[ South Asia Table of Contents ]
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Organizer: Brendan LaRocque, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Chair: Munis D. Faruqui, Bowdoin College
Discussant: Richard B. Barnett, University of Virginia
Keywords: state, empire, sovereignty, power, religion.
This panel explores the ways in which states established and maintained their power and authority in premodern South Asia by analyzing historical developments that have conventionally been considered either as a hindrance or irrelevant to the efficient functioning of state power. Challenging traditional scholarly assumptions regarding the respective roles of princely rebellions, religious leadership, sainthood, and family networks, this panel will argue that these phenomena in fact represented central arenas wherein states negotiated their power and expanded their control over human, cultural, and material resources.
The papers elucidate the underlying strategies for state-building employed by particular social, political, and religious groups in Portuguese Goa, and the Vijaynagara and Mughal empires. Reworking current theoretical models of early modern states, the papers suggest the inadequacy of such concepts as bureaucratic absolutism and patrimonial/feudal administration as means of fully understanding the functioning of early modern empires in India. Each paper further proceeds to identify and elaborate the specific social, political, religious, and economic strategies used by the various groups under consideration, thus enhancing our understanding of the patterns and particularities of early modern state-building. In so doing this panel contributes to the current scholarship wrestling with how best to understand the workings of power, authority, sovereignty and legitimacy in precolonial South Asia.
Merchants, Religious Associations, and the Mughal State
Brendan LaRocque, University of Wisconsin, Madison
This paper analyzes the political and economic dimensions of religious associations in early modern India, focusing on these groups’ relationship to the Mughal state. I argue that certain of these associations played a central role in the organization and protection of mercantile interests, and in this capacity exerted considerable influence at the Mughal court. Hitherto historians have overlooked the political role of such groups due to a tendency to recognize only the more formal types of mercantile organization based in charters and law, along with focusing only upon official, contractual types of relations between merchants and the state. These notions, based on a European model of civil society, fail to adequately account for the less "formal," but equally effective, kind of civic organization found in early modern India in the form of "religious" associations. Thus the perennial presence at the imperial court of leaders of religious groups (sampradayas, panths, etc.) has conventionally been seen as a gauge of a particular emperor’s curiosity in or tolerance of diverse spiritual traditions. But this view overlooks the manner in which such leaders represented the interests of their followers and devotees to the state, which ensured that merchant groups were provided protection by state officials, and gave the merchants a voice in the development of trade and tax policies. By means of an innovative interpretation of documents such as religious biographies and devotional literature, this paper demonstrates how such writings provide a rich, but largely untapped, source of information concerning state-merchant relations.
Princely Rebellion and Empire Building in Mughal India
Munis D. Faruqui, Bowdoin College
Princely rebellions against Mughal emperors have long been ignored by historians or simply dismissed as politically destablizing. This paper seeks to revise both perspectives by arguing that princely rebellions were critical for the construction and continued dynamism of the Mughal Empire. By examining a series of princely rebellions in the 17th century, this paper will argue that the contestory nature of rebellions in fact sharply focused the energies of the different imperial combatants enabling their access to, and harnessing of political, religious, ethnic, economic and intellectual networks. These networks, I contend, were the real foundations of Mughal power. Regardless of who emerged the victor, dynastic ties to old support networks were thus either renewed and/or new networks accommodated within a well established framework of imperial authority. This process was frequent, occurring on average every twenty years, through much of the 17th century. Princely rebellions allowed for a measure of fluidity within the Mughal state structure that was often lacking in more bureaucratized or rationalized state structures such as that of the Ottoman and Ching empires. Efforts to reduce the possibility of princely rebellions towards the end of the seventeenth century ultimately presaged the collapse of the princely institution and, thus, I argue, the Mughal Empire itself.
Biography of a Corpse: Discourses of Incorruptibility and the Making of a Portuguese Saint
Pamila Gupta, Columbia University
This paper explores sainthood in an early modern colonial context, suggesting that a religious order and the Portuguese colonial state used the "incorruptible" corpse of a Spanish missionary to legitimate their practices in Goa, India. Francisco Javier arrived in 1542 to set up a Jesuit mission in Goa under the patronage of the Portuguese. Ten years later, he died in an attempt to set up a Jesuit mission in China. It was upon discovery that his corpse had failed to decompose after death that the Jesuits took charge of moving him to Goa. The arrival of his miraculous body in 1554 in this Portuguese colonial city was a celebrated affair. The Viceroy led the procession which carried Xavier’s decorated corpse to the Jesuit College of St. Paul, and a Goan public was on hand to witness the numerous miracles of his corpse. Portugal’s request for Xavier’s papal canonization followed thereafter and Jesuits in both colony and metropole wrote biographies of Xavier during this period of his canonization "process"(1556–1622). In this paper, I argue that these Jesuit biographers rely on certain discursive strategies concerning the "incorruptibility" of Xavier’s corpse after death to make a case for Xavier’s sainthood and his place in Goa. At the same time, these biographies provide valuable information concerning the workings of church and state in both colony and metropole. Thus, instead of dismissing early Jesuit biographies of Francis Xavier as hagiography, I recognize their historical value in revealing the political weight of a dead body.
Rethinking State Formation and Sovereignty in Precolonial India
Christopher Chekuri, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Conventional approaches to the study of early modern empires in South Asia suggest that a religiously constituted worldview is central to notions of sovereignty and kinship. It is nowhere more baldly apparent than in the so-called frontiers of the Islamic World as in the case of Vijayanagara Empire of the Deccan region during the early modern Period. Much of the historiography of Vijayanagara Empire is deeply marked by its hindu-ness as opposed to the Muslim Deccani Sultanates of Golconda and Add Shahi. In studies of South Asian empires, the region is assumed to be an anarchic, asocial space where states or empires constantly find themselves in a competitive relationship with other states. Therefore their capacity to achieve real interests is simply a function of military or economic power. Norms of sovereignty are simply viewed as masking real interests. This paper questions the foundations of such conceptions in the following ways:
(a): that the empire is constituted by several familial/household states that operate within the region but not solely beholden to either Vijayanagara or the Golconda or the Adil Shahi empires. Coparcener conflict is endemic to all households including ‘imperial’ households.
(b): this paper views the household states of early modern Deccan as active polities in an ‘international system’ of a different time and space. Rather than examining individual polities, such as the Vijayanagara or Golconda Sultanate in isolation, this paper suggests that the simultaneous examination of the polities and the interactions between them reveal certain common norms and ethics, which inform notions of sovereignty.
Organizer and Chair: Anita M. Weiss, University of Oregon
Discussants: William L. Richter, Kansas State University; Saeed Shafqat, Columbia University
Keywords: civil society, contemporary period, Pakistan, political empowerment, social change.
Civil society, that arena of organizations existing between the family and the state, has been championed in unprecedented ways by the government of Pervez Musharaf since coming to power through a coup in October 1999. This is particularly significant given that it followed eleven years of democratic governments which had paid lip service to empowering the citizenry, but did little to implement their rhetoric. We now, however, see the state as promoting inclusion, particularly in its efforts to dialogue with civil society groups promoting women’s rights, community-based self-sufficiency, and the like.
There are significant regional implications to this nurturing of civil society by a military regime. Many states within Asia have been ruled by military (or quasi-military) governments. Scholars tend to regard such governments as restrictive, not expansive, in their potential to empower civil society. These papers examine the extent to which this is true in Pakistan today. Robert Nichols interrogates the rhetoric and the reality of the government’s promotion of civil society in the country. Christopher Candland assesses the treatment of NGOs by both the Sharif and Musharraf regimes. Anita Weiss and Farzana Bari analyze the on-going process of women’s organizations’ dialogue with the military government and their efforts to promote women’s voices in civil society. William Richter and Saeed Shafqat, the discussants, hold divergent views on politics and civil society in their own work, and will spark a lively discussion exploring the question of the possibility of a military government having long-term effects on empowering civil society.
Civil Society and Development Discourse under the Musharraf Regime
Robert Nichols, Richard Stockton College
This paper explores a key promise—and contradiction—of the military regime in power since October 1999: that internationally-advocated social and political reforms (including good governance, political devolution, and the empowerment of civil society) can be promoted by a government formed and maintained by a non-democratic, centralized authority.
Even before the change of government, Pakistan’s civil society advocates in the press, policy institutes, and NGOs framed persuasive arguments about the limits of state-driven development and about the need for political and institutional reform, devolution of control and power, and increased local participation in development processes. Since October 1999, the Musharraf regime has repeatedly stressed similar goals as well as ending corruption, ensuring efficient government, planning for local elections, and encouraging non-governmental sources of social services.
This paper examines several questions relevant to this continuing official strategy and discourse. To what extent has the rhetoric of civil society empowerment been matched by specific political and administrative initiatives? Second, to what degree has the state integrated pre-October 1999 civil society initiatives into regime policies and polemics? Third, has the Musharraf government selectively endorsed specific neo-liberal and sustainable development strategies, perhaps to conform to international structural adjustment guidelines? Is, indeed, civil society being unbridled?
Democracy and Non-Governmental Organizations: Lessons from Pakistan
Christopher Candland, Wellesley College
Before the elected Muslim League government of Nawaz Sharif was removed from office by Army Chief General Pervez Musharraf, it launched a campaign against non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as indecent, Westernized, feminist organizations bent on "destroying Pakistan from within with financial assistance from abroad" (Ahmed 1995). Thousands of NGOs were dissolved. NGO leaders were interrogated and arrested. The military government, in contrast, has involved NGOs in national development programs and appointed NGO leaders in senior policy positions, notably in the Ministries of Labour, Manpower, and Rural Development; Education; Environment; and Women’s Development.
This paper examines the relationship between NGOs and the elected and unelected governments in Pakistan since 1995. It argues that it is not authoritarian governments (Fisher 1998), but political parties, that are the greatest opponent of independent NGOs and the rise of civil society in Pakistan.
References Cited:
Ahmad, Ishtaq, "Agents of the Foreign Agencies?" The Nation, (4 December 1995), 4.
Fisher, Julie, Nongovernments: NGOs and the Political Development of the Third World, West Hartford: Kumarian Press, 1998.
Struggling for a Political Voice: Women Contesting the System in Pakistan
Anita M. Weiss, University of Oregon; Farzana Bari, Quaid-e-azam University, Pakistan
This paper examines the on-going process of women’s organizations’ dialogue with the military government, particularly its efforts to influence policy, change existing discriminatory laws, and promote women to have a voice in civil society. It identifies key issues that women’s organizations have mobilized around, the range of ways in which various women’s groups are responding to these issues, and analyzes the larger implications of these actions for the overall growth and empowerment of civil society in the country.
Organizer: Kelly L. Pemberton, University of California, Berkeley
Chair: Joyce B. F1ueckiger, Emory University
Discussant: Tony K. Stewart, North Carolina State University
Keywords: Indo-Pakistan, religion, performance studies, gender.
This panel considers the ways in which text and performance can reflect and challenge notions of distinct community and religious identities. Our papers address evidence of shared idioms of piety and sanctity as these emerge in the language of Panjabi qissa texts, Dhadi performance, and ritual practice at Sufi shrines. Communities and religious practitioners define their identities at critical junctures in the intersection of social, political, and economic discourses. At these symbol-laden nodes, we seek to elucidate how "normative" representational frameworks (of values, beliefs, and practices) often stand in stark contrast to cultural practice. By focusing on three apparently different fields of symbolic action—hagiographic narratives, commemorative oral recitations, and ritual observances—this panel will demonstrate how language and performance can operate to produce understandings of identity that are dialogical in process. We will further demonstrate that at the heart of this action lie shifts between modes of social action and alternative discursive fields, sometimes cutting across arenas that are often considered distinct. This approach will allow us to re-assess some of the discussions that have problematized the very notion of community in South Asia. Such a re-assessment is especially compelling for understanding complex and constantly shifting inter-communal relationships in light of the politically charged ways in which social groups differentiate themselves and draw boundaries in the subcontinent today.
Dissonant Memories: Recontextualising the Sikh Past in Dhadi Memory Delivery
Michael Nijhawan, Heidelberg University
Dhadi once denoted a specific form of musical, devotional, and commemorative practice that, until the mid-twentieth century, was shared among different religious and social segments of the Panjab. My paper considers the transitions of Dhadi, both as representational practice and as a form of media recognizable in its combination of traditional narrative and musical genres. I focus upon how Sikh composers have re-evaluated narrative, rhetoric, and sonic concepts of Dhadi since the 1930’s, beginning with an assessment of pre-partition Dhadi publications composed by Sohan Singh Seetal, and continuing with recent anthropological fieldwork with Sikh Dhadi performers in the Panjab. I pursue two key questions. First, how do the transitions in Dhadi memory delivery reflect issues of political violence? This question highlights the dialectical relationship between historical processes and choices of generic and performative style. Second, I ask how we may understand Dhadi as the embodiment of dissonant memories. The discourse through which performative practice is reevaluated as a form of Sikh Dhadi is located on a different temporal axis than those changes that occur on the plane of performative and musical apprenticeship. I therefore draw upon ethnographical data in focusing upon the complex relationship between musical form and collective memory.
Alternative Imaginings: Shared Piety in Panjabi Popular Narrative, c. 1850–1900
Farina Mir, Cornell University
My paper will explore representations of religious discourse and practices in late nineteenth-century renditions of the Panjabi qissa (story, epic) Hir-Ranjha. I argue that representations of religious discourse and practices in Hir-Ranjha texts, which privilege belief and participation in the heterodox religious practices associated with pir (saint) veneration, constitute a "spiritual community" which transcends the normative boundaries of the Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh religious traditions to include members of all three. In contrast to an emphasis in the existing historiography of colonial Panjab upon the rise of religious communalism in the region from the mid-nineteenth century onward, this paper will show that representations of piety in the oral traditions and popular literature of the period did not re-inscribe a narrowly defined "religious" community. In contrast, I argue, poets sought to reinterpret the definition of pious action by using the qissa as a discursive terrain. My goal is to delineate the ways in which the Panjabi popular imagination, as seen through a reading of the ubiquitous qissa tradition, represented community solidarities that were absent in arenas of formal politics. Despite this absence, these representations suggest a rethinking of the religious/ political solidarities that currently define Panjab’s colonial history.
A House of Miracles for One and All: Sufi Shrines, Islamic Identity, and the Synthesis of (Sub-) Cultures in India Today
Kelly L. Pemberton, University of California, Berkeley
The Sufi shrine evokes a range of images that simultaneously reinforce its role as an Islamic institution and highlight its viability as a symbol of national integration. This paper examines two activities important in the cycle of ritual life at the shrines of Mu’in ud-din Chishti (Ajmer) and Sharaf ud-din Maneri (Bihar) today: the performance of vows and the offering of prayers to the deceased shaikh. The manner, place, and role of these activities provides insight into two issues surrounding identity. First, I demonstrate how ritual performances can generate ambivalent views—in both performers and audiences—about the nature of spiritual power itself as ambiguous and indeterminate, which makes its explanation fraught with contradictions. Second, I ask how and when the question of identity becomes relevant in the context of ritual performance. Despite their local roles as multifunctional institutions, the shrines in my survey are often identified as primarily "Islamic." Such a view underscores the tenacity of beliefs that there exist "normative" markers of identity upon which turn notions of "authentic" and "inauthentic" practice, and which, at least in the shrine milieu, exist in tension with ritual activities that may be seen as accommodating or incorporating non-Muslim beliefs and practices.
Organizer and Chair: Sylvia Vatuk, University of Illinois, Chicago
Discussant: Erin Moore, University of Southern California
Indian feminists have focused much effort on pressing for legislative measures against gender-based discrimination and various socially-institutionalized forms of violence against women. In the mid-1950s they were involved in lobbying for the enactment of a reformed Hindu Code and Special Marriage Act and, in 1961, the first Dowry Prohibition Act. In the 1980s they helped design criminal laws against rape, sexual harassment, widow immolation, prenatal sex-determination, dowry harassment and murder, and domestic violence more generally and amend the law banning dowry gifts. They also pressed for the passage of the Family Courts Act (1984), to provide a structure for the resolution of marital disputes that would be easier for women to navigate and result in quicker and more equitable outcomes. But as legal anthropologists point out, the pre-existing cultural context within which reformist laws are applied often militates against their effectiveness, especially where the rights of women and other marginalized social groups are concerned. They typically continue to be disadvantaged, not only in terms of decisions rendered but in their ability or willingness even to utilize the state’s judicial machinery. These papers, by scholars who have recently done ethnographic research on issues of women, marriage and the law, address the question of what, in practice, the law does for women who are embroiled in marital disputes. They also show how these women cope with, contest, and negotiate with the authority of the state throughout the dispute-resolution process and as they attempt to overcome the personal and social trauma such disputes entail.
