consciousness are perhaps attributable to the strengthening of a Mughal/Persianized political and intellectual culture in Bengal from about the later 17th century.
Kali Yuga and Temporal Discontinuity
David Curley, Western Washington University
In Bengali literature of the 16th and 17th centuries the last stage of the last of the four human ages was used to criticize present political trends by representing a future of disorder. The disordered future was stereotyped through familiar and comprehensive images of revolution in proper gender, jati, and political hierarchies. In these representations, a period of the "extended present" stretches back into a very distant past, when Turkish rule began—if not when the Kali yuga began—and forward as well, into a future of gradually increasing disorder, until the last stage will finally be reached. Precisely because of a rich continuity between the past, present and future, representations of the final stage are stereotyped and they stereotypically can represent and criticize an "extended present."
In a few 18th-century Bengali texts, however, images of the Kali yuga were reconfigured to emphasize not the remote future, but, the immediate present; not an age of complete and stereotyped chaos, but, one where chaos is particularly intensified, is present especially in some localities, has unique manifestations which are different from those of the stereotyped "final stage" and is partly reversible. This paper will examine such images of an intensified Kali yuga of the present. It will argue that through them, Bengali authors found tropes by which to represent a new discontinuity between the immediate present and the extended past. It will attempt to carefully locate such images in relation to both the uncertain onset of colonial British rule in 18th century Bengal and to other experiences of "modernity" as a break with the past.
Maratha Histories Before Colonialism
Stewart Gordon, Independent Scholars of South Asia
Over the past two decades, the relation between colonialism and the writing of the history of the colonized has been one of the most tangled and contested areas of the study of South Asia.
For Western India, the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries were replete with "histories." The Maratha bakhar tradition of courtly stories of brave deeds and divine interventions often focuses on the grand events and exploits of a particular family. Bakhars play to exactly the reservations colonials had about whether India had a "history" or not.
I will consider a less known tradition, that of pre-colonial Maratha court cases as "history." Typically, no one such case invokes divine causation, magic time, or super-human traits. Rather, court briefs from the pre-colonial period are straightforward accounts of who held what rights, how they came by them, who seized them and when and why—the most boring, detailed history possible, including questions by judges to elicit historical "facts." It is precisely this kind of history that many—for varied ideological reasons—are reluctant to grant to India before the colonial period.
Custom and the Uses of History in the British Government of Early Colonial Agrarian Bengal
Jon E. Wilson, King’s College, London
Historians often assume that the British intended to introduce the dynamism of historical change to early colonial Bengal. "History" here is often equated with the forces of capitalism and modernity. In the colonial imagination it was contrasted with the construction of static, unchanging Indian custom or ancient textual law.
This interpretation might explain the attitude of many late 19th-century colonial officials towards "history," "custom," and "law." This paper is based on the argument that it does not provide a viable explanation of the relationship between history and custom within early colonial discourse. The central hypothesis of this paper is that "custom" was a central category in the British attempt to govern Bengal in the later 18th century. During this early colonial era, British officials believed that property rights were derived neither from Mughal state, nor from the regulations of the East India Company’s state, but rather from "custom" or, the prescriptive, historical character of property rights. The paper also shows how within the colonial state’s judicial arena, zamindars and others deployed a discourse of historical social practice and prescriptive right to legitimate their own local power.
The paper concludes that from about the second decade or so of the 19th century, British colonial discourse in India shifted its focus from "custom" and prescriptive rights to one that emphasized ancient, legal texts and the legislative authority of the Company. The argument is that this new shift represented a strategy to assert colonial authority by denying land-holders the opportunity to use "history" for their own ends.
Organizer: Meera Sehgal, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Chair and Discussant: Rajagopal Radhakrishnan, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
This panel explores the multi-faceted ways in which social and political movements relate to religious traditions in the Indian subcontinent. Each of the papers provides an examination of the role of religious symbols, beliefs, and practices in the construction of politically engaged movements and identities. Emphasis has been given to the historical and social contexts that condition how religious traditions are reproduced, transformed and contested.
The individuals and groups examined in these papers are in one way or another concerned with refashioning society according to their own sets of ideas and beliefs. Specific religious traditions are a common reference point and perceived as a central force by the people and movements being studied, with our collective focus primarily upon contested notions of the role of Hindu and Islamic traditions.
The variety of groups and individuals examined in these papers range from those that insist upon the superiority of one religious system over all others (such as is found in the politicized religion of Hindu nationalism or an orthodox-exclusivist interpretation of Islam), to secular opponents of religion per se, as well as to those who seek to promote a set of values shared by all religions (such as sufi and bhakti devotional movements).
The complexity and variability of the role of religion in South Asian society is mirrored in the nuanced theoretical frameworks deployed in each of the individual papers. Building on insights developed in the fields of gender and culture studies, sociology, and history, this panel ultimately aims to elucidate, in a non-reductionist manner, the politically- and socially-constructed meanings of religion and secularism.
Who is the "Good Muslim"? Contesting Islam During the Reign of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb
Brendan LaRocque, University of Wisconsin, Madison
In this paper I will discuss one specific struggle over the meaning of Islam in precolonial South Asia. From this analysis I will draw larger conclusions about the historically specific ways in which religious identity itself was constituted in that period. My paper will focus on my research and study of the works of the 17th-century devotional religious leader Mahamat Prannath.
The reign of Aurangzeb has been noted for the instigation of policies that discriminated against non-Muslims (as well as "unorthodox" Muslims). Scholarship has conventionally portrayed this development as having sharply exacerbated a supposed antagonism between Muslim and Hindu communities. In contrast to this conclusion, my paper will show how Aurangzeb’s discriminatory and repressive policies were criticized and resisted in such a way that repudiates the notion that separate "communal interests," rooted in distinct Hindu and Muslim identities, were the basis of this conflict.
Mahamat Prannath openly criticized the invocation of Islam by Mughal imperial officials as a means to justify Aurangzeb’s policies. In doing so, Prannath’s criticism rested on his own interpretation of Islamic scriptures and notions of what makes a "good Muslim," and in this was influenced by Sufi and Shiah thought. Prannath developed a religious system that was unique in its particular combination of Vaishnav, Sufi and Shiah elements. At the same time, Prannath nowhere proclaims his own religious identity in terms of being a "Muslim" or "Hindu". Instead, he bases his authority, and centers his identity, on a claim to esoteric knowledge of sacred scriptures, including the Quran, the Vedas and the Puranas.
I conclude that the conventional portrait of pre-colonial Indian society as one divided into mutually antagonistic and static communities constructed on the basis of religious affiliation is anachronistic.
"Allah Ki Ye Vaada-Khilaafi Afsos": The Uneasy Relationship of Progressive Urdu Poetry and Religion
Ali Husain Mir, Indiana-Purdue University
The establishment of the Progressive Writers Association (PWA) in the mid-1930s signaled the beginning of a new era in Urdu literature, especially poetry. The manifesto of the PWA declared its intention to "rescue literature and other arts from the priestly, academic and decadent classes in whose hands they have degenerated so long..." While the PWA had mixed results in other languages, its hegemonic hold over Urdu established a cultural consensus and allowed the language to occupy a pre-eminent space in progressive politics.
Many of the stalwarts of the PWA had an antagonistic relationship with organized religion. As a matter of fact, the association came into being out of the reaction to "Angaare," a collection of iconoclastic short stories which were deemed blasphemous enough to be officially banned. The PWA’s focus on social justice, influenced by the notion of socialist realism, forced it to seek newer metaphors and forms of expression.
This paper will seek to examine the process of the transformation of the relationship of progressive Urdu poetry with religion. On the one hand, the progressive writers sought to offer a self-conscious critique of organized and institutionalized religion while pushing for a secular understanding of nationalism. On the other, religion continued to make its presence felt in much of the literature of this period (for example through the use of Sufi mysticism, the frequent use of the trope of the battle of Karbala as a means of articulating issues of social justice, and the heterodox understanding of Islamic forms). The paper will argue that the alternative understandings of cultural, political and religious reconstruction of the PWA offers us a way of thinking through questions of contemporary formations and to engage with issues of communalism critically and dialogically.
Lessons in Women’s Self-Defense: The Training of "Female Warriors" in Hindu Nationalism
Meera Sehgal, University of Wisconsin, Madison
In this paper I will analyze the construction of the notion of "women’s interests" within a key branch of the Hindu nationalist movement, the Rashtra Seviak Samiti, focusing on the discourse and practices of the Samiti’s annual para-military camps. Based on my participant-observation and interviewing conducted in one such camp, I argue that these annual training camps are primary dissemination sites for the Samiti’s Hindu nationalist ideology. Under the guise of cultivating "Hindu women’s powers" the camp leaders claim to instruct participants to defend themselves through a para-military training regime. My analysis highlights the effects of this program on these women’s perceptions of gender-based oppression and violence. I argue that the camp constructs a "feminine siege mentality" wherein participants end up feeling chronically threatened by imminent sexual violence from "foreign" men. The causes of their oppression within "Hindu" patriarchy is in this process deflected and re-routed towards Muslim men, through the repeated portrayal of Muslims and Islam as the root cause of women’s oppression in general, and of Hindu women’s oppression in particular.
In this paper I discuss the intellectual and physical training components of the Samiti’s para-military regimen, focusing particularly on the methods and means chosen to condition women’s bodies during the camp. I argue that the actual fears of male-sponsored violence within the psyche of the women participating in the camps are brought to the surface through the medium of the camp’s physical training program, in order to recode and re-inscribe these fears for the participants in such a manner as to fit the Hindu nationalist agenda. Thus women’s fears, knowledge and experience of sexual harassment by men in general are brought to the surface through the physical training, only to be misleadingly represented as the result of a threat posed by Muslim men.
Minority Existence and the Subject of Conversion
Satish Kolluri, DePauw University
In a nation-state that constitutionally guarantees religious freedom and equality to all its citizens, the categories of "minority" and "majority" are inherently basic to the political and cultural life of India, but the ugly and hysterical resurgence of Hindu majoritarian nationalism in India has attempted to shift the dialectic in a dramatic and ruthless way, the relationship between ‘majority’ and ‘minority,’ and in the process has brought into sharp relief the differences between the ideology of religious nationalism (read: Hindu) that advocates "one nation, one culture, one people" and the ideology of secularism that emphasizes the equality of all religions and peaceful co-existence.
