Graduate Student Workshop

Spring 2022 South Asia Center Graduate Student Workshop and Reception

Friday, May 20, 2022
9:00am–3:30pm | Workshop
4:00–5:30pm | Reception
Denny Hall Room 313 (campus map)

All UW students, faculty, staff, and alumni affiliated with the South Asia Center are welcome to attend. Lunch will be provided for workshop attendees. The RSVP deadline to place a lunch order has passed, but you are still welcome to join us for the workshop and reception!

The Spring 2022 South Asia Center Graduate Student Workshop will feature presentations (see abstracts) from current UW graduate students spanning a range of topics and disciplines across South Asia Studies. This is an opportunity for students to gain valuable experience presenting their work in a conference format while getting feedback from peers and faculty members. The workshop will be followed by an informal reception hosted by the South Asia Center.

Workshop Schedule

9:00–9:15am | Welcome remarks

9:15–10:45am | Session 1

Enslavement, Jurisprudence, and Conceptual Art
Discussant: Purnima Dhavan

Uneven Spaces: Transregional Human Commodification in Indian Ocean Historiography
Sukhmann Bajwa (MA, International Studies – South Asia)

Muslim Unbelonging: Conceptual and Performance Art in Post-Independence South Asia (1970-2020)
Ananya Sikand (PhD Candidate, Art History)

Legal discourse as social history in the Fatawa-i Alamgiri
Ilsa Abdul Razzak (MA, International Studies – South Asia)

10:45–11:00am | Coffee break

11:00am–12:30pm | Session 2

Contemporary Politics in South Asia: Gender, Hindutva, and Public Health
Discussant: Radhika Govindrajan

Remembering Partition “Right”: Understanding Hindutva’s Regionalization in Sindhi Hindus
Karishma Manglani (MA, International Studies – South Asia)

New Bollywood Cinema’s Legal Imaginaries: Section 375 and the New Legal Order
Amalie Goul Dueholm (PhD Candidate, Cinema and Media Studies)

Loo ka Sitam: The Tyranny of Heat in Modern South Asia
Shelby House (PhD Student, Anthropology)

12:30-2:00pm | Lunch break

2:00–3:30pm | Session 3

Religion, Indigeneity, and Sovereignty
Discussant: Sunila Kale

Ecologies of Power: A Feminist History of State Building in the Gond Kingdom of Garha, 1500-1870s
Nastasia Paul Gera (PhD Student, Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies)

From Popular Print to Popular Media: Shifting Meanings of Kālī’s Iconography from Colonial Lithographs to Contemporary Day Internet Memes in India
Anjali Yadav (PhD Student, Asian Languages & Literature)

4:00–5:30pm | Reception

Workshop Presentation Abstracts

Uneven Spaces: Transregional Human Commodification in Indian Ocean Historiography
Sukhmann Bajwa (MA, International Studies – South Asia)

This presentation, adapted from my paper, analyzes the works of scholars spanning the fields of South Asian and Indian Ocean adjacent histories to highlight discourse as key in the redressing of historiographical marginality of enslavement in South Asia. Among a cross section of scholarship, I assess themes of source selectivity, methodology, and interventions to explain the discourses and illustrate how interdisciplinary research might better serve in correcting historiographical disparities and address historical erasure. The body of scholarship enslavement is plentiful and rich with historical discourse. Rooted in these case studies, I argue for an intersectional methodological framework that works to reimagine formulations about power, agency, identity, voice, and collective memory in temporally and spatially charged histories like the field of enslavement studies. The oversimplified projection of identity modern formations onto the plane of political constructions and positionalities extending beyond shallowness of such binaries as ‘free’ and ‘unfree’ into a period where the trajectories are unsettled should alert scholars to identify both the exact historical context they are engaging in. Thus, I argue that it is only through broader historical contextualization a more comprehensive mapping of an enslaved persons and others involved in the trade and their subjecthood becomes more pronounced. This paper problematizes neo-nationalist historical methodologies of reading both post-colonial and pre-modern archives and sources as inherently empty of bias and power struggles. The pre-modern period, where trajectories are unsettled thoroughly and where social identities such as caste, gender, and class present in complicated interlocking should encourage historians to redress the very fundamental values of ‘sub-altern’ and anticolonial theory. I also attend to function of these parallel narratives to regulate and construct the historical narrative that enslavement in the region was somehow gentler, kinder, more flexible, and less traumatic. It was not any of these things.

