Symposium

The American Institute of Indian Studies holds an annual dissertation-to-book workshop at the Madison South Asia Conference, co-sponsored by the American Institute of Bangladesh Studies, the American Institute of Pakistan Studies, and the American Institute of Sri Lankan Studies. The workshop aims to help a select number of recent PhDs re-vision their doctoral dissertations as books. Author participants are selected through an application process, and all admitted authors will submit a sample chapter and draft book proposal in advance, to be read by each member of their working group. The interdisciplinary workshop begins with a “Secrets of Publishing” Q&A discussion from 7-8:30 pm on Tuesday evening. During the day-long Wednesday symposium, we will divide into three groups of eight authors and three mentors each, to work intensively together discussing each project. We conclude the workshop with an all-group dinner at a nearby Indian restaurant. Faculty from diverse disciplines and areas of expertise will serve as mentors. Mentors have each published at least one book, specialize in a range of South Asian regions (including India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh), and come from various disciplinary backgrounds, including anthropology, sociology, history, literature, media studies, gender studies, and religious studies.

Organizer: Laura Brueck (Northwestern University)

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Mentor Participants:
Tarini Bedi (University of Illinois-Chicago)
Eric Beverly (SUNY Stonybrook)
Laura Brueck (Northwestern University)
Roanne Kantor (Stanford University)
Daniel Majchrowicz (Northwestern University)
Pavitra Sundar (Hamilton College)
Arsalan Khan (University of Tennessee-Knoxville)
Anand Yang (University of Washington)

Author Participants:
Anuraj Advani (Hamilton College)
The Disordered Mind: Madness and Irrationality in Mughal India, 1500-1750
Shaifali Arora (University of Texas at Austin)
Remembering Bahawalpur: Partition, Language, and the Survival of Subregional Belonging in India
Drishadwadi Bargi (LSA Collegiate Fellow)
Banality, Remediated: Dalit Visions In Times of Spectacular Majoritarianism
Bennett Comerford (University of Southern Maine)
Is This What is Called Civilization?: Religion and Race in the Satirical and Socio-critical Writings of Michael Madhusudan Datta
Corbett Costello (Hamilton College)
Crown-Jewel of the Jain Canon: The Kalpa Sūtra Scripture in Mūrtipūjaka Jain Scholastic and Spiritual Life
Annu Daftuar (Appalachian State University)
Reproducing a Eugenic Nation: Understanding Assisted Reproductive Technologies in India
Supurna Dasgupta (Santa Clara University)
Intimate Revolutions: Gender and Counterculture in the Postcolony
Nicole Ferreira (Santa Fe Community College)
Mobile Pasts: Memory and Migration in Afghan Identity, 1451-1770
B. Geetha (Columbia University)
Accidents of the Comic Hero: The Star Body of Vijay Sethupathi in Tamil Cinema
Shounak Ghosh (Univeristy of Manchester)
Performing Diplomacy: Ambassadors, Correspondence, and the Cultural Grammar of Courtly Exchange in the Early Modern Persianate World
Sourav Ghosh
Imperial Entanglements: Mughal Empire and Rajput State Formation in South Asia, 1570-1877
Sugandh Gupta (University of Florida)
Drugs, Dependency, and De-addiction: Care amidst Conflict in Jammu City, Jammu & Kashmir, India
Shruti Iyer (University of Cambridge)
Valuing Life and Labour: Silicosis and the State in Contemporary India
Sana Malik (Binghamton University)
Gender and Generation: Activist Assemblages and Women’s Rights in Urban Pakistan
Sita Mamidipudi (University of Pennsylvania)
Labor, Sea and Salt: Watering Landscapes in the Little Rann of Kutch
Christine Marrewa Karwoski
Saffron Citadel: Power, Print, and the Making of a Modern Hindu Identity
Shaivya Mishra
Exploding Jams, Blasting Jellies: Everyday life of Insurgent Technologies in British India, 1857-1945
Shafya Morshed (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid)
Devolutionary Empire – Demystifying State Formation in Mughal South Asia 1556-1707
John Nowak (Harvard College)
Unity in Contestation: Muslim Pluralism and Identity in Colonial India
Qazi Arka Rahman (University of Connecticut)
Faith through Fiction: Imagining Multiple Muslim South Asias
Pallavi Raonka (University of Missouri)
The Everyday Making of Indigeneity: An Ethnography of Munda Women in Jharkhand, India
Shaunna Rodrigues (Columbia University)
Justification After Empire: Democratic Reconstruction in India
Rupali Sehgal (University of Chicago)
Mediated Appetites: Food, Media, and Cultural Politics in Contemporary India
Jay Prakash Sharma (University of Pennsylvania)
Crown-Jewel of the Jain Canon: The Kalpa Sūtra Scripture in Mūrtipūjaka Jain Scholastic and Spiritual Life

The American Institute of Pakistan Studies (AIPS) is applying to host a symposium at the 54th Annual Conference on South Asia on Wednesday, October 28. This full-day symposium aims to mentor emerging scholars working on Pakistan-related research. If selected, the event will be the fifth such event at the Annual Conference on South Asia. The symposium will showcase new research by approximately eight US-based emerging scholars (both recent PhDs and graduate students with ABD status) whose research addresses Pakistan Studies. AIPS will hold an open call for applications, which it will widely advertise through its 40+ member institutions and its social media sites. It encourages abstracts from (but not restricted to) disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, political science, history, literature, religious studies, art history, music, women studies, film, and communications studies, etc. AIPS has identified established scholars to read the accepted papers and provide feedback, mentorship, and focused discussion following participants’ presentations. Because presenters get selected in advance, coupled with an in-depth question/answer/discussion period, the event will fully utilize a full-day and is inappropriate for the traditional conference panel format. AIPS’s emerging scholar symposiums enable emerging scholars to network with others in their field and expose them to established scholars who can act as additional advisors/mentors. The past AIPS Emerging Scholar Symposia held at the Annual Conference on South Asia have been instrumental in creating a nationwide dialogue between emerging and established Pakistan Studies scholars. Significant outcomes of past symposiums include published books, forged mentorships, written articles, and revised dissertations. Past symposium participants are also now successfully in tenure-track positions in academic institutions in the US.

Organizer: American Institute of Pakistan Studies

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8:30-8:45AM – Welcome and Introduction by AIPS President, Dr. Sana Haroon

8:45-10:15AM – First Session: Chaired by Dr. Sana Haroon, University of Massachusetts Boston

Paper 1 – “Recalcitrant Wives: Refusing Reconciliation in Peshawar’s Family Courts”

Sana Naeem, Harvard University

Paper 2 – “Ruin in the ‘Garden of Eternal Spring’: Disaster, Crisis, and the Imperial Spatial Imagination of Kashmir (1828-1834)”

Kamini Masood, Columbia University

10:15-10:30AM – All-Conference Break

10:30AM-12:00PM – Second Session: Chaired by Dr. Matthew A. Cook, North Carolina Central University

Paper 3 – “Arboreal Attachments – Urban Ecologies and Expertise in Islamabad the ‘Beautiful’”

Tayeba Batool, University of Pennsylvania

Paper 4 – “Plotting Pakistan: Militainment, Urdu Genre Fiction, and the Kashmir Conflict”