Violence against minority communities (Muslims and Christians) has escalated in the name of preventing the forcible conversion of "Hindus" to Christianity and Islam, which are considered by Hindu fundamentalists as imposition of alien ideologies from outside the boundaries of the so-called Hindu nation. That is, the practice of Hinduism is considered to be a matter of religious "faith," while Islam and Christianity are perceived as "ideological" belief systems, and in their eyes, as my paper would attempt to argue, the elevation of Hindu "faith" over the ideologies of Christianity and Islam is not only based on the false dichotomy of "religion as faith" and "religion as ideology," but also on the nostalgic notion of the syncretic nature of the Hindu way of life that lays claim, albeit falsely, to religious tolerance and co-existence.
I contend that the theocratic vision of the Hindu nationalists is as much about the (fore)closure of boundaries—personal and political, caste and class, self and other—as it is about the repression of minority voices and paranoia and irrational hatred of the Other (read: Christian and Muslim). My paper attempts to theorize the subject of "conversion" (in both senses of the word) in the context of the dialectic between majority and minority existence and the contradictory nature of the "civilizing" missions of nationalism and secularism in the postcolonial realities of India.
Organizer and Chair: Chandra Mallampalli, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Discussant: Gauri Viswanathan, Columbia University
Conversion movements in modern India often have provoked heated disputes concerning motives, loyalties, and civil entitlements of converts. Such disputes cross boundaries, which have typically separated public (legal/political) and private (religious/familial) domains. During the colonial period, converts to the Christian religion, as Gauri Viswanathan has shown, were marked by a sense of exile from the "Hindu community." In fact, two issues concerning Christian conversion have proven to be most vexing; (a): whether the act of conversion entails the adoption of a new community, or is "merely" a change in belief; and (b): how an "Indian Christian community" is to be constituted legally, politically and culturally. The proposed panel will address these questions by bridging conventional divisions between "religious" and "secular" discourses. How and why Christian identity manages to contest the boundaries of "Indian-ness" or "Hindu-ness" is a question that persists to the present day.
Our panel will consist of three presenters and one commentator. Presentations are designed to help us grasp the relationship between categories of identity derived from religious polemics and those which have crystallized in official state policies. Laura D. Jenkins, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Cincinnati, will discuss legal and discursive grounds for why converts to Christianity are denied "Scheduled Caste" status. Richard Fox Young, Department of History, Princeton Theological Seminary, will draw upon his extensive scholarly research to explore how notions of "Hindu-ness" and "Christian-ness" have been generated through Hindu-Christian debates of the 19th century. Chandra Mallampalli, who will have received his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin, Dept. of History, will discuss debates over the "civil disabilities of converts" within Princely and British ruled districts during the late 19th century.
Gauri Viswanathan, Professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University, has agreed to serve as our commentator. Her award-winning book, Outside the Fold (Princeton, 1998), harnesses a wide range of intellectual resources to shed light on what exactly is at stake in the act of conversion.
Christians and Scheduled Caste Status: Contesting Ideologies of Conversion
Laura D. Jenkins, University of Cincinnati
"Subordinated to the legal and administrative will of the nation, religion in the modern secular state is less a marker of subjectivity of belief systems than a category of identification."—Gauri Viswanathan.
In India, "reservation" policies offer the most striking examples of how official categories can overshadow personal beliefs. Reservations extend employment and educational quotas to members of untouchable or "scheduled castes" (SC), but only if such persons do not belong to the Muslim or Christian religion. In their efforts secure "SC" status, low caste Christians have applied two different strategies. Some have participated in an ongoing social movement, which stresses the persistent disabilities they face as members of so-called "polluted" castes. Other Christians have converted to Hinduism in order to qualify for SC status. This role of religious conversion as a means of securing state entitlements has made "religion" a relatively unstable identity category.
Compared to caste or race, religion, with its "escape hatch" of conversion, appears to be a more voluntary form of identity. Yet in its enforcement of reservation policies, the Government of India scrutinizes self-identifications of persons and groups in order to prevent identity fraud. In the process, it distinguishes "strategic" from authentic or genuine identity claims. This paper draws on interviews with government officials and political activists, as well as court decisions and official rulings. I argue that the Government’s continuing rebuff of "SC Christian" claims and the Supreme Court’s rejection of the authenticity of recent SC conversions each draw upon an older ideology, which regards all conversions to and from Christianity as strategic rather than genuine identity claims.
Inside Out/Outside In: Selected Cases of "Cognitive" Conversion and Identity Formation among Brahmin Christians in mid-19th-Century India
Richard Young, Princeton Theological Seminary
At a time when conversions are widely perceived as "forced" and issues of religious rights are discussed as if "cognitive" conversions cannot occur, this paper explores the process of conversion from the perspective of Brahmin Christians converted in the first half of the 19th century by engaging European missionaries in a dialogue characterized by rational argument and spirited (i.e., agonistic) disputation. Among the individuals adduced, Nilakanth Goreh, a Chitpavan brahmin, exemplifies not only an interreligious conversion (Hinduism to Christianity) but also multiple intrareligious conversions (Shaivism to Vaishnavism, Low-Church to High-Church Anglicanism, and to Anglo-Catholicism). From an examination of Goreh’s preconversion writings, which articulate an orthodox Vedantin’s resistance to Christian teachings on God, the soul, salvation, etc., one can reconstruct the "inside out" perspective, that is, an adversarial view on conversion for one whose identity was shaped by verities of the "eternal [sanatana] dharma." Goreh’s pre-conversion writings, however, should be read in tandem with those that he wrote after becoming a Christian. When so read, Goreh offers scope for adding the "outside in" perspective of a convert reflecting on his identity change and the "cognitive" processes that compelled him to embrace a religion in which he otherwise felt himself a stranger. If "cognitive" conversions are symptomatically intellectual, one learns from Goreh’s engagement with Christianity that the polemics, apologetics and—in rare instances—the dialogues initiated by missionaries gave individuals like him the freedom of distance from which to assess the religious traditions that shaped their identities as Hindus.
Civil Disabilities of Converts within Princely and British-Ruled India, 1850–1890
Chandra Mallampalli, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Under Hindu Law, converts to the Christian religion forfeited rights to inheritance and suffered other disabilities relating to their status as "outcasts." In order to address their grievances, the Company’s Raj issued the Native Convert’s Disabilities Removal Act of 1850 (or the Lex Loci). The Act secured to converts their civil rights, but only by treating them as though they were still "Hindu." This paper examines official debates over whether or not the Act of 1850 ought to be introduced within the "Hindu" states of Mysore and Travancore, reputed to be the most "enlightened" of the Indian states. It is based on official reports obtained at the Tamil Nadu State archives in Madras.
Three issues surface in these debates: (1) whether conversion actually unsettles the Hindu social structure or amounts to a "mere change in belief," as some Government officials had argued; (2) whether the Act of 1850 actually facilitated conversion out of "Hinduism" or amounted to a "dead letter" that was rarely used by converts; and (3) whether British ruled districts were more committed ideologically to Christian conversion than Princely states. Debates over these issues, I will argue, reveal the underlying conservative leanings of the Raj. By the late 19th century, the Government’s attitude toward the Act of 1850 was far more geared toward the preservation of "Hinduism’ than it was to liberal ideas that could legitimate religious conversion.
Organizer: Kirin Narayan, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Chair: Aseema Sinha, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Tibet, British India, Subaltern Studies: Notes from a Different Bengal
Carole McGranahan, University of Michigan
Empire does not end at the edges of the colonial state. The bulk of literature on empire and colonialism, however, focuses on situations of direct colonial rule. In this paper, I propose to look at the edges of empire and at the worlds beyond them. What can we learn about the European colonial project by studying places never colonized by Europe, but which nonetheless had important and often telling relationships with agents of empire? Specifically, I ask what insights does Tibet, for so long an object of the imperial imagination, offer us about the intricacies of colonial administration in British India? In addressing these questions, I engage the work of the Subaltern Studies collective, whose work often focuses on Bengal. Turning our gaze north, to the far Himalayan reaches of Bengal we arrive at the borders of Tibet, and to a different political and cultural economy of empire. Kalimpong, in the years 1936–46 was a heady mix of peoples and politics from across Europe and Asia, including a large Tibetan community diverse across class and region. Inspired by Bengali nationalists and Sun Yat-sen, a group of renegade Tibetan nationalists in Kalimpong formed a progressive political party they called the "Tibet Improvement Party." Their activities, the decision of the British that this group was a threat to the colonial state, and the ensuing drama—a tale of race, nation, and colonial insecurities—that ended with the deportation of the group’s leader to China comprise the heart of my paper.
Three Visions of ‘Scientific’ Medicine in India
Gary J. Hausman, University of Manchester, England
This paper will contrast three ideal-typical visions of Indian science and medicine in early twentieth century South India: the ‘modern’ scientific view, the ‘traditionalist’ perspective, and the ‘secularist’ standpoint.
For ‘modern’ scientific medicine, I shall examine the views of Surgeon-General Hutchinson, who advocated a homogeneous medical profession in India, modeled on the British pattern of intensive specialist scientific hospital research. As a representative of ‘traditional’ Indian medicine, I shall recount the views of the famous Ayurvedic physician A. Lakshmipathi, who characterized Ayurveda as an alternative science to that of the West. For the secularist viewpoint, I shall contrast the role of Captain Srinivasamurthi, Secretary of the Usman Committee Report, and first Principal of the Government School of Indian Medicine, who envisioned an eventual synthesis of Indian and Western systems of medicine into a single unified and integrated whole. I shall follow these three individuals through the technological network of the development, recognition, and institutionalization of the indigenous systems of medicine in early twentieth century Madras State. I shall further highlight discrepancies between public pronouncements and actual behavior. The views of the various Surgeon-Generals, for example, were frequently dismissed in Government archival notations as ‘unscientific’ and lacking in knowledge of local provincial conditions. Lakshmipathi, for all his stress on ‘pure’ Ayurveda, very successfully exploited modern scientific institutions such as mechanisms of registration and mass education. And Srinivasamurthi, the secularist, following his retirement as Principal, increasingly retreated into the spiritual activities of the Theosophical Society, Adayar, where he served as Secretary.
Writing Histories, Making Citizens: Women in India’s Partition
Debali Mookerjea, University of Chicago
The existing historiography on the partition of Bengal in 1947 locates the experience of trauma exclusively on the loss of homelands, migration and refugee dilemmas, and dispossession of property. The experience of specifically gendered violence in this historical upheaval has been largely unaddressed. This has been more or less the case in Bengali literature as well.
A notable exception to this society-wide repression of memory is Jyotirmoyee Devi’s 1967 novel Epar Ganga Opar Ganga. The proposed paper makes a sustained engagement with her text and the silence that surrounds it. Focusing on women’s bodily experiences of Partition, I map both the histories of violence in Bengal and how the suppression of this history operates as an effective denial of citizenship. Attending to Devi’s attempt at the recuperation of women’s unspeakable stories and bodily suffering, I uncover how she simultaneously re-members the raped and mutilated bodies of women as well as the experience of this violence theretofore collectively repressed.
