Spring 2026 South Asia Center Graduate Student Conference and Reception

Friday, May 15, 2026
Thomson Hall Room 317
Conference: 9:15am–3:45pm
Keynote: 4:00–5:30pm
Reception: 5:30–7:00pm

The Spring 2026 South Asia Center Graduate Student Conference 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.

Panel 1: Power Plays: Authority and its Varied Forms in South Asian Text and Performative Traditions

Chair: Heidi Pauwels, Professor of Asian Languages and Literature

Staging Divine Longing through Disguise in Rāsalīlā
Vishnupriya Goswami, Asian Languages and Literature

My thesis examines how the Mudariyā Corī Līlā, a disguise episode (chadmalīlā) within the Rāsalīlā tradition (drama) of Braj (the region between Delhi and Agra), utilises theatrical performance—particularly gender disguise—to articulate theological ideas in Vaiṣṇava bhakti (devotion to the Hindu deity Viṣṇu and his incarnations). It argues that Krṣṇa’s disguise of a śyāma-virahaṇī (a woman longing for Krṣṇa) functions as a dramaturgical strategy that foregrounds gopī-bhāva (feminine devotional emotion) as the highest mode of divine realization, a principle strongly associated with the Rādhāvallabh Sampradāya (a sect founded by saint/poet Hit Harivaṁśa). Drawing on Brajbhāṣā textual sources and contemporary performance, the research traces how narration, gesture, and dramaturgy encode theological meaning. It argues that Rāsalīlā operates as a ritual theatre where gender, devotion, and performance converge to express the theological primacy of feminine devotion in Braj Vaiṣṇava traditions.

Caged by the Law, Cleansed by the Flow: Investigating the Interpretive Capture of the Menstruating Body in Ayurvedic and Dharmashastric Texts
Joyeeta Das, Comparative Religion

This research investigates the philological roots of contemporary menstrual taboos in Hindu domestic spaces, a phenomenon characterized as the zooing of the menstruant. While modern justifications for these restrictions often cite ancient tradition, this study identifies a profound hermeneutic ambiguity at the intersection of medical and legal knowledge systems. By performing a comparative analysis of contemporaneous corpora, specifically the Ayurvedic Samhitas and the early Dharmasutras, this paper argues that the impurity of menstruation is a product of interpretive capture.

The research demonstrates that while medical texts maintain clinical silence regarding the social status of the menstruant, legal codes colonized this vacuum with mythic narratives of sin and ritual policing. Furthermore, this study exposes a critical category error: the Dharmasutras primarily outline ritual boundaries for the male subject, yet these rules were later inverted into involuntary restrictions for women. By exposing these internal contradictions, this paper seeks to dismantle the somatic glass ceiling.

Brahmin, Nāga, and the Buddha: Authority and Recognition in Early South Asia
Jonathan Laiman, Asian Languages and Literature

This paper analyzes an early Buddhist story preserved in the Gāndhārī manuscript RS 24, where a Brahmin youth, Nālaka, and a nāga king, Elapatra, independently seek out the Buddha. Although they come from different worlds—Brahmanical learning and cosmological power—the two figures come together in a shared moment of recognition, finally acknowledging the authority of the Buddha’s teaching. I argue that this episode serves as a narrative expression of religious hierarchy in early South Asia, positioning the Buddha above both Brahmanical and non-human authorities. At the same time, the episode appears inconsistently across different textual traditions and is missing from many key biographical accounts. This uneven transmission is intentional and reflects processes of selection and reshaping within Buddhist storytelling. Therefore, the paper highlights how early Buddhist communities established authority through both storytelling and transmission.

