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.

Conference Room 2, half day

The American Institute of Pakistan Studies (AIPS) will host a half-day symposium to mentor emerging scholars working on Pakistan-related research. This will be the fifth such event at the Annual Conference on South Asia. The symposium will showcase new research by approximately six to 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 member institutions and its social media sites. It encourages abstracts from disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, political science, history, literature, religious studies, art history, and music. 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 half-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 symposiums held at the ACSA 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.

Senate Room A, full day

What does it mean to be Indigenous in South Asia? In our symposium, we gather scholars who identify as Indigenous to Tibet and the Himalayas to consider how being Indigenous is intertwined with colonialism and ongoing struggles on the land. We are committed to engaging with lived experiences and ongoing contestations around Indigeneity to examine how such developments shape Indigenous practices. We hope this symposium can generate meaningful conversations about Indigeneity in contemporary South Asia. Being Indigenous is a political and epistemological claim, one that is oriented towards claiming a just future. In this context, claims to being Indigenous in South Asia, in particular, Tibet and the Himalayas, are connected to justice. We invoke the following interrelated themes of inquiry that connects with the objective of the symposium: (a) how and why are claims to Indigeneity considered a journey of justice across communities in South Asia; (b) How do assertions of custodianship including land-based practices and rituals shape and are shaped by claims of Indigeneity?; (c) How do communities who identify as Indigenous engage with everyday aesthetic and mundane forms which situate and deepen their identity and selfhood as Indigenous?; (d) How do distinctive ways of being Indigenous shape one’s research, communication, and the fundamentals of conducting fieldwork. All the speakers in the symposium will share images, songs, prayers, rituals, and accounts that speak to the questions we presented above. Our aim for the symposium is to invite all the participants to connect, discuss, and share their insights. We hope the emerging conversations connect and organically link the four inquiries we have offered. Of course, participants and speakers are welcome and open to generate questions outside the objectives framed above and reflect together on what it means to be Indigenous in South Asia.

University CD, full day

Commentaries have played a major role in the study of South Asian literature, both as resources for interpreting their source texts and as innovative contributions to the theorization of literary cultures. The influence of commentaries is especially prominent in the study of premodern Tamil literature, in which unique linguistic forms and subtle literary gaps often require the use of a commentary to make sense of the source material. While commentaries are often utilized and referenced in the existing research on premodern Tamil literature, relatively little attention has been given to commentaries as objects of analytic scrutiny in their own right, and commentaries are rarely published apart from their source texts—when indeed they are published at all. Yet, Tamil commentaries are an extraordinarily rich resource for deepening our understanding of the literary, religious, and intellectual spheres of premodern South India and an invaluable resource for examining shifts in reading and interpretive practices over time, literary networks, sectarian identity and exchange, and the ever-contested boundaries of the Tamil literary canon. This symposium aims to bring together scholars at various stages of their careers who work on an array of Tamil commentarial materials in order to highlight the significant payout of taking commentaries seriously as individual textual interpretations with projects or agendas that are embedded in large socio-cultural systems and literary cultures. In doing so, this symposium builds on the growing body of scholarship published in the last twenty years that increasingly has begun to pay attention to Tamil commentaries, including but not limited to the Śrīvaiṣṇava commentarial tradition that flourished from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, and aims to extend these insights in productive new directions.

Parlor 627, full day

Caucus Room, full day

From large-scale colonial irrigation projects to the harvesting of natural pigments for textiles, this symposium examines the ecological settings of practices of making in South Asia and its transregional relations. This symposium interrogates, through interdisciplinary engagements in visual and material culture and the history of art and architecture, the powerful intersections of ecology, aesthetics, labor, and cultural production in the colony and postcolony. While wide-ranging literature speaks of the politics of labor and craft, we seek to gain precision on those politics through studies of aesthetic practices, and through the ways things take shape and touch ground in specific habitats. We draw on an emerging literature that theorizes the environmental and elemental, from the shifting chars to the travels of the monsoon, in order to historicize and situate practices of water and earth through the ways those habitats give rise to forms of labor. Together we wish to debate and understand the historical transformations and socio-cultural meanings of the relations between forms and ecosystems, between techniques of material and cultural production and the various tangible and intangible effects of that labor, and between discourses and aesthetics in South Asia and beyond. We seek to interrogate collective aesthetic practices and individual works, whether at the scales of handicraft or urbanism, from precolonial geographies to international collaborations, and through a lens that prioritizes practices of making and the ecological horizons of that labor. These parameters bear on and are shaped by problems of colonialism and governmentality, political subject formation intersecting with gender, religion, caste, and class, industrial and urban development and preservation of heritage environments, and– not least– climate histories and futures. We will address diverse forms of aesthetic practice and cultural production– thinking with art, photography, film, textiles, architecture, landscapes, and ephemeral structures– in the shaping of modern South Asia.