Thus most generally, my study contributes to the growing literature on how, in an apocalyptic event of sectarian violence, struggles and anxieties both private and public can violently converge onto those bodies that are deemed most vulnerable to such a breakdown.
The Issue of Gender in the Plays of Bhuvanesvar Prasad Srivastav (1912/14–1957)
Diana Dimitrova, University of Heidelberg
Bhuvanesvar was one of the first mature recipients of Western naturalist dramaturgy in modern Hindi drama and was productive as a playwright in the 1930s. He was opposed to the dramatic method of Prasad whose neo-Sanskritic plays on historical subject matter were set as a standard by Hindi drama criticism.
In his plays, Bhuvanesvar handles the problem of the battle of the sexes against the background of middle-class Indian families. His portrayal of women and their freedom to choose or change a partner is unprecedented in modern Hindi drama. It did not reflect the objective reality of Indian society of the 1930s and did not "fit" into the ideology of the theatrical discourse of the discussed period in which the issue of gender was to be interpreted along the lines of traditional Hindu values.
Thus, Bhuvanesvar’s dramatic oeuvre represents a dramatic tradition of Hindi that has been marginalized by Indian criticism and excluded from the literary canon because of its subject matter and the unmistakably pro-Western naturalist character of the plays. This article examines the issue of gender in Bhuvanesvar’s dramas by discussing four of the author’s one-act plays, Pratibha ka vivah (1933), Latri (1935), Straik (1938) and Usar (1938).
Technical Terms: A Teacher’s Despair over Language in North Indian Schools
Chaise LaDousa, Miami University, Ohio
This paper considers the narrative of a teacher employed in a Hindi-medium inter-college in which she argues that Sanskrit-derived technical terms have dangerous coercive effects on young minds. Diglossia has been used to describe differences in language prestige in North India. Diglossia refers to a contextual split between situations in which a high variety (Hindi) or a low variety (dialect) is appropriate for use. Sanskrit lexical items can be interjected into Hindi discourse in order to enhance its diglossic "height," a strategy whose motives connect with multiple, discrete rationales. For example, some attribute the existence of Sanskrit lexical items in Hindi discourse to the desire to express ideas that are completely Indian and far removed from the West, while others attribute the existence to the desire to express concepts of modern scientific invention on par with the ability of English. Precisely the second of these motivations has produced coinages of technical terms for use in research, industry, and pedagogy. While many have outlined the multiple rationales that can organize and make social sense of such linguistic developments, few have considered the ways that persons utilize them and reflect upon their use. The teacher’s narrative exposes a technique unavailable to descriptions of language value such as those used to rationalize the presence of Sanskrit. She critiques students’ enthusiasm for the new terms by establishing two voices anchored in different temporal dispositions: a linguistically troubled present and a better past whose practices’ meanings have shifted beyond recognition.
Organizer and Chair: Sheldon Pollock, University of Chicago
Discussant: Robert P. Goldman, University of California, Berkeley
This panel explores problems concerning the conceptual structure and social context of Sanskrit knowledge from roughly 1550 to 1750. This period witnessed a flowering of scholarship that continued until the coming of colonialism, when a precipitous decline set in that eroded the millennia-old power of Sanskrit thought to shape Indian intellectual history. Little research has been devoted to the scholarship, intellectuals, and sociality of knowledge in this epoch. Accordingly, we understand little of what it was about the Sanskrit knowledge then produced that made it so vulnerable to colonial modernity.
The seventeenth century was a period of remarkable innovation in many ways, innovation now sometimes anachronistically misinterpreted as traditionalism. Minkowski shows how a commentator on the great Indian epic deployed a new style of interpretation to read the entire Mahabharata as a Vedic allegory, and seeks to find contextual grounds for this new mode of reading. Tubb examines the remarkable confrontation with European knowledge in the exact sciences at the Jaipur court in the early eighteenth century, when orthodox beliefs were consciously abandoned in the face of new paradigms. Deshpande explores the role of Sanskrit studies in the polity of the Peshwas, the successors of the Marathas, who attempted to arrest the erosion of Sanskrit scholarship seen in many other parts of the subcontinent. Finally, Pollock examines the languages of scholarship in early-modern South Asia, and tries to understand why the process of vernacularization so powerfully evidenced in the literary sphere was resisted in the domain of science.
On the Success of Nilakantha’s Commentary
Christopher Minkowski, Cornell University
Nilakantha Caturdhara, who flourished in Bananas in the second half of the seventeenth century, produced the only commentary on the Mahabharata that is widely used in Sanskrit studies today. Yet, when attention turns to the content of his commentary Nilakantha is often found by modern scholars to be a disappointment or an annoyance, on account of his "fanciful interpretations," and his "Vedantic allegorizing." Why then has his commentary appeared regularly with the Mahabharata since the early days of its publication? Is it safe to suppose that Nilakantha represents the "traditional" understanding of the text?
It is anachronism to expect Nilakantha to share our particular type of historical consciousness of texts. And yet it is anachronism of another kind to find in his commentary the expression of an "orthodox Hindu consciousness." Nilakantha tells us that he proposes to read the Mahabharata in a way that no previous commentator has done, in order to reveal its hidden sense. Perhaps it is exactly this "mystical allegorizing" that distinguished Nilakantha’s work, found favor in his own day, and accounted for the wide dissemination of his work. On this view, his commentary attained prominence exactly for the features that Indologists have most deplored, features that were his innovations by design, though they appear commonplace to us today. Can we further suppose that the times in which Nilakantha lived called this new commentary forth, and that the revelation of a previously undiscovered inner sense formed the terms in which innovation was valued in early-modern Bananas?
Sanskrit Traditions during the Rule of the Peshwas: Maintenance and Transition
Madhav Deshpande, University of Michigan
The rule of the Peshwas, the Brahmin prime-ministers of Shivaji’s descendants, represents one of the most important examples of pre-colonial Indian governance. Its beginning in 1690s connects it with the older medieval patterns, while its end at the hand of the British armies in 1818 marks an important transition to colonialism. Since the British captured Pune, the capital of the Peshwas, without destroying it, they came to possess the entire official records of the Peshwas, and it is through these massive collections of documents dealing with almost every dimension of official and private life of the Peshwas, that one can reconstruct a detailed picture of the period. The Sanskrit traditions of learning form an important part of the life of this epoch, and the present paper offers glimpses of the circumstances under which the Sanskrit traditions found themselves during this period. The Peshwas not only supported the Sanskrit traditions through official donations of large sums each year to thousands of Sanskrit scholars, the Sanskrit traditions were at the very core of the Peshwa mentality and their cultural and political framework. This is seen in the decisive role played by these traditions in legal decision-making at the Peshwa court, their military time-tables, and the perceived needs reflected in their correspondence. At the same time, the Europeans are appearing on the scene and their ways are beginning to make an impact. The present paper offers insights into these transitions.
Competing Systems of Knowledge in the Court of Jayasimha
Gary A. Tubb, Columbia University
The court of Savai Jayasimha of Jaipur is a remarkable site for studying the sociality of Sanskrit knowledge in early eighteenth-century India. Although scholars working in the Persianate order typically drew inspiration from sources different from those of Sanskrit, this was not true in the exact sciences, in part because Persianate and Sanskrit scholars both relied on shared Greek sources, in part because they worked side by side. Jayasimha gave financial aid to at least a dozen Muslim scholars. In the introduction to his great Zij-i-Muhammad Shahi, prepared for presentation to the Mughal emperor, the king himself remarks on the history of Islamic astronomical tables. Jayasimha’s court also provides extensive examples of direct engagement with European thought. Jayasimha writes of the discrepancy between his own observations and his calculations based on the European tables procured from Lisbon. This constitutes one instance in which we know precisely why a Sanskrit knowledge system was replaced by a European one: as Jayasimha patiently demonstrated to himself through a series of practical experiments, the European system gave more accurate results.
Jayasimha was a man at the center of some vigorous disputes on sources of knowledge, and one who, despite very strong sentimentally orthodox leanings, ended up abandoning a traditional system because of the greater empirical success of a new European one (in this case, Copernican astronomy with heliocentric elliptical orbits)—a factor that may have operated fairly widely in the larger demise of Sanskrit knowledge systems.
The Languages of Science in Early-Modern India
Sheldon Pollock, University of Chicago
One of the key factors in the modernization of knowledge production in seventeenth-century Europe was the transformation of the vernaculars into languages of science (as for example in the work of Bacon, Descartes, or Galileo). Although South Asia shared a comparable history of vernacularization in the area of literary production, Sanskrit persisted as the exclusive code for most areas of science, and scholarship more generally, outside the Persianate cultural sphere. This paper examines the relationship between language and knowledge during the period 1550–1750. It seeks first to delineate the boundaries of this relationship in terms of disciplines and regions, and then to lay out the presuppositions in Sanskrit language philosophy that militated against the vernacularization of scientific discourse. A useful orientation to the latter problem, which summarizes the dominant position of Sanskrit intellectuals on the eve of colonialism, is the work of the great scholar Khandadeva on scriptural hermeneutics from mid-seventeenth-century Banaras.
Organizer: Sugata Bose, Tufts University (Chair, SAC)
Speaker: Ranajit Guha, Institut fur Wirtsschafts und Sozialgeschichte, Wirtschaftuniversitat, Wien, Austria
Discussant: James C. Scott, Yale University
This is a special session organized by the South Asia Council which at its meeting in March 2000 felt it should take the initiative to raise the level of theoretical discourse at the annual meetings. We then agreed that perhaps no one had done more to achieve just that for South Asian history than Ranajit Guha and how marvellous it would be if we could sponsor a session in Chicago to both honor him and hear from him. Ranajit Guha kindly accepted our invitation. He is the author of A Rule of Property for Bengal, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, and Dominance without Hegemony, and founder and editor of the first six volumes of Subaltern Studies.
After a 15-minute introduction on Ranajit Guha’s contributions to history, theory and Asian studies by James C. Scott, Ranajit Guha will deliver a 45-minute address on that subject. He has agreed to focus on ways in which different generations of scholars learn about theoretical discourse and the philosophy of history from one another. A full hour will then be available for questions and discussion. It is the South Asia Council’s hope that similar panels may be organized by the four Councils on a rotational basis at the annual meetings.