Having Her Say: Authority and Resistance in the Calcutta Family Court
Srimati Basu, DePauw University
Courtrooms are complex sites for cultural and material negotiation: the everyday dynamics of Family Courts reveal contestations around subjectivity and repression, meanings of marriage, family and the distribution of power and resources, the intersection of publicly mediated authority and the private domestic realm. Family Courts in India were set up with the alleged goal of speedily mediating disputes in the area of Family Law in ways that were transparent and accessible to clients; feminist groups advocated for these courts as venues where women could potentially speak their piece without being disadvantaged by lesser access to wealth and legal resources. In practice, the courts create new legal subject positions for women while also reinscribing scripts about gendered responsibilities and privileges. In this paper, I want to present some of my ethnographic work in the Calcutta Family Courts to demonstrate these forms of gendered agency and manifestations of power and authority, and to analyze the ways in which the legal realm illuminates cultural and material dynamics.
Domestic Love: The Negotiation of Moral Parameters at a Legal Aid Cell in Delhi
Perveez Mody, Cambridge University
This paper examines the ways in which women activists of a non-government organization negotiate and intervene in domestic disputes that are brought before them. In particular, it focuses on cases involving self-arranged or love-marriage couples. Each case is heard in a closed room by a number of women activists of divergent ages and social backgrounds who provide a running commentary of bawdy interjections, subtle humor and the occasional off-hand sympathetic comment usually directed to the girl or her parents. The cases often concern serious injustices but the activists sorely lack sufficient financial, legal and logistical resources to actually gain justice for the aggrieved parties, and the latter are most reluctant to opt for separation or divorce (though this is changing with time). However, I argue that the drama and evident enjoyment in the details of each hearing also generates an important and strikingly critical moral discourse on the nature of female sexuality in North Indian society.
A Contradictory Task for an Indian Wife: Cutting Off the Marital Tie
Siru Maunuksela-Aura, University of Helsinki
A woman’s identity, social position among kin and in the family and as a culturally constructed person still depends heavily on her marriage in India. A woman’s bonds with her husband are so strong and complete that they are not ever supposed to be severed. This paper, which is based on anthropological fieldwork among 50 divorced or separated women in Bangalore, focuses on women’s ways of cutting down the connections with their husband after their marriage has broken down. Women experience various contradictions during this long lasting process. Some women want to break off the marital tie totally, whereas others want to maintain "something" of it. Nevertheless, breaking the bond is essential if a woman wants to move on to reconstruct her life. This paper looks at different meanings of the legal proceedings in this process. All women do not necessarily obtain a legal divorce or judicial separation although their marriage is over. There are as many reasons to avoid it as to go for it, for example, children, the status or a religious or moral ground. The legal battle may be a woman’s last effort to cut the marital connection—or to maintain it. All in all, women’s multiple ways of coping with the contradictory task of cutting the marital ties reveal both their vulnerability and their creativity as well as the flexibility embedded in the cultural constructions of gender.
Muslim Women’s Access to Divorce by Khul’: An Analysis of a Qazi’s Divorce Register
Sylvia Vatuk, University of Illinois, Chicago
The Dissolution of Muslim Marriages Act, enacted in 1939 under pressure from influential segments of the Muslim religious establishment, provides a means by which a Muslim woman, on certain broadly-defined grounds, can obtain a civil divorce. In most large cities cases under this Act are filed in the Family Court, established under a 1984 Act to deal with disputes between husband and wife. Elsewhere they are handled by the regular civil courts. A Muslim woman seeking a divorce has another option, however, one that does not involve a court appearance. She may approach her husband directly or ask a third party (usually a Muslim cleric) to ask him to agree to a negotiated divorce, or khul’. My research on Muslim women and personal law in Chennai and Hyderabad indicates that the number of women divorcing their husbands by khul’ greatly exceeds the number who file successfully under the DMMA and probably approaches that of women divorced unilaterally by talaq. Both women and men prefer this method of dissolving a marriage, though for different reasons. I supplement findings from ethnographic field investigations conducted in 1998–99 with data from a qazi’s recent divorce register to draw some conclusions about women’s and men’s motives for choosing to divorce by khul’, the procedure for obtaining khul’, the role of the qazi, the terms negotiated, and the implications for both sexes of choosing—or being prevailed upon to choose—this method of ending a marriage.
Organizer: Ian C. Petrie, University of Pennsylvania
Chair: David Arnold, University of London
Discussant: Richard Drayton, Cambridge University
Keywords: botany, demography, agriculture, psychiatry.
The history of science has received in the last decade a renewed interest from historians of South Asia within which different historiographical positions on the status, use and authority of "science" have been asserted. The main emphasis of this recent interest has been to interrogate the category of "colonial science" (following from Basalla) by posing instead fresh questions about the social context and the cultural norms that have underpinned the making of different scientific ventures.
The papers in this panel seek to further given understandings on this growing field of historical scholarship by intervening in two ways. In the first instance, the specific genealogies of emergent disciplinary practices in their social/institutional context will be mapped. Questions of the epistemological status of these practices will be interrogated by addressing the issue of "translation"—an issue that alludes not only to the important question of languages but also the manner in which the "universal" is interrupted in the face of cultural difference. Secondly, the nature of the Indian scientific enterprise will be discussed in the context of power relations between the colonial/ metropolitan order and the Indian scientific intelligentsia. By bringing together papers from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century, the changing interface between knowledges, agents and institutions will be dissected while simultaneously exploring the ideology and practice of science.
Science, Colonialism, and Romanticism
David Arnold, University of London
One of Victorian Britain’s leading naturalists, J. D. Hooker had a vital but largely unexplored relationship with science in 19th-century India, particularly through his travels in India and the Himalayas in 1848–50. Through his interests in ethnology as well as botany and though connections with individuals like Hodgson and Darwin, Hooker linked metropolitan and colonial science and combined a Romantic approach to landscape with the scientific ‘discovery’ of the tropics. His Journal makes possible a re-evaluation of the aims, forms and contexts of Western science in India under the East India Company and the understanding of India in contemporary scientific discourse.
Translating Science in Nineteenth-Century India
Michael S. Dodson, Cambridge University
Translation has been noted to be the ‘central act’ of European imperialism and colonialism, for the part it has played in the gathering of legal-cultural information for administration and rule, but perhaps more importantly, for its role in enabling the construction of representations of the colonised as Europe’s ‘civilisational other.’ While translations of texts from Sanskrit, as well as other South Asian languages, into English have undoubtedly played an important part in these processes, it is the practices of translation from English-language texts which will allow historians to further interrogate, in the colonial context of nineteenth-century India, the connections between ideas of language, history, civilization, and science.
As such, this paper examines the translational practices prevalent in government educational institutions in north India during the mid-nineteenth century for the rendering of English language texts into South Asian languages, and the roles which these practices played in enabling both the colonial civilizing project to bring scientific education to Indians, and the simultaneous absorption, or co-optation, of ‘Western science’ into especially Indian intellectual ventures. Particular attention is paid to the development of a rigorous set of translational practices in Benares College under the leadership of James Ballantyne (1846–61) for rendering English-language science and philosophy into first Sanskrit, and then Hindi, Marathi and Bengali. The roles of ‘traditional’ pandits in facilitating this exercise are also interrogated, with a view to understanding the processes which led to the re-situating of Western science into the realm of indigenous Indian rationality by emergent Indian nationalists of the late nineteenth century.
Freud and His Indian Friends: Religion, Selfhood, and Psychoanalysis
Shruti Kapila, Oxford University
The Indian psychoanalytic movement engaged early, directly and critically with Freud. This paper will examine the nature of the Indian engagement with Freud in the first half of the twentieth century and the manner in which this critical encounter influenced Freud himself. The paper will address the salience of the distinction between European and Indian appropriations, understandings and uses of Freud by addressing questions of religion and modernity, civilizational identity, and the fashioning of a modern selfhood. The Indian movement predated many of its European equivalents with the founding of the Indian Psychoanalytical Society in 1922 in Calcutta, which in the same year received membership in Freud’s International Association even before such a status was accorded to the French body. Further by the mid-twenties, psychology was being taught in over a hundred academic institutions in India.
Freud had a long-standing interest in the Indian psychoanalytic enterprise. For over a decade (1919–33) he communicated with Girindrasehar Bose, the founding figure of Indian psychoanalysis. India became a critical site in classical psychoanalysis in particular, defining the acrimonious contours of debate between Freud and Jung on religion. Significantly, the Indian psychoanalytic movement mounted its difference with both Freud and Jung in the manner in which the question of religion was posed and understood. The Indian "classical" (in particular, the Indian philosophical tradition) was fastened to psychoanalytic interpretations on issues of religion and selfhood. This transaction of ideas between Freud and his Indian friends both transcended national boundaries and added complexity to existing debates over science and culture.
"Faith in Experts and the Soil of Bengal": Scientific Agriculture in Colonial India, c. 1870–1945
Ian C. Petrie, University of Pennsylvania
In spite, or perhaps by virtue, of the absence of a dramatic transformation such as that wrought by canal irrigation in the Punjab, the ‘stagnant’ Bengal Presidency offers a useful vantage on the application of science to agriculture under the Raj. A mounting sense of crisis in Bengal during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, marked by recurrent famines and epidemic malaria, elicited voluminous commentary on the putative scientific reformation of rural life. This paper explores how various contemporary actors envisioned the definition and objects of such a body of knowledge; the desired ends to which such expertise could be put; and through whose agency its ameliorative effects could best be realized. The colonial state increasingly sought to intervene in agriculture, by funding research, disseminating information and inputs and, eventually, regulating cropping patterns and marketing. These efforts took place parallel to or in active partnership with emergent local and international business and philanthropic interests. Critics of the official programme of agricultural intensification seized upon particular failures but rarely questioned its premises, evincing a persistent faith in the legitimacy and power of a protean ‘science.’ By the inter-war years, local elites and colonial officials shared a broad consensus: Bengal’s economy was to remain agricultural, but agriculture now was held to be too vital to be entrusted to ‘mere’ peasants. Instead, an interventionist and modernizing state apparatus, armed with science, was called upon to effect transformation in the name of ‘rural reconstruction,’ ‘nation building,’ or, by the 1930s, ‘development.’
The Cold War Science of Population: Demography, Kingsley Davis, and the Always-Already of Over-population in India
Sarah Hodges, Cambridge University
While the accuracy and appropriateness of the term ‘overpopulation’ to describe the ills of the Indian economy and society was hotly-contested throughout the first half of the twentieth century, by the second half of the century, no academic or policy discussion of these issues could begin without foregrounding India’s ‘population problem.’ Indeed over the course of the twentieth century, the idea of overpopulation became so naturalized, popular, and common-sensical that the contest just a few decades earlier surrounding the concept as an explanatory model for economic and social backwardness and a roadmap for intervention and ‘development’ quickly faded from sight. This success of overpopulation discourse was due in no small part to telling a profoundly ahistoric tale: that India was always poor and teeming, in short: overpopulated.
This paper attempts to disturb the smooth ahistoricity of overpopulation discourse by investigating a key moment in its institutionalization: the making of Kingsley Davis’s The Population of India and Pakistan (1951), and situating it amidst the contemporary reformulation of postwar global population politics and anxieties. An investigation of Davis’s work and the climate in which it was produced and circulated also helps us to understand the fundamental change which characterizes a history of population control in India: how the target of international and government policy efforts changed from being attitudes, to that of outcomes. While early efforts sought to convince, if not convert Indians to the modernizing philosophy of population control, subsequent programmes set their sights quite literally on statistical targets and thereby relinquished any claims which had been made on the world of attitude, affect and meaning.
Organizer: Shafique N. Virani, Harvard University
Chair and Discussant: Gail Minault, University of Texas, Austin
Keywords: Hinduism, Islam, South Asia, religion.
South Asia, a veritable kaleidoscope of religions, cultures and ethnicities, presents a dazzling array of ever shifting colors and patterns to the inquiring scholar. Perhaps it is due to the daunting complexity and fluidity of the phenomena "on the ground," combined with concepts inherited from the colonial era, that scholars have tended to wield inordinately strict categories in their investigations. Identifications such as "Muslim," "Hindu, "Shi’ a" and "Sunni," which should serve to enhance our inquiries, all too often are straitjackets, unnuanced terms that serve to obfuscate rather than assist our understanding. This panel explores the concept of "shared spiritualities" in South Asia by examining some of the numerous communities across the Subcontinent that display religious beliefs and activities that would seem to challenge standard, rather rigid and exclusive, categorizations. The panelists address this theme by exploring the Qadiri Sufi order in Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka, the Gupti and Mahapanth communities in Gujarat, and the articulation of an alternative Islamic history at commemorative gatherings in a number of Twelver Shi’i centers. In all instances, cases of both juncture and disjuncture of various religious traditions are examined and evaluated. Notably, instances of "shared spirituality" seem to emerge across regions, languages and sectarian identity. This panel thus presents a renewed challenge and fresh evidence for an invigorated discussion of the utility of normative constructions of religious categories in understanding religious phenomena.
Sufism in Tamil-Speaking South Asia: Evidence for Hindu-Muslim "Shared Spirituality"?
Susan Schomburg, Harvard University
This paper presents literary, ethnographic, and historical evidence related to the Qadiri Sufi order in Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka to explore the question of Hindu-Muslim "shared spirituality" in the Tamil speaking region. Specifically, the paper discusses four nineteenth-century Tamil epics on the life of Muhyiuddin ‘Abdul Qadir Gilani, festival events at four regional dargahs/shrine-type sites (at Kayal-pattinam, Madurai, Pottalpudur, and Trichy), and historical and literary evidence pertaining to a unique Muslim cult in the region, that of the Tamil Muslim "cittars" (siddhas). Taken together, these important aspects of Tamil Islamic culture suggest—indeed, demand recognition of—significant "sharing" between Tamil Muslim and local Hindu cultures. However, closer analysis of the phenomena under discussion suggests limitations and complexities of a "shared spiritualities" account. The paper presents a lens—a flexible typology—for examining shared ground between Hindu and Muslim communities of the Tamil-speaking region, and an analysis of the relative depth of the types of sharing. The typology suggests "aesthetic," "ethical," "ritual-scientific," and "mystical technique" arenas of cultural overlap, with "aesthetic" and "mystical technique" arenas of shared culture representing lesser and greater depth of "spiritual sharing," respectively. Finally, the paper suggests that scholars examining sharing between "Hindu" and Muslim religious cultures should acknowledge limitations and asymmetries of accommodative/absorptive capacities in the relationship. The strong, long-standing normative tradition within Islamic Tamil Qadiri culture, at least, supports this view.
Defying Binary Categories: A Gujarati Religious Community
Shafique N. Virani, Harvard University
A community that venerates the Bhagvad Gita and bases its allegiance to a Shi’i Imam on its interpretation of this text; cremates its dead and daily recites the Muslim profession of faith (shahada); and begins prayers with the sacred syllable OM and the first verse of the Quran, the Gupti community of Bhavnagar, Gujarat challenges the validity of our labels of "Hindu" and "Muslim" as binary and mutually exclusive categories. By studying this Gujarati caste of Kachhiya Patels, this paper examines the usefulness and limits of labels such as "Hindu" and "Muslim" and the ways in which they can overlap and be permeable. The word "gupt" means "secret" or "hidden" and, as the name indicates, the Guptis have a practice of hiding their faith from outsiders for fear of persecution. The community was established in Bhavnagar as a result of the pioneering activities of a certain Khodidas and his son Parmananddas. Far from being a hodge-podge of random "Islamic" and "Hindu" elements, the Gupti weltanschauung is carefully crafted from Sanskritic, Arabo-Persian and vernacular antecedents. As such, a study of this community reveals a great deal about the concept of "shared spirituality," both with regard to its utility as well as its limits.
Light, Light-bearer, and the Enlightened Word: Shared Spiritual Symbolism of ‘Mahapanth’ and Nizari Ismaili Communities of Gujarat
Neelima Shukla-Bhatt, Harvard University
A religious path followed by a large number of people in Gujarat is known variously as ‘Adidharma,’ ‘Bijdharma,’ ‘Sanatan Dharma,’ ‘Nijiya dharma,’ ‘Nijar dharma,’ and most commonly as ‘Mahadharma.’ Its followers believe that their faith represents the most ancient religious path known to mankind, first taught by Lord Shiva to his consort Parvati. Focusing exclusively on spiritual progress with the guidance of the guru, the path displays countless layers of religious beliefs, vocabulary, and symbolism—Vedic, Buddhist, Yogic, Tantric, tribal, and Islamic—interwoven in its rituals and literature.
During the medieval period, some Shi’i Muslim saints of the Nizari Ismaili sect traveled to Gujarat. They found parallels to their own religious path in two aspects of ‘Mahapanth’—its egalitarian approach, and its emphasis on spiritual teaching through a strong guru tradition. These saints adapted the beliefs and practices of the path to spread their own religious message by interweaving it into the core beliefs of ‘Mahapanth.’ Through centuries, the followers of these Ismaili saints have shared rituals and poetic symbolism with their ‘Mahapanthi’ counterparts. In the process, many Ismaili terms and poetic images have also entered the devotional songs of ‘Mahapanth.’ This paper will discuss some important aspects of religious symbolism such as divine light, carriers of this light like avatar (divine descent) and guru, and enlightened word of the guru, shared by both these communities. It will not only examine the areas of overlap in religious meaning but also areas where the connotations of the shared symbolism diverge in both contexts to make it suitable for each community.