Madiha Ghous, Michigan State University

12:00-1:45PM – Lunch Break

1:45-3:15PM – Third Session: Chaired by Dr. Amanada Lanzillo, University of Chicago

Paper 5 – “Lineages in Transition: Shi’i Identity and the Performance of Spiritual Eliteness in South Asia”

Sana Rizvi, University of Pennsylvania

Paper 6 – “Playful Desires of the Muslim Girl-Child during Twentieth-Century Colonial India”

Arooj Alam, Tufts University

3:30-3:45PM – All-Conference Break

3:45-5:15PM – Fourth Session: Chaired by Dr. Shayan Rajani, Michigan State University

Paper 7 – “Reflections on Mughal Kingship: A Qazi’s Commentary on Nizami from the Seventeenth Century”

Ilsa Abdul Razzak, University of Washington

Paper 8 – “Sufism, Paracosms, and Fann: Miraji on Wondrous Makers”

Dr. Meghan Hartman, Visiting Professor, Barnard College, Columbia University

5:15-5:30PM – Discussion and Wrap-Up by Dr. Sana Haroon

Inspired by last year’s panel on “Big Books,” this symposium will address the joys and problems of translating long works, such as novels, epics, the memoir, and anthologies of poetry, either singly-authored or authored by many. How do translators maintain control of plot, characters, and issues of extended dialog? When translating as a team, how are issues such as vocabulary choice and individual style present problems when degrees of consistency are desired throughout a text. How is authorial “voice” handled when translating large collections of poetry written using the same conventions?

Organizer: Martha Selby (Harvard University)

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8:30-9:00: Introductions and presentation of the problems at hand

9:00-9:30: “From Upaniṣads to Aśvaghoṣa, via Kauṭilya.”

Patrick Olivelle, University of Texas at Austin (emeritus)

9:30-10:00: “Completion of the Translation of the Critical Edition of the Mahābhārata.”

Frederick M. Smith, University of Iowa (emeritus)

10:00-10:30: “Making a Case for Rough Translation: Thoughts on Translating Nannaya’s Telugu Mahābhāratamu.”

Ilanit Loewy Shacham, Tel Aviv University, and Harshita Mruthinti Kamath, Emory University

10:30-10:45: Coffee break

10:45-11:15: “The Sūrsāgar, Twice Translated.”

John Stratton Hawley, Barnard College and Columbia University

11:15-11:45: “Size Matters (or) How my Translation of the Tulsidas Rāmcaritmānas Got So Big.”

Philip Lutgendorf, University of Iowa (emeritus)

11:45-1:00: Lunch

1:00-1:30: “On Translating Bengali Dharma-maṅgala Texts.”

Rebecca Manring, Indiana University

1:30-2:00: “Joys and Troubles of Translating Mixed-register Poetry: The Case of Nāgarīdās.”

Heidi Pauwels, University of Washington

2:00-2:30: “The ‘Disorderly’ Anthology: The Problem of Translating Collections of Poems in Classical Tamil Texts”

Martha Ann Selby, Harvard University

2:30-3:00: “Time and Love: The longue durée of Literary Translation.”

Steven P. Hopkins, Swarthmore College

3:00-3:15: Coffee break

3:15-3:45: “Big, Uncomfortable Feelings: Translating Kampan’s Cuntara Kāṇṭam.”

Archana Venkatesan, University of California, Davis

3:45-4:15: “Questions of Authorial Voice in the Tamil ‘New Poetry’ of the 1960s.”

Preetha Mani, Rutgers University

4:15-4:45: “Big Translations in Multilingual Contexts.”

Bhavya Tiwari, University of Houston

4:45-5:30: Discussion and wrap-up

Group dinner, Botanist Social, 206 State Street

Our inaugural symposium “Deccan as Method” was immensely successful and highlighted Deccan’s importance in South Asian scholarship. Our second convening continues to explore Deccan as a mobile frontier, and a regional formation but with an intensive focus on longue duree social and cultural histories. The current preconference moves from justifying the region’s importance, to specifying its historical and conceptual boundaries. What methodological approaches, and diverse multilingual archives allow us to frame the region in its specific complexities? Participants at the 2025 meeting collectively raised questions on the physical, historical and social contours of Deccan, and what is made possible by thinking from the dual perspectives of Deccan as “region,” and as “frontier,” or borderland. We raised questions about the methodological valence of the term, and focused on the regional histories shaped by environment, economy, and politics that traverse the constraints of boundaries established by the formation of modern linguistic states. We reasserted that a focus across Deccan, indeed, offer some provocations for seeing the region anew. Keeping this in mind, our 2026 symposium will sharpen the focus and frame a distinctive vision for collaborative research on the region, drawing on existing scholarship while framing a future research agenda. To elaborate: The 2026 symposium moves away from the chronological limitations of the previous iteration to expand the temporal and environmental scope of studies on Deccan. Second, it frames literary, visual and material culture, that is, art history, archaeology, histories of science, and of literary cultures into conversation with social history and anthropology. Third, drawing on written reflections which articulate a collaborative approach to the studying Deccan, we plan to discuss establishing a scholarly network with plans for publication, a seminar in Bengaluru in December 2026, and elaborating a set of 3-4 short seminars with a focus on graduate student engagement.

Organizers: Sohini Chattopadhyay (Union College) and Anupama Rao (Barnard College, Columbia)

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Introduction and greetings: 8:30 – 8:55 am 

Region/Historiography: 9:00 am – 9:45 am 

Chris Chekuri (San Francisco State University)

Caste in a Qutb Shahi Epic Narrative

Richard Eaton (University of Arizona)

The 16th and 17th Century Deccan as Global Frontier: Military and Cultural Aspects

Persons and Property: 9:45- 10:15 

Mekhola Gomes (Amherst College)

Sexual Property and State Formation in the Early Medieval Deccan

Kaustubh Naik (University of Pennsylvania)

Caste and Capital in 18th Century Goa

Social Difference and Experience: 10:30 – 11:15 (45 mins) 

Divya Malhari (Columbia University)

The Gender of Caste in Kannada Lifeworlds

Gayatri Reddy (University of Illinois Chicago)

We Don’t Need ‘Caste,’ We Have Religion: Siddis, Claims-Making, and their Refractions in the Deccan

Word and World: 11:30- 12:15 (45 mins) 

Anjali Nerlekar (Rutgers University)

Contact Zones in the Deccan: Kannada–Marathi Entanglements in Literary Culture

Rama Mantena (University of Illinois Chicago)

The Deccan and the Telugu Language Movement

Break for Lunch (12:15 – 1:45) 

Space and Historical Comparison: 1:45 – 2:30 (45 mins) 

Malini Ranganathan (American University)

Reconstituting Caste, Labor, and Language in Bangalore After the Great Famine, 1876-1878

Sohini Chattopadhyay (Union College)

Regional Histories of Global Technologies: Is a Comparative History of Science Possible?

