Spring 2025 South Asia Center Graduate Student Workshop and Reception

Spring 2025 South Asia Center Graduate Student Workshop...

Spring 2025 South Asia Center Graduate Student Workshop and Reception

Friday, May 30, 2025
Thomson Hall Room 317
Workshop and Keynote: 10:00am – 4:00pm
Reception: 4:00 – 5:00pm

The Spring 2025 South Asia Center Graduate Student Workshop will feature presentations 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.

All UW students, faculty, staff, and alumni affiliated with the South Asia Center are welcome to attend this workshop . Lunch will be provided for workshop presenters and attendees.

RSVP by May 23: bit.ly/sac-workshop-2025

10:00 – 10:30am
Welcome and Opening Remarks

Dr. Radhika Govindrajan, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology; Director, UW South Asia Center

10:30am – 12:00pm
Panel 1: South Asian History through Narratives, Chronicles, and Scriptures

Chair: Dr. Purnima Dhavan, Associate Professor, Giovanni and Amne Costigan Endowed Professor in History, UW

Jonathan Laiman, Graduate Student, Buddhist Studies, Department of Asian Languages & Literature
Reclaiming Dharma: Śakuntalā’s Story Across Epic, Jātaka, and Drama

This paper examines the narrative of Śakuntalā, mother of Bharata, as depicted in three early sources, the Mahābhārata, Kālidāsa’s Abhijñānaśakuntalam, and the Kaṭṭhahāri Jātaka, through the lens of restoration. While previous studies have compared these versions based on motifs, visual elements, and aesthetic representations, the central theme of dharma as a restoration force remains underexplored. This paper argues that dharma governs individual duty and serves as a mechanism of narrative and social restoration, particularly in moments of climax and resolution.

Focusing on the court scene, where Śakuntalā and King Duṣyanta debate, this study examines how dharma functions linguistically and conceptually to repair broken bonds and reinstate rightful relationships. The term “dharma” frequently appears in compounds defining obligation, truth, and conjugal status, demonstrating how dharma’s authority restored lost recognition, disrupted vows, and fractured trust.

Key motifs of the story, such as love, marriage, the ring, rejection, and reunion, interact within this dharmic framework. The ring, a token of Duṣyanta’s promise, challenges the dharma of the giver. Love and marriage must align with dharma, or they bring consequences. The conflict and resolution in the narrative are not merely personal but function within a larger ethical and cosmic order.

By highlighting dharma’s role in restoring balance, justice, and rightful relationships, this study deepens the understanding of the Śakuntalā narrative. It also invites reflection on the broader cultural framework of restoration in South Asian traditions, from moral duty in classical texts to contemporary efforts in reclaiming lost identities, cultural heritage, and historical narratives.

Parul Behl, Graduate Student, Department of History
Locating Silence, Locating Shah Hussain

The Mughal seasonal capital of Lahore, was an urban and religious center, well documented in the sources of the imperial court by Abul Fazl, Badayuni, Jahangir and Muhammad Salih Kanbo Lahori. How does one account for the absence of a well-known and popular saintly personality escaping the eye of a prominent account by a Mughal bureaucrat? This paper accounts for the absence of one of the most prominent saints of Lahore, Shah Hussain, in Badayuni’s chronicle Muntakhab-al-Tawarikh in sixteenth century Lahore. Badayuni’s extensive travels to Lahore and Multan suba in the closing decades of the sixteenth century and his meetings with the prominent personalities of Lahore and Multan, does not incorporate Shah Hussain, although surprisingly he documents his details about extensive time spent at the hospice of Shaikh Daud of Chati, the founder of the Qadirriyah order to which Shah Hussain is later associated. Badayuni is grateful to the Sufi pir for bestowing him with his grace. His interactions with poets of Lahore indicate his familiarity with the poetic sensibilities of the time, for he carefully allocates space to different poetic compositions across genres, but surprisingly vernacular poets composing in kafis or other genres specific to Punjab are absent. This paper argues that the memory of Shah Hussain is a later invention, not only in terms of his affiliation with the Qadiriyya Sufi order, but also in terms of memorializing and documenting Hussain’s gender affiliation and confrontation with the imperial court. It also examines the politics of documentation during Shah Hussain’s lifetime. Hussain’s omission from Badayuni’s memoirs can be attributed to the politics of documentation, nurtured by linguistic, social and urban rural hierarchies. Shah Hussain’s poetic compositions in Punjabi, operated outside the elite circles of Arabic and Persian compositions, the languages of intellectual, religious and imperial scholarship. The privileging of elite intellectual traditions over regional expressions in Punjabi indicate the status accorded to vernacular compositions. Shah Hussain’s poetic compositions, as preserved in later manuscripts, navigate this marginalization for his poetry is reflective of the growing interaction with the rural and urban landscapes of Lahore. Shah Hussain’s location as a vernacular composer is critical for identifying why Badayuni narrative overlooks Hussain. By exploring Shah Hussain’s composition in Punjabi language and Badayuni’s Persian-language chronicle titled Muntakhab-Al-Tawarikh, this paper locates Shah Hussain in the religious and intellectual network of sixteenth century Lahore, while critically examining the relationship between vernacular and Persian sources of this period.

