8:30 AM - 5:30 PM (Pacific Time)
Royce Hall, Rm 314

The UCLA Center for India and South Asia (CISA) Eighth Annual Graduate Interdisciplinary Conference on South Asia, Saturday 18 May 2024
UCLA, ROYCE HALL, ROOM 314

9:00 a.m. WELCOME, Registration, and tea, coffee and snacks

9:30 a.m. PANEL 1: Empire, Nation and Counter-currents
                Chair: Dr. Esha N De, Senior Lecturer, UCLA

Paper 1             “The Chimur Outrage(s): Discourses of Sexualized Violence in Anticolonial Uprising and Colonial Repression, 1942”, Rebecca Waxman, UCLA

Paper 2             “Echoes of Ideology: Radio, Governmentality and Cold War Geopolitics in Shaping Postcolonial Mediated Culture”, Anirban Mukhopadhyay, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign

Paper 3             “Imperialism, Islamism, and Feminism: The National Conference for Muslim Women,1980 Pakistan”, Aiza Khan, UCLA

11:00 a.m. BREAK

11.30 a.m. PANEL 2: Spaces of Hindutva and Protest
                 Chair: Dr. Vinay Lal, Professor, UCLA

Paper 4             “Architecting the National Myth: Spatial Dispositif of Political Hindutva”, Soumya Dasgupta, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign

Paper 5             “At the Margins of Hindu Nationalism, ABVP Pune”, Leela Khanna, New York University

Paper 6             “Anatomy of a Careful Protest: The Shaheenbagh Movement and its Ethos of Care”, Alisha Ibkar, University of Manchester

1:00 p.m. LUNCH (provided)

2:00 p.m. PANEL 3: Labor and Migration in South Asia
                Chair: Dr. Purnima Mankekar, Professor, UCLA

Paper 7             “The Nepali State and the Biopolitical Governance of Female Migrant Workers”, Anusha Khanal, 4Cities Erasmus Mundus Joint Masters Degree program.

Paper 8             “Erratic Rain, Exiting Men: Shifting Agricultural Experiences of Female Farmers in Rural India”, Swaroopa Lahiri, University of California Santa Barbara.

Paper 9             “Murder on the Lake: Debt, Patronage and Bonded Labor in the Little Rann of Kutch, India”, Sita Mamidipudi, UCLA

3:30 p.m. BREAK

4:00 p.m.          Keynote, “The Yoga of Power: Yoga as Political Thought and Practice in India”, Dr. Sunila S. Kale & Dr. Christian Lee Novetzke, Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington.

5:00 p.m.          Q&A and general discussion

5.30 p.m.          End     

PAPER ABSTRACTS

PANEL 1: Empire, Nation, and Counter-currents

Paper 1. ‘The Chimur Outrage(s): Discourses of Sexualized Violence in Anticolonial Uprising and Colonial Repression, 1942’, Rebecca Waxman, UCLA

This paper seeks to narrate the overlapping, conflicting, and parallel accounts of the sexualized violence that occurred, was disavowed, and was sensationalized during the anticolonial uprising and colonial repression in Chimur, a small town in the Central Provinces (present-day Maharashtra), during the Quit India movement of August 1942. On August 16^th, a violent rebellion took place in Chimur; government buildings were burned and four police officers were killed. Over August 19th -21st, the town was occupied by police and the military as they arrested the men of the town en masse. These officers of the state also committed “outrages” and “atrocities” against the remaining residents of Chimur: the women. Various reports, narratives, and rumors emerged and circulated describing allegations of sexualized violence, from the townspeople themselves, local and national political figures and groups, official government communiques, and news publications, which together comprise my archive. The violence at Chimur made national news at the time. People were galvanized by the C.P. government’s staunch refusal to conduct an official enquiry into the “atrocities” and “excesses” that occurred in Chimur, and the event continues to be memorialized in Chimur today. However, it has largely lost notoriety or even recognition among popular and scholarly audiences. Why? I examine nationalist and colonial documents on the violence at Chimur to clarify the significant discourses on the uprising and repression that occurred in Chimur and interrogate its significance as an historical event for understandings of Indian nationalism, anticolonialism, and feminism.