South Asian Shia Majalis: Articulating Alterity through Invoking Outside Authorities
S. Akbar Hyder, University of Texas, Austin
In this paper I will explore the manner in which the articulation of an alternative Islamic history during the Twelver Shi’i gatherings in South Asia for the commemoration of the death of the Prophet’s grandson and Shi’i Imam al-Husayn (majalis-a aza) is constituted by free-floating, trans-communal significations and networks of relationships. I use the term ‘alternative’ in the sense that Islamic history, as articulated in the majfs context, interrogates and disrupts the dominant historical understandings within the larger (Sunni) Muslim community. I hope to bring these Shi’i interrogations and disruptions to light through discussing various written and oral texts originating from non-Shi’i sources that are invoked within the context of the majalis in order to legitimize the sectarian orientation of these gatherings. Hence the Bhagvad Gita along with Rumi’s masnavi and Edward Gibbon’s "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" become important legitimizing citations for South Asia’s Shi’i minority community in its quest to safeguard its own history and traditions in the face of perceived or real Sunni onslaughts on its institutions.
Organizer: Prakash Kumar, Georgia Institute of Technology
Chair: Papiya Ghosh, Patna University
Discussant: Henrika Kuklick, University of Pennsylvania
Keywords: modern India, history, twentieth century, social study of science.
This panel will map the complexities of the history of science and medicine in modern India by examining the role of religion, nationalism, gender, caste, and market in the shaping of science. Three of the papers deal with three distinct strands—gender and medicine, market and laboratory-research, and identity and ideology in modern science in late colonial India, while the fourth deals with the nexus of science and society in contemporary India. We clarify the contingent nature of scientific practices and highlight the role of individuals and groups in the process of scientific production.
Prakash Kumar studies the response of planter-businessmen towards sponsorship of laboratory experiments being conducted to improve indigo dye in early twentieth-century India. Kumar focuses on a particular chronological point in the 1900s, when slow progress of research and a situation of market uncertainty blocked investment in research. Maneesha Lal displays the impact of the ideology of purdah on medical research conducted by women physicians in late colonial India. Lal argues that despite limitations of funding and access, these women physicians shaped prevailing medical and public opinion. Abha Sur finds semblance of personal ideologies in the science of two prominent Indian scientists. She locates an imprint of brahmanical aesthetic on one, and egalitarian worldview on the work of another. Banu Subramaniam challenges the rhetoric of Hindu nationalists in contemporary India, who claim to facilitate a convergence between Indian spirituality and Western science. She tests their claim by examining the content of science envisioned by them.
Profit and Science: Business and Laboratories at Crossroads in British India, 1897–1930
Prakash Kumar, Georgia Institute of Technology
This paper explores the context in which indigo-planters/businessmen in British India stopped investing in the laboratories set up to experiment with and improve natural indigo. The beginning of the commercial production of cheaper synthetic indigo by the German corporation BASF in 1897 had provided the primary impetus for starting these experiments.
Since the year 1903 a sudden downslide came in the quantum of planters’ investment in laboratory research. Using documents from the Bihar State Archives (India) and new trade information from the BASF, I will investigate the boundaries of Indian businessmen’s initiatives in sponsoring scientific experiments. By examining the content of laboratory experiments on indigo, a connection will be illustrated between planters’ waning interest in the experiments and the slow pace of results from the laboratories from that year. However, I will argue that the planters’ lack of faith in laboratory experiments also resulted from their ongoing experience with the financial realities of market forces. I will cite price, production, and profit statistics for both natural and synthetic indigo to clarify the financial aspects of the competition between the two products.
Using information from the Indian Planters’ Gazette, my paper will argue that bad crop-years at crucial points of time also shaped planters’ decision about investing in science. In a market wherein competition, bad crops, and the failure on part of the scientists to deliver immediate results created a situation of uncertainty, the planter/businessman chose other avenues for his capital.
Practicing Science: Language and Culture of Modern Science In India
Abha Sur, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
On November 24, 1937 as the procession made its way to the crematorium, tens of thousands of people poured out on to the streets of Calcutta to pay their last respects to Jagadis Chandra Bose, India’s first and undoubtedly the most popular physicist. Bose’s researches in the generation and transmission of microwaves and especially in plant physiology had fired the popular imagination. His widely professed vision of the grand unity of nature, which permeated his science, found ardent supporters in poets and scientists alike.
However, Bose’s influence on Indian scientists was but ephemeral. The succeeding generation of Indian scientists, notable among them C. V. Raman, Meghnad Saha, and S. N. Bose, despite close physical proximity to J. C. Bose, maintained a safe distance from the uniquely defining aspects of his research—the invocation of philosophy and his plea for abandoning compartmentalization of science.
Their desire to pursue value neutral science notwithstanding, a close reading of the scientific papers of C. V. Raman and Meghnad Saha reveals the influence of social relations and of differing ideologies in their scientific writings. In this paper I will analyze the confluence of colonialism, nationalism, and caste in the production and content of modern science in India. I will illustrate that while the imprint of a Brahminical aesthetic is clearly visible on the science of C. V. Raman, the science and science policy of Meghnad Saha convey his egalitarian worldview and his resolute opposition to caste hierarchies.
Purdah and the Practice of Medical Research in Late Colonial India
Maneesha Lal, University of London
From the late 1910s, women physicians in colonial India began carrying out medical research on diseases such as osteomalacia and anemia, the causes of maternal and infant mortality, and the maternity conditions of women factory and plantation workers. Published in prominent British and Indian medical journals and in government reports, these inquiries highlight how the ideology of purdah fundamentally shaped medical research in India, as it had shaped medical institutions and medical care. Women physicians laid claim to a domain they could call their own—the health problems of Indian women and children—and guarded and exploited their circumscribed niche while also suffering from the disadvantages such a separatist strategy entailed.
This paper argues that despite major limitations such as inadequate funding and restricted access to training, equipment, and personnel, women physicians conducted medical research that often circulated widely and had clear impact on important social reform issues of the late colonial period. Over three short decades, women researchers had assembled an impressive body of evidence to demonstrate that Indian women’s and children’s health deserved serious attention and was of vital importance to the entire country. While the translation of this new understanding into concrete policy initiatives never became a significant official priority during the colonial period—women’s and children’s health remained primarily in the voluntary sector or consigned to local efforts—it persuaded an influential body of medical and public opinion, reflected most dramatically in the Report of the Health Survey and Development Committee (the Bhore Report) of 1946.
The Scientific Vedist and the Vedic Scientist: Religion and the Practice of Science in Modern India
Banu Subramaniam, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
The emergence of Hindu nationalists, The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), as the new arbiters of power in India is one symptom of a larger shift in the Indian body politic. Out of the resurgence of Hindu nationalism, both nationally and locally in certain states, has emerged a new ethos of science and religion. The emerging discourse of the scientific Vedas and the Vedic sciences seeks a "convergence" between "Indian" spirituality and "modern" science. In their efforts to recast science and scientific practices, nationalists have, for example, incorporated astrology within the curriculum of the University Grants Commission and Sanskrit into the Indian Institutes of Technology. How do we evaluate these developments within the social studies of science? What does it mean to develop a "convergence" of Indian spirituality and Western science? What contradictions and possibilities emerge in these visions of a postcolonial science? In this paper, I argue that despite the rhetoric of a "convergence," Hindu nationalists embrace "modern" science and scientific practice alongside the rhetoric of an ancient Vedic tradition. What characterizes this archaic modernity, I argue, is a confluence of masculinity, science, technology, development, and militarization rather than any ideological critique of scientific practice. Finally, I reflect on the possibility of a postcolonial, "situated" practice of science. Is it possible to re-imagine science and religion not simply as antagonists where one will eventually banish the other completely from its domain but rather as collaborators in a vision for an anti-racist, de-colonized, and feminist world?
Organizer: Lawrence McCrea, University of Chicago
Chair and Discussant: Sheldon Pollock, University of Chicago
Keywords: Sanskrit, knowledge-systems, intellectuals, precolonial.
This panel presents the ongoing work of the NEH funded collaborative research project "Sanskrit Knowledge Systems on the Eve of Colonialism," exploring the objectives, methods, and institutional dynamics of Sanskrit intellectual life in the period from roughly 1550 to 1750. This period saw a tremendous explosion of intellectual production in a variety of disciplines, producing new genres, discursive modes, and lines of affiliation and conflict both within and across disciplines. As the project enters its data-gathering phase, the participants are able to work toward a more historically nuanced and sociologically grounded understanding of the practices of Sanskrit intellectuals in this era.
All four papers, in various ways, contemplate the persistence or resurgence of the old in a period of widespread and self-conscious innovation. McCrea considers the guarded and selective deployment of the precise formal techniques which characterize "New Logic" by the key figure in 17th century scriptural hermeneutics. Bronner explores the dialectic between innovative and traditional currents in "new" poetics, as it confronts its own tangled history as well as the ongoing practice of poetry. Minkowski’s paper examines the attempt of one 16th-century astronomer to reconcile in a new way the tension between empirical observation and scriptural accounts of cosmology, and the controversy that ensued from this restructuring of existing astronomical models. Houben’s exploration of the role of Vedic ritual in the precolonial period in relation to larger cultural practices, such as the continuing vitality of Sanskrit, prompts a more general reconsideration of ritual theory as such.
Novelty of Form and Novelty of Substance in Seventeenth-Century Mimamsa
Lawrence McCrea, University of Chicago
The late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries saw the rise in several fields—grammar, poetics, and scriptural hermeneutics (Mimamsa)—of intellectual movements styling themselves "new" (navya). This idea of "newness" was certainly modeled on that of the already well-established school of "New Logic" (Navya Nyaya) which had existed at least since the thirteenth century, and was in part founded on the application in new areas of the precise formal and definitional techniques devised by the new logicians.
Yet the relationship between these "new" movements and Navya Nyaya was never one of simple imitation. This is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the field of Mimamsa. Khandadeva, the scholar generally recognized as the founder of "New Mimamsa," avoids the wholesale incorporation of the formal tools of new logic found in other fields in this period. He makes extensive use of them when arguing with the logicians themselves, but only rarely and very selectively applies them in confronting the key "internal" problems of Mimamsa in this period. Treating Khandadeva as a case study, the paper will consider the impact of these formal techniques in 17th-century Sanskrit intellectual life. Does the rigorously formal discourse of the new logicians in some sense force itself on the intellectuals of this period? Can one respond to the arguments of the new logicians only by in some measure adopting their terms, making it difficult to resist assimilation to their formal discursive method?
What is New and What is Navya: Sanskrit Poetics on the Eve of Colonialism
Yigal Bronner, Tel-Aviv University
Remarkably new trends characterize Sanskrit Poetics (alamkarasastra) in the late pre-colonial era. Authors adopt a discursive pattern compatible with that of the logicians, compose in new genres such as the hostile commentary (khandana), show a fresh interest in the history of their tradition and work across disciplines at a rate hitherto unknown. Yet the relationship between such tendencies, rightly seen as the trademarks of a New (navya) Poetics, and actual theoretical innovation is far from simple.
This is partly the result of features that set poetics aside from other new schools of the day. Alamkarasastra never possessed a core-text to provide it with universally accepted foundations and, at the same time, it had to come to terms with an ever-evolving textual tradition—poetry. The discipline was thus highly susceptible for radical innovations, yet it also strove to preserve or even manufacture a tradition for itself. Both these tendencies became manifest through the highly novel idiom of the period, sometimes even within the works of a single author.
The paper sets to explore this paradox of the New Poetics by briefly examining the lives and works of three of its key figures: The South-Indian polymath Appayya Diksita (c. 1550), who in many ways founded the movement, winning immense reputation but also many rivals, Benaras’s Jagannatha Panditaraja (c. 1625), Appayya’s most vehement opponent and a poet and scholar in his own right, and the Almora based Visvesvara (c. 1730), a highly innovative traditionalist and a critic of both.
Turtles All the Way Down? Tradition and Experiment in Cosmological Reasoning
Christopher Minkowski, Cornell University
In 1503 the astronomer Jnanaraja completed the Siddhantasundara, the first general treatise on astronomy to appear in Sanskrit in three and a half centuries. In one chapter of the work, Jnanaraja re-opened a cosmological problem: how to reconcile the spherical, geocentric model of the astronomers with the flat-earth cosmology of the sacred literature, the Puranas. Jnanaraja sought to reconsider the position of accommodation reached by earlier astronomers, especially Bhaskara (11th Ct.). Jnanaraja argued against Bhaskara concerning the support of the earth, its power to attract objects, and the ‘down-ness of down.’ These proposals and others touched off a new round of cosmological debate in Sanskrit that continued into the 18th Century.
The history of Jnanaraja’s ideas opens into a larger historical problem—how to place the Siddhantic astronomers in the wider intellectual history of Sanskrit authors. A way into the problem lies in asking an underlying question—in what would a satisfying "reconciliation" of Puranas and Siddhantas consist? One finds a growing interest among the astronomers of this period in integrating the method of astronomy with the Pramana system of proof that was developed in the principal sastras, especially logic. In discussing cosmology, astronomers were willing to put into play their three forms of gaining certainty and their mutual relations: evidence from observed phenomena, mathematical calculation, and textual authority.
Ritual as Medium in Pre-colonial South Asia
Jan Houben, Leiden University
The strong presence of ritual, especially Vedic ritual, could be part of the explanation of a number of remarkable features of the South Asian cultural area, to begin with the persistence over millennia of Sanskrit as widely used cultured language. For a better understanding of the capacities and limitations of ritual as medium next to a number of other media, the pre-colonial period is of special interest, as: (a) relatively detailed sources—though so far insufficiently explored and studied—are available; (b) developments in India were still largely having their own momentum, with only limited influence from Europe; and (c) an important alternative medium which would become of major significance in transforming South Asian culture both at the hands of colonizers (the British) and colonized (e.g. in Bengal, Maharashtra), viz. the printing press (technologically advanced form of writing with quite special features), was still largely marginal in South Asia.
In order to come to grips with "Ritual as Medium" a suitable theoretical model is to be developed. Staal’s theory of "meaningless ritual" is the most recent attempt at rigorous theorizing of the oldest ritual system of which we have elaborate sources, viz. Vedic ritual. At first sight it seems unsuitable as theoretical basis for dealing with Ritual as Medium. Nevertheless, it provides a starting point from which a useful theory may be developed when some recent contributions by other scholars on ritual are taken into account. The theory will be illustrated with references to a few cases in pre-colonial South Asia.
Organizer and Chair: Michele Gamburd, Portland State University
Discussant: Anupama Rao, Barnard College
Narratives about women’s nature shape the context in which women work. This panel explores what is at stake politically in four separate arenas: plantation labor, factory work, migrant domestic service, and entrepreneurship. Chatterjee examines the political effects of a dominant idea that tea-plucking is work ‘naturally’ suited to women’s bodies. As used by tea planters in North Bengal, this construction devalues both women and their work, justifying low wages. The women themselves use this identity to create alternative commentaries about community, history, and the alienation of their labor. Lynch considers the social history of the term ‘Juki girl,’ a derogatory nickname that connotes sexual immorality and that is used to describe Sri Lankan garment factory workers. She examines the term and its use in the context of Sri Lankan responses to globalization and the impact of new production processes on working women’s social and economic lives. Wijenaike explores how middle-class women in Sri Lanka have negotiated their entry into the formerly masculine world of business ownership. Such entrepreneurs use women’s traditional social networks in novel ways to enable and enhance their commercial endeavors in global and local markets. Gamburd investigates the cultural logic of labor and morality among Sri Lankan women who work as domestic servants in the Middle East. Women feel that anger, jealousy, and dislike can affect the profitability of earnings; prosperity depends not only on hard work and ethical behavior but also on wider social relations. All four panelists explore how women workers accept dominant values while at the same time challenging, resisting, and reworking them in a global economic context.
Discipline, Delicacy and Labor: Women’s Bodies, Fetishisms, and Resistance on an Indian Plantation
Piya Chatterjee, University of California, Riverside
Tea plantations in northeastern India are sites of strikingly feminized labor practices. Women’s so-called "nimble fingers" ensure their highly visible, yet low-waged, presence in the intensive fieldwork that constitutes the bulk of tea production. Using ethnographic and historical material from North Bengal, this paper demonstrates the important ways in which a fetishism of women’s leaf plucking—as nimble, delicate, feminine—comes to mediate the daily work regimes of the plantation. The paradox of worth (tea-as-woman in consumption practices) and devaluation (tea plucking as low paid women’s work) is tracked historically, and then underscored within the contemporary experience of plantation women in the labor fields. The paper demonstrates how the fetishism of labor practice and commodification comes to justify the coercive terms of that fieldwork. Simultaneously, women workers are acutely conscious of these bodily inscriptions and use its fetishisms to construct alternative commentaries about their labor, its alienations, and in powerful ways—claims to community and history. In some instances, these are commentaries that break through into spaces of explicit resistance. This paper argues that such embodied understandings of labor and power constitute an important, often elided, gendered narrative about subordination, endurance and politics.
