Friday, May 15, 2026<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Schedule:<\/span> Staging Divine Longing through Disguise in R\u0101sal\u012bl\u0101 My thesis examines how the Mudariy\u0101 Cor\u012b L\u012bl\u0101, a disguise episode (chadmal\u012bl\u0101) within the R\u0101sal\u012bl\u0101 tradition (drama) of Braj (the region between Delhi and Agra), utilises theatrical performance\u2014particularly gender disguise\u2014to articulate theological ideas in Vai\u1e63\u1e47ava bhakti (devotion to the Hindu deity Vi\u1e63\u1e47u and his incarnations). It argues that Kr\u1e63\u1e47a\u2019s disguise of a \u015by\u0101ma-viraha\u1e47\u012b (a woman longing for Kr\u1e63\u1e47a) functions as a dramaturgical strategy that foregrounds gop\u012b-bh\u0101va (feminine devotional emotion) as the highest mode of divine realization, a principle strongly associated with the R\u0101dh\u0101vallabh Samprad\u0101ya (a sect founded by saint\/poet Hit Hariva\u1e41\u015ba). Drawing on Brajbh\u0101\u1e63\u0101 textual sources and contemporary performance, the research traces how narration, gesture, and dramaturgy encode theological meaning. It argues that R\u0101sal\u012bl\u0101 operates as a ritual theatre where gender, devotion, and performance converge to express the theological primacy of feminine devotion in Braj Vai\u1e63\u1e47ava traditions.<\/p>\n Caged by the Law, Cleansed by the Flow: Investigating the Interpretive Capture of the Menstruating Body in Ayurvedic and Dharmashastric Texts 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Brahmin, N\u0101ga, and the Buddha: Authority and Recognition in Early South Asia<\/strong> This paper analyzes an early Buddhist story preserved in the G\u0101ndh\u0101r\u012b manuscript RS 24, where a Brahmin youth, N\u0101laka, and a n\u0101ga king, Elapatra, independently seek out the Buddha. Although they come from different worlds\u2014Brahmanical learning and cosmological power\u2014the two figures come together in a shared moment of recognition, finally acknowledging the authority of the Buddha\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n MODERNITY IN PRINT: MARG Magazine and the Negotiation of Aesthetics, Democracy, and Global Discourse<\/strong> Founded in 1946 by Mulk Raj Anand, MARG emerged at a critical moment in India\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Devotional Erotics in Brajd\u0101s\u012b\u2019s Khy\u0101l Sa\u1e45graha from Eighteenth-Century Kishangarh<\/strong> Khy\u0101l Sa\u1e45graha (Collection of Khy\u0101la), attested to Brajd\u0101s\u012b (1703-1768 CE), is a collection of 175 short two-to-four-line poems categorized by r\u0101ga (musical note) and t\u0101la (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, Khy\u0101l Sa\u1e45graha\u2019s manuscript has not been the subject of any edition or focused scholarly analysis till now. Brajku\u1e43var\u012b B\u0101\u1e43k\u0101vat\u012b, alias Brajd\u0101s\u012b, was the second queen of R\u0101j Singh, the seventh ruler of Kishangarh and stepmother to the famous saint-poet of the region, N\u0101gar\u012bd\u0101s. Regional histories remember Brajd\u0101s\u012b as a devotee, known only for her devotion to R\u0101dh\u0101 and K\u1e5b\u1e63\u1e47a, often mentioning her magnanimous translation project of the \u015ar\u012bmad Bh\u0101gavata Pur\u0101\u1e47a, an important Vai\u1e63\u1e47av 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 Khy\u0101l Sa\u1e45graha complicates the conventionally singular persona of Brajd\u0101s\u012b as a devotional queen. This paper, in no way argues that she was otherwise\u2014rather, 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 (khy\u0101l) that was emerging at the local kingdoms in North India during the eighteenth century. This paper hopes to trace how poems from Khy\u0101l Sa\u1e45graha, when incorporated into devotional anthologies, under the name of N\u0101gar\u012bdas, transformed subtly from erotic to a more devotional register.<\/p>\n Single File: Typewriters and Script Reform in India<\/strong> “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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.”<\/p>\n Documents of Dispossession: Patwaris<\/em> and the Bureaucratic Infrastructures of Occupation in Kashmir<\/strong> 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\u2014physical, political, and social\u2014it 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<\/em>, 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<\/em>, 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 \u201cland\u201d became a governable administrative object: the auctioning of state \u201cright, title and interest\u201d in land, and the rule that sale was \u201csubject to confirmation by the State Council,\u201d showing how ownership became a documentary achievement rather than a social fact.<\/p>\n Wilding the Denwa: Damming, Displacement, and the Postcolonial Histories of a River, 1950s-1970s<\/strong> Caste Ecologies, Inheritance, and Multispecies Succession at Jorbeer Conservation Reserve<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n Caste and democracy: the politics of inclusion and power concentration in India<\/strong><\/p>\n 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\u2019 candidates across national and state elections from the 1960s to 2024.<\/p>\n Gilles Verniers<\/strong> 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\u2019s democracy, qualitative methods, political violence and histories of the far-right at Ashoka University, India, and at Amherst College, Massachusetts.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Spring 2026 South Asia Center Graduate Student Conference and Reception Friday, May 15, 2026 Thomson Hall Room 317 Conference: 9:15am\u20133:45pm Keynote: 4:00\u20135:30pm Reception: 5:30\u20137:00pm 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<\/p>\n
\nThomson Hall Room 317<\/strong>
\nConference: 9:15am\u20133:45pm
\n<\/strong>Keynote: 4:00\u20135:30pm
\nReception: 5:30\u20137:00pm<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n9:15\u20139:30am | Welcome and Coffee
\n9:30\u201311:00am | Panel 1
\n11:15am\u201312:45pm | Panel 2
\n12:45\u20132:15pm | Lunch
\n2:15\u20133:45pm | Panel 3
\n4:00\u20135:30pm | Keynote Presentation
\n5:30\u20137:00pm | Reception<\/p>\n
\nPanel 1: Power Plays: Authority and its Varied Forms in South Asian Text and Performative Traditions<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Chair: Heidi Pauwels, Professor of Asian Languages and Literature<\/h5>\n
\n<\/strong>Vishnupriya Goswami, Asian Languages and Literature<\/em>
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>Joyeeta Das, Comparative Religion<\/em><\/p>\n
\nJonathan Laiman, Asian Languages and Literature<\/em><\/p>\n
\nPanel 2: Modernity, Humanism, and Erotica in Indian Print and Poetic Traditions<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Chair: Sravanthi Kollu, Assistant Professor of Asian Languages and Literature<\/h5>\n
\nAashvi Trivedi, Architecture<\/em><\/p>\n
\nAnjali Yadav, Asian Languages and Literature<\/em><\/p>\n
\nKarthik Malli, International Studies: South Asia<\/em><\/p>\n
\nPanel 3: Refusing Dispossession: Engaging Caste, Indigeneity, and Occupation<\/h3>\n
Chair: Purnima Dhavan, Associate Professor of History<\/h5>\n
\nAshfaq Ahmed, International Studies<\/em><\/p>\n
\nNastasia Paul Gera, Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies<\/em><\/p>\n
\nKyle Trembley, Anthropology<\/em><\/p>\n
\nKeynote Presentation<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Gilles Verniers, Postdoctoral Researcher, Center for International Studies, Sciences Po, Paris
\n<\/span><\/h5>\n