Bio: Rebecca Waxman is a PhD candidate in History at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Specializing in modern India with a concentration in Gender Studies, her dissertation examines sexualized violence in late colonial and postcolonial India and its discursive framings in order to better understand the histories of gender, politics, and resistance in 20th century India. She is a recipient of the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad fellowship and the Penny Kanner Dissertation Fellowship. Her work has been published in Women's History Review and A Cultural Encyclopedia of Lost Cities and Civilizations, and is forthcoming in an edited volume by Manohar Publishers, New Delhi.

Paper 2. ‘Echoes of Ideology: Radio, Governmentality and Cold War Geopolitics in Shaping Postcolonial Mediated Culture’, Anirban Mukhopadhyay, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

In this paper, I explore how the postcolonial Indian state rationalized radio as an agent of modern state-building and, simultaneously, how governing through radio in India reflected tensions of Cold War geopolitics in the policies affecting radio broadcasting. In the immediate aftermath of colonial rule, the postcolonial Indian state marked the overhauling of broadcasting policies as a vital part of nation-building. India inherited the colonial infrastructure of radio, and the lawmakers of independent India saw radio as an essential tool to be used not just for disseminating news and entertainment but also to shape the national consciousness of a newly independent nation. I analyze how broadcasting policies governing radio were entangled with the politics of producing ideals of citizenship. Focusing on the radio from 1950-2020, I argue that the policymakers in India saw and continue to see radio as a “citizen machine,” and broadcasting policies became integral to producing cultural nationalism. My analysis relies upon archival material, lists of radio programming, and newspaper clips to fathom how All India Radio (AIR) evolved as a tool for producing cultural citizenry. Examining how the policy infrastructure was intended to produce a space of national consciousness provides essential clues to understanding the politics of disciplining cultural space and (re)imagining the “Nation”. In the present-day nexus between digital media and neoliberal governance in India, the role of radio is hardly diminished, and this paper emphasizes that historicizing the framing of broadcasting policies opens future spaces for resisting inequity in the cultural and public sphere.

Bio: Anirban is a Ph.D. candidate in Communications and Media at the Institute of Communications Research, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He explores the historical and present entanglements of communication technologies, media policies, and transnational geopolitics. Currently, he is examining the roots of the Indian media system and its evolution. Enquiring, on the one hand, how state power governs media technology and, on the other, how the critique and contestation of state power evolve in a postcolonial milieu.  In his dissertation, he traces the history of broadcasting policies and radio in India from the early post-independence years to the present to investigate shifting politics behind state broadcasting policies that attempted to mold All India Radio (AIR) as a governmental tool to solidify citizenship and national identity

Paper 3. ‘Imperialism, Islamism, and Feminism: The National Conference for Muslim Women,1980 Pakistan’, Aiza Khan, UCLA

In October of 1980, Pakistan’s President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq organized The National. Conference of Muslim Women. At this conference, he spoke of advancing women’s rights in the country, expanding their representation in the government and improving women’s literacy and employment opportunities under the ambit of an “Islamic Renaissance”. While these advancements seem in line with the demands of second-wave feminism, a movement contemporary to the National Conference, Zia-ul-Haq’s military regime was marked with a complex domestic and international political context. His rule is considered one of the most oppressive for Pakistani women and minority groups. Nevertheless, Zia-ul-Haq remained a close ally of the United States and received billions of dollars in aid and arms over the course of the Cold War. In my paper, I study what it means for an Islamist military regime to host a conference for the advancement of women’s rights. My findings suggest that Islamism and feminism are closely related movements and have similar goals for women’s roles within a nation state - while Islamists may condemn feminism on the basis of sexual freedoms, both Islamists and liberal feminists uphold women’s education, right to work, and conjugal, bourgeois marriage as ideals. The questions I contemplate include: What kinds of politics did the Zia-ul-Haq regime espouse? What gendered prescriptions did the Islamist military regime impose on the women citizens of Pakistan? How did women in the country (including feminist resistance groups) respond to these prescriptions? How did transnational support, including from the U.S. facilitate the imposition of such gendered norms?

Bio: Aiza Khan is a PhD student in the Gender Studies Department at UCLA. Their research draws on transnational feminisms, decolonial feminist thought, and queer and trans of color critique to look at feminist histories, construction of nation-states, and political Islam in South and Central Asia.