Karthik Malli, MA Student, South Asian Studies, Jackson School of International Studies
Scripting Modern Malayalam

I aim to examine literary and sociolinguistic debates around the introduction of print mechanization for the Malayalam language, and the script standardization measures that accompanied this push. I argue that since this new print technology required script reform, the Malayalam literary community came to see script simplification as necessary for their language to become modern. I draw from archival work conducted in Malayalam, existing literature on print culture in India, and sociolinguistic theory around Indian linguistic nationalism and script. This is supplemented by work on print mechanization and its political significance in India. I also draw from research focusing particularly on Kerala (where Malayalam is spoken) and its literary and print networks of production and readership.

12:00 – 1:00pm
Lunch

1:00 – 2:30pm
Panel 2: Communicating Political Activism in and around South Asia

Chair: Dr. Anis Rahman, Assistant Teaching Professor, Department of Communication

Sohaa Khan, Ph.D. Student, Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies
Hashtags to Hate Crimes: The Real-World Impact of Online Hate Speech on Religious Minorities in Pakistan

Social media platforms, originally intended as tools for creating global connections, have increasingly become vehicles for spreading online hate speech, leading to offline violence. Exploring connections between online and offline worlds, this research will investigate how hate speech on social media targets religious minorities in Pakistan and can translate into real-world harm. This paper serves as a draft prospectus for future research that may utilize a mixed-methods approach by combining interviews with individuals of various religious backgrounds in rural and urban communities in Pakistan, and large-scale data scraping of social media posts that contain hate speech. This research will seek to highlight the deep entrenchment of sectarian and religious hatred fueled by unregulated online spaces and exacerbated by political and religious actors. This research will challenge the urban-centric focus of previous studies by incorporating rural perspectives, providing a more comprehensive understanding of hate speech dynamics. Findings from this study will contribute to both theoretical debates about freedom of speech and policy discussions on how to mitigate online hate before it manifests violently. Ultimately, the study will demonstrate that online hate is not merely digital rhetoric, but a trigger for societal fragmentation, urging urgent policy and educational interventions within Pakistan.

Pavandeep S. Josan, MA Student, South Asian Studies, Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies
Sikh Gurdwaras in the Pacific Northwest as Sites of Political Activism

I will be analyzing the role of Sikh Gurdwaras in the Pacific Northwest as sites of political mobilization for the diaspora Sikh community. I will be assessing the ways in which Gurdwaras in Washington and British Columbia outwardly encourage political activism through their use of artwork, imagery, and posters. I will also consider the methods with which the congregations of these Gurdwaras actively engage in political activities. These political activities include engagement in domestic politics, within the local and national communities that these Gurdwaras are situated in, and international politics within India, the host country that many members of the Sikh community are from. I will root this analysis in an assessment of the political role of Sikh institutions, considering how the Gurdwara has developed over time. I will argue that the political nature of Pacific Northwest Gurdwaras demonstrates how political activism is fundamental to Sikh places of worship.

Shahrukh Baloch, MA Student, South Asia Studies, Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies
Memories of the Camps: Visual Archives and Spaces of Representation

Enforced disappearances in the garb of counterinsurgency operations provide carte blanche to postcolonial authoritarian states to illegally detain civilians indeterminately. Counterinsurgency operations in Balochistan, Pakistan by the armed forces has led to the illegal detainment of thousands of people who either fade into the oblivion or what returns is not the person but a mutilated corpse beyond recognition. Missing persons’ families protest endlessly in the makeshift campsites displaying pictures of their family members demanding their release. The makeshift camp with its rudimentary infrastructure becomes a space of a counter-memory imbued with the sensory medium of loss, grief, and death. Collective memory of disappearance and death is (re)enacted through the register of visual memory. In this paper I read the campsite as a temporary archive—a space characterized by its sensory, visual, and affective dimensions.

2:30 – 2:45pm
Break

2:45 – 4:00pm
Keynote Presentation

Dr. Jayaseelan Raj, Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and International Development, King’s College London
Political Life of Development Models in India

Competing development models in India necessitate a critical engagement that moves beyond the realm of comparative statistical indicators. Such an analysis must consider development not merely as a set of policy outcomes, but as a political discourse embedded within the structures of India’s electoral democracy. Development, in this sense, emerges as a contested terrain—infused with ideological, cultural, and socio-political significance. At the heart of these divergent narratives lies their role as sub-nationalist frameworks that construct region-specific claims to progress and modernity, often invoking a sense of exceptionalism. This lecture aims to unpack the discursive and performative aspects of these models, paying close attention to how they blur the boundaries between political rhetoric and knowledge production. In doing so, it examines how this development apparatus functions as an ‘anti-politics machine,’ depoliticizing deeply entrenched inequalities while producing consequences that disproportionately impact marginalized communities.