Sri Lankan "Juki Girls": A Foreign Brand, a Stereotype, and a Response
Caitrin Lynch, Johns Hopkins University
This paper begins with an exploration of how a foreign brand name is used as an insult in contemporary Sri Lanka, and it moves into an ethnographic study of the impact of this insult on the lives of those at the receiving end. Juki is the brand name of Japanese industrial sewing machines used in many Sri Lankan garment factories and "Juki girl" is a derogatory nickname (connoting sexual promiscuity) for the women who work in these factories. Still widely used today, the nickname emerged within the decade after the Sri Lankan economy was liberalized in 1977 and the nation’s first Free Trade Zone opened in 1978. Juki does not simply identify women with machines, but with a foreign machine brand. By highlighting the foreignness of both the machine and the production process, the name symbolizes the prostitution of the Sri Lankan state to foreign investors through the metaphor of the prostitution of Sri Lankan women. As such it is a key metaphor for anxieties connected with the country’s post-liberalization social and economic transformations. In the context of the recent wave of "alternative globalization" activism, what conclusions can we draw about Sri Lankan responses to globalization from the social history of the Juki moniker? Furthermore, in the face of this nickname and its implications, how do garment factory workers respond to the term? How do they carve out lives for themselves that allow them to value the social and economic transformations that Juki machines have brought to them yet also distance themselves from the negative implications of the Juki nickname?
"That Money Burns Like Oil": A Sri Lankan Cultural Logic of Morality and Work
Michele Gamburd, Portland State University
Based on ethnographic data gathered in 2000, this paper examines ideas of morality, fate, choice, and blame among Sri Lankan women who have earned money working as housemaids in the Middle East. Numerous villagers suggest that money earned through hard labor bore good fruit, while money gotten through dishonorable, exploitative or corrupt methods will not lead to long-term advancement. Despite their hard work, however, many women have difficulties bringing any lasting improvements to their families. They often remark, "That money burns like oil," in order to explain that the ill will of their employers infuses the money, negatively affecting ventures undertaken with their wages. This view of agency and identity emphasizes how outsiders’ anger, jealousy, or dislike can influence an individual’s future; prosperity depends not only on one’s ethical behavior but also on one’s position in wider social relations. This paper examines why women think that their money is vulnerable to ‘burning up’ and explores the consequences of the strategies they employ to prevent this. It also investigates how local people morally assessed and judged their own and their neighbors’ financial advancement. The essay seeks to pinpoint the underlying assumptions about identity, agency, and social structure implicit in this cultural logic of morality and work.
The Work of Networking: Women Entrepreneurs in Sri Lanka
Manjari Wijenaike, Boston University
In Sri Lanka, establishing, maintaining, and utilizing social networks is women’s work. It is how children get educated and married, husbands get clients, and families get ahead. Since urban middle-class women, who were traditionally absent from the business sphere, have increasingly chosen entrepreneurship as a career option, networking is also a businesswoman’s work. Critical to women’s success in these new business ventures has been the manner in which they have co-opted traditional, socially sanctioned networks (such as social service organizations and "old girl" networks) to launch their businesses, gain information, market their products, find clients, and share experiences.
This paper is based on my 1997–1999 fieldwork among women entrepreneurs in Colombo, Sri Lanka. It focuses on how new organizations and associations are mimicking old social service organizations while promoting business networking. It examines the reasons why women choose to become entrepreneurs, the role and changing nature of women’s networks in supporting these activities, and the impacts of their work on society, family, and consumption. Finally, it considers recent trends in women’s social and business networks and hypothesizes about the future.
Organizer: Raminder Kaur, University of Manchester, England
Chair and Discussant: Thomas Blom Hansen, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Predominant perspectives in literature on South Asian diasporas have until recently focused on how cultural practices that were derived from the desh, the land of origin, became markers of new hardened, syncretized and reconfigured ethnic identities (Ballard, Bates, van der Veer). This focus was shaped by the ‘culturalism’ which liberal regimes of multiculturalism have espoused in order to get beyond earlier mappings of communities in racial terms (Prashad).
Notions of race persist, nonetheless, in official discourses as well as everyday and demotic forms of identification and recognition (Back, Gilroy), perhaps in mutated forms as ‘culture’ combines with the physiognomic aspects of race as exclusionary dynamics (Balibar, Modood). This panel proposes to take a fresh and maybe heretical view of how notions of race are played out in different parts of the wide-ranging historical experiences that in an often problematic way has become known as the South Asian diaspora. Papers look to the markings of South Asians in racial terms in the metropole (Britain, U.S.) and the formerly colonised worlds of Africa, the Pacific and the Caribbean. A wider comparative perspective on the mutual imbrications of identity, culture and race in the South Asian diaspora may thus allow us to explore how race is conceptualized by diasporic South Asians in particular locales, how it is imposed on them through variant official categories, and how racialization is negotiated by diasporic communities through strategies of education, consumption, violence and the construction of exclusionary or inclusive markers of community.
The Progressive-Regressive Politics of Expatriates: South Asians Negotiating Hindu Nationalism in the U.S.
Arvind Rajagopal, New York University
The central issues underlying the definition of immigrant identity in the U.S., this paper argues, involve race and religion. As the ground on which these issues take shape shifts, perceptions do not change at the same rate. The speed of communications complicates these definitions in interesting ways and reflects class-stratified patterns of transnational exchange.
Nehruvian secularism shaped the patterns of middle class society during the first four decades of independence in India. Matters of caste and religion were defined as private but the cultural means to re-imagine the social landscape were not available to the majority society. The rise of Hindu nationalism from the 1980s onwards reflected a new historical equation between dominant power blocs and emergent classes, in the context of market liberalization and the growth of electronic media. The reiteration of Nehruvian secularist norms represented the cultural codes of state-sponsored middle class privilege which was unable to respond to new aspirants who sought to contest the terms of class membership. In the U.S., Hindu religion became a means for South Asian immigrants to sidestep the stigma of a minority racial status; simultaneously, echoes of a strong nationalist identity seemed to promise a superior status for them as expatriates. This paper will analyze recent activist and progressive academic writing in the U.S. to elaborate how different practices of communication, and the technological and institutional factors involved, shape the contradictory historical formation of Indian identity that progressive political coalitions must contend with in the case of U.S. based South Asian expatriates.
The Racial Implications of ‘Protected Women’ and ‘Predatory Men’
Raminder Kaur, University of Manchester, England
Oldham, then Burnley, Bradford, Stoke, Summerstown, East London, not discounting simmerings elsewhere: one of the striking images that have come to the fore with the Asian riots up and down Britain in 2001, is the rivalry between not just (South) Asian and white youth, but also Asian against black (Africa-Caribbean) youth. The far-right British National Party’s concerted campaigns are notably addressed against Muslims—often interpreted as diasporic Asian altogether. Vindicating Balibar’s and Modood’s argument on culturalism as the new medium of racism, the category of Asian has become essentialized in an uneasy merging of racial physiognomy and attributes of culture.
In this paper I account for the main movements that have led to the rupture of Asian riots in Britain. I consider the demise of the inclusive political signifier of ‘Black’ as a vehicle against racism in the 1970s, to one where the picture blurs by the 1990s such that, on the one hand, there is dissolution of the political category of ‘Black’; on the other hand, new alliances are set up which confound an analysis based simply on racial politics. I locate the rivalry in not just racial or ‘cultural clashes,’ nor in an argument about the depressed economic states of these largely working-class neighborhoods that have been torn apart by violence. Rather I offer another perspective by positioning the anti-Asian resentment in culturalist discourses premised upon assumptions of non-integration and gender—women as ‘protected’ and therefore out of bounds, men as ‘predators’ and thus potential competition for ‘their women.’
Race and Forced Migration in the South Asian Diaspora
Suvendrini Perera, La Trobe University, Australia
Whereas both postcolonial theory and its critiques can represent South Asians as privileged figures of globalization, border-crossing embodiments of transnational diasporic hybridity, this paper focuses on the figure of the South Asian in the context of the limits of global mobility.
Specifically, it examines the current (re)racialization of the South Asian on the underside of globalization through discourses of the "illegal" and the transient. In the borderless world of transnational mobility and fluid identities aspired to by proponents of globalization, the asylum seeker, the refugee and the transient worker remain enmeshed in the relentless logic of border controls and impermeable frontiers. Invariably racialized figures, they bedevil the seamless flow of goods and labor, fuelling new methods of surveillance and necessitating new forms of response from states, transnational corporations and human rights organizations. How are South Asian ‘forced migrants’ racialized in these processes and in what ways do they deploy notions of race, identity and belonging in response?
Taking as a starting point A. Sivanandan’s recent exposition of "xeno-racism" in Europe, the paper examines new—gendered and classed—racializations of the South Asian in two excentric contexts: female migrant domestic workers in the Middle East and Hong Kong, and mostly male asylum seekers in Australia.
Racism, Bollywood, and Politics of Identity: Fiji Indians from Indenture to Diaspora
Manas Ray, Centre for Study in Social Sciences, India
The paper examines the process of imagining into existence of a sense of nationhood by a specific diaspora of Indian origin—namely, the Fiji Indians—and the role that initially Ramayan and subsequently Bollywood play in articulating ethnic and racial identity in course of the community’s journey from indenture Fiji to multicultural metropolis of the west
As memory of ‘roots’—the real India—was fading away among Fiji Indians, Hindi films took over the responsibility of constructing a memory space through its never-ending web of images, songs, and stars. When the military—manned almost exclusively by the Fijians—took charge of the country in 1987, many Fiji Indians left for destinations such as Sydney, Auckland and Vancouver. The situation was complex, since the India the Fiji Indians met in those locations was unwilling to give up its historical memory of unquestioned superiority vis-à-vis those who, even if now Westernized and fairly prosperous, were once nothing but ‘coolies.’
The paper tries to address two aspects of the so-called ‘South Asian diaspora.’ First, it endeavors to read ‘diasporic practices’ in the interface of post-welfare, self-monitoring communities of the West and narrative communities of postcolonial origin with specific historical trajectories. Second, it tries to highlight the fact that for Indians (both inside India and outside), ‘Indianness’—like any other identity concept—is always already fissured. This ‘Indianness’ varies with different communities, is used at times for contradictory purposes and quite often gives rise to unintended consequences.
Charous and Ravans: Racial Encounters in a South African Township
Thomas Blom Hansen, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
For the substantial Indian community in South Africa apartheid meant living in separate townships, going to Indian schools, Indian beaches, Indian shopping malls, etc.—in brief living ‘Indian lives.’ Apartheid also afforded Indians new prosperity and offered a partial incorporation into the apartheid structure through a form of ‘subordinated citizenship.’ All this began to change when ANC assumed power in 1994. Today, former Indian townships are increasingly inhabited by large African squatter colonies; former Indian schools have a majority of African students, and many jobs previously held by Indians are today taken over by African labor. This paper explores these new, anxiety ridden and often unfamiliar encounters between Africans and Indians in a formerly Indian township in Durban. The perspective is on the Indian side, not the African, and the intention is to explore and map Indian perceptions of Africans, known in popular slang as ravans—referring to the black demon god in the Ramayana. The paper will, firstly, explore conflicts over education, discipline and sexuality in the context of a secondary school; and will, secondly, throw light on how Indian residential associations that once were in the forefront of the resistance to white racist policies today have become vehicles for more ambiguous attempts to protect Indian properties and Indian ‘ways of life’ against the alleged encroachment of African squatters on the once exclusively Indian areas. The paper will finally reflect on how the expressions of ‘Indian racism’ in South Africa may be linked to attempts at integrating Indians in South Africa into a global ‘diasporic’ South Asian culture.
Organizer and Chair: Monica Ghosh, University of Hawaii, Manoa
Discussant: Sheila Nayar, Greensboro College
The first film screenings in India were in 1896 in Bombay and 1897 in Calcutta and Madras. The Indian film industry has produced over 17,000 popular (Bollywood) and art films in many languages in the 20th century. These films continue to engage South Asians both at home and abroad in many interesting and complex ways. Furthermore, South Asians in the diaspora have been producing films that often deal with issues of "straddling two cultures," such as the films of Hanif Kureishi and Nisha Ganatra. This panel will highlight contemporary discourse on film by raising questions and making connections that demonstrate the complex influence of film in pedagogical and scholarly approaches from South Asia and the South Asian diaspora. The papers presented will deal with the language of cinema and the relationship between cinematic representation and reality; the complicated and relational hierarchy of the representation of how Indians speak English in the films of the diaspora; the emergence of a demanding patriarchal reconstruction of Indian womanhood in Bollywood films; and relationships between literacy and orality in the art films of Satyajit Ray and popular films. Emphasis will be on connections between the cinematic narrative as visual, aural, and oral representation and its role in depicting social and cultural conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations. Each paper will use various theoretical perspectives to explore issues and ideas related to films of South Asia and the South Asian Diaspora.
Speaking and Seeing: Language, Reality, and Technology in South Indian Cinema
V. Sanil, Indian Institute of Technology
Is cinema a language? What is the relationship between cinematic representation and reality? How does cinema, which is at once art and technology, attain language-like qualities within specific cultures? I shall explore these questions within the context of Indian cinema—specifically the Tamil and Malayalam cinema.
The answers provided by both semiotics and hermeneutics are inadequate. I shall use Wittgenstein’s insights on the visual nature of language to develop a theory of cinematic language, which can treat the cinematic image as an essentially audio-visual phenomenon. Language involves both saying and showing. Language opens itself to the real through the gap or rupture between these two planes. I shall argue that both the descriptivist theories of language (Searle) and the anti-descriptivist theories (Kripke) misunderstand the relationship between language reality. Later, Wittgenstein offers a language theory of picture; which surpasses his own earlier picture theory of language. I shall use the former to develop a notion of the image that retroactively constitutes the real.
The reality which cinema addresses is a virtual one that needs to be distinguished from the actual. The virtual dimension of reality is realized only through technology. Hence cinema is at the intersection between language, technology and culture. Through a detailed analysis of a few selected Indian films I will try to show how cinema can be a locus of cultural articulation and technological innovation. By establishing complex connections between speaking and showing these films unfold a dimension of the real, which bursts through the horizons of specific cultures and affirms a universality that belongs only to technology.
Recasting Femininity: A Study of the Reconstruction of Indian Womanhood in Contemporary Indian Popular Cinema
Shivani Chakravorty, Emory University
Indian popular cinema, with its ubiquitous presence in South Asia, and in South Asian diasporas all over the world has always played an important role in the politics of identity formation, gender construction and the socialization process. This has been particularly so in terms of women, who have historically been represented as cultural signifiers upholding tradition and preserving the essence of the nation. The heroine of the silver screen has been a mythically empowered being who can hold the nation together just as she holds her family together, against the onslaught of threats from the outside and inside—whether it be imperialism in the past or globalization in the present.
My paper aims to explore a trend in Bollywood films to change the depiction of women according to the needs of the time, while retaining a core of the "essential Indianness"—the notion of purity, sacrifice and self-abnegnation that a "true Indian woman" has to embody in mind, body and spirit at all times and at all stages in her life. With exceptions, how women live their actual lives, the pressing issues of class, religion, ethnicity, cultural conflicts that permeate their lives and how they negotiate with and subvert patriarchal assumptions have usually remained outside the realm of Bollywood. I will analyze a few films that have created box-office records in recent years to trace the emergence of an even more vicious and demanding patriarchal reconstruction of a blindly homogenized Indian womanhood. I see this trend as a recasting of women in the same old molds, albeit with new embellishments, in an era of militant fundamentalism that has serious ramifications on the existence of South Asian women everywhere in the world.
From Bombay to Ray: Indian Film through the Orality-Literacy Continuum
Sheila Nayar, Greensboro College
Why did Satyajit Ray’s initial film and cinematic masterpiece Pather Panchah (Song of the Little Road; 1954) elicit so little interest on the part of Indians at home? How was it possible that a visual narrative of such simplicity, purity and universality—and hence, by all accounts, of accessibility—was greeted with such little enthusiasm by the "unsophisticated audiences" Ray thought he could reach?
This paper posits that the fundamental distinction between Ray’s movies (i.e., art film) and the commercial cinema privileged by "unsophisticated audiences" (i.e., Bombay masala movies) can be lucidly enucleated when examined in light of recent scholarship in the areas of orality and literacy. Indeed, this paper will claim that what significantly distinguishes art cinema generally from popular movies, and by extension high art from popular culture, are characteristics of a decidedly literate (or oral) nature, with respect to narrative and performance.