PANEL 2: Spaces of Hindutva and Protest

Paper 4. ‘Architecting the National Myth: Spatial Dispositif of Political Hindutva’, Soumya Dasgupta, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign

Within the broader discourse of political Hindutva, my paper explores the evolving relationship between architecture and nationalism by looking at a range of spatial design strategies deployed by government and non-government actors across urban India since the formation of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led national government in 2014. Scholars have coined several neologisms, including saffron wave, metropolitan Hindutva, Hindutva 2.0, and neo-Hindutva, to identify the socio-political dimensions of the 21st-century Hindutva project, concurring that while its ideological roots may be traced to the 19^th century Hindu reformists, its present form is distinctly shaped by a geopolitical nexus of neoliberal capitalism and digital technocracy (Hansen 2001; M. Basu 2017; A. Basu 2020; Anderson and Longkumer 2020). Meanwhile, under BJP’s broader call for developmentalism, several mega-packages of architectural-urban-infrastructural projects, including – city renaming, beautifications, riverside developments, cleanliness missions, memorials, statues, smart cities, and heritage preservation schemes, have materialized in the last decade with an unprecedented scale and speed making irreversible transformations on India’s urban landscape. However, few architectural scholars who have written on this matter chiefly raised concern about how the current regime is rapidly erasing the once adorned austere-but-elite aesthetics of the Nehruvite cosmopolitan fabric (the demolition of Architect Raj Rewal’s Hall of Nations is one of several such erasures) but have not directly discussed Hindutva’s spatial dispositif (Mehta 2017; Rajagopalan 2022; Dharwadker 2022). Exemplified through three case studies, I deliberate on how the design strategies governing these transformations rename, recast, and remythologize the nation– that help sketch a nationwide overview of Hindutva as a spatial project. To this end, I look at the discursive milieu of architecture vis-à-vis nationalism (without advocating for either) as systems of productions that co-constitute each other and shed light on how nationalist ideology gets enshrined through design within the broader rhetoric of neoliberal developmentalism or in other words, probe: how does architecture become national? 

Bio: Soumya (Shoumo) Dasgupta is a Ph.D. Candidate in Architecture at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, a Humanities Research Institute Graduate Fellow, and a former recipient of the Illinois Distinguished Fellowship. His research interests include nationalism, neoliberal developmentalism, digital technocracy, and South Asia. His dissertation broadly explores transformations of architectural practice in urban India following the implementation of economic liberalization, privatization, and globalization policies in 1991. At Illinois, Soumya has assisted in teaching graduate-level history, theory, and design courses for professional architecture students and served as a design reviewer in various studios. He holds a Certificate in Criticism and Theory from Cornell University, a Master in Urban Design from the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi, and a B.Arch. from IIEST Shibpur, Kolkata.

Paper 5. ‘At the Margins of Hindu Nationalism, ABVP Pune’, Leela Khanna, New York University

This paper centers the margins of Hindu nationalism to explore its contemporary challenges. As the second largest metropolis in Maharashtra, Pune has historically been known as “Brahmin city.” This enduring nickname simultaneously evokes two diametrically opposed historical narratives. For the followers of Phule and Ambedkar, Pune is the peshwa city where Brahmins have perpetually subjugated Dalits. But for many Punekars, Pune represents the ‘rational intellect’ of Maharashtra’s Brahmin-led social reform movements that advocated for ending caste hierarchies. As a nationalist strand that emerged from these social reform debates, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) has a comfortable presence in Pune, and for generations has sustained a strong presence of its student organization, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), in Pune’s universities. However, as the RSS expands its reach across diverse communities, the ABVP must spread into the peripheries of Pune, a region that mostly houses lower caste communities and religious minorities. I offer an ethnographic account of these physical and social margins, where ABVP’s student karyakartas are tasked with establishing a Hindu nationalist network in run-down colleges. I explore how these karyakartas conceptualize these spaces and the people that occupy them as being impermeable to RSS’s sanskars (values). I focus on the partnerships the ABVP develops with extremist Hindu nationalist organizations that are unaffiliated with the RSS. I argue that these margins are at once the logical limits of the Hindu nationalist project and the site of its most sinister forces that are pushing their way into the center.

Bio: Leela Khanna is an anthropology PhD candidate at New York University. Her work engages with questions of social hierarchy and difference in relation to Hindu nationalism, caste, rural-urban relations, and higher education in Western India. Her dissertation is an ethnography of rural, lower-caste students who migrate to Pune for public university education and develop novel political and social sensibilities through participating in Hindu nationalist organizations. Leela’s research, writing and ethnographic documentary work have been supported by grants from the American Institute of Indian Studies, the Fulbright-Hays DDRA, the Society for Visual Anthropology, and various NYU fellowships. She holds a BA from Bard College, an MA in South Asian Studies from Columbia University, and an M.Phil and Advanced Graduate Certificate in Culture & Media (ethnographic filmmaking and theory) from NYU.