Conference Room 4, full day

Senate Room B, full day

This symposium extends from the “Many Yogavāsiṣṭhas” project, a multilingual, collaborative textual-study project that seeks to trace the Pan-Indian impact of the Yogavāsiṣṭha (c. 11th – 14th C CE), an important Classical Sanskrit philosophical-literary text that has popularly been transmitted in the Advaita Vedānta tradition. Over the centuries, the Yogavāsiṣṭha has circulated widely throughout India by means of its abridged Sanskrit edition known as the Laghuyogavāsiṣṭha, which has inspired many vernacular translations, re-tellings and commentaries. The earliest manuscript tradition of the Yogavāsiṣṭha, known as the Mokṣopāya (c. 950 CE), points to an early nondual (advaita) tradition separate from hegemonic Advaita Vedānta, complicating our received historiography. The papers in this symposium seek to shed light on the process by which the non-sectarian advaita philosophy of the Mokṣopāya was integrated into the Śaṅkara lineage of Advaita Vedānta. We will investigate the historical and philosophical footprint of the Mokṣopāya via the Yogavāsiṣṭha and other instances of its transmission, reformulation and doctrinal adjustment. We ask, How did the Yogavāsiṣṭha, through its many vernacular iterations, acquired pan-Indian authority as an Advaita Vedānta text when its earliest manuscript tradition does not indicate any Vedānta affiliation? How did the Yogavāsiṣṭha become a key text in Persian literature which must be addressed in order to understand the philosophical objectives of that textual lineage? What do the alternate versions, translations and interpretations look like? And what do these instances tell us about the social and political context of those who composed them? The many vectors of this text—into Persian literature, vernacular traditions in Tamil, Marathi and Hindi—and the processes of doctrinal shift that they reveal have only recently begun to be explored, and the symposium with its planned edited volume will make a significant contribution to this scholarship.

From making tik tok videos to strolling through malls and from whistling at the silver screen to partying in bars, South Asia enjoys non-work. This full day symposium both celebrates and examines the intricate politics behind the array of practices that can be broadly understood as South Asian play, leisure, and non-work. Leisure, a term originally used to refer to consumptive practices during non-laboring times and a classed activity, is deconstructed in this symposium by examining the variety of ways in which South Asians approach non-work time across socio-economic classes. Situating ourselves within gender, caste, and class studies we examine transformative, transgressive, and radical practices of leisure, non-work, and play while acknowledging the barriers and violence embedded in it through their history and present-day iterations. We do not believe play, leisure, and non-work to be apolitical acts and instead conceptualize them as critical to understanding the current and historical sociopolitical dynamics of South Asia. Papers will examine different aspects and terminologies of non-work, play, and leisure: Timepass and ghumna look at ordinary practices of hanging out, stolen moments, and the non-productive “work” of gossip and chit-chat, to think about the construction of time and time delays embedded in the term. Masti looks at gendered and sexual constructions of “fun,” as well as the embedded power relations of celebrations of joy, and how “khel” or play is defined through this term (see also Anjaria and Anjaria et al 2020). Fursat, aaram, and oivyu examine moments of rest and relaxation, of pauses between work, and their implication for how work itself is understood. While not meant to be all encompassing these terminologies allow entry into different modalities of leisure in South Asia.