Organizer: Kirin Narayan, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Chair: Ronald J. Herring, Cornell University
Mothering Earth? Gender and Environmental Protection in the Jharkhand, India
Sarah Jewitt, University of London
With reference to field-based evidence from the Jharkhand region of India, this paper seeks to problematize the assumption of a simple women-environment link and outline the pitfalls of translating such ideas into development policy-making. Following the work of Bina Agarwal and Cecile Jackson (amongst others), it challenges the perception of women as environmental guardians. In particular, it highlights the fluidity and localized nature of inter- and infra-community variations in work allocation and identifies significant gender variations in decision-making and control over environmental resources. Specific emphasis is placed on the impact of patrilineal inheritance systems and patrilocal residence patterns on women’s familiarity with and control over local environments.
Changing Interpretations and the Power of the State: the 786 Urs Mela in Ajmer, Rajasthan (India)
Keri Olsen, Syracuse University
This paper examines changing perceptions of the state around the annual Urs mela commemorating the death and union with God of a famous 12th-century Sufi saint in Ajmer, Rajasthan in November 1998. Capitalizing on the significance of the Urs mela and the number "786" in religious practice, the state projected that the 786th year since the saint’s death would be an extraordinarily auspicious one. Excluding a handful of knowledgeable albeit silenced detractors, people involved in an event often defined as Muslim, if qualified by its pan-Indian and Sufi character, responded to the state’s projections in strikingly similar ways. Most accepted the state’s construction of the 786 Urs mela, and responded to predictions of exponential growth in numbers visiting the shrine through wild speculation and then, when the crowds failed to materialize, disillusionment.
Perspectives on the state—a powerful and amorphously defined actor in society—moved from positive evaluations of the state’s proactive and facilitative role to angry critiques of a misguided force intervening in ways harmful to the people. Insisting that the state’s actions hurt everybody, regardless of religious background, people recounted the burdens that they, the "people," shouldered. By focusing on people’s commentaries leading up to, during and after the 786 Urs mela, I consider negotiations of meaning between the state and local population. Peoples’ responses demonstrate the contingent nature of the state’s legitimacy and reveal the ability of local populations to challenge the epistemic power of the state.
Globalization and the ‘Ethnic Conflict’ in Sri Lanka
Asoka Bandarage, Mount Holyoke College
Analyses of the on-going conflict in Sri Lanka are dominated by ethno-nationalist and liberal perspectives both of which tend to contribute to further ethnic polarization. This paper seeks to move beyond these familiar perspectives by placing the social crisis in Sri Lanka within a broad historical and global framework.
The paper will discuss the origins of modern ethnic politics and conflicts in British policies and the colonial transformation of Sri Lanka’s political economy and culture. It will then delineate the worsening of ethnic antagonisms as well as social class and religious divisions in the post-1977 period of economic liberalization. It will place the expansion of the Sri Lankan conflicts in the context of global political-economic forces and the arms trade as well as deepening local poverty and the mobilization of poor youth into armed struggles.
The paper will also consider the limits of ethno-nationalist and liberal solutions for resolving the Sri Lankan crisis and the need for an alternative model of socio-economic development which can arrest the social, seconomic and cultural marginalization of poor youth.
The Limits of Hindu Sangathan: The All-India Hindu Mahasabha and the Depressed Classes, 1922–47
Keith Meadowcroft, Concordia University, Montreal
South Asian scholars have rightly devoted much ties and effort to studying the development of politics organized on the basis of religio-communal categories. Little attention has been given, however, to how the efforts of India’s untouchables to escape their caste disabilities impacted on the communal-political struggle. This paper aims to promote greater interest in this question, by exploring one of its facets: the attitude of the All-India Hindu Mahasabha to the Depressed Classes (or in contemporary parlance the Dalits) and the movement to eradicate untouchability.
At its revival in 1922, the Mahasabha claimed to be a non-political organization dedicated to reforming Hindu society and to forging sangathan (unity/solidarity) among all Hindus, including those traditionally considered outside the four varna system. In fact, a key factor is the rise of the Mahasabha was the fear of elite Hindus that their position in the communal-political struggle was being undermined by untouchable conversions to other faiths. But the Mahasabhites’ attitude to untouchable reform was always ambivalent. Although they recognized that conversion depleted Hindu numerical strength, which had become an important factor in the distribution of political power, their efforts to remove caste disabilities were tempered by their fear of alienating orthodox support.
This paper is based on extensive field research in India, including perusal of the documents of the Mahasabha and the personal papers of key Mahasabha leaders including V. D. Savarkar, B. S. Moonje, and S. P. Mookerjee and Depressed Class leaders M. C. Rajah and B. R. Ambedkar.
Comparing One-Party-Dominance: Japan’s LDP and India’s Congress Party
Anindya Saha, Cornell University
The Liberal Democratic Party in Japan and the Congress Party in India have dominated the politics of their respective countries for very substantial periods. This resilience cannot be seen as only based on unqualified popular support as reflected in the share of votes won, which for both parties has often been below fifty percent. The displacement of both parties from their hegemonic position in the 1990s is an appropriate moment to re-visit the roots of dominance. Party dominance does not just happen: it has to be actively sustained, in a process of continuous strategic interaction with other parties. I examine some of the mechanisms behind ensuring party dominance that were similar in both nations, despite the vast differences between their socio-economic structures. These include the bias in both countries’ electoral systems in translating votes into seats, the collective action and coordination problems that prevented opposition politicians from coming together, the active assistance in fostering such disunity by temptations offered by the dominant party, the skilful co-optation of new issues, and the creation of personal networks of patronage and dependence that assured support from sizable support groups while simultaneously downplaying policy differences. Throughout, my intention is to synthesize the modern theoretical perspective on parties and elections that emphasizes strategic interaction (in such texts as Gary Cox’s Making Votes Count, 1997) with the empirical literature on one-party-dominant systems (such as T. J. Pempel, ed., Uncommon Democracies, 1990).
Organizer and Chair: Theodore P. Wright, Jr., State University of New York, Albany
Discussant: Sheila McDonough, Concordia University, Montreal
Religious traditions, like national, may foment collective violence. Yet all of the world’s major living religious traditions, including Islam, also contain the seeds of tolerance, justice, compassion, and peace. Observers, both journalistic and academic, especially in recent years, have been preoccupied with the violent element in Islam and equated jihad with terrorism to the neglect of the peaceful aspect.
This panel will present four case studies of nonviolent and quietistic Muslim movements during the twentieth century. Robert Johansen will present a paper on the nonviolent religious empowerment of Pashtuns under the leadership of Abdul Ghaffar Khan against the British raj in the Northwest Frontier Province of British India (present Pakistan) at the time of Mahatma Gandhi’s second satyagraha in the 1930s. Then Irfan Omar will explicate the theological thought of the contemporary and controversial Maulana Wahiduddin Khan of New Delhi rethinking jihad. Mumtaz Ahmad will analyze the Tablighi Jamaat, a mass based, nonpolitical dawn movement in Bangladesh for propagation of the faith of Islam. Karim D. Crow, an activist of Nonviolence International, will describe peaceful action in Aceh, Indonesia.
The panel will discuss the theological basis for nonviolence in the Quran as well as the similarities and differences between explicitly nonviolent political movements like those explored by Johansen, Omar, and Crow, and the pietistic and nonpolitical Tablighi Jamaat with its emphasis on orthopraxy. What are the goals and methods of the various movements and what are the conditions for their success in terms of these goals?
Tablighi Jamaat in Bangladesh: A Mass-Based Dawa Movement
Mumtaz Ahmad, Hampton University
The assumption underlying most of the works on contemporary Islam is that "Political Islam" is the only form in which the current wave of Islamic revivalism is manifesting itself, or, to put it another way, "Political Islam" is the only religious, intellectual, ideological and political alternative in Muslim societies. Yet, there is a great deal more taking place in the Islamic World than religio-politcal militancy that receives disproportionate attention by the Western media and academia. There are powerful religious, intellectual and "Political" alternatives which are equally, if not more, Islamically legitimate, and which may pose an important challenge to political Islam that became popular in the 1980s. Tablighi Jamaat, which represents a more quietistic, non-political, peitistic revivalist movement and which has become quite popular in Bangladesh and Pakistan in recent years, has, in our view, the potential of becoming a major challenge to the monopoly of political Islam on Islamic discourse and practice.
This paper, based on a recent field work, will contextualize the Tablighi Jamaat in Bangladesh’s socio-political space, examine the circumstances of its growth, and analyze the religio-political consequences of its religious mobilization.
Islamic Peaceful Action in Aceh
Karim D. Crow, Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilization, Kuala Lumpur
The conceptualization and practical application of nonviolent direct action in authentic Islamic terms poses real difficulties for contemporary Muslim societies struggling for justice and peace. Conceptually, the Islamic principles for legitimate use of force are indeed relevant for Peaceful Action (al Jihad al-Silmi, al-‘Amal al-Silmi), given specific requirements. In practice: much depends on the historical, cultural, and social-political conditions of the particular society and polity in question.
The Muslim population of the ‘Special Territory’ of the Indonesia province of Aceh (a northern Sumatra island) has only recently emerged from a long series of brutal abuses perpetrated by the Indonesian military. Student, civic, and humanitarian organizations are now agitating for political, economic and human rights; while a long running law-level insurgency (the Free Aceh Movement) conducts an armed struggle for independence. The increasing utility of ‘Peaceful Action,’ understood in Islamic terms, is definitely gaining ground among sectors of Acehnese civil society. This paper examines recent efforts and obstacles in the promotion of a nonviolent Islamic solution to the conflict in Aceh (1998–present). It is based on the contacts and workshops conducted by the Islamic Peace Forum, with cooperation from the Washington DC based NGO Nonviolence International, in Aceh during 1999 and 2000.
Radical Islam and Nonviolence: A Case Study of Religious Empowerment Among Pashtuns
Robert Johansen, University of Notre Dame
Religious traditions, like national traditions, may foment collective violence. Yet all of the world’s major living religious traditions also contain the seeds of tolerance, justice, compassion, and peace. A preoccupation with the violent elements of these traditions impedes the expression of their less violent themes. For diverse reasons, observers may give insufficient attention to the peace-building prospects in religious traditions. As this case study of Islamic political activism among Pashtuns in North-West Frontier Province of colonial India in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s demonstrates, religion may motivate people for bold action against political repression while confining themselves to nonviolent means in pursuit of humanitarian ends. A formula for Muslim nonviolent direct action developed by Abdul Ghaffar Khan has many applications in contemporary conflicts where change is desirable but violent means are often self-destructive. Islamic religious identity can provide the basis for recruiting people to become political activists, for nurturing a strong identity and discipline within their movement, for enabling activists to overcome an inclination to use violence, for contesting the more violent elements of a religious tradition in religious rather than secular terms, for avoiding intolerance toward people of other religious traditions, and for nurturing determination against great odds. If imaginative leadership would draw upon the bold yet nonviolent contributions that religious traditions can make, even in contexts where violent reactions may seem justified, then a possible clash of civilizations might be managed without irretrievable disasters for the human race.