Paper 6. ‘Anatomy of a Careful Protest: The Shaheenbagh Movement and its Ethos of Care’, Alisha Ikbar, University of Manchester

My paper looks at the historic Anti-Citizenship Amendment Act protests of 2019 led by the elderly Muslim women of Shaheen Bagh, India, through the lens of care ethics and performance. The dadis (grandmothers) of Shaheen Bagh drew on their day to day practices of maternal care and nurture to create a unique repertoire of protest strategies centred around the undervalued practices of care. In giving care a principal role in the protest, as a representative human practice, and more importantly, as a form of political expression, they offered a radical reimagination of feminist protest organisation and performance. The paper works to elucidate how the Shaheen Bagh movement did not only make possible a novel narrative of careful political resistance, but also demonstrated how the everyday practice of caregiving can be a legitimate response and lesson in careful governance for the State that is largely uncaring towards its disenfranchised population.

Bio: Alisha Ibkar is a 2021-22 commonwealth scholar currently pursuing her PhD in Applied Theatre at the Martin Harris Centre for Music and Drama, University of Manchester, with her project being funded by the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures Doctoral Fellowship. Her work focusses on the study of ethics and aesthetics of care in the context of political activism.

PANEL 3: Labor and Migration in South Asia

Paper 7. ‘The Nepali State and the Biopolitical Governance of Female Migrant Workers’, Anusha Khanal, 4Cities Erasmus Mundus Joint Masters Degree program.

Over the past two decades, the Government of Nepal has implemented various restrictive policies targeting female migrant workers. They include blanket policies banning women under a certain age from travelling abroad for domestic work due to the perceived risks of physical and sexual violence. This paper analyzes these foreign-labor migration policies of Nepal which target female migrant workers and restrict their ability to travel abroad for work. Through this analysis, the paper investigates how the modern Nepali nation-state employs women’s bodies as national territories. It focuses particularly on how the Nepali nation-state produces a discourse about the bodies of emigrating female migrant workers seeking foreign employment as a biopolitical category. I argue that this biopolitical governmentality is used to define the Nepali state’s responsibility towards female migrant workers, and to justify the state’s regulation of women’s bodies both domestically and abroad. The paper connects these discursive practices employed by the Nepali state with colonial discourses and practices, to highlight a global phenomenon of biopolitical governance, and to reject the exceptionalization of this phenomenon to Nepal. For this exploration, I rely on the seminal works of Michel Foucault, Rita Segato, Joan Nagel, Lata Mani and Anibal Quijano to show the intersections of biopolitical governmentality, gender, and colonialism. In doing so, the paper hopes to initiate a critical engagement with the consequences of discourses and policies aimed at regulating and administering life.

Bio: Anusha Khanal is a graduate student from Kathmandu, Nepal, currently pursuing the Erasmus Mundus Master’s Programme in Urban Studies (4Cities). She completed her undergraduate degree from Colorado College in 2021, with a major in International Political Economy and a minor in Asian Studies. She also works as the Curator for a web documentary series from Nepal - "Herne Katha”. Her interests include post-colonial studies, the rural, the urban, transnational migration, nation-states and global political economy.

Paper 8. ‘Erratic Rain, Exiting Men: Shifting Agricultural Experiences of Female Farmers in Rural India’, Swaroopa Lahiri, University of California Santa Barbara

Globalization and policy shifts have increased market volatility and weakened farmers’ safety nets in India, generating serious concerns that culminated in the world’s largest farmer protests in 2020-21. This has been accompanied by two trends: intensifying climate change effects and an increasingly rapid exit of men from agriculture. Simultaneously, the agricultural environment has become increasingly hostile, characterized by irregular water availability, plot fragmentation, high input costs, soaring agricultural debt and rising farmer suicides. It is in this landscape that an increasing number of women are compelled to navigate the unfamiliar terrain of farm management. My paper focuses on the agricultural experiences of women farm operators in five climate vulnerable districts of India that also face an increasing rate of male exit from agriculture (outmigration, farmer suicides, and a shifted focus on non-agricultural work opportunities in the village). My paper is based on qualitative findings from 45 focus groups conducted with 583 women farmers and 18 semi-structured interviews with journalists, NGO representatives, government officials, and farmers. My paper has two key findings. First, most of the female cultivators are negatively selected, they are disproportionately lower caste and Adivasi, with less access to productive land. Patriarchal gender norms exacerbate this negative selection, reducing female farmers’ access to vital agricultural inputs such as labor and water. Second, while the literature has established that other things equal, obtaining land rights increases women’s welfare, I show that the conditions under which they acquire land rights matter.