The Archive: 2:45 – 4:00 (45 mins) 

Anupama Rao (Professor, History, Barnard College; and MESAAS, Columbia University)

Caste, Region and Archive

Mohit Manohar (University of Chicago)

Premodern Bijapuri Architecture as a Source for Colonial Indo-Saracenic Buildings 

Roundtable: 4:15-5:30 pm An open conversation steered by the three organizers, to outline key critiques and takeaways with present participants, some 2025 “Deccan as Method” participants, and the larger ACSA community in attendance

In India in 2002, men were quickly organized into communal mobs that carried out pogroms state authorities simultaneously facilitated and denied. In Afghanistan and Iraq, workers recruited from South Asian communities through labor networks staffed American military bases in active war zones. We tend to think of these as fundamentally different actors, one mobilized through ideology, the other recruited through labor markets. But both were assembled rapidly for work in the context of immense violence and abandoned when the job was done. Insurgent groups and paramilitaries are typically studied through the lens of ideology and communal mobilization. Private military companies and foreign military laborers are studied through market logic and individual profit. This neat division has kept two scholarly conversations apart despite striking operational similarities. Both rely on rapid recruitment, abbreviated training, and swift disposal. Both depend on infrastructures, whether organizational, relational, or material, that must exist before the first fighter is enlisted. And both produce violence workers whose afterlives, once the fighting ends, follow remarkably similar patterns of abandonment and disavowal. This workshop brings both sets of scholars together to ask what becomes visible when we stop sorting violence workers by motivation and look instead at how they are produced. What infrastructures make rapid mobilization possible? What role does ideology itself play when examined as one form of that infrastructure rather than as an explanation that stands apart from it? And what happens to these fighters when the infrastructure that produced them no longer needs them? By centering these questions, the workshop invites new conversations across South Asian about political violence, military labor, and the economies of organized force.

Organizer: Ali Raza (Lahore University of Management Sciences)

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Each panel will have two-three presentations (20-25 minutes each) followed by 30 minutes open discussion.

Chair: Sharika Thiranagama (Stanford University)

8:30 to 10:15 — Session 1: Assembling Violence Workers

What has to exist, materially and organizationally, before fighters can be recruited? This session puts cases that require decades of institutional construction alongside cases where kinship networks and labor routes enable mobilization in weeks.

Presenters:

Ameem Lutfi (Lahore University Management Sciences)

Mahvish Ahmad (London School of Economics)

Jahanzeb Baloch (University of Balochistan)

10:15 to 10:30 — Break

10:30 to 12:15 — Session 2: What Holds Fighters in Place

Once assembled, what sustains commitment? Ideology, pay, kinship obligation, coercion, reputation, belonging. This session treats motivation as a question rather than a starting assumption. It asks what work ideology does when placed alongside other mechanisms that keep violence workers in the field, and examines cases where multiple logics operate simultaneously within the same conflict.

Presenters:

Ilyas Chattha (Lahore University Management Sciences)

Adeem Suhail (Franklin and Marshall College)

12:15 to 1:45 — Lunch

1:45 to 3:30 — Session 3: Disposal and Afterlives

What happens when the fighting ends? Abandonment, disavowal, reintegration, the long silence. This session examines whether the patterns of disposal reveal something about the nature of the original arrangement that the recruitment phase concealed. If ideological fighters and military laborers are discarded in the same ways, what does that tell us about the relationship between motivation and expendability?

Presenters:

Ali Raza (Lahore University Management Sciences)

Sadia Mahmood (Cornell University & Quaid-i-Azam University)

3:30 to 3:45 — Break

3:45 to 5:30 — Session 4: Discussion/Recap/Further Steps

In the last session we will collectively review our discussions during the day. By crystalizing our discussion into few key concerns, we hope to set the agenda for a Special Issue to be published in a mutually agreed Journal.

Discussants:

Tahir H. Naqvi (Trinity University)

Sharika Thiranagama (Stanford University)

Detachment from worldly desires has long constituted one of the core values of South Asian religions. The scholarly conversation around this ideal continues to evolve, as is evidenced, for instance, by recent ethnographic interventions that point toward alternative models of ascetic indifference that do not conform to classical frameworks of renunciation articulated in, e.g., the Dharmaśāstras and related Sanskrit literature. Nevertheless, much of the intellectual, literary, and social history of dispassion (Skt. vairāgya) remains uncharted. Indeed, one can argue that even the semantic range of this concept has not been historically mapped. This is especially true of the past eight hundred years or so, a period that witnessed the crystallization of enduring conceptions and practices of religious austerity that persist in shaping religious life on the subcontinent and among the global diaspora. The sheer diversity of expressions of dispassion as, at the very least, a prerequisite for journeys of salvation, in this period invites an approach that intentionally transgresses regional, linguistic, religious, and temporal boundaries. Consequently, participants in this symposium explore what dispassion means across a range of different contexts, examining textual materials composed from the twelfth century to the twentieth, in languages as varied as Braj Bhāṣā, English, Kannada, Sanskrit, Tamil, and Telugu. In what ways do notions of dispassion engage with prevailing social, political, and institutional configurations? To what extent do considerations of aesthetics and gender mediate the production of particular formulations of ascesis? How do specific Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava devotional traditions, in dialogue with philosophical knowledge-systems such as Vedānta and Yoga, interpret the significance of worldly detachment? How is the concept factored into ideas of the ethical life? By addressing these questions, the symposium will open up dispassion as a multifaceted, mutable, and contested phenomenon of vital importance to the religious cultures of second-millennium South Asia.

Organizers: Eric Steinschneider (Ithaca College) and Srilata Raman (University of Toronto)

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8:30–10:15 a.m. Session 1: Dispassion in Monastic and Didactic Contexts

8:30–8:50 a.m. Elaine Fisher (Stanford University) “Who Were the ‘Viraktas’? Contextualizing Renunciation in Early Modern Vīraśaivism” 

8:50–9:10 a.m.     Eric Steinschneider (Ithaca College) “Training Tuṟavis: Teaching Dispassion in Seventeenth-Century South India”

9:10–9:30 a.m.  Jesse Pruitt (University of Toronto) “The Horror of Home: Ennui as Ideal in Ramalinga Adigal’s Allegory of Urban Domesticity”                   

9:30–10:15 a.m.                        Q&A

10:15–10:30 a.m.            All Conference Break

10:30 a.m.–12:15 p.m. Session 2: “Dispassion’s Gendered Genre Aesthetics”

  10:30–10:50 a.m. Shashank Rao (University of Toronto) “The Mirror of the Heart Lotus: Theological Aesthetics in the Ragaḷe of Akka Mahādēvi”

10:50–11:10 a.m. Aalekhya Malladi (McGill University) “Sword, Soothsayer, and Sakhi: Analyzing Vairāgya and Gender in Telugu Bhakti Literature”   

11:10–11:30 a.m. Janani Comar (University of Toronto) “Imagining Love and Detachment: Tirikūṭarācappa Kavirāyar’s Kuṟṟālakuravañci”               

 11:30 a.m.–12:15 p.m.              Q&A

12:15–1:45 p.m.                  Lunch Break

1:45–3:30 p.m. Session 3: “Dispassion, Devotion, Vedānta, and Yoga”

1:45–2:05 p.m. Aditya Chaturvedi (Ahmedabad University) “Rāga for the Lord: Vairāgya in Puṣṭimārga”

 2:05–2:25 p.m. Phillip Sergio (University of Chicago) “The Five Gems: A Case of Self-Fashioning or Vairāgya?”   