Panel 2: Modernity, Humanism, and Erotica in Indian Print and Poetic Traditions

Chair: Sravanthi Kollu, Assistant Professor of Asian Languages and Literature

MODERNITY IN PRINT: MARG Magazine and the Negotiation of Aesthetics, Democracy, and Global Discourse
Aashvi Trivedi, Architecture

Founded in 1946 by Mulk Raj Anand, MARG emerged at a critical moment in India’s transition to independence, articulating a vision of modernity grounded in aesthetic, ethical, and humanist concerns. This paper examines MARG as a medium of aesthetic pedagogy and a platform for transnational intellectual exchange between 1946 and 1966. The magazine’s ethos was shaped through a sustained dialogue between global modernist principles and Indian cultural specificities, producing a distinct postcolonial “humanist” sensibility. It investigates how the magazine shaped conceptions of democracy, architecture, and civic life and explores how these ideas were translated into material practice, culminating in the planned city of Chandigarh. In doing so, the paper positions MARG as a dialogical apparatus through which modernity was actively imagined and produced rather than merely represented, foregrounding how its networks of contributors and sustained exchanges shaped the conceptual and material contours of postcolonial modern life in India.

Devotional Erotics in Brajdāsī’s Khyāl Saṅgraha from Eighteenth-Century Kishangarh
Anjali Yadav, Asian Languages and Literature

Khyāl Saṅgraha (Collection of Khyāla), attested to Brajdāsī (1703-1768 CE), is a collection of 175 short two-to-four-line poems categorized by rāga (musical note) and tāla (rhythm) composed in Kishangarh during the eighteenth-century. This collection contains poetic exchanges between two or more lovers, often erotic in nature, covering themes such as (but not limited to) masculine bravery, weddings, monsoonal and spring festivals, and intense lovemaking. While briefly noted in passing, Khyāl Saṅgraha’s manuscript has not been the subject of any edition or focused scholarly analysis till now. Brajkuṃvarī Bāṃkāvatī, alias Brajdāsī, was the second queen of Rāj Singh, the seventh ruler of Kishangarh and stepmother to the famous saint-poet of the region, Nāgarīdās. Regional histories remember Brajdāsī as a devotee, known only for her devotion to Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa, often mentioning her magnanimous translation project of the Śrīmad Bhāgavata Purāṇa, an important Vaiṣṇav scripture, into the vernacular language. This is her only work that has been edited and published by a local devotional press. The new material in Khyāl Saṅgraha complicates the conventionally singular persona of Brajdāsī as a devotional queen. This paper, in no way argues that she was otherwise—rather, it suggests frameworks that allow us to see her as a rounded poetess who translated and composed not only devotional literature but also erotic, in a musical genre (khyāl) that was emerging at the local kingdoms in North India during the eighteenth century. This paper hopes to trace how poems from Khyāl Saṅgraha, when incorporated into devotional anthologies, under the name of Nāgarīdas, transformed subtly from erotic to a more devotional register.

Single File: Typewriters and Script Reform in India
Karthik Malli, International Studies: South Asia

“The introduction of mechanized printing to India marked a qualitative shift in textual production, by introducing industrialized mechanisms of typesetting controlled by keyboard input. The 90 character limitations of keyboard matrices spurred sweeping script reform proposals across different literary languages in India, characterized by script linearization. These script reforms have been described by historians of typography, but their socio-political contexts have not been analyzed.

I explore this entanglement of script, technology, and politics and its importance for language policy and state planning in the newly independent Indian state. I look closer at the trajectories of Malayalam and Marathi (Devanagari) script reform. My analysis draws from of typographic histories of Indic scripts, scholarship on Indian linguistic nationalism, and STSS work on the typewriter.

My analysis demonstrates the centrality of script reform to ideas of linguistic modernity in newly independent India, and how script reform became state responsibility through typewriter development committees.”

Panel 3: Refusing Dispossession: Engaging Caste, Indigeneity, and Occupation

Chair: Purnima Dhavan, Associate Professor of History

Documents of Dispossession: Patwaris and the Bureaucratic Infrastructures of Occupation in Kashmir
Ashfaq Ahmed, International Studies