Muslim Unbelonging: Conceptual and Performance Art in Post-Independence South Asia (1970-2020)
Ananya Sikand (PhD Candidate, Art History)

By exploring the overlooked histories of conceptual and performative art of South Asia and its diaspora through the art practices of Rasheed Araeen, Nasreen Mohamedi, Rummana Hussain and Zarina Bhimji, I question a longstanding disciplinary tendency that takes Islamic art to be a static category that can only be used to examine singular positions of subjectivity, community and religion. Instead, using archival evidence, ethnography and exhibition histories in Africa, England, India and Pakistan, I suggest that these artists offer new configurations and alternative understandings of ‘Muslimness’ and thereby propose ‘Muslimness’ as a way of being, knowing, as well as a field of knowledge that can only be accessed by theorizing the materiality of the body and lived experience. I investigate the sites these artists work within as a form of both Muslim unbelonging and worldmaking and argue that the artists make worlds that are both similar to and different from the world of the archive which they work on and against.[1] Thus, my project challenges dominant hegemonies – namely the ways in which secular Western modernism has shaped knowledge paradigms and the subjectivities that they render visible. My research disrupts such paradigms and contends that they critically limit how we can understand the complexity of Muslim human subjectivities.[2] By privileging subjugated forms of knowledge and meaning making, my project will formulate new articulations and understandings of ‘Muslimness’ that center vulnerability and precarity as opposed to articulations of visible identity politics. It will also capture the persistent practice of self-critique and social engagement inherent to the terrain of modern and contemporary Islamic art. Finally, I propose the mediums of conceptual art and performance as lenses through which history can be read, and artistic practice as a methodology and tool to do so.

[1] Muñoz, Disidentifications (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 1999, 1.

[2] Here Muslim human subjectivities thinking through art and performance operates distinctly differently from ethnography or activist work which are grounded in solidified collective identities along with an acceptance that those identities are strategic, for example, Dalit feminism or Muslim female identity.

Legal discourse as social history in the Fatawa-i Alamgiri
Ilsa Abdul Razzak (MA, International Studies – South Asia)

This paper explores sections of an Islamic legal compendium, Fatawa-i Alamgiri, commissioned
by the Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb or Alamgir I during the seventeenth century. It is a collection of legal responses to questions based on Hanafi jurisprudence, and was compiled by jurists who used older legal texts that had already been in use across the Islamicate world. The paper engages with relevant historiography of the Mughal Empire while exploring the Fatawa-i Alamgiri in order to connect legal activity with legal discourse. It argues that the customs of non-elite actors were important and that Islamic legal discourse presented multiple pathways rather than people manipulating law. It also highlights how the judge is presented as an arbiter in marital disputes. These multiple explorations are aided by secondary scholarship on law in the Mughal Empire, ultimately opening up possibilities for understanding the way shari’a was shaped and navigated imperially and communally.

Remembering Partition “Right”: Understanding Hindutva’s Regionalization in Sindhi Hindus
Karishma Manglani (MA, International Studies – South Asia)

The Hindu nationalism of today has now gained ground and permeated new spaces, regions, and communities. Looking at online entrepreneurial influencers, I present how these third-generation Sindhi Hindu migrants use Sindh’s history to integrate Hindutva’s ideology. During the 1947 India-Pakistan partition, Sindh fully became a part of Pakistan, which was to be a homeland to South Asian Muslims. The act of border creation caused an exodus of Sindhi Hindus from the region, of whom now a diaspora (and descendants of migrants) exists in India and over the world. These influencers now use specific localized and familial memories such as those of Partition, among other Sindhi cultural memories, as a site to produce a majoritarian Hindutva narrative. This also allows us to see in how online spaces Hindutva is being localized into struggles for belonging, where resonances and negotiations between Hindutva and liberal movements, decolonial projects, and even anti-Hindutva projects occur. Alongside this, I also seek to explore how introducing caste into the cultural memory of Sindhi Hindus and Partition can explain some of these resonances with Hindutva’s projects of creating a caste-free homogenous community.