Rethinking Jihad: Wahiduddin Khan’s Theology of Non-Violence in Islam
Irfan A. Omar, Temple University
"Islam is the answer to the demands of nature," says Maulana Wahiduddin Khan (b. 1925) of New Delhi, India, a leading Muslim thinker and Editor-in-Chief of the monthly journal al-Risala. Human nature desires "peace and love," which are also the demands of Islam. Peace is the ultimate goal of each human being. For that reason, in Islam the goal of religious worship is also peace. Each individual is required to greet others with the salutations of peace (al-salam ‘alaykum = peace be upon you).
Similarly, Khan says, jihad is used in the Qur’an in a general sense of ‘struggle,’ while warfare is designated by the term qital (‘fighting’) or other related terms. Therefore popular understandings of jihad as violence are completely wrong. Since we are living in an age of freedom of belief and worship, there is absolutely no justification for even a "defensive war." This leads to Khan’s theology of non-violence, which to him is not "inaction" or "passivity," but rather peaceful activism focusing on the positive. Non-violent struggle implies positive action while accepting the status quo and remaining apolitical.
Based on the above, this paper will explore the "authenticity" of his theology of non-violence in the context of the Qur’an. Furthermore, Khan’s views on non-violence will be compared with those of M. K. Gandhi’s.
Organizer: Indrani Chatterjee, Brown University
Chair and Discussant: Richard M. Eaton, University of Arizona
Historians of pre-colonial India have long associated slaves with a particular form of statehood, namely the Delhi Sultanate. This panel attempts to confirm the persistence of older patterns of slave-acquisition and use in the later medieval and in the colonial period. The panelists hope thereby to reconfigure some of the historiographical debates about the nature of the transition to colonial rule in the subcontinent. Sumit Guha uses Marathi-language records to outline a synthetic biography of slaves and slavery during the eighteenth century in western India. Extending and overlapping in time, Michael Fisher studies the range of relationships between servitude and contract that some Indians entered into with British masters, both in the colony and in the metropole. This paper focuses on the agency, or lack thereof, available in each type of servitude in each location. Sylvia Vatuk looks at domestic slavery in aristocratic Muslim households in Madras, and explores the ambivalent attitudes of British officialdom towards the feasibility of ending slavery. This paper shows how issues of gender and class impinged on policy-making, as well as on the resolution of specific cases involving slaves, and slave-traders. Indrani Chatterjee analyses the production of a local ‘history’ of Tripura, a native state of eastern India, called the Sri Rajamala. She suggests that this history can be understood only with reference to the conflicts around slave-birth, which occurred in many such households during the nineteenth century, rather than in terms of the ‘tribe-to-caste’ continuum hitherto applied to the study of this household.
Life in Slavery: Towards a Synthetic Biography
Sumit Guha, Brown University
Efforts at writing the social history of South Asia rarely address the individual lives of the most numerous and the poorest. Biographers have been forced to focus on the lives of those notable—either for wealth or for saintliness. The vast majority obviously does not fall into either category. Yet even a preliminary scrutiny of the historical record reveals evidence on the lives of slaves—but evidence so scattered makes it difficult to narrate the life of any single individual in a coherent way. This paper will attempt to knit these diverse records into a plausible collective life by using them to illustrate common predicaments, situations and incidents in the experience of slavery—a status endured by many in eighteenth century western India. It draws mainly on sources in Marathi, Portuguese, and English. The paper is organized in the following way: slavery is not a biological but a social condition—so a slave’s life as a slave does not necessarily begin in that status, though it may do so. It will:
• begin with the social processes by which people became slaves.
• move on to socialization in that status—training, upbringing etc.
• the progressions of social roles will be studied next—this succession constituted a slave’s career.
• consider slave agency and resistance
• exit from slavery—either by death or by social processes such as marriage, emancipation or abandonment.
Varieties of Servitude: South Asian Slaves and Bonded and Contracted Servants in India and Britain
Michael H. Fisher, Oberlin College
During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, South Asians entered servitude to British masters through a range of relationships. Some became domestic slaves, others became bonded or contracted servants. In each instance, their status differed according to the social, legal and cultural contexts of India or Britain. Using case studies and quantitative analysis, this paper examines this body of slaves and servants, the range of their relationships with their masters, and their respective conditions of servitude in the colony and the metropole. This paper also tries to focus attention on the agency, or the lack thereof, of South Asians in each type of servitude in each location.
"A Gentler Institution": British Officialdom and the Problem of Domestic Slavery in Nineteenth-Century Madras
Sylvia Vatuk, University of Illinois, Chicago
With specific reference to the phenomenon of domestic slavery in aristocratic Muslim households in Madras in the early 1800s, this paper explores the ambivalent attitudes of British officialdom toward the feasibility and desirability of ending slavery in their Indian possessions. It shows how issues of gender and class impinged on overall policy-making, and on the manner in which specific cases involving slaves and slave-traders were dealt with.
History and the Erasure of the "Shameful Institution"
Indrani Chatterjee, Brown University
Tripura, one of the last princely states of eastern India, has often been studied by modern historians in terms of its ‘tribal’ populations, and its ruling house as an example of a group which had successfully transformed itself into Kshatriyas. This paper looks closely at the moment of this transition in the later nineteenth century, and argues that it co-incided with a colonial legal and ideological redefinition of the rights and statuses of those members of the ruling group who were born of slave and concubine-mothers. One such slave-born member, defeated in a legal suit for succession, was the patron of a local historian, Kailash Chandra Singha, whose text Sri Rajamala bears the traces of the conflicts that accompanied such an onslaught. Singha, who had played a major role in the preparation of his patron’s legal suit, bore contradictory witness to history as a result. His text both contested the colonial legal attribution of ‘degradation’ to the slave-born, at the same time that it accepted that slave-keeping was a source of ‘shame’ which needed to be erased from the history of the household. This paper attempts to understand the social and political nature of the conflicts within which ‘indigenous’ history was both produced, and suppressed, in the late nineteenth century.
Organizer: Narendra Subramanian, McGill University
Chair and Discussant: Vasant Kaiwar, Duke University
The formation of centralized states is said to have sharpened community boundaries and encouraged the institutional recognition of homogenized community practices. Such arguments, many of which emphasize the roles of colonial states and hegemonic colonial knowledge, once appeared appealing, but have grown stale. Closer examination of colonial and post-colonial societies suggest that state centralization is always partial, that the rules for the institutional validation of knowledge remain somewhat flexible, that the making of states and official knowledge are products of ongoing contention. The panel explores such processes of contention in making different features of post-colonial South Asia—modernizing material life, governing the personal and sculpting the civil. From diverse disciplinary and analytical perspectives addressing different kinds of sociopolitical change, the papers plot the complex relations between grand conceptualizations of nationhood and the ways in which knowledge and community are recognized and acted upon. They explore the implications of such official recognition for nations and citizens, homogenized in some respects and differentiated in others.
Insuring Lives, Assuring Rights: Nation, Citizenship, and Globalization
Geeta Patel, University of Iowa
This paper will examine two aligned spaces that address the nexus of rights, property and citizenship. One is the insurance industry that has recently been "liberalized." The other is the arena of social insurance, whose mandates have been the purview of Non Governmental Agencies (NGOs). Both the insurance industry and NGOs engage with discourses and practices of modernity that are simultaneously global, national and local. Both address concerns of providing "adequate" material conditions for a "good" life, and sculpt interactions which make up the civil sphere. This paper considers the following questions: how are general discourses whose language and scope have been articulated globally (in neo-liberal language) like those of insuring property or assuring rights rendered in relation to the Indian nation-state? How do the daily material practices that are brought into being through insurance and the assurances of rights craft or display the workings of state agencies (such as the collection of statistics)? How do the notions of personhood, national citizen, and global subject which are circulated and developed under initiatives from the insurance industry and NGOs interact with, transform or produce communities?
Making Person and Citizen: Hindu Law Reform in Post-Colonial India
Narendra Subramanian, McGill University
The post-colonial Indian state introduced reforms in the Hindu personal laws inherited from the colonial period in the 1950s with the proclaimed aims of making the laws more uniform, enabling national integration and promoting greater gender equality. Many ambiguities characterized these reforms, and influenced post-colonial contestation over nationhood, citizenship and pluralism. The reforms reinforced the official recognition of religious boundaries, though they were presented as steps towards a uniform and secular civil code. They focused solely on the laws governing the religious majority, ostensibly to accommodate the minorities, but thereby left the minorities on the margins of the institutional definition of the nation. While partially codifying Hindu law, they left considerable room for judicial interpretation, which largely favored upper caste practices and undermined the aim of promoting gender equality. The revised Hindu laws also left some room for further reform by state governments, which increased diversity and mostly gave women more rights. And finally, the continued recognition of the ‘customs’ of some ‘tribes’ potentially accorded these groups greater autonomy, but also added to their marginality within the ‘Hindu community.’ By exploring the roles of different state institutions in the reform and implementation of Hindu law, the paper considers some of the complex relations between state formation, nation-making, and differentiated citizenship.
Community Development and Catholic Activism in South India
Ajantha Subramanian, Duke University
In the late 1950s, the Tamilnadu State government extended its Rural Community Development program to the southern coastal district of Kanyakumari. The program localized the presence of the state and sought to integrate Kanyakumari’s population of Catholic fishers into a national developmental framework. Through its operation, the concept of "development" became central to the crafting of community identities, and a crucial ingredient of local cultural politics. In this paper, I explore the terrain of contestation opened up by the introduction of "development" into the district’s political lexicon, and narrate the process by which local Catholics appropriated "development" for symbolic and practical ends unforeseen, and unintended, by the state.
Organizer and Chair: Kirin Narayan, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Transcending Religious Boundaries: Cult of the Eight Matrikas in Nepal
Dina Bangdel, Western Michigan University
The cult of the eight Mother Goddesses (Astamatrika) as manifested in the religious milieu of present-day Kathmandu Valley in Nepal presents an enigmatic problem for both religious and cultural historians. The Astamatrikas have an essential role in both the Hindu and Buddhist ritual practices. This apparent overlapping of religious categories has often led to dismissing Nepal’s religious environment simply as "synecretic"—as a harmonious blend of Hinduism and Buddhism. Rather, in this paper I ask: what allows for this fluidity and multivalency?