How does an occupation ensure its endurance? What logics of rule, forms of governance and affective attachments does a state wield in order to transform the terrain—physical, political, and social—it occupies? I address these questions of global significance through an archival and ethnographic investigation of everyday bureaucratic practices around land in Indian-Occupied Kashmir. Drawing on archival and ethnographic evidence, I explore how the administration of land in Indian-occupied Kashmir has become a key mechanism of dispossession, surveillance, and settler expansion. My project explores how these laws are enacted by low-level bureaucrats, specifically patwaris, officials of the revenue department who are tasked with maintaining land records and property transactions. Resisting the impulse to read these officials as collaborators, I investigate how kinship, neighborhood ties, and political pressures influence the everyday process of recording, with its violence, delays, and discretions. I track how patwaris, despite being linguistically, ethnically, and culturally part of local communities, navigate complex forms of complicity, obligation, and negotiation rather than fixed moral positions. My research highlights the infrastructures of bureaucratic dispossession, positioning Kashmir within global frameworks of settler-colonial control and contributing to anthropological research on occupation, capitalism, and decolonization. Archival material on land-governance from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century allow me to ground this argument in the historical mechanics through which “land” became a governable administrative object: the auctioning of state “right, title and interest” in land, and the rule that sale was “subject to confirmation by the State Council,” showing how ownership became a documentary achievement rather than a social fact.

Wilding the Denwa: Damming, Displacement, and the Postcolonial Histories of a River, 1950s-1970s
Nastasia Paul Gera, Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies

My dissertation traces how the postcolonial Indian state has shaped and mobilized “wild” nonhuman actors to secure territory and profit in Satpura Tiger Reserve, a project I refer to as “wilding.” This presentation examines how wilding unfolded through the Denwa River from the 1950s to the mid-1970s. Drawing on Adivasi oral histories, I trace how the Denwa was once a slender, flowing river that sustained livelihoods Adivasi people in forest villages remembered as dignified and autonomous. Through analysis of Irrigation and Forest Department documents, I show how the Denwa was reshaped into wide, deep backwaters through the construction of the Tawa Dam, and then positioned as the nonhuman author of Adivasi people’s displacement. These transformations, I argue, produced the conditions through which this region could be reconstituted as Satpura Tiger Reserve several decades later.

Caste Ecologies, Inheritance, and Multispecies Succession at Jorbeer Conservation Reserve
Kyle Trembley, Anthropology

In this presentation, I build upon ethnographic fieldwork at the Jorbeer Conservation Reserve in 2022 during the Lumpy Skin Disease (LSD) epidemic which led to the death of over 75,000 cows in Rajasthan. Jorbeer is also an Important Bird Area (IBA) and prominent site for attempts to recuperate the Indian vulture population (gyps indicus) which nearly went extinct between 1992 and 2007. These instances of mass death of cows and vultures have led to surges in other scavenger populations such as feral dogs and pigs, as well as an intensification and entanglement with the labor of Dalit and Muslim migrant laborers who transport, skin, and tan the hides of dead bovines. Ultimately, this presentation will explore caste ecologies and how the labor of Dalit and Muslim laborers is at the center of conservation initiatives and ecotourism at Jorbeer Conservation Reserve.

Keynote Presentation

Gilles Verniers, Postdoctoral Researcher, Center for International Studies, Sciences Po, Paris

Caste and democracy: the politics of inclusion and power concentration in India

This paper interrogates dominant narratives surrounding caste and political inclusion in contemporary India, drawing on original large-scale longitudinal datasets covering caste identities for over 8,000 MPs, 56,000 MLAs, and more than 200,000 major parties’ candidates across national and state elections from the 1960s to 2024.

Gilles Verniers is a Research Fellow at CERI, Sciences Po, Paris, currently affiliated with the Center for South Asia at Stanford University. His research focuses on South Asian politics, Indian electoral politics, and political history. His most recent work focuses on political representation, gender and politics, the political sociology of public elites and the institutional exclusion of Muslims in India. In addition to his research, he has taught courses on South Asian politics, India’s democracy, qualitative methods, political violence and histories of the far-right at Ashoka University, India, and at Amherst College, Massachusetts.

At Ashoka University, he founded the Trivedi Centre for Political Data, a research laboratory dedicated to producing open-access datasets on Indian elections and to conducting empirical research on Indian politics. He is a regular contributor to various Indian Media.