 2:25–2:45 p.m. Tarinee Awasthi (Flame University) “Vairāgya and Saṃnyāsa between Yoga, Śrīvidyā and Vedānta in Twentieth-century Transnational Yoga”   

2:45–3:30 p.m.                          Q&A

3:30–3:45 p.m.                All Conference Break

3:45–4:00 p.m. David Monteserin Narayana (Stanford University) “The Vairāgya of the Bhagavad Gītā as Reimagined by the Mokṣopāya and the Yogavāsiṣṭha Corpus”

4:00–5:30 p.m. Group discussion of “Dispassion”, facilitated by Srilata Raman (University of Toronto) and Eric Steinschneider (Ithaca College)

“The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity,” wrote Wittgenstein. “One is unable to notice something because it is always before one’s eyes.” We miss, deflect, look past it toward what appears more significant, visible and analytically worthy. And nowhere is this absence more visible than regions marked by occupation. In such accounts, violence tends to organize the story. Life in its most ordinary and mundane forms gets foreshadowed. This symposium is an intervention into that foreshadowing. In Balochistan, where military occupation has been woven into the texture of everyday life for decades, the conventional boundaries between ordinary and extraordinary, the spectacular and invisible, the normal and abnormal collapse. What Mona Bhan and Haley Duschniski insist on looking at the ‘life’ violence produces; life which is maimed and left to mere living is how Jasbir Puar, Deepti Misri and Ather Zia demonstrate it. What remains when we place life, not violence, not resistance, at the center of our analytical gaze, is the aim of this symposium. This symposium brings the everyday, relational, ethical stories that have made life inhabitable in militarized Balochistan. It is organized around two themes. One, to focus on the textures of everyday life in Balochistan, what it feels like, sounds like, smells like, how it moves. Two, to engage with these textures through Indigenous epistemologies and knowledge systems: oral stories, art, poetry, photography, and films. Each panel is devoted to one of these forms, not to explain it, but to make it present, creating an ‘affective encounter’ with what it means to live ordinarily under extraordinary conditions. This reflects our methodological and ethical commitment as Baloch scholars: to approach everyday life through its own forms, letting Indigenous stories, poetry, and films carry what prose cannot.

Organizers: Bramsh Khan (Syracuse University) and Noor Bakhsh (York University, Toronto)

What conceptual work does the category of “vernacular” perform in contemporary Indian media? Does it describe media practices outside standardized institutional and industrial frameworks, or does it merely index scale, value, and address? When does a media form cease to be “vernacular,” and must the vernacular always be aligned with the category of the “minority”? Rather than resolving these definitional dilemmas, this symposium shifts the conversation to the everyday lives of media objects. Focusing on quotidian processes (from popular politics to subjective experience) and practices (such as selfies, blogs, meme pages, magazines, communal songs, and religious videos), we examine how media objects are situated, animated, and transformed in daily life. We begin from the premise that vernaculars—linguistic or medial—name ways of attending to and expressing everyday cultural practices. By foregrounding the ordinary trajectories of media objects, historically and in the present, we explore how their embeddedness in daily rhythms shapes their epistemological and political effects. The symposium advances a central methodological claim that the everyday provides a crucial analytic vantage point for understanding media’s cultural status and socio-political force. Tracing how media objects are embedded within quotidian rhythms, we aim to apprehend how they exceed or reconfigure dominant economies of representation and recognition. Bringing together scholars from comparative literature, art history, anthropology, cinema and media studies, sociology, and communication, we engage a wide corpus of forms—literature, photography, digital media, sculpture, and music. We invite approaches that treat media not simply as products of mass culture, but as objects overdetermined by everyday habitation and reinterpretation. In an era when new media ecologies unsettle established frameworks of cultural significance, we return to the ordinary as a generative site for apprehending media’s evolving meanings and effects.

Organizers:

• Nisarg Patel [USC, Comparative Media and Literature] 

History, Mythology, and the Everyday in Early Indian Cinema

• Dr. Shubham Shivang [Chicago, Teaching Fellow] 

Liveness, Mediated: The inner and outer lives of Bhojpuri music videos 

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Panels: 

1. Everyday Media | 8:30 am to 10:15 am

• Prof. Vebhuti Duggal [CSDS, Literature & Cinema] 

Ordinary listening? What can we learn from everyday sounds 

• Ankush Bhuyan [Columbia, MESAAS]

Everyday Ecologies of Cinema: Bamboo and Vernacular Film Production in Assam, Northeast India

• Kinjal Dave [U.Penn, Communications]

Reagan Aunties: Toward a Media Archeology of Manufacturing, Gujarati Factory Labor, and Family Values in the Diaspora

• Prof. Rahul Mukherjee [U.Penn, Cinema and Media Studies] 

Tracing the Mobile Everyday in India: Differential Mobilities, Media Practices

2. Digital Platforms and Political Life | 10:30 am to 12:15 pm

• Prof. Anirban Baishya [U. Wisconsin, Rhetoric, Politics and Culture]

Do Electorates Dream of AI Memes?  Notes on an Emergent Memetic Unconscious in India’s AI-augmented Memosphere

• Prof. Amrutha Kunapulli [Ohio State, Theater, Film, and Media Arts] 

Cine-politics in the Digital Age: TN 2026

• Rohan Sengupta [NYU, Anthropology]

The Ethics of Manipulation: IT Cells, Creative Labor, and the Everyday Lives of “Disinformation” in India

• Laboni Bhattacharya [USC, Cinema Studies]

A Digital Churn: IndiaForums.com and the Aesthetic Inventions of Hindi Serial Fanfiction 

3. Mediations of the Social | 1:45 am to 3:30 pm

• Prashant Parvataneni [Stanford, Art History]

Collectivizing Cinema: Mediated sociality and counter-fictions in films of Ektara Collective

• Prof. Eléonore Rimbault [Chicago, Anthropology]

Overseeing the Overland: Representing Western itinerancy on the Hippie Trail in 1970s India

• Dr. Shubham Shivang [Chicago, Teaching Fellow] 

Liveness, Mediated: The inner and outer lives of Bhojpuri music videos 

• Nisarg Patel [USC, Comparative Media and Literature] 

History, Mythology, and the Everyday in Early Indian Cinema

4. Technics and Senses of Media | 3:45 pm to 5:30 pm

• Prof. Kartik Nair [Temple University, Film Studies]

How to Draw a Tree: Generational and Generative Image Making

• Prof. Gayas Eapen [Coastal Carolina U., Digital Culture and Design]

Media in public: techniques and performances in North Indian streets

• Anju Parvathy Biju [UPenn, Comparative Literature]

Making the Nation (il)legible: Didacticism and Fantasy in Children’s Cinema by the Indian State (1950s-60s)

• Aatika Singh [Stanford, Art History]

Desecration as Method: On Materiality, Memory & Ambedkar Statues

The embodiment of divinities in South Asian traditions has received much scholarly attention (Holdrege 2015; 2016; Holdrege and Pechilis 2016; Waghorne et al. 1985). For instance, scholars such as Pechilis (2000) have argued for shifting the terminology of bhakti from ‘devotion’ to ‘participation,’ highlighting that bhakti requires active engagement in worship and emphasizes the physical embodiment necessary for the practitioner to fulfill their religious obligations. Novetzke underlines that “the publics of bhakti in South Asia require ’embodiment,’ the human as medium” (Novetzke 2007). For this year’s Regional Bhakti Studies Network (RBSN) Symposium at the Annual Conference on South Asia, we invite scholars to contribute papers that examine the conceptualization of embodiment, veneration, and presences of human figures of veneration in bhakti publics. The veneration of human presences need not be confined to a living, flesh‑and‑blood human body. Such presences may be embodied in multiple registers: as living practitioners, as deceased figures whose presence continues to be made real, or as non‑historical beings whose reality is affirmed through ritual and material practices. Such embodiment is made perceptible through the adornment, veneration, and circulation of their images, icons, literary invocations, hagiographies, material traces, and so forth. In this sense, the human figures and their presence are rendered real, tangible, and efficacious through sensory and material practices. Through this symposium, we aim to explore the diverse ways in which the bodies of such human figures of veneration are imagined, theorized, enacted, and brought into relation with other embodied presences across South Asian traditions. We particularly welcome studies that investigate the sites and modes of such embodiment through a wide range of sources, including material and visual culture, textual traditions, performative practices, and ethnographic accounts. Given the cross-traditional scope of this inquiry, a symposium format is essential to accommodate more speakers and deeper dialogue. This extended time will facilitate the collaborative groundwork for a future edited volume.