The paper re-evaluates the role and importance of the Astamatrikas in the Hindu and Buddhist religious practices, particularly as it relates to the self-arisen sacred spaces (matrika pithas) of the Astamatrikas found in the Kathmandu Valley. Through iconological and textual analysis, I will discuss the defining of the Valley’s sacred geography through these sacred pithas in disparate Hindu and Buddhist contexts. The Hindu and Buddhist ritual practices relating to the Astamatrikas emphasize the importance the goddess tradition (sakti/prajna) that is central to both Tantric Hindu and Buddhist methodologies of Nepal. I suggest it is the Tantric nature of the goddesses that serves to transcend the categories of religious boundaries and allows for the multivalency of religious interpretation, an aspect often glossed in previous scholarship.
Whose Deities? Buddhist Influences in Later Hindu Tantras
Gudrun Buhnemann, University of Wisconsin, Madison
While Buddhism incorporated Brahmanical and Hindu deities at various stages in its development, it has, in its Tantric form, also influenced the Hindu pantheon. In this talk I will address the influence of Buddhist Tantrism on Hindu Tantras as evident from the adoption of deities, mantras and elements of Buddhist Tantric visualization procedures by some later Hindu Tantric texts. Based on textual evidence I will identify some elements which indicate that a deity is borrowed by the Hindu Tantras from the Buddhist pantheon.
A Hindu God in the Guise of a Mughal Emperor: The Ramayana of ‘Abd al-Rahim Khan Khanan
Anna M. Ranero-Antolin, Arizona State University/Smithsonian Institution
This paper deals with the Mughal manuscript of the Sanskrit epic Ramayana that is now in the collection of the Freer Gallery of Art (Smithsonian Institution) and is known as the Freer Ramayana. This manuscript, commissioned by the Mughal noble ‘Abd al-Rahim Khan Khanan, is one among several Hindu texts translated into Persian at the end of the sixteenth century. The manuscript itself is apparently a copy of the translation of the Sanskrit epic commissioned by emperor Akbar, who believed that knowledge of Hindu texts would ease the religious tension between Muslims and Hindus at court.
In this paper I will present some preliminary results of my study of the Freer Ramayana. In this manuscript the story of Rama is presented and interpreted as a Hindu story but told in a Muslim context. Thus, in the text we see Rama endowed with the characteristics of both a Hindu god/king and a Mughal ruler. Similarly, the characters depicted in the illustrations share features of both Mughal (or Persian) and Indian visual traditions.
My paper will compare the text of this manuscript with the Sanskrit version. I will especially focus on those passages in which the translator deals with terms of Indian religion and of Indian culture in general. This will be followed by a brief discussion of some of the illustrations. This essay will conclude with an examination of the relevance of this text for scholars of Ramayana studies and of Mughal painting.
Smallpox: The Measure of Morality
Eliza Kent, Central Washington University
I examine the ways in which smallpox was conceptualized and represented by Protestant Christian missionaries in south India in the nineteenth century: I follow Talal Asad’s relentlessly historicizing approach to religion to reveal the rhetorical moves and interventionist practices that missionaries used in their deployment of medical discourse to constitute "religion" as a separate domain of practice and belief distinct from "superstition."
Missionaries were intent on discrediting the local conceptualization of small pox, which associated the disease with the wrathful aspect of a village goddess, Mariamman. Part of this campaign involved the missionaries’ consistent description of the Indians’ beliefs and practices associated with smallpox as "superstition." The irony in this is that missionaries’ own understandings of epidemic disease were profoundly shaped by a notion of a powerful deity, who, though ultimately transcendent, worked through history—punishing and protecting human beings according to their conformity to his will. In criticizing Indians for their religious understanding of smallpox as the result of the will of a powerful deity, missionaries had to walk a narrow line in order to distinguish their cosmology from that of the Hindus surrounding them. I examine here three missionary texts in order to argue that what missionaries specifically defined in relation to smallpox as "superstition" was not the invocation of the supernatural per se. Rather, what missionaries objected to were the series of mediations that Hindus interposed between the will of the goddess and the visible result—disease. I argue that it was the immediacy and materiality of the goddess that most offended the sensibilities of missionaries.
"We Will Become Jijabai": Folklore and Hindu Nationalist Women in India
Kalyani Devaki Menon, Syracuse University
In this paper I look at the way folklore about Jijabai is deployed by women belonging to the Rashtra Sevika Samiti, one of the women’s wings of the Hindu nationalist movement in India. Jijabai is the mother of the seventeenth-century Hindu king Shivaji who has become an icon of Hindu nationalism. In these stories Jijabai is frustrated by the cowardly refusal of Hindus to challenge Muslim oppression and by her own inability, as a woman, to fight for change. She inspires Shivaji to free the Hindu nation from the "oppressive" rule of the Mughals thus establishing, according to Samiti women, a blueprint for Hindu womanhood today. Samiti women deify Jijabai for her matritva (motherhood). They argue that she was an "enlightened mother" worthy of emulation who fought for the Hindu nation through her son Shivaji by inculcating in him the values, ideology, strength, and patriotism that the Hindu nation lacked. Samiti women encourage new recruits to become like Jijabai and use their roles as mothers to inculcate the values of Hindutva (Hindu nationalism) in the minds of children. They argue that the stories about Jijabai teach them that women can facilitate the cultural and political renaissance of the Hindu nation in India by moulding the new generation. Samiti women use these stories to establish a role model for women in the movement today and, in doing so, propagate a revisionist history of the Hindu nation.
Organizer: Anand A. Yang, University of Utah
Chair: Eugene F. Irschick, University of California, Berkeley
Discussant: Sandria B. Freitag, Univeristy of California, Santa Cruz
As has oft been noted, British India became in many respects a laboratory for emerging 19th-century ideas about the nature and management of crime. The beginnings of this practice can be discerned in the late-18th-century attempts to revise the indigenous system of criminal law and to institute and consolidate colonial law and order. Subsequently, the Indian Law Commission was established in the 1830s. Its efforts resulted in the promulgation in 1860 of the significantly Benthamite Indian Penal Code that represented an effort by the British to codify a set of intellectual assumptions for the rational control of crime. And yet, at the same time, British thinking about crime in late 19th- and early-20th-century India was deeply influenced by a set of British presumptions about the distinctive character of Indian society and its moorings in Indian tradition.
These papers look at the ways these presumptions shaped British thinking about criminal behavior and criminal law. One set of assumptions (discussed in Yang’s paper) led to the British development of transportation as one of the most effective punishments for heinous crimes. Central to these beliefs were not only British ideas about its cultural currency but also its value as a punishment that could be calibrated and recalibrated to become appropriately severe for different categories of crime and criminals. Assumptions about indigenous patriarchal authority (in Maskiell’s paper) and about the moral primacy of the settled "village community" (in Gilmartin’s paper) all influenced how the British viewed crime. Yet, at the same time, as these papers also argue, British assumptions also shaped complex interactions between the British and indigenous communities. As all these papers suggest, these interactions do not disclose a sharp dichotomy between "British" and "indigenous" ideas about the meaning of crime and punishment, but rather a narrative of the ongoing interplay in Indian society between state authority and, as Maskiell puts it, the "local, diverse hierarchical network" that ordered much of colonial north India’s social life.
A Punishment to Fit the Crime: The Transportation of Criminals in Late 18th- and Early 19th-Century Colonial India
Anand A. Yang, University of Utah
Transportation was first systematically deployed in India by the British in the late eighteenth century. In the early nineteenth century, it became (along with imprisonment) one of the primary forms of punishment applied to a variety of crimes. Although transportation had little precedence in precolonial Indian history, it emerged as an important ‘secondary’ punishment because of its perceived effectiveness in deterring crime. Central to this perception was the colonial belief, apparently shared by some Indian subjects, that transportation violated prevailing (principally Hindu) religious norms about crossing the "black waters" and thus constituted a particularly effective punishment in India. Moreover, British administrators were drawn to transportation—and therefore sought to expand its scope and reach—because they wanted to maintain an arsenal of severe punishments at a time when they were in the midst of dispensing with the more sanguinary punishments (such as mutilation) that were left over from the precolonial regime. Transportation thus seemed to be a punishment well suited to counter the ‘new’ wave of serious crime that threatened to undermine the emerging colonial state. This paper will focus on the cultural, social and political assumptions underlying the colonial preoccupation with transportation as well as relate how this punishment was fashioned and refashioned to target particularly categories of crime and criminals.
Witches, Widows, and Barren Wives: The Folklore of Domestic Crime in Colonial North India
Michelle E. Maskiell, Montana State University
Nineteenth-century Punjabi society was a collection of local, diverse hierarchical networks ordered along patriarchal principles. While this arrangement preceded the British conquest in 1849, the ‘Punjab Tradition’ of administration in the late nineteenth century gave these principles formal recognition and additional rigidity, creating what I have called elsewhere a "pax patriarchica." Domestic crime was defined and represented in colonial discourse within a paradigm that postulated British officials as the paternalistic overseers of Punjabi society as a whole, while senior Punjabi men were positioned as the overseers of all behavior in their own villages and families, especially that of their female relatives. The paper is divided into three parts. In the first, it will show how establishing colonial law and order included defining and regulating domestic crime, using the example of female infanticide. I will then detail the folklore of domestic crime as represented in two English-language publications, Punjab Notes and Queries and North Indian Notes and Queries. Modeled directly on the publications of the Folklore Society in London (founded 1878) and under the editorships of R. C. Temple and William Crooke, Indian Civil Service administrators and enthusiastic collectors of folklore, these publications provide a number of rich examples of British understandings of domestic crime. The short articles in these publications can be read, following Gayatri Spivak’s formulation, as the incorporation of stories about witches etc. into colonial narratives of "white men saving brown women from brown men [and other brown women]." The third part of my paper will explore other possibilities, such as whether or not representations of domestic crime can be read ‘against the grain’ as resistance to patriarchy (of either the family or the state or both).
The Karnal Cattle-Lifting Caper: Cows, Crime, and Community in Colonial India
David Gilmartin, North Carolina State University
Cattle theft appears in colonial records as a crime that was pervasive in the Punjab. One might argue that in a region in which interactions between pastoral herding and agriculture had long been critical to the colonial economy, trafficking in stolen cattle helped to define the social relations between pastoral and sedentary society. Yet, cattle theft became for the British a symbol of the moral turpitude of "unsettled" peoples. Settled production in agricultural village "communities" was the normative model for colonial society, and "rings" of cattle thieves were often seen as "preying" on settled villages, reflective of the moral contrast between settled and wandering peoples. But when the British broke up one of the major "rings" of cattle theft in Karnal district in the early 20th century, it became evident that the interaction between settled and wandering peoples was far more complex. The evidence of the case seemed to challenge a range of British moral presumptions underlying the criminal law. An analysis of the language of the case suggests how in these circumstances the British sought to hold on to a set of moral presumptions about Indian society, even as they came to terms with the complex meanings of "criminality." The language of "conspiracy," which runs through much of the evidence of this case, was thus itself a product of British efforts to fit the "facts" of early-20th-century cattle theft into the moral presumptions that structured British thinking about the meaning of crime, suggesting how presumably simple, moral people were seduced by a "secret" world of wandering criminals.
