Keynote
Joseph W. Elder Keynote Lecture
Each year, the conference chair invites a distinguished scholar or expert on topics related to South Asia to attend the Annual Conference on South Asia and deliver the Keynote Lecture.
Tithi Bhattacharya
Professor of History, Purdue University
Thursday, October 29, 2026 3:45-5:30 PM
Madison Ballroom
Scaffolding the Revolution: Social Reproduction on the Frontlines of Anticolonialism
The paper explores the uneven relationship between gender and political organizing in the Indian anticolonial struggle by focusing on the political concepts women in revolutionary organizations employed in order to make sense of their world. Rather than tell the story of their lives, I want to tell the story of their politics. The lives of these women, like others before and after them, should make us more attentive to the highly gendered nature of women’s labor that goes to sustain both life and political infrastructures, but remains invisible and veiled by a normative understanding of ‘politics.’
Tithi Bhattacharya is a Professor of South Asian History and Empire at Purdue University. She is the author of The Sentinels of Culture: Class, Education, and the Colonial Intellectual in Bengal (Oxford University Press, 2005) and the editor of the now classic study, Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression (Pluto Press, 2017). Her coauthored book includes the popular Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto (Verso, 2019) which has been translated in over 30 languages. Her new book, Ghostly Past, Capitalist Presence: A Social History of Fear in Colonial Bengal, published from Duke University Press in 2024, won multiple awards including the 2025 John F. Richards Prize in South Asian History, presented by the American Historical Association, and the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for South Asian Studies, awarded by the Modern Language Association.