Organizers: Máire White (Stanford University) and Kshitij Jain (University of Oxford)

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8:30–10:15 a.m. Panel I: Devotional Communities: Lineage, Intimacy, and Sacred Place

Máire White (Stanford University) Dying for Duḥkhānta: Mokṣa, Memorialization, and the Materiality of Pāśupata Samādhis

James Mallinson (University of Oxford) Nāth Samādhis and the Restoration of the Asthal Bohar and Jalore Temples

Prateek Pattanaik (Berhampur University) Between Friends: Jagannatha, the Pañcasakha, and Modes of Devotional Intimacy

Jason Schwartz (Stanford University) Pierced and Then Alone: How the Mahanubhavs Learned to Watch Their Absent God

Elaine Craddock (Southwestern University) Respondent

10:15–10:30 a.m.            All Conference Break

10:30 a.m.–12:15 p.m. Panel II: Devotional Memory via Presence and Absence

Anchit Jain (University of Delhi) Monuments, Memorials, and Multivalent Representations in Jain Temple Art

Kshitij Jain (University of Oxford) Absent Monks, Present Memories: Embodied Monks and Their Tīrthas in the Nirvāṇa-bhakti of Digambara Jainism

Steven Vose (University of Colorado, Denver) A Reception History of a Fourteenth-Century Jain Ācārya: Jinaprabhasūri as Inscribed, Sung, Narrated, and Embodied

Prathik Murali (University of Florida) “We Do Not Speak of Their Passing”: Towards a Śrīvaiṣṇava Phenomenology of Presence

Richard Davis (Bard College) Respondent

12:15–1:45 p.m.                  Lunch Break

1:45–3:30 p.m. Panel III: Performing Bhakti

Sahaj G. Patel (Venderbilt University) Dreams and Visions: Understanding Presence in Gujarati Bhakti

Vivek Virani (University of North Texas) ‘The Sants Are Our Own Selves’: Veneration of Self and Community by Entrepreneurially Empowered Kabir Singers

Gil Ben-Herut (University of South Florida) Remembering the Bodies of the Śaraṇas

Mercy Dutta (University of Chicago) Kṛṣṇa Weeps at Satyabhāmā’s Feet: Some Thoughts on the Affective Dimensions of the Deity as the Devotee in the Pārijātaharaṇa of Śaṅkaradeva

Ellen Gough (Emory University) Respondent

3:30–3:45 p.m.                All Conference Break

3:45-5:30 p.m. Panel IV: Material and Visual Forms of Devotional Presence

Abhishek Jain (University of Arizona) Embodiment of Divinity Within: A Case Study of Jain Pandit-Poet Daulatrām’s Poems

Amy-Ruth Holt (Independent Scholar) A Body of Light: The American Pop Imagery of Swami Satchidananda

Sharvi Maheshwari (University of Oxford) Embodying the Divine: Ritual Performance, Trance, and Goddess Traditions in Bhaktapur’s Navadurgā Tradition

Kanika Singh Sisodia (University of Chicago) Making the Past Present: Vaiṣṇava Idioms, Exemplary Figures, and Devotional Publics in Early Hindi Print Culture

Todd Lewis (College of the Holy Cross) Respondent

Diasporic formations are increasingly shaped by the intensification of global media flows, especially in moments of crisis. As communities move across borders—whether through forced displacement, labor migration, or climate driven mobility—their media practices become essential infrastructures for sustaining identity, memory, and belonging. Crisis amplifies this dynamic: ruptures such as political repression, economic precarity, or environmental disaster not only precipitate migration but also reconfigure how diasporic subjects produce, circulate, and interpret media. These mediated circulations—ranging from social media storytelling and community radio to independent film and digital archives—forge transnational publics and challenge dominant narratives while enabling migrants to navigate uncertainty, question normative power hierarchies, and imagine progressive cross-racial bonds of solidarity. At the same time, media flows can intensify vulnerabilities, as misinformation, surveillance, and platform inequalities shape how crisis is represented and experienced. Thinking through diaspora at the intersection of media and crisis thus reveals how mobile communities continually negotiate the tension between fragmentation and connection, loss and reinvention, as they craft new forms of cultural expression and political presence across borders. This panel asks: What aesthetic strategies do diasporic artists and filmmakers employ to represent crisis, displacement, and the affective landscapes of migration? How do crisis-driven media practices reveal inequalities in global information flows and platform infrastructures? What can South Asian media exchanges within and beyond the nation-state tell us about the ways communities co opt, work around, and reimagine political subjectivities? Where does cultural labor fit within these dynamics, and how might examining the conditions and contingencies of such labor sharpen our understanding of diasporic media-making as both survival strategy and world-building practice?

Organizers: Darshana Mini (University of Wisconsin–Madison) and Pallavi Rao (University of Virginia)

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15 Min per speaker

8.30-9.00 Am: Welcome/Coffee

9.00-10.15 AM: Panel 1: Visual Ephemera and Mediated Publics

Radhika Parameswaran (Indiana University)

Making Non-Sense of Migration: Displacement and Emplacement in Annu Palakunnathu Mathew’s Photographic Artistry

Darshana Mini (University of Wisconsin–Madison)

Plantation Media Infrastructures in Southeast Asia: Malaysian Tamil Identity Formations

Lia Wolock (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee)

“How punk is the Mutiny?”: Blogging racial solidarities in the post-network, pre-streaming era

Q/A: 15 Minutes

Break: 10.15-10.30

10.30-12.15: Panel 2: Diasporic Interiority and Gendered Self-Making

Madhavi Mallapragada (University of Texas-Austin)

Nothing to Joke About: Zarna Garg’s Comedy and the Recirculation of Indian American Stereotypes in the Contemporary Media Ecosystem

Magna Mohapatra (University of Wisconsin–Madison)

Chasing the Cosmo-liberal: The Transnational Affective Mediation of Weirdass Comedy

Simron Gill (University of Pennsylvania)

Pricing Safety: Gender, Racial Capitalism, and the Governance of South Asian Women within US Affective Economies

Maitrayee Basu (University of Leeds)

Synctin, this protein: feminist re-mediation and digital diasporic interiority in Shailja Patel’s Migritude

Q/A: 15 Minutes

12.15 PM-1.45 PM: Lunch

1.45 PM-3.30 PM: Panel 3: Creative Practices for Mediated Belonging

Alif Shahed (University of Toronto)