This paper will introduce and explain what these various literate attributes are by mapping them against their oral counterparts in a pseudo-binary fashion (for, in actual fact this is a continuum, not a dichotomy). When positioned besides the attributes of conventional Hindi film, it is hoped that the significance of orality and literacy to visual media—indeed, to the very notion of aesthetics—will become fully apparent. In some respects, this is a new model for understanding how visual media work. For, these differences are not unique to India; it is simply that India offers an arena in which such attributes have been more pronounced, given its historically large non- and low-literate population, synchronous with a historically elite and educated upper class.
What You Hear . . . What You See . . . That’s Not All You Get (Films and the South Asian Diaspora)
Monica Ghosh, University of Hawaii, Manoa
This paper will engage with linguistic and cultural criticism to discuss issues related to the ways South Asians speak English. "Indian accents" will serve as a springboard for further analysis of how the South Asian diaspora is represented in independent and big budget films using films made in the UK and the USA by South Asian and non-South Asian film makers. This paper will rely primarily on these films—My Son The Fanatic, Bhaji on the Beach, East is East, and Chutney Popcorn, juxtaposed with short clips from the Hollywood blockbusters Sixth Sense and Keeping the Faith—as examples to explore and articulate the complex hierarchical relationships and issues of class, gender, and sexual preference among South Asians in the diaspora because simple binary explanations are not enough. What kinds of alternative explanations suggest themselves? And can these explanations have relevance for a greater discourse on diaspora? The research and analysis presented in this paper place an emphasis on understanding the numerous issues and concerns of straddling two or more cultures and how they are represented in film.
Organizer: Daisy Rockwell, Loyola University, Chicago
Chair: Frances Pritchett, Columbia University
Discussants: Vikram Chandra, George Washington University; Luke S. Roberts, University of California, Santa Barbara
Keywords: South Asia, Literature, Urdu, Ghalib, Bengali, Hindi, Indian English, Fiction, Translation, Literary Criticism, Commentary.
The word ‘translation’ has gained enormous popularity in many fields of academic inquiry over the past few years and has become a popular word used to invoke notions of hybridity, transnational identity and migrancy. The fortunes of literary translation have strangely sunk in proportion to the rise of the popularity of translation as an abstract function of individuals, traditions and cultures changing places and crossing physical and virtual boundaries.
This panel seeks to reinvigorate and reintroduce translation as a rigorous, demanding and highly complex field of study and scholarly activity with particular reference to textuality in South Asia. In her paper on Quratullain Hyder’s English ‘transcreation’ of her Urdu novel, Ag ka Dariya, Laurel Steele theorizes a dialogue between the two texts, created and monitored by the author. Frances Pritchett’s research on the celebrated Urdu poet Ghalib and the uncharacteristically (for the tradition) unproductive commentaries which accompany his work reminds us that criticism and commentary are in fact modes of translation and transcreation in themselves. Abhijeet Paul’s contemporary translations of the Bengali author Jibananda Das’s fiction pose a series of complex and interlocking questions regarding the resistance of the Bengali prose to transformation into a fluent English idiom which neither flattens out the nuance of the author’s particular registers nor wipes away its multivalence. In her paper on representations of Subcontinental settings in twentieth-century South Asian English, Hindi and Urdu literatures, Daisy Rockwell explores the possibility of a poetics of place encoded in the literary idioms of each language literature. Finally, the discussant, Indian English fiction author Vikram Chandra, adds to the mix his own perspective as a creative writer.
Quratullain Hyder’s River of Fire: The Urdu Novel, the English Novel, the Audience and the Critics
Laurel Steele, University of Chicago
Forty-four years ago, Quratullain Hyder wrote a novel, Ag ka Darya (River of Fire). It had a huge sweep and was immediately popular. It precipitated the author’s return to India from Pakistan, and readers and critics alike have acknowledged it as the great novel of Partition.
Now, River of Fire has been "transcreated," into English by the author herself. Reviewed enthusiastically in, among other places, the New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement, its presence in English does something that its existence in Urdu could not do. It states emphatically, by its very existence, that "multicultural" does not occupy a space that exists only in an English universe.
Yet, the original novel and the English version differ in significant ways. Literary allusions, in particular, have been changed. In fact, although the English novel is shorter, whole scenes have been added to it that use new literary allusions to set tone and communicate character.
Since the author herself is responsible for the English version, her changes give rise to broader questions about her perceived audience, and about critical response. While it is obvious that translated works do not "stand for" the original novel with a perfect symmetry, we as readers tend to forget this. This paper will begin with looking at the meaning of the changes in the use of literary allusion. Then, I will look at what the radically different audiences and the changed critical universe means for the two works. The two works create a dialogue with each other about text, audience and critical response that speaks to the real meaning of "multicultural" texts and "global" responses.
When a Critical Conversation Is Interrupted: Ghalib and his Commentators
Frances W. Pritchett, Columbia University
Uniquely among Urdu ghazal poets, Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib (1797–1869) has been accorded a substantial commentarial tradition that begins in the 1880s and continues unbroken to the present. Depending on how we define "commentary," a hundred or more works can be identified as belonging to this genre. Basically, the commentaries go through Ghalib’s ghazals verse by verse, providing interpretive help for the reader. This is a notable service, and quite useful—as far as it goes. Unfortunately, in most cases it doesn’t go very far. This supremely complicated poet, this famous (and infamous) creator of multiple meanings, has been blessed or cursed with an interpretive apparatus that is conspicuously deficient both by traditional Indo-Persian critical standards, and by modern Western ones. Most commentators allot to each verse a few sentences of prose paraphrase that explicate no more than a single meaning, and that ignore all wordplay, alliteration, and other formal features of the verse. Why is this? Since I am in the process of writing my own commentary on Ghalib, I will explore these limitations through examples, and will suggest some reasons that the commentarial tradition has developed in such a notably deficient way.
Translating Jibanananda Das’ Fiction: Reconstructions and Confusions
Abhijeet Paul, University of Calcutta
This paper attempts to study the contemporary experience of translating some of the early short fiction (1931–33) and a novel Malloban (1948) by Jibanananda Das (1899–1954), the major post-Tagorean poet and posthumously published novelist of Bengal. It does not ostensibly represent the linguistic and generic fluency of the original Bengali into the target language text because of the wide gaps in cultural resisters, including the historiography of colonialism and the gradual rise of a nationalist and post-nationalist modernity since the turn of the century. Judging from this context, the several layers of reconstruction and their attendant confusions in the target language could be attributed to the orientation of his prose itself, which mostly ran contrary to the novelistic tradition of the times. To begin with, Jibanananda did not sentimentalize or naturalize the ideals of nationalism, romanticism and progressively, Marxism in his unpublished fiction. As a corollary, he remained focused on low-life fiction—different from the radically violent and controversial low-life novels of the Pakistani partition writer, Saadat Hasan Manto though—exploring the mockingly unheroic, mundane, low-intensity, decadent lifestyle of the lower middle class Bengali, who proliferated in the emergent nondescript concrete urban sprawl called Calcutta since the 1920s and 30s—a landscape several times removed from a verdant Bengal. While the selection of images, metaphors, speech, jokes, slang, etc. always remains a difficult and a contemporary exercise, hence a complex, if not a confusing issue in translating Jibanananda’s fiction, competence would however be enhanced with the practice of a style sensitized to the attendant discourse of the text.
"Were the Smells Strong; the Colors Intense"? Exploring the Poetics of Place in English, Hindi and Urdu Fiction
Daisy Rockwell, Loyola University, Chicago
Indian and South Asian writing is described nowadays as a phenomenon, a new wave, an exciting development on the World literature scene. This of course refers to works written in English, those countless works of twentieth-century fiction in the many other languages of South Asia scarcely known and sparsely translated, leading to or caused by Salman Rushdie’s remarks of a few years ago in which he called into question the very literary merit of this massive corpus of artistic endeavor. Conversely, potshots are regularly aimed from the Subcontinent at ‘the new phenomenon of Indian writing,’ with oftentimes facile claims being made for a lack of authenticity in Indian English writing, a poverty of progressive ideals and a general deracination. Are these debates merely territorial, or is there something there, something (not a negative, but present nonetheless) which makes Indian English writing distinctly different, distinctly unlike literature written in other South Asian languages?
In this paper I examine this larger question through a particularized lens, the lens of setting, or mise-en-scène, of some South Asian literature in English, Hindi and Urdu. Through issues of anticipated audience (a global one for English, a local one, or a globally-located but locally-familiar one for Hindi-Urdu), embedded idioms of descriptions of place in the three languages, and perceptions of location (is the novel set ‘in India’; ‘in South Asia’; ‘in Bombay’; ‘in this city’; ‘down the street’?) I attempt to discover a poetics of place in three distinct fiction writing universes.
Organizer and Chair: Geraldine Forbes, State University of New York, Oswego
Discussant: Ann Grodzins Gold, Syracuse University
Philippe Aries’ Centuries of Childhood published in the early 1960s established childhood as a field of historical study. His work was followed by studies that explored this topic in different periods of European history. In the field of South Asian studies, the study of children and youth has been limited to the postcolonial period and focused primarily on issues of abuse and exploitation with few references to historical antecedents. Whether one looks at the lower ranks, the aristocracy, or the middle-class there is virtually no attention to children in Indian history texts. Pradip Kumar Bose’s "Sons of the Nation: Child Rearing and the New Family" (1995) is singular for its focus on an emerging normative discourse on the family in colonial India. Clearly, documentary evidence can be teased from the historical record. The three historians on this panel examine ideology, reform efforts, and state intervention dictating changes in children’s lives and the experiences of children in colonial India. Sonia Amin selected three Muslim women, born between 1904 and 1940, and asked questions about their socialization into adulthood in the context of the patriarchal system. Swapna Banerjee reads the autobiographies of three important figures in Indian history, all members of the Tagore family, to understand the tropes used in narrating childhood. Ranjit Roy moves the discussion to youth by focusing on the young men and women who dedicated their lives to Gandhi. In this paper Roy examines both Gandhi’s appeal and the lives of middle-class youth in India of the 1930s.
Muslim Women in Transition: Narratives of Childhood
Sonia Nishat Amin, Dhaka University
The colonial period challenged the structure of the Muslim family. Especially sensitive elements of that structure were the education and socialization of the girl child. Despite the importance of this topic, it remains unexplored outside the realm of didactic literature. This paper, using autobiographical accounts and interviews, examines the lives of three Muslim women born between 1904 and 1940: Syeda Monowara Khatun (1909–1981), Zulikha Bano (1904–1974), and Selina Bahar Zaman (b. 1940). The family of each represents a different economic and cultural pattern. Monowara’s family was landed gentry, Zulikha was from the aristocratic Dhaka nawab family, and Selina comes from an urban, middle-class family. In her memoir, Smritir Pata Theke, Monowara Khatun provides a narrative that recalls the socialization of her dead foremothers in the inner quarters. The strict, elitist, "Victorian" upbringing of Zulikha and her cousins was narrated by her daughter Sarwar Khan. Selina grew up in Dhaka in the 1950s where her parents were in the vanguard of the new cultural and educational movements. Her autobiography, now being serialized in the daily "Sangbad" relates how her family received ‘modernity’ and transmitted it to their daughter. These women, in recounting experiences of childhood, address the issue of how their families negotiated and implemented decisions about education, modernization and religion within the patriarchal framework. This paper intends to fill a gap in social and cultural history by addressing the link between the home and the changes taking place outside the home as they impinged on the socialization of daughters.
Narratives of Childhood: Three Readings from Colonial Bengal
Swapna Banerjee, University of Florida, Gainesville
In late colonial Bengal, writing autobiographies became a vehicle for men and women to articulate their middle-class identity. The illustrious aristocratic Tagore family, trendsetters and culture-builders for the Bengali middle class of this period, took an active role in this cultural production.
Selecting three autobiographies written by members of the Tagore family that dwell heavily on memories of growing up: Rabindranath Tagore’s Chhelebela, Abanindranath Tagore’s Apan Katha, and Sarala Debi Chaudhurani’s Jibanér Jharapata, this paper engages in a close reading of their narratives of childhood. These writers played major roles in colonial history, as poets, nationalists, artists, social critics, and feminist activists. While other genres of literature, such as advice manuals for middle-class women, extensively discuss the question of how to raise children, these personal narratives provide significant insight into the lived experiences of children in a wealthy colonial family. By examining the trope of childhood employed by each of the writers, this paper will reflect on how experiences of "childhood" were conceived and constructed by the adult writers in retrospect, and how they captured the gender and generational gap. This study casts light on the structure, composition, and division of labor within the family as well as emerging standards for raising children. More importantly, it addresses the question of how the experiences of childhood shaped the articulation of adult identities in a colonial culture.
" . . . To Be Young Was Very Heaven": Gandhi, Nationalism and Youth
Ranjit Kumar Roy, Rabindra Bharati University
This paper explores Gandhi’s perception of Indian youth, the special role he envisaged for them in the non-violent battle against the Raj, and the factors that made him so endearing to them. Gandhi’s ideas on youth go back to the days of the Tolstoy farm when he first educated young boys and girls. He believed the qualities of youth—dynamism, commitment, spirit of self-sacrifice, honesty, tenacity, and freedom from familial responsibilities—meant they could play a crucial role in his movements. Young people heard his message and responded. This paper focuses on Gandhi’s ideas about youth and special role he envisioned for them, as well as the autobiographical accounts of men and women who joined Gandhi when they were teenagers. Individuals such as Usha Behn, Mani Behn Patel, Sushila Nayar, Atulya Ghosh, Kamala Dasgupta, and Satish Dasgupta have all written memoirs about their attraction to Gandhi and their decisions to join the movement. This paper will seek to clarify the motivations and intentions of youth in the course of this movement. What attracted them? Was it Gandhi’s charismatic appeal, his image as a saintly person, or the simplicity of his message? Or, did they adhere to the movement because Gandhi was the only leader with a vision of a free India, the only one who taught young people how to nurture their dreams?
Organizer and Chair: Sankaran Krishna, University of Hawaii, Manoa
Discussants: Mustapha K. Pasha, American University; Itty Abraham, Social Science Research Council
Keywords: India, citizenship, political economy, twentieth century, Diaspora.
The three papers that constitute this panel share a central premise: to understand the emergence and content of contemporary India necessitates placing that country in the movements of capital, ideas, peoples and technologies across world-space. They are all attendant to the ways in which crucial aspects of what it means to be an Indian in contemporary times—issues such as citizenship, religious identity, consumption patterns, attitudes towards neighboring countries emerged in an intense interaction with the region and the rest of the world all through at least the modern period. Srirupa Roy’s paper historicizes the current rage for Diaspora studies by delineating the literally global character of early Indian nationalism, emerging as it did in diasporic spaces as far removed as South Africa, Vancouver and Singapore. Leela Fernandes focuses on the production of a modern middle-class cultural citizenship that is mediated heavily by the consumption patterns and modes of living seen as alluringly global—and she marks the gender, caste and class biases that underlie the new consumer/citizen. Sankaran Krishna argues that the international dimensions of one of the constitutive moments in modern Indian history—the partition—has been greatly under-studied and suggests that there is much to be gained from placing that event in the context of a global obsession with getting maps and identities to coincide in the early 20th century. The panel thus balances the latest enthusiasm for global ethnography with detailed attention to specific and contextual nuances.
Passages from India: International Dimensions of Indian Nationalism, 1880–1947
Srirupa Roy, University of Massachusetts
This paper is an attempt to historicize current academic discussions about diasporic nationalism and transnational activism through an examination of an often overlooked component of anti-colonial nationalism in India—the activities of overseas nationalists in the colonial period; those who addressed ‘the home’ by engaging with ‘the world.’ Anti-colonial nationalism had a vigorous presence not just in the physical space of the Indian colony, but in overseas locations as well. Moreover, while London was predictably an important hub for overseas Indian nationalists, the anti-British agitation was waged from places as diverse as San Francisco, Berlin, Vancouver, Paris, Moscow, Tokyo, Bangkok, Kabul, Cairo, Singapore, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Mexico, and Durban. From the late nineteenth century until the declaration of Indian independence in 1947, numerous organizations and individuals located outside the territorial coordinates of India, espousing diverse ideologies and adopting a wide array of strategies worked for the cause of national liberation. Through a focus on this ensemble of individuals, organizations, and transnational networks in the colonial period, this paper pursues three specific goals:
(1) Questioning the assumption that nationalism is an internalist discourse or one that addresses itself to a domestic audience and works to mobilize those who live within a particular national territory;
(2) Departing from presentist perspectives on the novelty of transnational activism through an exploration of the transnational linkages forged by anti-colonial nationalists more than a century ago;
(3) Replacing binary understandings of diasporic nationalism as either reactionary or progressive through an examination of the diverse and contradictory ideological affinities of overseas nationalists.