New Bollywood Cinema’s Legal Imaginaries: Section 375 and the New Legal Order
Amalie Goul Dueholm (PhD Candidate, Cinema and Media Studies)

Released after several highly publicised rape cases, Section 375 (2019) was promoted as a film about the misuse of rape laws with the tag line ‘marzi ya zabardasti’. Following the courtroom proceedings after a director is accused of rape, the film uses the court case and the legal counsel to discuss the purpose of law, and the relationship between law and justice. Situating Section 375 within a longer history of cinematic representations of the law, I suggest that popular Hindi cinema contributes to a legal imaginary of law as neutral and universal, even as the films often show it to be embodied and subjective. As an example of New Bollywood’s topical social, I argue that we need to read Section 375’s reframing of the law as a fact-based tool outside of politics and separate from justice in the context of what Oishik Sircar refers to as ‘the New Legal Order’.

Loo ka Sitam: The Tyranny of Heat in Modern South Asia
Shelby House (PhD Student, Anthropology)

On April 29, 2022, the cities of Sibi and Jacobabad, Sindh, Pakistan, reported scorching temperatures of 116.6 degrees Fahrenheit (47 degrees Celsius). As such deadly temperatures become the so-called ‘new normal’ across the Global South, medical anthropologists have emphasized the need for ethnographic studies of heat. In this presentation, I argue for an anthropological understanding of heat as a social, political, and ecological actor in modern South Asia, and I ask how heat emerges as an archival and ethnographic subject. Through an exploration of colonial records, literature, periodicals, television broadcasts, and social media posts from contemporary India and Pakistan, I consider: What does it mean to live with heat, and how is heat experienced differentially across lines of caste, class, gender, and species?

Ecologies of Power: A Feminist History of State Building in the Gond Kingdom of Garha, 1500-1870s
Nastasia Paul Gera (PhD Student, Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies)

My research uses a feminist analytical framework to investigate the ecologies of the Gond kingdom of Garha from the early modern to the early colonial period. I show how the gendering and sexualization of elephants in early modern South Asia was crucial for state building in Garha, embedding the kingdom into the wider region. I argue that Garha’s ecologies produced specific meanings for “queen” as well, who were powerful actors in this kingdom. I investigate shifts and continuities as Garha came under British colonial rule in the nineteenth century. I demonstrate how British colonial actors mobilized gender and sexuality to discursively co-construct Gond people, forests, and the nonhuman beings who inhabited them as “wild” in the arenas of witchcraft, hard drinking, and hunting. I argue that this enabled the production of an elite British colonial masculinity needed to “tame” the wild, justifying the appropriation of labor and resources from Garha. Nevertheless, I show the on-going importance of Gond queens and other powerful Gond women, the absence of biological sex as a marker of gendered capacities to labor and drink among Gond people, and Gond people’s knowledges of forests and their nonhuman inhabitants through this period.

This presentation can be described as a comparative analysis of two popular iconographies of the goddess Kālī. One, is a pamphlet from late 19th century British India, in which Kālī is garlanded by the European heads. Second, an internet meme of goddess Kālī, author unknown, surfaced on social media platforms once the news of mass molestation in Bangalore in the name of “western” clothing broke out. While there are no European heads this time, the focus now shifts to the ‘shortness’ of her skirt, and the caption reads as a warning, “Tell me my dress is ‘asking for it’ one more goddamn time”.

I will start the presentation by giving a brief overview of the goddess Kālī and how she came about to be recognized as a militant deity. Then I will detail the socio-political events that led to the adaptation of Kālī in the two visual works in question. This will also entail a brief description of the two visual forms: lithography and memes and their contextual significance. Lastly, I will talk in length about the nationalist and feminist affects that two similar iconographies of a militant, blood-thirsty created. Most importantly, how the icon of the same goddess appeared during two different time periods to evoke two distinct political affects.