Organizer: Maria Hibbets, California State University, Long Beach
Chair: Steven D. Heim, University of Chicago
Discussant: Kevin M. Trainor, University of Vermont
This panel considers the relationship of emotions and ethics in South and Southeast Asia Buddhism. Our work belies the overly rationalistic interpretations of Buddhist ethic that have tended to mark many previous studies of Buddhist moral thinking. The panelists argue that in many cases, Buddhist practice seeks to cultivate—rather than extinguish—certain specific kinds of emotions, which are regarded as conducive for human flourishing. The panel considers the role of pleasure, horror, and aesthetic experience in Buddhist moral discourse. Specifically, we explore the rhetorical techniques of such discourse aimed at producing determinate types of affective experiences, which register not only emotionally, but also physically. The panelists argue that Buddhist moral discourse is not limited only to rational or calculated moral choice, but also recognizes the critical role of emotional response in moral development.
The panelists explore Buddhist treatments of a range of emotions. Mrozik focuses on pleasure and desire in Sanskrit Buddhist texts and the ways in which the texts invoke the very pleasure that the tradition holds suspect. Rotman’s paper deals with the representation of the practice of prasada in avadana literature and the ethical implications of the apparent effortlessness required of the practitioner to engage in the practice. Berkwitz considers how gratitude towards the Bodhisattva in Theravada histories creates relationships of dependency and obligation. Hibbets turns to awe and horror generated by moral deeds that are described as "thrilling."
Productive Pleasures
Susanne Mrozik, Western Michigan University
Buddhists define desire as the cause of all suffering, and liberation as the transcendence of desire. Yet, pleasure, delight, and enjoyment are the most common and, arguably, most appropriate responses to the buddha, dharma, and sangha. For example, one Mahayana medieval monastic compendium argues that the monastic bodhisattva must protect, purify, and nurture his body so that it can be enjoyed (bhuj-) by living beings. Giving pleasure is the highest duty of a bodhisattva, who is likened to a prostitute who attracts clients with his beauty. This paper explores the multiple representations of desire and pleasure in Sanskrit Buddhist literature, focusing particularly on the ways in which this literature invokes the very pleasures it holds suspect. Thus one Mahayana sutra warns of the dangers of sensual pleasures only to describe liberation in the most sensual of terms—as touching, awakening, or tasting the nectar of dharma.
The paper exposes a tension evident in Buddhist literature between the repudiation of desire and sensual pleasures and the suggestion that certain kinds of desires and pleasures are conducive to liberation. The paper considers the possibility that the repudiation of desire on the part of the buddha or realized bodhisattva serves to engender productive desires in others. Primary sources include the Siksasamuccaya, Suvarnaprabhasottama sutra, Sanghana sutra, and selected avadanas.
Automatic Actions and the Ethics of Prasada
Andy Rotman, University of Chicago
In many Buddhist narratives (avadanas) from the early centuries of the Common Era, there is a well-articulated practice associated with the mental state of prasada. The most common scenario involving this practice runs as follows: an individual comes into visual contact with an abject that is an "agent of prasada," such as a Buddha, an arhat, or a stupa; this contact, in turn, leads to the arising of prasada in that individual; and, finally, this arising of prasada leads that individual to offer a gift which in the future will yield great results.
The representation of this practice in the Divyavadana and the Mulasarvastivada-vinaya offers a vision of Buddhist ethics that challenges many of the normative claims in Buddhist scholarship. In these texts, the performance of this practice is shaven to require only a bare minimum of personal effort and mental conditioning on the part of the practitioner. The practitioner is portrayed, for the most part, as a passive performer who is acted upon through the forces of prasada: first by an object that is an "agent of prasada" and then by the giving that the arising of prasada entails. Hence, is it necessary to actively follow the eight fold path, to exert oneself to think and act in certain ways, when the exigencies of prasada can do it for you? The practice of prasada, it seems, is ethical in the sense that it is natural and automatic.
In this regard, I will discuss the practice of prasada and its inscription as natural law, possible social and political agendas of this naturalization process, and, finally, the implications that this conception of proper behavior has for Buddhist ethics.
Gratitude, Dependency, and the Bodhisattva in Theravada History
Stephen Berkwitz, Southwest Missouri State University
This paper considers literary representations of the Bodhisattva in the Theravada Buddhist tradition of Sri Lanka to discern how historical texts were composed to evoke feelings of gratitude and dependence in an audience. Usually associated more with Mahayana Buddhism, the figure of the Bodhisattva nevertheless appears with regularity in Theravada chronicles. Therein, narrating the career of a particular Bodhisattva working for the "welfare of the world" expresses a conception of history where the past deeds of others are held to have a determinative influence over one’s present and future well-being.
Focusing primarily upon medieval Buddhist chronicles written in Pali and Sinhala, I will demonstrate that Bodhisattva narratives are crucial for developing a moral subjectivity among latter day devotees. By emphasizing the sacrifice and suffering of the Bodhisattva in the past, these texts condition feelings of gratitude in an audience, which in turn prefigure a relationship of dependency upon certain historical agents. Thus, the primacy of moral self-cultivation in Theravada Buddhism is undercut by a model whereupon individuals are made to feel grateful and obligated to others who leave enabled them to obtain worldly and supraworldly benefits. In this way, Theravada piety appears as a manifestation of gratitude that arises out of encounters with historical texts. Finally, I will argue that such depictions of the Bodhisattva assume an important role designed to generate emotions conducive to an ethics of dependency for Theravada moral discourse.
The Aesthetics of Excess
Maria Hibbets, California State University, Long Beach
My paper considers narrative and discursive literature from a range of both Sanskrit and Pali Buddhist texts that describe spine-tingling moral deeds which are said to induce grief, horror, awe, astonishment, and anguish in observers. Accounts of extraordinary gifts made by the Bodhisattva, such as gifts of his wife, children, and his own flesh and blood, not only describe great consternation in the other characters in these stories at witnessing these actions, but they also employ literary devices to evoke horror in the reader as well. I consider these actions in the context of the criterion that gifts should be "thrilling," and attempt to understand what the moral value of being affected in this way might be.
What is the rate of hyperbole in moral discourse and narrative? How does a sense of wonder and paradox generate moral subjectivity? I argue that narratives of excessive generosity (what the Milindapanho calls "atidana") are not intended to inspire imitation. Instead, I propose that accounts of astonishing moral deeds suggest that moral sensitivity can be cultivated by the aesthetics of excess at a number of different levels: they inspire awe and esteem toward the Bodhisattva, they evoke horror and dismay at the world, and they generate renown which itself has moral presence in the world.
Organizer and Chair: Nita Kumar, Brandeis University
Discussants: McKim Marriott, University of Chicago; Barbara Daly Metcalf, University of California, Davis; Partha Chatterjee, Centre for Studies in Social Science, Calcutta; Heidi Pauwels, University of Washington, Seattle; Priya Iyer, Nirman, Varanasi
This roundtable aims to discuss research approaches in different disciplines in South Asian studies to take stock of what a region’s knowledges, logics, structures, and histories mean for scholars today when we have been progressively moving away from notions of a universal ‘science.’ As we know, ideas about a relevant ‘Sociology for India’—how the knowledge systems and social structures of India contribute to understanding the society have been addressed for five decades. Similarly, there has been the influential approach of ‘Ethnosociology,’ which aims at a rich ethnography leading towards a theorization that is true to the internal logic of the society’s conceptualization about itself. Over the last two decades, ‘Subaltern Studies’ has made a case for the colonial and nationalist history of India as a major contributor towards the ways of writing about India. Those who do Gender Studies want to be attentive to regional, class, ethnic, and cultural differences. Similarly, approaches in Religion, the Arts; and Literature that may not have popular labels, have similar motivations to be ‘region-sensitive.’ Studies of globalism would argue as forcefully that localities and alternative modernities interact powerfully with global forces.
The organizer is convinced that a conversation on recent practices by representatives in different disciplines will open up a lively discussion with the audience who include other such representatives. The aim is not a conclusion about theory, but a stimulating exchange of ideas regarding how region and method interact, leading to new insights for all.
Organizer: Christopher Chekuri, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Chair: Shanti Kumar, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Discussant: Himadeep Muppidi, Vassar College
The papers in this panel explore the ways in which locality, community, and identity are defined historically and how they are redefined in the context of changes in global economy. By examining experiences of migration and transnational community formation from within, they show the remaking of community, nation, and identity in a more global context. In so doing, they explore alternative conceptions of culture and place as they contribute to the reformulation of nation and region. If the majority of the scholarly studies presuppose binaries of Western/non-Western, national and regional, global and local, modern and non-modern, these papers go beyond such easy binaries. They argue that such binaries are inconsistent with the experiences and imaginations that inform a more complex world that people inhabit.
These papers come together on their common interest on Hyderabad and the Deccan. They bring together an interdisciplinary approach to the Deccan region which has a diverse history of language, religion, and caste. Finally, all the papers explore alternative conceptions of modernity that inform the making of a South Indian global experience.
Inside Looking Out: Imagining Migration in Hyderabad, India
Syed Ali, University of Virginia
There are two questions that are frequently asked about migrants: why do they leave, and what do they do once they get where they are going? Studies of immigration and ethnic behavior often look at how migrants in their new places conceive of and reproduce "home," as for example how pre-Revolutionary Tehran gets reproduced in Los Angeles, or how Pakistanis and Indians in Hong Kong think about India and Pakistan, though they may have never set foot in India or Pakistan. In this paper, I flip the focus—I examine how Muslims in Hyderabad ("home") construct the idea of "abroad," and how the reality of "abroad" affects those at "home." Based on extensive interviews conducted in Hyderabad (1996–98), I ask two interrelated questions: how Muslims in Hyderabad imagine the outside world (specifically the United States and Saudi Arabia), and what effects the flow of money, ideas, and people have on social organization of Muslims in Hyderabad.