Globalising the Sarvajanin: State Rebranding of Durga Puja for the Bangladeshi Diaspora

Zunayed Ahmed Ehsan (University of Wisconsin–Madison)

Desis Rising Up and Moving: Materializing Transnational Solidarity and Politics of Care

Khurram Sheikh (Indiana University) Postmemory as a method: Muslim diaspora film practices from South Asia

Pallavi Rao (University of Virginia)

New York Vich Munda Rehnda: Zohran Mamdani and the Par/desi Diasporic as an NYC “Insider”

Q/A: 15 Minutes Break: 3.45-4.00

4.00-5.00

4.00-4.15: Radhika Gajjala (Bowling Green State University) Overview of the themes emerging from the preconference

4.15-5.00: Concluding Roundtable and Future Directions

This symposium brings South Asia studies research across disciplines into conversation with the anthropology of labor and the study of religion by asking: What happens when “religion” and “work” are placed within the same analytical frame? How do “religion” and questions of labor illuminate each other? Thinking with, as well as against, Weberian formulations of work as beruf—calling, discipline, and ascetic accumulation—we examine how religious practice and capitalist formations are co-constituted. Participants variously interrogate the many meanings, practices, and relationships that emerge from the co-constitution of religion and work in South Asia and its diasporas, past and present. Drawing from works-in-progress, participants ask a range of questions, including: How are work formations and processes of capitalist accumulation structured by religious practice (and vice versa), and what might this mean for the variegated ways in which capitalism morphs itself into newer avatars? Is the term “religion” even useful when thinking about, say, the alliance of capitalism with caste and kinship? What are some of the emergent formations of “work” and “religion” in contemporary South Asia? How might these newer assemblages of religion and work help us both understand and move beyond the naturalization of older legacies and frameworks through which “religious work and labor” has come to be understood, whether it is the Weberian assumptions that frame “work” in terms of virtue and economic productivity or even the liberatory claims associated with the laboring subject? What becomes visible when we attend not only to work, but to its “others” such as non-work, play, recreation, and refusal? Situating these questions in South Asia and its diasporas, the symposium rethinks the entanglements of religion and capitalism as well as the fundamental categories such as “religion”, “work”, and “labor” that are the conditions of possibility of these entanglements.

Organizers: Emilia Bachrach (Oberlin College), Ridhima Sharma (University of Toronto), and Deonnie Moodie (University of Oklahoma)

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Welcome and Opening Remarks: 8:30-8:45

Session I: Consumption and Karma

8:45-10:15

1. Redeeming Labor: Karma in Neoliberal Times, Carla Bellamy, Baruch College, City University of New York
2. Theology, Labor, and the Critique of Caste in Vaiṣṇava and Śākta Poetry in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Bengal, Anirban Karak, University of Chicago
3. Godly gifts: Consumer Behavior as Religious Work in the Gayatri Parivar and the Brahma Kumaris, Nick Tackes, Louisiana State University
4. Don’t Follow the Guru; Be the Guru: Debating Hindu Cultures of Leadership and Productivity at the IIMs and Beyond, Deonnie Moodie, University of Oklahoma

Break: 10.15-10.30

Session II: Economies of Caste 

10:30-12:15

1. Conversion Against Caste: A Politics of Labor and Capital, Pinky Hota, Smith College
2. The Creation of the Whatsapp Uncle: Work, Leisure, and the Unclefication of Politics in Contemporary India, Ridhima Sharma, University of Toronto
3. Worship, Work, and Ethical Life at the Shrines of Kodungallur Bhagavathy, Shweta Radhakrishnan, Columbia University
4. “They have No Religion”: Caste, Tribe, and the Invention of the “Coolie” or Indentured Worker, Gaurika Mehta, Santa Clara University

Lunch: 12.15-1.45

Session III: The Entrepreneurial Ethic

1:45-3:30

1. Neoliberalism, Mercantilism and the Rituals of the Jain Shopkeeper, M. Whitney Kelting, Northeastern University
2. Leisure and Religion in South Asian Women’s Workplaces in Spain, Emilia Bachrach, Oberlin College

Break: 3.30-3.45

Final Discussion: Future Directions: 3:45-4:30

This proposed symposium brings together scholars and artists working across art history, history, literature, anthropology, religious studies, performance studies, and allied disciplines in the humanities and social sciences to reconsider Odisha as a critical site for South Asian Scholarship. Odisha is one of the most internally diverse sites of the subcontinent, reflected most profoundly in its demographic, which includes a significant caste-oppressed and Adivasi population of the Indian subcontinent. Simultaneously, Odisha remains a site for diverse religious beliefs, literary cultures, performative traditions, and architectural praxis. Yet despite this density of cultural, social, and historical formations, Odisha remains curiously peripheral within dominant conversations in South Asian studies. Frequently eclipsed by its more institutionally and historiographically prominent neighbor, Bengal, scholarship on Odisha continues to receive uneven and sporadic attention. The consequence is not merely regional neglect but a missed opportunity to rethink broader questions of religion, regionality, material culture, and social formation in eastern India and the subcontinent at large. This symposium seeks to rebalance that longstanding aporia by foregrounding Odisha as a generative intellectual terrain rather than a marginal case study. Bringing together scholars and artists at diverse stages of their academic careers, the symposium aims to foster sustained interdisciplinary dialogue attentive to both longue durée historical processes and contemporary transformations, positioning Odisha as central to reimagining the analytical horizons of South Asian studies.

Organizers: Sinjini Chatterjee (Ohio State University) and Ujaan Ghosh (Ohio State University)

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8:30-10:30 a.m. Session 1: Art, Aesthetics, and Religious Cultures
Justin Grosnick (Graduate Theological Union)
Sacred Art and Expansion of Ritual in Odiya Diaspora
Westin Harris (University of California, Davis)
TBA
Sonali Dhingra (California State University, East Bay)
Ruptures and Continuities: Erasure, Survival, and the Transformation of Bodhisattva Images from Medieval Odisha to Living Temples
Shriya Patnaik (Pierre du Bois Foundation)
Sonic Lineages and Embodied Archives: Re-Reading the Mahari Performatice Repertoire Beyond Nationalist and Orientalist Frames

Break

10:30 a.m.-12:15 p.m. Session 2: Performative and Literary Traditions
Pralay Kanungo
TBA
Urmishree Bedamatta (Ravenshaw University)
Performance, Community and Literary Tradition in Odisha: A History of Texts in Motion
Kaustavi Sarkar (University of North Carolina, Charlotte)
Odissi: A Loktantra
Yaaminey Mubayi
TBA
Jatin Nayak, moderator

Break

1:45-3:30 p.m. Session 3: Hindu Nationalism, Indigeneity, and Politics of Marginality in Odisha?
Jagannath Ambagudia (Tata Institute of Social Sciences)
TBA
Pinky Hota (Smith College)
State of the Nation: Regional Populism as Precursor of Ethnonationalism
Rajkumar Khosla (Nabakrushna Choudhary Centre for Development Studies)
Politics of Marginality and Forest Rights: A Study of Tribal Communities in Odisha
Chad Bauman (Butler University)
The Kandhamal Violence: Religion, Politics, and the Construction of Conflict
Angana Chatterji (University of California, Berkeley), moderator