Assembly Room, full day

Despite its ephemerality as a print object, the periodical has had a sustained influence on South Asian literary, cultural, and socio-political imaginations. The multilingual, multigenre, and multimedial engagements of the periodical make it a potent form to be inserted within critical conversations and generate new publics in national and transnational contexts. Beyond the conventional categorization of ‘little magazines’ and ‘mainstream journals’, book historians of South Asia have found periodicals to be archives of manifold identities and collectivities, such as those constituted by college magazines, science periodicals, proletarian magazines, caste journals, children’s papers and so on. Oftentimes bending the rules of the genre, the magazine in South Asia has lent itself to numerous patterns of circulation and multiple functions, not all of which are ideologically consistent. For instance, on the one hand, periodicals generate maps of local and global knowledges and desires that otherwise might not be available to readers, a feat that is frequently financed through advertisements. On the other hand, as a product of print modernity, periodicals also try to democratize access to political consciousness and critical vocabulary for minoritized sections of the society, often defying commercialization. A near-elusive object of much editorial scrutiny and authoritarian censorship, the periodical has emerged as a historical actor in a diverse range of modern politico-cultural debates across the subcontinent, which cannot be studied under the restrictive parameters of a tightly thematized panel. Through this symposium we want to explore how the South Asian periodical is not simply a repository of colonial and postcolonial histories but an active participant in those conversations.

Prosimetric literature (often termed campukavya), involving the blending of prose and verse, became a major mode of literary production in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and regional languages in South Asia from the 8th century CE. The simultaneous rise of prosimetric poetry across these traditions raises significant questions about literary influence and stylistic choice, and more broadly between literary form and content. In Sanskrit, the interplay between prose (gadya) and verse (padya) allowed for more expansive descriptions and intricate literary ornamentation, offering creative freedom to explore social imaginaries beyond the constrained tropes and structures of mahakavya poetry. For Prakrit, the prose-verse form gave dynamism to lengthy narrative sections that involved less description than Sanskrit works either accelerating or slowing the rhythm, while also allowing for shifts in perspective and tonal variation. Similarly, in South Indian literary traditions of Kannada, Telugu, and Malayalam, the alternation between prose and verse influenced narration, pacing, and audience engagement. Our discussions will focus on how regional literary style influenced Sanskrit, while being simultaneously permeated by Sanskrit linguistic and rhetorical elements. The symposium will also explore comparison with Persian literature, which was dominated by prose-verse mixed composition. Despite recognized symmetries between Sanskrit, Prakrit, and South Indian prosimetric literatures, scholarly examinations have so far been largely limited to focused studies of individual works and literary traditions. The symposium is crucial for starting a broader conversation, and giving this rich and neglected area of South Asia’s literary heritage the attention it deserves. The symposium format will allow for scholars working in a range of languages and periods to workshop research-in-progress and will facilitate conversations about shared methodological and theoretical questions transcending the presenters’ own research areas.

Conference Room 1, full day

We invite participation in a full-day symposium at ACSA that critically engages with the themes of refusal and reclaiming the Indigenous Baloch ontologies, epistemologies, and perspectives. We focus on the spaces, histories, and geographies embedded in everyday stories of resistance, transformation, and survival of the Baloch nation. The question of Balochistan remains an unsettled one within the state apparatus of Pakistan, since its annexation in 1948. In light of the growing global movement toward reclaiming Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies, we, as Baloch students and scholars, seek to ask: What is the problem of Balochistan? How has Balochistan’s history been constructed, and what does that history mean for its Baloch inhabitants? Is Balochistan a militarized region within Pakistan, or is it an occupied land? Is the issue one of representation, or does it extend into deeper socio-economic, political, and cultural domains? What do concepts like self-determination, honor, and dignity mean to Baloch, and how are they being overlooked or marginalized within the broader political struggle between Pakistan and Balochistan? Moreover, how are the Baloch perspectives further sidelined in the expanding contest for influence, now extending beyond Pakistan, India, and other South Asian countries to China’s growing strategic interest in Balochistan’s geostrategic location? These critical questions arise when discussing Balochistan, a place and people whose representation has historically been constructed about them rather than with them. This symposium aims to bring together Baloch scholars, students, practitioners, and community members to create an intellectual and activist space where Baloch voices from Balochistan and beyond can converge to interrogate dominant narratives and assert their own perspectives.