Politics of Economic Reform: Gender, Consumption, and Middle Class Identity in India
Leela Fernandes, Rutgers University
This paper examines the ways in which consent and conflict around India’s economic liberalization policies in the 1990s is being managed through the production of a new urban middle class identity. This identity is marked by attempts of the middle class to distinguish itself from the working class and urban poor. The paper explores the production of such status distinctions and examines the ways in which middle-class cultural citizenship is linked to new identities based on shifting consumption patterns, notions of consumer rights and existing hierarchies based on gender, class and caste. Furthermore, the paper examines a case of organized agitation of women in the form of anti-price rise campaign in Mumbai as a case of mobilization which draws on a cross-class consumer identity of women which contests hegemonic definitions of consumer identity. Through this analysis the paper examines the way in which such local consumer identities negotiate conflict and consent to liberalization. The paper draws on interviews and ethnographic research in Mumbai.
Methodical Worlds: India’s Partition in Comparative Context
Sankaran Krishna, University of Hawaii, Manoa
This paper places the Partition of 1947 in a wider historical and international context. The first half of the twentieth century was a period that saw large-scale movements of peoples across state borders, ethnic cleansings with various degrees of epistemic and physical violence, large scale migrations—both forced and voluntary, exchanges of peoples, and the like. The decline of empires and the emergence of the nation-state, especially in Europe, was underlain by a specific and novel imaginaire: this was the modern idea that every enclosed territory on a map ought to be a container for a ‘people’ with a distinct destiny or genius. And a recalcitrant and disordered global space was re-ordered violently to make it fit the simulacrum of the ideal nation-state. This larger background is generally ignored in the vast literature on the Indian partition, which is mostly seen as a unique tragedy that befell the sub-continent. The proposed paper re-reads the historical sources on the partition with a comparative eye—to see the ways in which the main protagonists and their ideas were informed and influenced by events in the larger world that surrounded them.
Organizer: Leslie C. Orr, Concordia University
Chair and Discussant: Ginette Ishimatsu, University of Denver
Keywords: India, religion, history, kingship, divinity.
This panel uses the thematic focus of processions to explore a number of issues in the religious and social history of South Asia.
Daud Ali’s paper, on the processions of the Chola kings of Tamilnadu, shows how these displays were constitutive of royal authority, and thus were occasions when sovereignty could be challenged as well as affirmed. In her paper, Leslie Orr looks at the religious processions that took place in the temple milieu during the period of Chola rule, and finds there a more fluid social and ritual order, and a processional idiom that is rather different from that of the Chola court. Richard Davis’ examination of representations of British participation in festival processions provides a context for discussion of the problematically overlapping realms of religious and political ceremonial in colonial India. Finally, Paul Younger seeks to show how the composite character of festival processions in contemporary Sri Lanka shows a layering of Chola period imperial pageantry, and later influences, over earlier tribal traditions.
All of the papers attend particularly to patterns of change and of interaction and contestation, as is fitting when the subject itself is so closely tied to "process" and to ritual ordering. The papers also share a concern with the relationship between religious practices and political authority. The authors draw on a diverse body of evidence—courtly literature, stone and copper-plate inscriptions, Company School paintings, colonial documents, and contemporary ethnography—and our discussant’s knowledge of both ritual texts and contemporary South Indian practices further enriches our proposed session on procession.
Royal Processions in the Cola Kingdom
Daud Ali, SOAS, University of London
This paper looks at the practice of royal processions from Tamil literature and epigraphy produced in the Cola period. It reviews the nature of different types of royal procession—city processions, hunting or battle processions, and processions in absentia to demarcate revenue privileges. It suggests that an ornamentalizing logic made the procession a technology for producing consensus and displaying authority in a publicly aestheticized manner. Reiterated as a favorite literary theme in courtly literature, the procession participated in the larger theophonic conception of lordship typical of medieval Indian polities. We may glean from certain references however, that processions in medieval India, as in modern India, did not simply represent a ‘static’ order but were moments for the constitution of order and hence open to contestation and struggle.
Processions in the Medieval South Indian Temple: Sociology, Sovereignty and Soteriology
Leslie C. Orr, Concordia University
Temple processions in Tamilnadu function to demarcate social and sacred space, and serve as means through which relationships are articulated among human beings, among deities, and between gods and humans. The processional route may be seen as a statement about a god’s lordship over a territory and his supremacy vis-à-vis other deities, as an expression of local and pan-Indian mythological and theological understandings of the nature of the god, or as a demonstration of his accessibility to different strata of human society residing beyond the quarter of the temple. The make-up of the procession—the forms of the gods processed, the identities and roles of human participants, the manner in which the procession is ordered, and the "purpose" of the procession in terms of its interior ritual logic or its place within a broader ceremonial context—give us further insights into local notions of sociology, sovereignty and soteriology.
I propose to show how some of these notions have undergone significant changes over time, on the basis of an examination of what temple inscriptions dating from a.d. 850 to 1300, from a number of sites in Tamilnadu, have to tell us about processions. These temple processions challenge us to rethink our ideas about the hierarchical fixity of "caste" society, the shared symbolic worlds of king and god, and the exclusivism and competitiveness of sectarian Hinduism in medieval South India.
What’s That British Couple Doing in Jagannatha’s Procession?
Richard H. Davis, Bard College
An 1822 Company School print depicts that year’s Rath Yatra of the "Idol Juggernaut." The deity stands in his massive 16-wheeled chariot, surrounded by hundreds of temple servants, dhoti-clad rope-pullers, and other followers. Rising above the mass of devotees are two large elephants. One carries an Indian prince, while the other bears a red-coated British officer and his English wife. Why is this British couple participating in Lord Jagannatha’s procession, at a time when other British were denouncing this deity as the "Indian Moloch"?
By reconstructing the background of this painting and others like it, I will explore the role of processions in articulating authority in India during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I am interested in how British officials and other observers of this period understood ceremonial processions within the existing symbolic constitutions of India, and how they represented their own ambivalent participation in such religiously based rituals, during a period of experimentation and debate over modes of colonial governance. This paper will focus on Company School paintings, produced by native Indian artists for British patrons, as revealing (and delightful) historical documents.
Temple Processions in Sri Lanka
Paul Younger, McMaster University
In Tamilnatu today, worshippers regard temple processions as expressions of the grandeur of medieval imperial glory. On the other hand there are a few festivals which preserve a processional style free of the imperial features, and one wonders if they could represent an earlier tradition. In order to help answer this question I propose in this paper to examine two festivals from Sri Lanka, where the experience of Cola imperial power was short-lived, and the festival features borrowed from that experience appear as add-ons to an older processional style.
In Kataragama the central theme is the romance and marriage of a Vedda (local tribal) girl and a supernatural being or "prince" from India. The "procession" from his temple to hers each night carefully follows Vedda romantic custom and priestly behavior, with the result that the sacred is revealed as the mysterious "process" of sexuality. The addition of a royal canopy and a government official in medieval dress to this procession is quite odd.
In Kandy the juxtaposition of styles of procession has a more complex history. Cola rule in this area resulted in the attachment of a Cola-style ten-day festival to a five-day Vedda festival. But in 1778 the festival was reorganized by the ruler of Kandy in order to give it a third component which focused on the Buddhist Tooth Temple. While the imperial overlays have overwhelmed the Vedda processional activity in Kandy, there too they seem to be built around an original tribal tradition.
Organizer and Discussant: John D. Rogers, Tufts University
Chair: Douglas E. Haynes, Dartmouth College
Keywords: historiography, region, colonialists, identity, Hyderabad, Kashmir, Maharashtra.
This panel is designed to address two main issues: (1) change and continuity in the epistemology and contents of historical writing on three South Asian regions between the late pre-colonial period and the late nineteenth century, and (2) the ways that these developments in regional historigraphies were linked to broader social, political, and cultural changes. The three regions considered—Hyderabad, Kashmir, and Maharashtra—will form the basis of a comparison that will led to the consideration of more general issues about the relationship between region and broader geographical entities in modern South Asia. One productive entry to these broader issues will be the ways in which the presence or absence of nineteenth-century "princely states" did or did not shape regional historiographies and identity formation. This will open up the question of the complex manner in which the development of important but ambiguous and often changing regional identities in nineteenth-century South Asia were shaped by changing political and social structures. And this discussion may in turn touch on the general issue of the extent to which changes in nineteenth-century South Asia should be viewed as the product of a "colonial modernity," as opposed to a "universal modernity." The discussant is working on similar issues in Sri Lanka, another South Asian region that like Hyderabad and Kashmir lay outside British India. There are only three papers and one discussant because the panelists intend to structure their presentations to encourage a discussion that will incorporate additional regional comparisons from scholars in the audience working on other places in South and Southeast Asia.
Deccani Regional Difference and Princely Modernity: Modern and Premodern Historical Writing in the Hyderabad Deccan
Eric L. Beverley, Harvard University
This paper examines the intricacies of the historiographical environment in "indirectly ruled" South Asia under colonialism. It focuses on the largest Princely State, Hyderabad, and draws a comparison between portions of Firishtah’s seventeenth-century Indo-Persian history and various English-language texts from the late nineteenth century. It analyses the different uses of the established historiographical trope that emphasized Deccani regional difference from northern imperial powers (Delhi Sultans, Mughals, British), which remained central to the official history-writing in Hyderabad. It highlights the way in which this trope came to be used to depict continuities with precolonial "native" regimes, and to present Indian alternatives to colonial modernity. By concentrating on the way in which religiously-informed cultural difference is commented upon in these texts, the paper notes the ways in which changing historical circumstances influence the deployment of different tropes in historical writing. In addition to comparing the premodern and princely historiographical environments, the paper considers differences and similarities between nineteenth-century official histories of Hyderabad State and writings produced in British India.
History, Memory, and Representation in Kashmiri Historical Narratives
Chitralekha Zutshi, College of William and Mary
Nationalist discourse on Kashmir, whether Indian or Kashmiri, defines Kashmiri cultural identity in terms of a concept known as Kashmiriyat. Colonial, post-colonial and Kashmiri historical narratives, for their own reasons, have contributed in equal measure towards the perpetuation of this concept, which can be defined as the harmonious, syncretistic blending of religious cultures into a uniquely Kashmiri identity. The focus on discovering Kashmiriyat throughout Kashmiri history is responsible, in no small measure, for the significant lacunae in the region’s historiography, which refuses to acknowledge the parallels between Kashmiri history and that of the rest of pre-colonial and colonial India. This paper takes a different approach. It delineates the construction and evolution of the idea of Kashmiriyat in Kashmiri historical narratives from the eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries and offers an alternative trajectory for the history of Kashmir in this period. It argues that pre-colonial Kashmiri political culture was imbued with a sense of belonging to a land that can more appropriately be termed a regional patriotism, the content of which changed in the early colonial period in response the transformation of state and economic structures, the religious milieu, and the public sphere. Kashmiri political discourse has clearly evolved over the centuries, but the myth of the immutability of the Kashmiri cultural identity has remained embedded in the region’s historical narrative, providing the proponents of majoritarian Kashmiri nationalism with a convenient means to erase differences, conflicts, and contradictions in the history of Kashmir as well as in the history of the Kashmiri nationalist movement.
Chronicle, History, and Identity in Colonial Maharashtra
Prachi Deshpande, Tufts University
This paper looks at the world of history writing in Maharashtra under Maratha rule in the eighteenth century and its transformation after the introduction of colonial rule. This writing, in the form of Marathi bakhars or chronicles was an important part of the overall set of practices that made up power and legitimacy in the Maratha political environment and ought to be seen as history in its own right. Positivist "scientific" historical approaches in the nineteenth century combined with the imperatives of Maharashtrian nationalist intellectuals seeking proof of a glorious pre-colonial past condemned these often hyperbolic narratives to the realm of fiction. Even as these chronicles were derided as History in modern political narratives on the Maratha past, they emerged in the colonial print arena as "sources" for a scientific history. Transmitted to the new middle classes via print in the nineteenth century and increasingly, through cultural forms such as historical novels, drama and, later, cinema, many of the "hyperbolic" narratives contained in the bakhars continued to survive and flourish in the Marathi public sphere. This continued transmission of the historical narratives, I argue, was crucial to the regional identity that was shaped in Maharashtra over the colonial period, an identity based on pride in pre-colonial Maratha military and political successes in the subcontinent.
Organizer: Mathew N. Schmalz, College of the Holy Cross
Chair: Andrew Rotman, Smith College
Discussant: Susan S. Wadley, Syracuse University
Keywords: India, Pakistan, anthropology, religious studies, history.
Ethnography has been the subject of contentious academic debates for decades. Scholars who undertake specific programs of ethnographic research must not only negotiate the complex influences shaping the relationship between ethnographer and informant in the field but also engage the vexing issue of how the often fluid and shifting nature of ethnographic investigation is "represented" as a formal scholarly product. The papers comprising this panel explore these issues within the specific context of South Asia by highlighting the various ways in which reciprocity between scholars and informants can shape the practice and productions of ethnographic research. The panel begins with a paper by Sarah Lamb that considers informants’ attitudes to anthropological research in a comparative discussion of research in two sites, one in suburban America and the other in rural Bengal. Co-presenters Peter Gottschalk and Mathew Schmalz then reflect upon how the images, texts and hypertext of their "Virtual Village" website create a space for a reciprocal questioning between informants and ethnographers but also "veil" the dynamics shaping the representation of ethnographic research in cyberspace. Sarah Caldwell follows by considering the question of "true sources" of material for those who engage the Tantric tradition and its secrecy. Shahzad Bashir then concludes the paper presentations by discussing how he as a historian negotiated complex issues of religious and scholarly identity in his study of and eventual collaboration with the Nurbakhshis of Baltistan. Unified by the theme of reciprocity, the papers of the panel alternate between considerations of the process of ethnography and the final production of ethnographic research. But as Shahzad Bashir’s paper reminds us, the issues associated with ethnography cannot be exclusively confined to the domain of anthropology. The panel thus seeks to probe issues of representation and reciprocity in the study of South Asia in order to engage broader issues of interdisciplinary concern for those involved in the teaching and study of Asia as a whole.
Informants’ Perspectives on Representation and Other Uses of Anthropology: Vignettes from Suburban America and a Bengali Village
Sarah Lamb, Brandeis University
Over the past several decades, perhaps since Said’s Orientalism, scholars have become sensitive about the ways we represent the social-cultural worlds of "other" people. Some contemporary theorists suggest that we move away from representing generalized cultural wholes, to focus instead on particular, divergent narratives and voices, thereby downplaying the hierarchy and othering involved in the anthropological project. This paper turns away for the moment from such scholars’ concerns, to put at center stage some informants’ perspectives on representation and what they see as more practical and everyday potential uses of anthropologists and anthropology. I draw on voices and vignettes from two very different field sites—a village in West Bengal, India, and a suburban U.S. community of Indian immigrants. To the extent people in both places understand and feel interested in the anthropological project at all (which is minimal among many), they tend to wish me to represent them as "Bengalis" or as "Indians," categories they view as generalizable cultural wholes indeed "other" to "America" or the "West." Further, most wish to use anthropology and the anthropologist in ways in line with their own pressing, everyday concerns, caring very little ultimately about the representational scholarly product (such as a dissertation, article or book) that may emerge from the encounter. In a time when we wish to more sensitively represent the viewpoints of those we study, I wonder why we do not pay greater attention to informants’ perspectives on our mutual relationship.
Image, Text, and Hypertext: Representation, Reciprocity, and Concealment in the Virtual Village
Peter S. Gottschalk, Southwestern University; Mathew N. Schmalz, College of the Holy Cross
In order to engage undergraduates with cultural materials foreign to their experience, professors often rely upon the artificial immediacy of images and translated text. The rise of the World Wide Web thus offers a potent pedagogical opportunity because the primacy of images in mainstream American culture when combined with the immediacy of computer interaction can lend a similitude of reality to many internet projects. But interactive materials increasingly appearing on-line can also create circumstances in which students fail to understand the cultural and material barriers that exist beyond cyberspace.
This paper examines "Arampur: A Virtual Indian Village" (http://www.colleges.org/~village), a website developed by the co-presenters that uses virtual reality software and translated interviews to bring a Bihari village onto to the internet. The first part of the paper, presented by Peter Gottschalk, will discuss the veiled construction of a seemingly self-evident north Indian village that necessarily hides the decisions of exclusion demanded by political, social, and personal dynamics. In this sense, visual images when combined with interactive technology offer an engaging yet problematic feigned intimacy and artificial presence. Mathew Schmalz then considers how the website’s translated interviews allow a reciprocal interrogation between ethnographer and informant while arguing that a strategic use of hypertext offers an important corrective to an unnuanced use of web-based media. As an exercise in self-reflective critique, this co-presented paper thus explores the implications of using internet materials for pedagogy and the presentation of ethnographic research.