Break

4:00-5:30 p.m. Roundtable Discussion for New Directions for Odisha Studies
Angana Chatterji, Pinky Hota, Jagannath Ambagudia, Pralay Kanungo
Frédérique Apfel-Marglin (Smith College)
The Tantric Meaning of the Vanished Dance of the Mahari in Jagannatha Temple

This symposium examines how ruins function as potent sites of memory and political authority in the making of modern nationhood in Afghanistan and India. Moving beyond viewing archaeology as a neutral recovery of the past, it argues that ruins are active political objects—material anchors through which states and communities construct narratives of sovereignty, civilizational continuity, and territorial legitimacy. By situating material remains within struggles over memory and power, the symposium shows how the past is continually reinterpreted to serve present political ends. Through a comparative focus on two postcolonial states shaped by imperial interventions and contested borders, the symposium explores how ruins are mobilized to narrate origins, authenticate authority, and define belonging. In India, monuments and archaeological sites have been incorporated into projects of civilizational nationalism, framing the nation as an enduring cultural continuum rooted in antiquity. In Afghanistan, premodern heritage has been entangled in geopolitics, nation-building, and protracted conflict, where ruins symbolize both resilience and vulnerability. In both contexts, material remains are deployed to stabilize authority, negotiate plural histories, and manage competing territorial claims. The symposium also interrogates colonial legacies embedded in archaeological knowledge production, examining how postcolonial regimes inherit and repurpose these frameworks. By foregrounding preservation, destruction, restoration, and display as political acts, it highlights deeper struggles over memory, identity, and sovereignty. Bringing together scholars across disciplines, the symposium fosters dialogue on archaeology’s entanglement with nation-building and argues that ruins are dynamic instruments through which modern nationhood is imagined and materially inscribed in the contemporary global political landscape.

Organizers: Agnik Bhattacharya (University of California, Irvine) and Mou Banerjee (University of Wisconsin–Madison)

In the last two decades, South Asian cities have not only become important subjects and sites for global urban scholarship but also, in necessitating attention to caste, coloniality, embodiment, informality, and everyday practice, have reshaped key theories of the urban. Meanwhile as flooding, heat, drought, air pollution, and other climate catastrophes unfold, questions of vulnerability and survival in the city have gained immediacy not only for research and planning, but in everyday life, learning, and labor. In this context, the South Asian Urban Climates symposium will ask how building knowledge, teaching, and fighting for and from the South Asian city are necessarily interconnected. It will bring scholars, teachers, artists, activists, and cultural producers to workshop pedagogies for collective futures that are grounded in places, practices, and ecologies across the region. To do this, we will build from ongoing dialogue in the South Asian Urban Climates community and think with experimental, community-centered, and climate-justice pedagogies that refuse the coloniality of disciplines, borders, and social categories. The conversation will be grounded in, and examine ways to mobilize, new and ongoing research on aqueous pasts, landscapes of disease, ecologies of brick-making, and ways of knowing food, water, air, and land in Lahore, ​​Janakpurdham, Palghar, and beyond. This work will position the city not only as the site of climate’s colonial returns, but also, through empirically informed pedagogies, as the path out of them. Asking how we might bridge classrooms, creative practices, and grounded political action — especially in mahauls of austerity and authoritarianism — the symposium will curate interdisciplinary perspectives and curricula that address changing climates in the region.

Organizers: Nida Rehman (Carnegie Mellon University) and Aparna Parikh (Pennsylvania State University)

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8:30-8.45am Welcome and introduction by Aparna Parikh and Nida Rehman
Brief self-introduction

8.45-10.15am Session 1 – Infrastructure and embodiment
Chitra Venkatramani (Australian National University) The Temporalities of Exhaustion
Deepti Chatti (University of California San Diego) Changing Hearths and Minds: Energy Technologies, Air Pollution, and the Politics of Environmental Expertise in India
Nari Senanayake (University of Kentucky) “One monkey = total chaos:” Infrastructural failure and multi-species life in Sri Lanka
Shweta Wagh (Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute for Architecture, Mumbai) Negotiating Infrastructure: The Coastal Commons and Resistance to
Megaprojects in Mumbai

10:15-10:30am Coffee break

10.30am-12.15pm Session 2 – Countering climate unfreedoms
Malini Ranganathan (American University) Climate Scapegoating: Environmental Unfreedoms and the Caste Ecology of Bangalore’s Wetlands
Sabin Ninglekhu (Social Sciences Baha, Kathmandu, Nepal) Of Ponds, Pilgrims, and Politics: Religious environmentalism, climate change, and the growing undercurrents of Hindutva in southern Nepal
Aslam Saiyad (Independent researcher and photographer, Mumbai) Festivals as Food Policy: Ritual Calendars and Nutrition Security Among the Warli
Abuzar Madhu (Independent performance and visual artist, Lahore) Listening to the River: Art, Embodiment, and Pedagogies of Resistance along the Ravi

12:15–1:45pm Lunch break

1.45-3.30pm Session 3 – Pedagogies of material practice
Ronishka Nalpathil (Carnegie Mellon University) Counter-Captioning Teak: Climate Pedagogy through Material Histories and Visual Archives
Waqas Butt (University of Toronto) What is a River For?: Flooding and Lands in Lahore’s Ravi River
Ifrah Asif (Carnegie Mellon University) Living Heritage, Collective Methods: Participatory Mapping and the Making of Counter-Archives
Akshar Gajjar (Institute of Architecture, EPFL) “Above My Head is Sun and Below My Feet is a Burning Kiln”: Learning Climate Through Drawing

3:30–3:45pm Coffee Break

3:45-5:00pm Concluding discussion – Pedagogies for Collective Futures

The July 2024 mass uprising in Bangladesh marked a distinct political rupture whose consequences continue to unfold across state and non-state institutions, social lives, and political imaginaries. Emerging from student-led protests and rapidly expanding into a nationwide insurgent movement, the uprising exposed deep fractures in the country’s moral economy, governance structures, and regimes of legitimacy. This symposium brings together transdisciplinary scholarship to examine the uprising not as a singular event but as an ongoing process whose afterlives are reshaping Bangladesh’s political, social, and epistemic futures. The first panel, titled “Moral Economies and Political Imaginaries of Uprising,” situates the uprising within its structural and ideological conditions, examining how economic crisis, elite corruption, and competing political imaginaries converged (or did not converge) to destabilize authoritarian rule. The second panel, titled “Bodies, Affects, and the Social Life of the Uprising,” turns to the embodied and affective dimensions of the upheaval, analyzing how state violence against marked bodies intensified insurgent momentum while also reshaping gendered power, minoritization, and broader patterns of social complacency. The third panel, titled “Reckoning after the Uprising: Wages, Justice, and Digital Power,” addresses the terrain of reckoning after regime change, focusing on labor precarity, demands for transitional justice, cycles of reparation and retribution, and the expanding role of digital media in mediating political power. The final panel, titled “Institutions, Knowledge, and Post-Uprising Futures,” looks forward to institutional and epistemic futures, interrogating struggles over knowledge production, constitutional redesign, and the uncertain prospects of democratic renewal amid risks of backsliding. Taken together, these interventions span political economy, anthropology, sociology, law, and gender studies. The breadth of materials and the need to trace the uprising across multiple registers necessitate a full symposium rather than a single or double panel, enabling transdisciplinary dialogues on the uprising’s complex and still-unfolding afterlives within Bangladesh and beyond.