Wisconsin Ballroom, full day

This symposium explores the scholarly legacy of Tony K. Stewart (1954-2024) by responding to his writings on religious encounter, hagiography, and translation in South Asia. We understand these themes as processes that play out through a complex network of authority, social relationships, and texts. Beginning with Stewart’s salient article, “In Search of Equivalence,” (2001), we test his approach to examining the Hindu-Muslim encounter in early modern Bengal to other times, geographies, and genres. Hagiography both constructs and transforms religious communities through complex negotiations of authority, theology, and practice. Stewart’s groundbreaking monograph, The Final Word (2010), on the Caitanya Caritāmṛta of Krishnadas Kaviraj, moves panelists to consider the significance of Stewart’s interpretation of it in their own scholarship on the Bengali Vaishnava tradition. Moving beyond the Bengali literary world, Stewart’s work on hagiography encourages the examination of the genre as an ever-shifting discourse of authorship, devotional practices, and community values to understand how the saint’s image is constructed. We expand this scholarship to life stories throughout South Asia by thinking about the strategies biographers use to address the concerns of their audience and the social and temporal realities they live in. Stewart’s dexterous engagement with translation theory and his craft of translation inspires our panelists to examine the role of translation theory and practice in their own work, whether in the form of texts, materials, or ideas. This symposium will bring together scholars at all levels who engage with religious encounter, hagiography, and translation in the study of South Asian religiosity.

Parlor 638, full day

University AB, full day

Tamil’s distinctiveness is primarily understood through its Dravidian, non-Indo-Aryan linguistic structure. Scholars have traditionally emphasized “Dravidian consciousness” as fundamental to understanding the Tamil language and culture. However, Tamil scholar Xavier S. Thaninayagam initiated a paradigm shift from philological studies to cultural studies in the 1960s (Raman, 2017). Through his leadership, international Tamil conferences in Malaysia, Singapore, Sri Lanka, and India have established Tamil Studies as a multidisciplinary field. Five decades later, today’s scholars engage with Tamil Studies through diverse research streams, including Environmental Studies, Gender Studies, and Digital Humanities. Nevertheless, the dialogue between these new research approaches and traditional disciplines such as History and Anthropology has not been effectively channeled within Tamil Studies. This symposium aims to bridge conversations between innovative disciplinary approaches and traditional fields. By bringing multidisciplinary perspectives into dialogue, we seek to collectively reimagine Tamil Studies’ future. The symposium will feature three panels bringing together senior professors, early career researchers, and PhD scholars.

Conference Room 3, full day

Did theory and practice exist as self-conscious markers categorizing discursive production in pre-modern South Asia? How did South Asian intellectuals and practitioners conceive of theory and praxis across disciplinary, linguistic and genre boundaries? What were the emergent interactions between South Asian procedures distinguishing them and those introduced by European and contemporary academic classificatory methodologies? How do these interactions play out in our own work of theorizing and practicing scholarship? The panel seeks to address these questions as a means of academic and methodological self-reflection. Sheldon Pollock’s work has made a case for the tendency of theory to determine and precede practice in South Asia at a scale unmatched anywhere else, although focusing primarily on śāstra and prayoga (as theory and praxis respectively). It has broached ways in which theory regulates and codifies the practical and social spheres by offering various ‘cultural grammars’ of rule-governance. The panel encourages constructive engagements with this thesis. But there have existed other formulations of the theory-praxis distinction, as between jñāna (knowledge) and karma/kriyā (action) or sāṃkhya (theory) and yoga (application). Conceptions like vyavahār (usage), upayog (use), upāy (expedient), abhyās (practice), prayojan (motive) occupy the semantic landscape of ‘practice’ in South Asia. What are the implications of conceiving theory and praxis along such alternative frameworks? We also take note of the judgment that ‘Indian thought’ is too ‘practical’, concerned with the exigencies of the everyday as opposed to the pure pursuit of theoria. We are thus faced with a paradox in the wake of previous scholarship: Indian modes of discourse are too determined by theory (thus erasing historical change and practice) and conversely, owing to their practical entanglements, not theoretical enough. The panel considers further engagement with these issues from an interdisciplinary perspective, inviting scholars of philosophy, literature, aesthetics, embodied practice, intellectual history and critical theory.

Capitol Ballroom A, full day