Bio: Swaroopa Lahiri is a PhD candidate at the Global Studies Department of University of California Santa Barbara. Her current research focuses on the farming experiences of female farmers in climate vulnerable districts of India that are also affected by increasing rates of male exit from agriculture. She has a Master of International Affairs degree from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and a Bachelor's degree from Sciences Po Paris. Her latest publication was a chapter on women’s participation in the 2020-21 farmer protests in India

Paper 9. ‘Murder on the Lake: Debt, Patronage and Bonded Labor in the Little Rann of Kutch, India’, Sita Mamidipudi, UCLA

In this paper, I discuss the 1981 murder of Yusuf Abdullah, a highly respected Miyana community elder, adjudicator and master-thief in the Little Rann of Kutch. This region is located along the Western coast of India, inundated by the sea during the four months of the monsoon, and a saline desert for the rest of the year. This historical pattern of inundation and recession structures the lives of fishworkers from the Muslim Miyana community who live by this ever-shifting coast. During the monsoon, Miyana fishworkers and their families live in temporary settlements for as long as the desert is inundated to harvest prawns, and then return to their villages once the monsoon ends. The Miyana prawn trade is highly monopolistic, and tightly controlled by a few middlemen from the community. This control is established through endemic household debt and bonded labor wherein fishworkers are forced to borrow heavily from these middlemen or ‘Seths’ during the off-season, on the condition that they relinquish their entire seasonal prawn produce to them. Based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork in five Miyana villages in the region, I unpack the various ways of narrating debt through stories of witnessing Abdullah’s murder. I argue that Miyana fishworkers narrate kinship ties to Abdullah, roles in his funeral rites, stories of communal grief and mourning, and tales about his generosity, skill, thievery and cunning, in order to articulate imaginaries of just and ethical debt, and theorize debt as simultaneously relations of patronage, and violent exploitation.

Bio: Sita Mamidipudi is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at UCLA with an interest in the relationship of labor with materiality and ecology of place. Her doctoral research project is based in the Little Rann of Kutch, an estuarine space on the Western coast of India where water and land, human and non-human actors, saltwater and freshwater, meet. Prior to her PhD journey at UCLA, she was an Assistant Professor at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Hyderabad and a Program Manager at ANANDI, Gujarat

KEYNOTE

‘The Yoga of Power: Yoga as Political Thought and Practice in India’, Dr. Sunila S. Kale & Dr. Christian Lee Novetzke, Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington

Yoga has an enormous range of meanings, though most often it names psychophysical practice and philosophy. In this talk, we argue for an expanded understanding that embraces yoga’s meaning as political thought and practice. The political idea of yoga names the tools of kings, poets, warriors, and revolutionaries. This idea of yoga encodes political stratagems for going into battle and for the demands of governance that follow victory. It suggests routes to sovereign self-rule when faced with implacable obstacles, and defines righteous action amidst the grime of politics and even war. Our talk provides an overview of the argument we make about yoga in a forthcoming book, The Yoga of Power, and then focuses on how these of ideas of yoga are expressed in the c. 3rd CE text, the Arthaśāstra, and in the early 20th c. context of Princely Aundh.

Bio:

Sunila S. Kale is a professor in the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her previous publications include Electrifying India (Stanford 2014) and Mapping Power (Oxford 2018) and numerous essays in the disciplines of political science, development studies, energy studies, and South Asia Studies.

Christian Lee Novetzke is a professor in the Jackson School of International Studies and the Comparative History of Ideas at the University of Washington, Seattle. His prior publications include Religion and Public Memory (Columbia 2008), Amar Akbar Anthony (Harvard 2016), The Quotidian Revolution (Columbia 2016), and many essays in the fields of religious studies, history, and South Asia Studies.

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Sponsor(s): Center for India and South Asia