Organizer: Nafisa Tanjeem (Worcester State University)

Wednesday, October 28, 2026; 8.30 am – 5.30 pm

Zoom link: https://worcester.zoom.us/j/93513613253?jst=2 (only for virtual/international presenters)

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Panel 1: Rethinking July Uprising: Power, Violence, and Political Futures [8.30 am – 10.15 am]

Naomi Hossain, Professor, SOAS University of London, Department of Development Studies:

“The Moral Economy of the Bangladesh Uprising: The Role of Economic Crisis and Elite Corruption in the Awami League’s Downfall” (Zoom)

Anupam Debashis Roy, DPhil Candidate in Sociology, University of Oxford:

“Homo Sacrosanctus: How the Violence of Inviolable Bodies Boosted the July Uprising in Bangladesh” (Zoom)

Shehzad M. Arifeen, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin:

“The Nation must be Defended: The Cultural Politics of the Awami League and the Problem of Post-Colonial Sovereignty”

Samina Luthfa, Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Dhaka:

“Left-Right-Center: Challenges and Opportunities for Mobilizing in Post-uprising Bangladesh”

Seuty Sabur, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Department of Economics and Social Sciences, BRAC University:

“This is not My Revolution: Aspiration, Erasure, and the Political Field in the Post-July Uprising Bangladesh”

10:15–10:30 AM All-Conference Break

Panel 2: Whose Bangladesh? The Politics of Minoritization after the July Uprising [10.30 am – 12.15 pm]

Aanmona Priyadarshini, Lecturer, Department of Anthropology, Southern Methodist University:

“Bangladesh as Corporealscape: Minoritization and the Affective Life of the Nation-State after the July Uprising”

Nafisa Nipun Tanjeem, Associate Professor, Department of Interdisciplinary Studies, Worcester State University:

“Gendered Power, Limits of Reforms, and Feminist Politics in Post-July Uprising Bangladesh”

Tanveer Hossain Anoy, Ph.D. Student, Department of Feminist Studies, University of Minnesota:

“Queering Bangladesh’s July Revolution: Survival, Recognition, and Political Legitimacy”

Nadine Shaanta Murshid, Associate Professor, School of Social Work, University at Buffalo:

“The Long Complacency”

12:15–1:45 AM All-Conference Break

Panel 3: Reckoning after the Uprising: Wages, Justice, and Digital Power [1.45 pm – 3.30 pm]

Dina Siddiqi, Clinical Professor, Liberal Studies, New York University:

“Capitalizing on Labor: The Elusive Search for Just Wages in Post-Uprising Bangladesh” (Zoom)

Sara Hossain, Senior Advocate, Supreme Court:

“Truth and Transitional Justice in Bangladesh: After the Uprising”

Taqbir Huda, Clarendon Scholar (DPhil Law), The Queen’s College, University of Oxford and Senior Fellow, Tech Global Institute:

“After the Uprising: Reparation, Retribution and Repetition”

Salwa Hoque, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Department of English; AIAI Network, Emory University:

“Navigating Digital Media and Power during the Uprising and After”

Jannatul Maoa, PhD Candidate, Women and Gender in Religion, Claremont Graduate University:

“July 2024: A Tale of Temporal Revolution”

3:30–3:45 AM All-Conference Break

Panel 4: Reimagining Bangladesh: Institutions, Knowledge, and Post-Uprising Futures [3.45 pm – 5.30 pm]

Hana Shams Ahmed, Independent Scholar:

“Who Controls Knowledge? Education and Social Justice in the Context of the July Uprising in Bangladesh” (Zoom)

Moyukh Mahtab, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin: “Exceptional Times: (Re)forming Nation and State in Bangladesh 2.0”

Niger Sultana, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, Indiana University: “The Aesthetic Turn of Resistance: Digital Protest Art and the July Revolution in Bangladesh”

Nayma Qayum, Associate Professor of Political Science, Manhattanville College:

“Writing Constitution after Transition” (Zoom)

Navine Murshid, Associate Professor of Political Science, Colgate University:

“Democratic Renewal and Backsliding in Post-Uprising Bangladesh”

This symposium celebrates the formative influence of Sumita Chakravarty’s National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema (1993, 1996) on subsequent studies of Indian cinema. Timed to coincide with the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of its Indian edition from Oxford University Press in 1996, the symposium brings together a multi-generational and international set of scholars across three roundtables. In the first roundtable, scholars assess the impact of the book itself, which drew on a diverse set of frameworks (including postcolonial literary theory, myth and folklore criticism, cultural studies, Film Studies, and histories of South Asian performing arts traditions) and explicated, through thematic criticism and close analysis, the ideational complexity and richness of Indian cinema’s engagement with the nation and national identity. In this way the book introduced India’s sprawling cinematic traditions – especially then-neglected popular cinema – to generations of scholars in the Anglo-American academy, South Asianist and otherwise, in lucid and evocative terms. The second roundtable will feature scholars who will reflect on the extraordinary influence of Chakravarty’s book on their scholarship on Indian regional cinematic traditions, on India’s documentary cinema, on Indian cinema’s relation to world cinema traditions, and on the continuing patterns of this cinema’s complex engagement with popular cultural intertexts. A third roundtable will present new approaches to Indian cinema research, affirming the book’s ongoing relevance and resonance. The symposium will conclude with a conversation with Prof. Sumita Chakravarty, who will be in attendance for the day’s proceedings. The full-day structure is meant to make time to assess the book’s influence and, as per Prof. Chakravarty’s express request, to introduce attendees to exciting new directions in Indian film studies methods, archives, and areas and topics of inquiry.

Organizers: Neepa Majumdar (University of Pittsburgh) and Sudhir Mahadevan (University of Washington)

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Roundtable 1: “Revisiting National Identity and Indian Cinema”

8:30-10:15

Speaker 1: Neepa Majumdar, University of Pittsburgh, USA

Speaker 2: Corey Creekmur, University of Iowa, USA

Speaker 3: Jyotika Virdi, University of Windsor, Canada
Speaker 4: Rosie Thomas, University of Westminster, UK
Speaker 5: Bhaskar Sarkar, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA

Roundtable 2: “Learning from National Identity and Indian Cinema

10:30-12:15

Speaker 1: Swarnavel Pillai, Michigan State University, USA

Speaker 2: Samhita Sunya, University of Virginia, USA

Speaker 3: Anuja Jain, Wesleyan University, USA

Speaker 4: Gohar Siddiqui, Clark University, USA

Speaker 5: Lakshmi Padmanabhan, Northwestern University, USA

LUNCH: 12:15-1:45

Roundtable 3: New Directions in Indian Cinema Studies

1:45-3:30

Speaker 1: Silpa Mukherjee, UC San Diego, USA

Speaker 2: Tanya Desai, Boston College, USA

Speaker 3: Rahul Kumar, University of Pittsburgh, USA

Speaker 4: Priyadarshini Shanker, University of North Carolina Wilmington, USA

Speaker 5: Debarati Roy, Emory University, USA

Wrap Up: A Conversation with Prof. Sumita Chakravarty, Professor Emerita, The New School, USA

3:45-5:30

Speaker 1: Sudhir Mahadevan, University of Washington, USA

Speaker 2: Sangita Gopal, University of Oregon, USA