Initiation, Reciprocity, and Disclosure in Ethnographic Studies of Tantric Traditions
Sarah Caldwell, Harvard University
A recent spate of field-based studies of Hindu tantric religious traditions in South Asia has begun to broaden scholars’ understanding of this much-misunderstood practice and philosophy. Because of its intrinsically secret nature, tantric knowledge can only be obtained via initiation, and serious students of these esoteric traditions must therefore undergo at least some levels of personal initiation in order to engage the traditions in a meaningful way. Academic prejudices against such subjective, experience-near forms of knowledge has prevented contemporary scholars of tantra from coming forward with the true sources of their ethnographic data, leading to a dissimulating form of writing that veils the production of knowledge. This paper discusses the difficult issues arising in such an ethnographic situation and suggests both the need and the means to break free of the practice of dissimulation and secrecy.
Burdens of a Messianic History: Negotiating the Politics of Identity and Representation among the Nurbakhshis of Baltistan
Shahzad Bashir, Carleton College
This paper will discuss my interaction with the Nurbakhshiyya, an Islamic sect which began as a messianic movement in Central Asia in the 15th century and today survives only in small communities in Baltistan and Ladakh. I contacted contemporary Nurbakhshis after researching the movement’s pre-modern history, which proved to be a source of ambiguity for both myself and members of the movement. Over the course of the 20th century, the Nurbakhshis have made efforts to expand their horizons beyond their isolated mountainous enclaves to both become better informed about the movement’s past and be accepted as a distinctive viewpoint in the spectrum of Islamic groups in South Asia. This process has divided the community into factions that emphasize divergent aspects of the movement’s past. As an outside researcher equipped with the legitimizing gaze of Western academia, I myself and my work can be used as partisan tools in the community’s internal debate over identity and representation. Furthermore, I have my own historian’s academic agenda in approaching the contemporary Nurbakhshis that stands apart from the community’s internal debates. This situation has resulted in guarded cooperation between myself and scholars of the community where both sides have provided valuable medieval resources to each other but have avoided discussing issues on which opinions and perspectives may differ. The experience of personal interactions with Nurbakhshis has expanded and complicated my academic purview of the topic by forcing me to ask questions about the role of the researcher in ways more typical of social scientists and ethnographers than historians.
Organizer: Alyssa Ayres, The Asia Society
Chair: Philip Oldenburg, Columbia University
Discussants: John Echeverri-Gent, University of Virginia; Christophe Jaffrelot, Center d’Etudes et de Recherches Internationales; Joydeep Mukherji, Standard & Poor’s; Mark Nichter, University of Arizona; Alok Rai, Indian Institute of Technology
The dynamic changes taking place in India today are the subject of Asia Society’s new volume, India Briefing.
Decentralization and market liberalization have propelled India’s economy forward, but this shift has also sharpened cleavages between the fast-growing south and west and the stagnant north. Politically, the rise of the BJP has taken place in conjunction with the rise of new political parties—none with a truly national reach—necessitating coalitions and moderating the BJP. Some newer political parties are subordinate caste movements now politically empowered. How this economic "pulling apart," political decentering, and rising participation of groups previously left out of the political process are changing India will be answered by Joydeep Mukherji, John Echeverri-Gent, and Christophe Jaffrelot.
The rising profile of Indian Americans and their increasing influence on India mirrors the rising profile of India itself and its new relationship with the United States. A convergence of interests has driven the U.S. and Indian governments together just as Indian Americans are playing new roles in Indian policy and technology circles. Alyssa Ayres and Philip Oldenburg will discuss the growing web of links bringing the state and civil society spheres of both nations closer together.
Alok Rai will speculate on what the rising profile of Indian writing in English may mean for the way India is perceived outside national boundaries, and in turn, for Indian writing more generally. Finally, Mark Nichter will outline demographic and epidemological changes in India, and explain how India is facing a health and health care transition, one driven by economic liberalization and changing care paradigms in its wake.
Organizer: Ajantha Subramanian, Cornell University
Chair: Stanley J. Tambiah, Harvard University
Discussant: David Gilmartin, North Carolina State University
Keywords: South Asia, cultural history, community, law and culture, citizenship.
The relationship between formal systems of social classification and collective identities "on the ground" has been the subject of extensive research and debate. While earlier analyses argued convincingly for the transformative power of classificatory systems such as the census and the law, later work has challenged the easy mapping of official categories onto social identities. This panel joins the latter discussion by pointing to discrepancies between official knowledge and unofficial "common sense," legal codes and cultural practices, and public claims and private sentiments at "home" in colonial and postcolonial South Asia, and "abroad" in the Indian diaspora. From diverse disciplinary and analytical perspectives, these papers address the internal contradictions and external challenges that shape seemingly coherent systems of power and knowledge, giving rise to articulations of cultural and racial difference, and to forms of differentiated citizenship.
Orientalism, Ethnology and Race: William Jones in Bengal
Minakshi Menon, Harvard University
This paper examines the ethnology and racial ideas of the British Orientalist Sir William Jones (1746–1794), founder of the Asiatic Society and editor of the initial volumes of Asiatick Researches.
Jones’s Mosaic ethnology, which was also deeply influenced by the stadial theories of social development of Adam Ferguson, found expression in a theory of the ‘brotherhood’ of Indians and Europeans demonstrated by the linguistic affinities between Sanskrit, Greek and Latin. Jones set out his ‘Indo-European’ theory in eleven Anniversary Discourses delivered to the members of the Asiatic Society in Calcutta between 1784 and his death in 1794. He assessed the civilizational status of various peoples and cultures in these Discourses according to a classification of their languages. This work became an important source for a mid-nineteenth-century British ethnology based on comparative philology.
As a judge of the Supreme Court in Calcutta, Jones also had a wide variety of encounters with South Asians. His reflections on these quotidian interactions display racial feelings at work which were quite at variance with his formal ethnology.
I examine the tensions between Jones’s public ethnology and his private confusion, as his pleasure and delight in Oriental poetry (the Orient as fantasy) gave way to the reality of the Orient as place and race, through a close reading of his Anniversary Discourses, his letters, a travel narrative and two essays on botany.
Pensioning Off Race
Geeta Patel, Wellesley College
Pensions allocated, given and redeemed through the East India Company and through the British colonial government of India provide a peculiarly productive site for the articulations of racial difference. Pensions were scripted into the financial dealings of the East India Company since its inception. In the early years of the company’s attempts to acquire a hold in India, pensions seem to have been primarily given to those who qualified as unremittingly indigent and European. Until 1857, pensions were given to those officers whose work was understood as having a certain value, and who labored for the company for the requisite number of years. Though there was some discussion of how pensioners were assessed in relation to moral worth, these did not form the bulk of the adjudications around pensions and people. After 1857, however, pensions were distributed more extensively and became a site through which racial differences were tallied up in relation to labor, but more often in relation to moral worth. Indian pensioners, in particular, were subjected to harsh scrutiny about their worth as a person. Not only was moral worthiness under target, but the very being of the person considered for a pension was up for grabs. Since pensions were allocated for all sorts of groups, they become an extraordinarily productive site to begin to articulate a technology of race through the value allocated to particular racialized bodies.
North Carolina’s Indians: Erasing Race to Make the Citizen
Ajantha Subramanian, Cornell University
The U.S. 1964 Civil Rights and 1965 Immigration Acts set the stage for the entry of new immigrants into a nation-state formally committed to race-neutral democracy. While in the early 20th century, laying claim to whiteness was a necessary condition for citizenship, the post-Civil Rights era witnessed the rise of a cultural model of citizenship. Now, the anxiety over national belonging that structures the lives of ethnic minorities in the U.S. is played out through the politics of multiculturalism.
In tune with wider societal trends, Indian professionals in North Carolina have crafted a public profile that fits neatly into the framework of American multiculturalism. They are "hard-working," they have their community institutions and practices, and, most importantly, they have defined themselves in cultural terms that avoid any obvious racial referent.
In spite of the ascendance of culture in American political discourse, I submit that race has continued to be a hidden referent of both U.S. multiculturalism and Indian American cultural politics. In this paper, I show that for North Carolina’s Indians, U.S. national identity continues to be constituted by a racial hierarchy within which "whiteness" is the mark of first-class citizenship and "blackness" represents the negative side of belonging, a racialized citizenship that is a permanent disadvantage. I argue that the politics of culture has served them as leverage to gain the "right" kind of citizenship while avoiding the "wrong" kind.
Custom and the Country: Matrilineal Customary Law in Post-Colonial India
Narendra Subramanian, McGill University
Post-colonial regimes which inherited plural legal systems adopted different approaches to legal change, ranging from the retention of much of colonial legal pluralism to its replacement with uniform laws. Family laws varied in colonial India across boundaries both of religion and custom, mostly specific to regionally concentrated groups. Laws specific to religious groups persisted after decolonization, while undergoing some change, but fewer customary laws did. Major policy makers regarded the codification of religious laws as a step towards modernity because it would simplify the legal system and supposedly aid national consolidation. Some tried to codify religious laws around visions of the patrilineal nuclear family as the modern norm.
Most customary laws were taken to fall short of modernity on these grounds. The defense of customary law drew considerable support among groups whose customary laws differed markedly from post-colonial religious laws. This led to the partial retention of some customary laws. Groups with matrilineal laws were among the more successful in this regard, especially those officially deemed tribes. The paper explores how many non-tribal castes in Kerala State of southwest India that enjoy higher socio-economic status, more extensive social links, and participate more directly in post-colonial law-making at the national-level than tribals, retained many of their matrilineal customary laws after decolonization, only to subsequently lose the support this gave the matrilineal joint-family. More broadly, the paper discusses the implications of the retention of some of Kerala’s matrilineal laws for differentiated citizenship in post-colonial India.
Organizer: Deana Lee Heath, University of California, Berkeley
Chair: Eugene F. Irschick, University of California, Berkeley
Discussants: Eugene F. Irschick, University of California, Berkeley; Durba Ghosh, Wellesley College
Keywords: sexuality, South Asia, state, colonial law.
This panel aims to challenge four central assumptions that have dominated the scholarship on the politics of sexuality in colonial India: that moments of crisis such as the Mutiny or the Ilbert Bill served to expose the ‘true’ ideology of the colonial state in regard to issues of race and sexuality; that the state withdrew from social or cultural regulation following the 1857 Mutiny; that in the second half of the nineteenth century Indiana carved out a private sphere to which the state was denied entry; and that by the end of the nineteenth century both colonial and indigenous elites had effectively marginalized subaltern discourse. Moments of crisis, this panel reveals, serve to distort our understanding of both British and Indian attitudes towards sexuality in colonial India, for there were, in fact, no major shifts in the colonial state’s attempts to regulate sexuality throughout the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, any more than there was an attempt on behalf of Indian elites to constitute Indian sexuality as a matter over which state regulation should be denied. Indeed, all of our panelists reveal that not only did Indians actively seek state intervention to regulate the sexua1ity of recalcitrant members of their communities, but that both indigenous elites and non-elites subverted the legislative powers of the state to serve their oven interests. The state, in turn, exploited such indigenous opportunism by making the sexual (as manifested through such means as property law and censorship) inherently political.
Regulating Heterosexuality and Subsuming Caste: Adultery and Bigamy in the Late-Nineteenth-Century Bombay High Court
Rachel Sturman, University of Michigan
This paper examines a series of cases pertaining to the adultery and bigamy of women in the colonial Bombay High Court following the enactment of the 1861 Indian Penal Code, which established new, uniform provisions for the offences of adultery and bigamy by configuring them as crimes against the state, crimes that the state maintained needed to be curtailed "in the interests of public policy." In these cases, virtually all of which involved members of non-elite communities, the defendants regularly asserted that they were following a caste or community custom that allowed a woman to separate from her husband and remarry during his lifetime. I argue that the Court’s ongoing rejection of this claim of custom reflected an expansion of state power over the regulatory authority of castes. Through this process, the Court increasingly curtailed the customary power of castes to regulate marriage and other practices, and located that power solely in the state. Moreover, this formed part of larger changes through which the Court marginalized non-elite practices and brought non-elite communities increasingly under the purview of a homogenized and highly Brahminical version of Hinduism. At the same time, however, these processes occurred through the actions of members of these non-elite communities themselves, who brought their disputes to the colonial courts to advance their personal claims. Further, this pattern of colonial adjudication highlights some of the ways in which the Court regulated heterosexuality and focused central attention on the conjugal couple as the defining relationship of family.
Sexuality, Capital and Colonial Law: Engendering Histories of Property and the State
Mytheli Sreenivas, William Paterson University of New Jersey
This paper examines the relationship of sexuality and the state through an analysis of laws regulating property in colonial India during the early twentieth century. Focusing on civil litigation in Madras Presidency, I argue that discourses of sexuality played a critical role in the transformation of property systems under colonial rule. A key site of contention concerned property belonging to families. In regulating such property, the courts also intervened in a whole host of familial relations, ranging from the conduct of ‘adulterous’ wives to the rights of ‘illegitimate’ children. In particular, the question of conjugality became pivotal; the rights and duties of men and women in marriage became important to the courts’ determination of individual property right vis-à-vis familial property responsibilities. As a result, assumptions about ‘native’ sexual norms and practices became entwined with the legal regulation of capital, producing contradictory results for both. Thus, although little studied, I suggest that attention to the intersections of sexuality with property law raises new questions about the colonial state itself.
The Memsahib Undressed: Reconstituting the Sexuality of the White Woman in Colonial India
Deana Lee Heath, University of California, Berkeley
Most of the work that has been done on the sexuality of European women in colonial India tends to replicate the dichotomous Victorian middle-class conceptions of women either as inherent asexual or as sexually degenerate (the "angel of the hearth" versus the prostitute), although protecting the virtue of the memsahib or preventing the ‘degenerate’ white woman from undermining the racial politics of British rule is generally viewed as making her sexuality an even greater ‘problem’ in India than in Britain. This paper aims to challenge conceptions both of the dominant discourse of sexuality in colonial India and of the state regulation or ‘protection’ of European women’s sexuality by examining the attitude of the Indian and two provincial governments (Bombay and Bengal) to the question of obscenity from the 1880s to the 1930s. It reveals firstly, that not only was Indian law more ‘liberal’ than elsewhere in the empire by determining that nudity, contraceptive literature, and references to bodily functions were not obscene, but that the legal construction of obscenity reduced the state’s power to ‘protect’ the sexuality of European women. But while the colonial state was troubled by photographs of "stark naked white women" and other imported "indecencies" that circulated virtually unimpeded in India by the early twentieth century, by the 1920s it learned to exploit the body of the white woman for its own ends as, ironically, a symbol of both the liberalism and civility of the colonial government.
Organizer: Kirin Narayan, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Chair: Anindya Saha, Cornell University
National Education and the Social Logic of Swadeshi Nationalism
Andrew Satori, University of Chicago
The second half of the nineteenth century had seen the emergence in eastern India of a bifurcated socio-economic formation composed of a "white" commercial sphere of circulation and a "native" sphere of agricultural production. The appeal to a liberal discourse of equal rights was the basis of the early-nationalist critique of racial discrimination—but it could also appear problematic when the sphere of circulation in which the ideals of that liberalism were socially grounded itself assumed the racialized appearance of an alien social form. In such a context, the sphere of circulation’s universal promise of emancipation could only be experienced as heteronomy.
It was in this historical context that discourses of "culture" assumed from the late nineteenth century an increasing centrality in Bengali intellectual life, ambiguously straddling humanistic and ethnographic meanings. I shall discuss the role of the concept of "culture" in the political, social and economic discourses of the Swadeshi movement in Bengal (1905–1908). The proponents of "national education" used discourses of "culture" to elaborate a critique of colonial pedagogy and to construct an alternative program of education on indigenous principles. I shall argue that this discourse was grounded in a critique of the sphere of circulation from an external standpoint that was simultaneously indigenist and universalist—a standpoint constituted by the practice of "culture."
History, Literature, and Gender: Recasting the Critique of Nationalism
Kavita Daiya, George Washington University
This paper engages the critique of nationalism and ethnic violence that has emerged recently from feminist and subaltern studies of the 1947 Partition of India. This revisionist historiography and anthropology by scholars like Urvashi Butalia, Ritu Menon, and Kamala Bhasin, largely from a feminist perspective and through oral testimony, emphasize women’s experience of violence during this moment of decolonization and forced migration. My paper inhabits an interdisciplinary conversation about nationalism, gender studies, literature and history writing, by taking up historical and anthropological work through the representation of Partition in literature and film in the public sphere. The paper’s argument has two dimensions. Firstly, it shows that the focus on questions about memory and violence in Partition studies has tended to elide Partition refugees’ experience, the representation of which in the public sphere sheds important light on the production of ethnic citizenship and national belonging in postcolonial India. Secondly, it complicates feminist critiques of Partition violence as rooted in the construction of woman as a symbol of nation, by taking into account the violence against men that also prevailed during Partition. Thus, rather than translating ‘gender’ as ‘woman,’ as some feminist scholarship does, it suggests that we now need to further develop current explanations of the relationship between women and nationalism, by examining the role of gendered violence suffered by male bodies. I argue that a more nuanced understanding of nations and nationalisms, as well as history writing, can be gained from examining the interrelationship between masculinity and femininity, men and women, in moments of ethnic violence and displacement like Partition.