Identities Lost (or Never Gained): Language and the Making of Borders in Contemporary South India
Lisa Mitchell, Columbia University
This paper examines 19th-century attempts to articulate and define regional identities within South India—regionalisms which preceded, and may even have competed with, the construction of the linguistic politico-cultural identities upon which South India was reorganized in the 1950s. It argues that language as a basis for the construction of regional identities was only one of a number of bases available during the 19th century, but one which eventually overshadowed and erased other incipient contenders. In particular, this paper will focus on several early 19th-century texts—arguably the first examples of their genres to be written by South Indians—which attempt to articulate and construct a Deccan regional identity by cataloguing the literary production of the region, as well as attempting to define and fix the geographical limits of such a region. Crossing disciplinary borders of socio-cultural anthropology, history, geography, and literary production, this paper also questions the naturalness of the borders which divide contemporary South India upon linguistic lines.
Mapping Tollywood: The Cultural Geography of ‘Ramoji Film City’ in Hyderabad
Shanti Kumar, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Telugu cinema provides a rich source of imagination. Historically, south Indian audiences drew upon movies for an understanding of the modern world. More recently, diasporic and local communities increasingly look to the celluloid world for their understanding of global transformations. Telugu cinema has come to be a rich resource for a variety of cultural, economic, and political practices. One manifestation of this was the rise of the charismatic celluloid figure of N. T. Rama Rao whose regionalist Telugu Desam Party significantly altered the political landscape for Andhra Pradesh. Another is the symbiotic relationship between the diasporic Telugu community, the cyber savvy Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh Chandrababu Naidu and media moguls such as Ramoji Rao. Hyderabad’s rise as a high-tech global city has been accompanied by its increasing prominence as a major center for film industry. Ramoji Film City is a concrete embodiment of such a phenomenon.
This paper will critically map the cultural geography of Hyderabad’s film city as a way of tracing the intimate relationship between Telugu culture, material relations and its distinctive understandings of globality in south India.
The Political Economy of Migration in Twentieth-Century Deccan
Christopher Chekuri, University of Wisconsin, Madison
This paper explores the domestic precursors to the current global migratory patterns from the costal districts of Andhra Pradesh into Hyderabad and the Deccan region. In particular, this paper will explore the history of agricultural migration between the rich deltaic regions into the interior ‘dry’ lands of the Deccan during the later 20th century. This migration was instrumental in the redefinition of Hyderabad as a metropolitan space, the emergence of region-centered politics, and the seething tensions in the cultural politics of the two historically diverse regions of Andhra and Telangana. This study seeks to go beyond macro-economic explanations based on planning, irrigation, and development, by turning towards the caste dynamics, regional politics, literary productions so as to arrive at a complex history of the migrant farmers’ experiences.
By examining popular Telugu novels and short stories (eg. Regadi Vitthulu by Chandralatha; Bhumi by Allam Rajayya) and other influential historical and political writings of our times, this paper seeks to understand the confluence of identities, migration, and modernities in the making of a global south India.
Organizer: Manju Parikh, College of Saint Benedict, Minneapolis
Chair and Discussant: Mary Katzenstein, Cornell University
Keywords: women, political representation, electoral system, reservations/quotas.
Since the 1980s Indian women’s activism has increased public awareness about gender discrimination. As women’s grievances gained public sympathy, there was support for increasing women’s participation in politics. This panel focuses on reservations (quotas) as a means to enhance women’s political representation.
Indian women’s representation in parliament has never been more than eight percent. Frustrated by the present electoral system, many women leaders have demanded reservation of thirty-three percent of seats in the parliament and state assemblies. This was the intent of the 81st Constitutional Amendment Bill (in 1996) and two other unsuccessful bills (in 1998 and 1999). Quotas for women’s representation are not unknown. During 1920s and 1930s, the British government offered representation through quotas to weaken support for Indian independence. Geraldine Forbes offers valuable insights by examining the experience of reservations to increase women’s political participation during the colonial period.
At present, reservations are controversial. While there is support for enhancing women’s political representation, there is no consensus on the means, even among the feminists and political activists. Manju Parikh explores the arguments for and against reservations, and other proposed alternatives. A positive step in 1993, the parliament passed the 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendments, reserving one third of the seats in municipal bodies, and in village and district panchayats (councils), including the position of sarpanch (council chairperson). Usha Thakkar examines and reflects on the experience of women who have chaired village councils. All the three presenters will comment on reservations and their utility in increasing women’s political representation.
"Women of Character, Grit, and Courage": The Reservation Debate in Historical Perspective
Geraldine Forbes, State University of New York, Oswego
Through the India Act of 1919, Provincial legislatures enfranchised some women between 1921 and 1930. There was a second round at increasing female enfranchisement in 1927. Some women, dissatisfied with their meager representation, saw reservations as a solution, while others supported the Indian National Congress and its advocacy of universal franchise.
Women’s main concern was adding more women to the voting rolls, so they agreed to reservations and a patchwork design allowing wives to vote in some provinces, literate women in others, and the wives of military officers in still others. But party leaders were reluctant to field women when they had a sure win with a man and when the 1937 election results were in, the percentage of women candidates never exceeded the percentage of seats reserved for women. The Indian Constitution later satisfied these women with the provision of universal franchise.
The 81st Amendment to the Indian Constitution is debated as if reservations have no history. This paper revisits the issue of reservations for women in the making of the India Act of 1935 and the various other schemes to secure women more representation. In the end, the organized women’s groups supported Congress, partly out of loyalty, but also because they had come to agree with Muthalakshmi Reddy that they needed "women of character, grit, and courage" and reservations were not the answer. Finally, I will consider the fate of women in the 1937 elections and the relationship of these debates to the discussion of the 81st amendment.
Are Reservations the Way to Engender the Indian Parliament and State Legislatures?
Manju Parikh, College of Saint Benedict, Minneapolis
To the dismay of Indian women, the 81st Constitutional Amendment Bill of 1996, reserving for women one third of seats in the national parliament and state assemblies failed to pass, as did two further attempts in 1998 and 1999. Rationale for these bills lies in the Indian women’s political activism resurfacing in the last three decades.
Frustrated by the mainstream political parties’ lack of understanding, women activists built autonomous political organizations, and led protests and movements to address their gender based discrimination. As these women’s movements gained public support, major parties saw the need to woo the women’s vote and offered support for reservation of seats for women in their election manifestos in 1996.
The bills were introduced but faced considerable opposition and hostility from the male power elite. Simultaneously, women activists and feminists began to debate whether reservations were the best policy for ensuring genuine political representation. Some are extremely critical of the undemocratic political system, with widespread corruption, kickbacks, violence and other unethical practices. Would not reservations for women be misused by male politicians to further their nepotistic ambitions?
Conversely, supporters of reservations argue that undemocratic political system is responsible for women not doing well. Thus reservations will enable women candidates to enter and reform these political institutions. Ultimately, I conclude that as long as women choose a strategy of reservations (legislative or party-based), women leaders would have to persuade the power elite that their political representation is a political entitlement, yet would benefit the whole nation.
Towards Empowerment: A Study of Women Sarpanchs in Maharashtra
Usha Thakkar, Institute of Research on Gandhian Thought, Mumbai
The 73rd Amendment to the Indian Constitution empowered rural women in 1993 by reserving one third of seats in the Panchayats (village and district councils), including the position of Sarpanchs (chairpersons). Unexpectedly, the experience of women’s participation in Panchayats has been positive. I interviewed 145 women Sarpanchs in Maharashtra, and found that many discovered their potential with new opportunities but also faced obstacles from local power holders. Multiple factors such as family background and support, local politics and personal leadership qualities affected their abilities as leaders. What is important, however, is the fact that the Panchayats have offered them opportunities to show their grit and determination to make a difference in politics.
Experiences of rural women leaders are important in the context of the current debate over the 81st Amendment, which would introduce reserved seats for women at the level of national parliament and state assemblies. When critics of reservation raise doubts about women’s abilities to function well in politics, the research on the new Panchayats shows that these women have brought positive results in the areas of health, education, and activities related to rural development. Given the opportunities, women can evolve their ways of working in the male-dominated world of politics. Although the reservation policy by itself is not enough for political empowerment of women, positive gains have been made. Reservations need to be accompanied with support from the political system, percolation of democratic values at the grass-root level and acceptance of the feminist perspective in the public sphere.
Organizer: Lawrence A. Babb, Amherst College
Chair: Douglas E. Haynes, Dartmouth College
Discussant: David Rudner, Independent Scholar
The Vaisyas are the forgotten varna. Brahmans and Ksatriyas have received the lion’s share of scholarly attention, both separately and in their relationship to each other. Sudras and Untouchables, too, have had their share of the limelight, particularly with regard to issues of purity and pollution. But although there has been a scattering of important studies of Vaisyas, they have generally languished at the periphery of modern studies of South Asian culture and social organization. Considering the historical importance of castes wearing this label, and especially their importance to the modern Indian polity, this is as surprising as it is deplorable. This panel will address basic issues concerning the Vaisyas as a social category. Who are the Vaisyas? How does this category fit with other varna categories? What is the relationship between the Vaisya category and on-the-ground social reality? By addressing these and similar questions, we hope to lend much impetus to studies of Vaisyas and other middle-level castes.
Alchemies of Violence: On the Cultural Identity of Rajasthani Traders
Lawrence A. Babb, Amherst College
This paper deals with the cultural identity of Rajasthani trading castes as expressed in their origin narratives. We normally think of trading communities as Vaisyas. But although the term "Vaisya" is certainly used in Rajasthan—both by non-traders and traders themselves in self-identification—the Vaisyas varna category turns out to be only weakly salient in this region. Far more important than varna to trader identity have been their political, economic, and social relationships with other groups, especially the Rajputs. Examination of trader origin narratives reveals a strong tendency, with some exceptions, for trading groups to claim Rajput ancestry. This claim is typically coupled with the idea that violence, a trait natural and proper to Rajputs, is renounced by the ancestral traders as a result of encounters with Brahman sages (in the case of Hindu traders) or Jain ascetics (in the case of Jains). The result is a total inversion of the group’s social personality in which traders emerge as the cultural "others" of Rajputs.
Perspectives on Vaisyas from the Dharmasastras
Mary McGee, Columbia University
Drawing on early dharma literature and commentaries, with specific reference to the Yajnavalkyasmrti, this paper sketches out brahmanical views on Vaisyas. Particular attention is given to the duties and privileges of Vaisyas, the range of occupations allowed to the Vaisya class, and dharmasastric guidelines on interactions of other classes with Vaisyas. This presentation on the social category of Vaisyas as idealized in dharma texts will provide an important background for scholars analyzing the actual practices and social reality of Vaisyas in later historical and contemporary contexts.
Jains, Caste, and Hierarchy in North Gujarat
John Cort, Denison University
The nature of caste among the Jains has