South Asia Seminar Series

Lisa Björkman, Associate Professor of Urban and Public Affairs at the University of Louisville, will present her work in the ICGC South Asia Seminar Series. 

GS Sahota, Associate Professor of Literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz, will give a talk on his current work in the ICGC South Asia Seminar Series. 

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883–1966) was an intellectual, ideologue, and anticolonial nationalist leader in India’s struggle for independence from British colonial rule, one whose anti-Muslim writings exploited India’s tensions in pursuit of Hindu majority rule. Savarkar and the Making of Hindutva is the first comprehensive intellectual history of one of the most contentious political thinkers of the twentieth century. Janaki Bakhle examines the full range of Savarkar’s voluminous writings in his native language of Marathi, from political and historical works to poetry, essays, and speeches. She reveals the complexities in the various positions he took as a champion of the beleaguered Hindu community, an anti-caste progressive, an erudite if polemical historian, a pioneering advocate for women’s dignity, and a patriotic poet. This critical examination of Savarkar’s thought shows that Hindutva is as much about the aesthetic experiences that have been attached to the idea of India itself as it is a militant political program that has targeted the Muslim community in pursuit of power in postcolonial India. By bringing to light the many legends surrounding Savarkar, Bakhle shows how this figure from a provincial locality in colonial India rose to world historical importance. Savarkar and the Making of Hindutva also uncovers the vast hagiographic literature that has kept alive the myth of Savarkar as a uniquely brave, brilliant, and learned revolutionary leader of the Hindu nation

Mumbai’s east coast, housing port industries and raced, classed and indigenous populations, has long been produced as a toxic industrial waterway for furthering British imperial and Indian nationalist ambitions. Recent neoliberal interventions intensify port, oil and logistics industries while including ‘green’ options of real estate development and ecotourism. Coastal planning is founded on capitalist projects of colonization that forget its watery history. They also erase those who inhabit the coast differently, such as the indigenous fishing community of Kolis. This talk foregrounds fisher place making or commoning that has substantively contributed to making Mumbai’s eastern fringes an incipient urban, coastal commons but that has been erased as fishing villages have often been at odds with the (colonial) state’s paradigm of drying/draining the city and engineering hard boundaries between land and water. Might we read this commoning as a form of hitherto unrecognized and provisional environmental stewardship that is built up from the muddy grounds on which racialized capitalist violence is enacted? And what might this competing notion of environmentalism offer to expert planning scholarship and practice in a time of global climate crises?

This book presents a comparative genealogical analysis of informal settlement evictions in Indian cities from the late 19th century to the present. Drawing on extensive archival research and ethnographic fieldwork, it traces how evictions have been shaped over time by critical events and their associated governing logics to produce the cumulative logics underlying the practice today. This talk will outline the broader framework for the book and an empirical chapter focusing on the critical event of the Emergency, during which time, evictions came to be used as a tool for securing electoral advantage and showcasing government power – coalescing into “electoral eviction logics” still relevant today. Tracing the genealogies of contemporary eviction practices across India’s largest cities, this analysis offers more historical grounded explanations for contested politics in Indian cities today, while contributing to broader debates in global urban studies and comparative historical sociology.

How do ideologies of ascriptive difference structure capitalist economies? How do subjects of such ideologies experience and interpret their own ascribed differences? What forms of collective politics do they articulate? How do their political projects reconstitute the terms of ascription? These are the broad conceptual questions that knit together two of my projects. The first, older project that resulted in the book, The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India , is on the social and political lives of alumni of the Indian Institutes of Technology, some of whom were part of the post-1965 wave of professional migration to the United States. A subset of this group -- Tamil Brahmins -- is the population that I’ll be focusing on in this paper. The second, new project is on the social and political lives of Tamil Dalits who worked as the underground labor force in the Kolar Gold Fields, a gold mining company town in South India. While at first glance, these seem to be wholly divergent histories, there is considerable overlap. Both Tamil Brahmins and Tamil Dalits were conscripted into capitalist labor regimes that naturalized caste difference . Conscription into these labor regimes catalyzed mobility across political borders and into new spaces of social stratification. These spaces of labor and life produced novel articulations of caste and class that hinged in part on a sense of relational geographies. They also animated new forms of collective self-representation and claims to post-caste futures. In this paper, I consider these histories together to see what the comparison illuminates about the dialectics of caste ascription and future-making.

Rita Kothari (Ashoka University, Delhi) will give a paper as a part of the South Asia Seminar Series. 

Keya Ganguly (Department of Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature, UMN) will give a paper as a part of the South Asia Seminar Series. 

Dr. Huzaifa Omair Siddiqi will offer an analysis of Friedrich Nietzsche and Mansur Ibn Husain al-Hallaj in Iqbal’s Javednama.

Francesca Orsini will talk about how we can reassemble the languages and oral and written textual traditions that colonial ideas of language and modern literary histories have separated.

Sumangala Damodaran will talk about how a corpus of music from mid-1980s India onwards come to address and re-constellate questions of nation, identity and politics in a refreshing manner, challenging right-wing cultural assertions frontally, and also shaping popular music listening cultures in the country through providing contemporary interpretations.