Along the Peninsula’s Edge: Rethinking Sri Lankan Nationalist History
Cynthia M. Caron, Cornell University
Today Sri Lankan historiography celebrates national progress achieved since Independence and ethnic and religious harmony of the pre-colonial period. Privileged within this singular historical narrative are increases in foreign direct investment and military victories over the separatist group the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Beyond the Sinhala-Tamil debate, outside the sanctioned Buddhist mytho-political story, there are examples of social histories that are nonetheless Sri Lankan which capture both the historic diversity and contemporary social constructions of a ‘total’ national history. This paper draws upon Prasenjit Duara’s notions of narratives of descent and discent (1995: 65–69) to think through contemporary social relations on Sri Lanka’s Kalpitiya peninsula. I use three events of the 1990s to begin outlining an alternative historical reading of the Sri Lankan nation. The Catholic Church’s mobilizations against the construction of a coal-fired power plant and the Voice of America transmission station as well as action taken in conjunction with election malpractice during the 1999 Provincial council elections question state-authored accounts. Using open-ended interviews, environmental impact statements, parliamentary debates, articles from the Sinhala and English press, and participant observation at rallies and public hearings, this paper highlights local understandings of Sri Lankan history and presents the possibility of contradictory or complementary narratives that are excluded from the dominant narrative.
National or Local Roots? India’s Economic Reforms in Comparative Perspective
Aseema Sinha, University of Wisconsin, Madison
This paper addresses three puzzles: (a) why have post-1991 reforms in India made substantial progress despite the contrary expectations of both scholars and policymakers; (b) why is this progress more obvious in unintended and implicit ways? (c) why do we see increased and disproportionate initiative by many regional leaders; CMs and state officials are leading the way in policymaking and implementation. In answering all three questions, my argument will stress the distinction between national and regional/local politics. I show that national-local differences facilitate the consolidation of economic reforms in India through three types of mechanisms. First, pre-existing interest groups are able to predict the benefits from liberalization in stable ways. Second, new interest groups with stakes in liberalization coalesce at different levels of the multi-level system. Third, the political consolidation of reforms in India is facilitated because it undermines national-level opposition from ‘losers’ from emerging.
In an earlier paper I outlined the logic of economic reforms at the regional level in India; in this paper I move to the next stage of research to explore the conditions under which the distinction between the regional or national becomes salient and of relevance to economic policy changes. My argument is that the spatial balance of power provided by the pre-liberalization period, the number of spatial units and the political structure of federalism rather than its economic or administrative architecture determines whether the reform will acquire differentiated spatial response across different levels of the political system. This distinction between local and national politics has not been addressed in the extensive literature on the politics of economic reforms, where interest groups rather than political institutions figure prominently. This paper will address that gap.
The Internet in India: The Emergence of Transnational Identities and Their Relation to National Identities
Shoma Munshi, University of Pennsylvania
"IT means India’s tomorrow" (Atal Behari Vajpayee, Indian Prime Minister, cited in Computers Today: 1999).
India’s first-ever IT ministry was formed in October 1999, and its software capability is slated to make it the largest exporting sector from the country by 2003, growing twice as fast as the US software sector (Mehta 1999: 3), where Indian success stories in the Silicon Valley are by now legend. India, which accounts for 10% of Microsoft’s worldwide workforce (Financial Times: 1999), is the country where the majority of the Fortune 500 companies outsource their software.
This paper will examine how migration today (especially after the 1970s) has distinctly new possibilities to be involved in long-distance nationalism via the hyphenated identity of the non-resident Its (NRI) in the Benelux (Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg) countries and in the politics of the diaspora itself. Transnational investment and the cultural capital of ‘belonging’ go hand-in-hand here (Rajagopal 1997: 49–50). Diasporic politics which connects as much with the ‘homeland’ as with the different nodes in the migration network is made into an everyday possibility by satellite and cable television, telefax, Internet and e-mail. The institutions of the nation-state, both in the countries of origin and in the countries of immigration, are only partly able to ‘nationalize’ these hybrid populations. Based on my fieldwork, the paper wall also look at how the Internet culture has in no way resulted in a decline of national identity for the NRIs in the Benelux countries, but has enhanced it, in different ways from before.
Organizer: Clare Talwalker, University of Dayton
Chair: Parna Sengupta, Carleton College
Discussant: Nita Kumar, Reed College
Keywords: colonial pedagogy; modernity; South Asia.
Our panel explores the centrality of education in the 19th- and 20th-century projects of modernity in colonial South Asia. Our papers will explore from different angles the transformative impact of colonial pedagogy and colonial curricula on Indian society itself and on the ways in which the social was articulated and apprehended. Dewan traces the collision of traditional Indian decorative arts and Western modes of naturalist depiction in colonial art education. McGowan explores how the curriculum for industrial education framed a new economy in contradictory ways that, among other things, did not seek to fully transform artisan-based manufacture to modern industry. Sengupta, focusing on the "object lessons" in metropolitan and colonial teacher training schools, analyzes the connections between ‘modern’ pedagogy, Protestant epistemology and empire. Talwalker examines the first series of Marathi primary textbooks as attempts (though limited and flawed) to symbolically resolve the paradoxes of a society and economy in transition. Given the ongoing revamping of the national curriculum by the present Hindu nationalist government, such a focus on the historical unfolding of modern education in India is particularly timely. The very demand for a Hinduized curriculum reflects the legacy of colonialism on current debates on the place of schooling in postcolonial India. It is to historicizing this legacy that the papers in our panel attend.
Fine Art/Decorative Art Curricula in Colonial Art Education
Deepali Dewan, University of Minnesota/Royal Ontario Museum
One of the most perplexing problems in nineteenth-century art education in colonial South Asia is the coexistence of training in traditional Indian decorative arts and in Western modes of naturalistic depiction associated with the fine arts of painting and sculpture. Described as a "schizophrenic" program of colonial education, fine art and decorative art studies were sometimes separate, sometimes indistinguishable, and often contradictory. This paper examines fine art and decorative art curriculum at the Madras School of Art during the later half of the nineteenth century: in particular it traces the intersection or collision of fine and decorative art training as colonial art education sought to establish the foundations of "modern" visual production. The results of these configurations include the production of a certain discourse about the state of Indian art and its necessary revival; knowledge about the visual past; and a new kind of visual culture.
Imagining the Economy Through Education
Abigail McGowan, University of Pennsylvania
In this paper I focus on the manual training curriculum offered in industrial schools in Western India from the 1880s to the 1920s. Inspired by the technical education movement in Europe, British and Indian officials and reformers started industrial schools in small towns and cities across the Bombay Presidency in the 1880s and 1890s. In such schools, students moved through sequential courses, learning new technologies and more efficient work practices, usually in carpentry and blacksmithing. Industrial education was central to plans to modernize the Indian economy: the schools offered a standardized curriculum subject to external examination but free from family or caste control, thereby encouraging a vision of industry as rational, progressive and modern, peopled by disciplined, precise workers unencumbered by caste or tradition. And yet, the modernity offered by industrial schools in India was conflictual, as the promised transformative powers of education had to be reconciled with the structures and requirements of a colonial society. Rather than transform the existing social order, industrial education aimed to preserve it. Thus, industrial schools targeted boys from artisan castes as a way to keep such boys in traditional occupations and prevent them from aspiring to clerical employment. Similarly, for all of the official talk about the role of industrial education in modernizing Indian industry, such education actually promoted a very limited vision of Indian industrial capability, in which Indian industry relied on hand not mechanical processes, and was located in small workshops not centralized factories. Using curricula and reports from several schools, I will explore these contradictions, arguing that industrial schools were central to the late 19th-century attempt to come to terms with the industrial future of the subcontinent.
An Object Lesson in Colonial Pedagogy
Parna Sengupta, Carleton College
In this paper, I will explore the multiple ways in which a popular nineteenth-century pedagogic technique called the object lesson was used in metropolitan Britain and colonial India. I examine object lesson books, as well as the practice of object theory in teacher training colleges in Britain and Bengal in order to demonstrate the inextricability of ‘Western’ pedagogic theories and Protestant epistemology. Although early lessons emphasized the use of objects found in the natural environment (shells, leaves etc), British teachers were encouraged to use a wide variety of colonial commodities (tea, ginger, sugar) in their curriculum. While the content of object books spoke to an expanding British empire, the form of the lessons reflected the widely held colonial belief that it was not only children who were incapable of abstract thinking, but non-Christian colonial populations more generally. The object lesson thus became the means and the metaphor for the transformation of colonial society by Western, ‘modern,’ Christian education.
Colonial Textbooks as Myths of the Modern
Clare Talwalker, University of Dayton
In this paper, I focus on the first series of primary textbooks written in Marathi between 1857–1861 by British officials collaborating with English-educated Marathi Brahmins. While these state-produced Marathi textbooks were used in a small number of schools established by the colonial state, they later became the template for successive private textbook writing ventures by prominent Marathi-speaking figures in the late 19th and early 20th century. These later textbooks were framed as distinct from those produced by the colonial state in that they were written as cultural objects of group pride and as overt and covert criticisms of the colonial state. Yet, the significance of this first series is that their logic—and, specifically, the relationship they assumed to exist between modern prose writing and the embrace of social progress—carried over to the later textbooks written by Indian elites. Drawing on the work of those who argue that modern prose is the myth of contemporary society, I approach these early textbooks as sites of modern myth making in western India. With Claude Levi-Strauss, who views myth as symbolic resolution of social contradiction, I read the form and content of these textbooks as symbolically resolving the contradictions imminent in the transition from a precapitalist social formation to a peripheral capitalist formation. My paper illustrates how in the logic of these modern myths the ideologies of land, caste, and family are symbolically resolved with the emerging ideologies of individual merit and the demands of increased productivity for profit.
Organizer and Chair: Kirin Narayan, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Creating the Modern Consumer: Gender and Identity at the Site of an Indian Development Project
Kathleen O’Reilly, University of Iowa
Development discourses are complex social processes that involve actors operating at many different levels in development aid hierarchies. Little research has investigated the construction of discourses at the particular site of development projects, tending to look at them as homogenous units. I suggest viewing development projects as sites where the multiple agendas and disparate power of individuals coming from different social locations converge. At these sites, NGO donors, staff and constituents struggle over discourses that: (1) regenerate meanings about class, gender, modernity, and rural/urban identities; and (2) have material results for lives and landscapes. The outcomes of these struggles reflect the operations of power.
My research focuses on the microprocesses through which development discourses, and especially meanings of ‘women’s empowerment,’ are constructed at the site of a foreign-funded development project in northern Rajasthan. The Project involves: (1) building a drinking water supply system; and (2) creating need in the Project area for clean water and sanitation facilities. An overt focus of Project staff on issues of water accessibility, health, and sanitation veils a parallel concentration on creating new identities for women fieldworkers and their clients in villages. I aim to show that actors working at different scales within this Project aspire to transform rural women, both staff and villagers, into ‘modern subjects’ who reflect urban, middle class values. These values include accepting the commodification of a resource (water) they have been getting for free.
Our Rajput Brothers: History, Romanticism and Imperial Critique in Tod’s Rajasthan
Jason Freitag, Columbia University
In Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, Lt.-Col. James Tod presented his life’s work on the history and culture of the Rajputs of Rajasthan. Integral to the work is his theory of the "Scythian" ancestry that provides a racial tie for the Rajputs with the European world, including their British overlords. Tod’s Annals is an example of Romantic historical Orientalism in an imperial political context. The Romantic longing for the pure origins of racial communities found a ready home in the imperial ethnographic project. This paper will examine Tod’s explication of the racial relationship between the British and the Rajputs, especially Tod’s analyses of the common historical developments he took as evidence of this shared ancestry: "feudal" social structure and bardic chroniclers. The ramifications of this British-Rajput identification are not simply academic. Tod acted on this interpretation in his official duties as Political Agent to the Western Rajput States, and sought special status for the Rajput princes. Further, Tod deployed Romantic notions of the Oriental origins of European peoples in novel, supple ways. His attempt to protect the Rajputs was simultaneously a statement of the humanitarian potential and duty of the British Empire—the moral uplift of the best of the natives—as well as a social critique of the worst in imperial political culture and mercantile society—the disregard for noble native cultures in the face of mechanistic economic imperatives. Tod’s historical work and official actions delineate a Romantic strand within and, therefore, the multivocal nature of, nineteenth century Orientalist discourse.
The Eye of the City: Dowry and Civility in Colonial Calcutta, 1880–1940
Rochona Majumdar, University of Chicago
The anonymity of the city is often contrasted to the face-to-face quality of rural relationships. Yet, cities have their share of scandals, rumors, and legends that bring shame and ignominy to denizens. How is the so-called anonymity of the city compromised (or indeed constituted) by a gaze that also watches people? To whom does one feel answerable in a city? What role does the media have, for instance in creating a public that not only debates issues of general interest but also disseminates social scandals in order to shame people?
This paper attempts to answer some of these questions by examining the discussions that attended the practice of marriage-dowry in early twentieth-century Calcutta. The practice of dowry became a contentious issue in Bengali modernity since the 1880s when a large of number of satirical plays against dowry exchange were staged. Reformist men also used fiction and other forms of public writing to criticize the practice. The discussions surrounding dowry became particularly intense in the 1910s, following spectacular acts of suicide carried out by young women who wanted to spare their families (in particular their fathers) the humiliation of not being able to arrange for dowry in connection with their marriages. These became instances of dramatized ways of shaming communities over the dowry issue. I discuss these cases of suicide to show how modern institutions such as print culture, law and fiction come together in twentieth-century Calcutta to constitute an impersonal eye to which citizens could be held answerable for their actions. At the same time, dowry payment became a mode of acquiring respectability in the city where the middle class householder’s existence was anonymous compared to the village. These contradictory pulls of respectability and humanist critique over the dowry issue provide an interesting case study of the constitution of civility in the urban, colonial setting.
Law, Gender, and Identity: Colonial Civil Law, the Family and Household in North India, 1780–1880
Malavika Kasturi, Oberlin College
The articulation of gender and ethnic identities and notions of citizenship is intimately tied to law and legal discourses. After independence (1947), the Indian nation state maintained, with some changes, the British legacy of separate personal/religious laws, giving religion the right to regulate gender relations. Despite these linkages between the legal past and the present, a large gap still exists in the literature in understanding the ramifications of colonial civil law for structuring family relationships and the politics of community and religion. My paper will engage with this problematic through a historical analysis of ‘Hindu’ personal law dealing with property relations and succession in north India between 1780 and 1880.
I shall focus on the role that colonial political and legal discourses played in conflicts over land, the establishment of the patrilineal ‘joint’ family structure as the legal norm and the mapping of the legal, cultural and political boundaries of gender and ‘community.’ I will explore the structural contradictions built into colonial ‘personal’ law, which upheld caste, familial and religious rights within the kinship group, while bolstering individual rights to property in the public space. I will also investigate the ways colonial civil law was shed by its dialogue with local hierarchies of authority based on caste, class, gender and religion and was used by litigants to reconstitute ‘tradition,’ social relations, and identities.
The Explanation of Draupadi’s Polyandry in Amaracandrasuri’s Balabharata
Jonathan Geen, University of Rochester
One of the most interesting and provocative episodes in the Mahabharata is the polyandrous marriage of Draupadi to the five sons of Pandu (i.e. the five Pandavas). Instances of polyandry are rare in brahminical literature, and polyandry appears to play virtually no role in normative brahminical culture. This episode, as found in the Critical Edition of the Mahabharata, demonstrates a self-awareness of the morally ambiguous nature of polyandry by means of a discussion amongst the main characters regarding its legality. During this discussion, the sage Vyasa (i.e. the legendary author of the Mahabharata himself) arrives on the scene and narrates two stories to Draupadi’s father King Drupada in order to explain why it is both lawful and preordained that Draupadi marry all five Pandavas. Each of the two stories told by Vyasa appears to be a complete and sufficient explanation for the polyandry, though the two stories are themselves seemingly unconnected and, arguably, incompatible. However, in the 13th century Balabharata, a medieval epitome of the Mahabharata, the two stories told by Vyasa are altered so as to be seamlessly connected and harmonious. The author of the Balabharata, Amaracandrasuri, was not himself a Hindu but a Svetambara Jaina, and was doubtless aware of several popular Jaina versions of Draupadi’s marriage. While his Balabharata is unquestionably Hindu in nature, the harmonization of Vyasa’s two stories was likely influenced by his knowledge of Jaina versions of this episode.