Seminars

Please join the Columbia University Seminar on South Asia as it hosts a conversation on the politically and morally fraught task of writing single-volume histories of India for non-specialist audiences. Professor Davis will speak about his new book Religions of Early India: A Cultural History (2024, Princeton University Press); Professor Truschke will discuss her forthcoming book India: 5,000 Years of History on the Subcontinent (June 2025, Princeton University Press). The conversation between Dr. Davis and Dr. Truschke will be mediated by seminar chair Carla Bellamy and will include time for questions and comments from seminar attendees.

What does the horizon of decolonizing and debrahmanizing caste (and race) from the global South feel like? How might the politics of viscerality (feeling) and sensoriality (sensing) open up new ways for analyzing caste inequities as multisensory events that defy epistemic foreclosure and augment the embodied possibilities of critique and repair? Based on longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork in northern India’s formal and informal opioid addiction and pain management spaces with Dalit substance-users, and adjacent insights from ethnographically insurgent Hindi Dalit literary archives, this talk critically analyses the authenticating powers of the senses in materializing and catalyzing radical political subjectivity around quotidian landscapes of racialized caste pain (dard) in contemporary India. It further asks, how do Dalit/Bahujan bodies become implicated in the production and regulation of racializing regimes by biomedicine? How does the Dalit moral imagination of anti-casteness transform pain into a praxis of knowing/feeling/being otherwise? And, how might these embodied epistemologies importantly contribute to an understanding of casteism as a vital public health issue?.

This paper argues for factoring in the environmental phenomenon of the nearly predictable alterations of the monsoons for sailing, navigation and commercial, cultural and political interactions in the Indian Ocean worlds during the pre-modern times (up to c 1400 CE) and also during the initial phase of the early modern (1500-1650 CE) by interrogating a variety of primary sources, including Indic inscriptions, the Cairo Geniza documents and the 15 th century navigational manual by Ahmad ibn Majid. The monsoon (derived from Arabic mausam/mawsim) shaped and guided the crossings in the northern Indian Ocean, the third largest ocean of the earth, over millennia till the advent of thesteam navigation. The pre-modern times did not experience a maritime empire in the Indian Ocean arena; the occasional violence at sea, by piracy and/or political aspirations of primarily continental powers, had to conform to the alterations of the monsoon winds. Even the North Atlantic state powers and/or joint stock companies, intent upon unleashing armed trade, had to adhere to the overwhelming ‘monsoon’s empire’, an environmental phenomenon unknown to the North Atlantic elements that had to encounter the Little Ice Age during their imperial ventures.

In the middle of the thirteenth century, the western Deccan witnessed a sudden sea-change in values, with profound and lasting repercussions for South Asia's political, religious, and juridical imaginaries. Abrogating long-standing precedents affirmed by his own father, Kandharāya, the King at Devgiri, abruptly ceased to recognize the legitimacy and autonomy of the vast, wealthy, and powerful independent monastic estates of the Deccan. For five hundred years, regardless of personal or theological commitments, secular power had entered such spaces as a guest, whether seeking the favor of their religious authorities, employing their skilled artisan labor forces, or publicly reaffirming the sovereign rights of these so-called undying land grants. Kandharāya instead sent in his soldiers and armies of bureaucrats. His forces seized monastic wealth and annulled local institutional norms, redefining lands and resources as subject to direct taxation and state oversight. Liquidating local and often subaltern governing bodies, he substituted in their place brāhmaṇa jurists, to manage the premises according to a singular state-sanctioned set of standards and values. In śāstra and in stone, Kandharāya and his successors proclaimed the coming of a new kind of political order and a new vision of disciplinary power. Combining micro-historical accounts of the monastic estates the Seuṇa Yādava sea-change obliterated with an examination of the juridico-religious frameworks that had formed their conditions of possibility, this presentation offers a fresh encounter with the often surprising life-worlds of the early medieval Deccan. I argue that the pluralized religious institutional cultures of the early medieval world, in which a range of non-brāhmaṇa—even Dalit—agents acted as juridical and religious authorities, were disrupted by the Seuṇa Yādava state in the service of inculcating a radically new singular vision of universal, brāhmaṇical dharma. This undiscovered moment of rupture bears significant implications for longue durée histories of political sovereignty, community rights, and caste in South Asia.

In one of the first articles I ever published (“Krishna’s Cosmic Victories,” 1979) I proclaimed, on the basis of an ever so unsystematic survey of visual representations of stories of Krishna’s early life, that the episode most frequently and sometimes most boldly depicted was the one in which Krishna lifts Mt. Govardhan. We can amplify the record with examples from Southeast Asia. Why this prominence—and how? I will ask this question from a particular vantage point: Udaipur, 1680-1730. There we witness an unparalleled effort, for its time, to give visual representation to poems bearing the signature of Surdas. Several questions emerge: (1) Is there a special connection to the emotions? (2) What happens when a poem becomes a painting? (3) Is the Vallabha Sampraday involved, with its famous worship of Shri Nathji only 25 miles away? (4) Does the environment matter—the seasonal monsoon and the physicality of the Aravalli range? (5) Or are we meeting something eternal and essentially unchanging instead: an archetype?

Nineteenth-century album paintings from southern India depict both the encounter between Yama and Shiva and give the meeting pride of place, staging it in vivid color and energetic action. The episode, considered one of Shiva’s eight heroic deeds, was popularized by the Shaiva poet-saints in the first millennium and is widely represented in medieval temple sculpture of the Deccan and Tamil regions. In the myth, the death god Yama ensnares 16-year-old Markandeya when his time on earth is up, but Shiva materializes at the eleventh hour to save his devotee, killing Yama in the process. Made in southern India in the wake of the Anglo-Carnatic and Anglo-Mysore wars of 1767-1799, the albums featuring Hindu gods and major regional temples were crafted by Indian artists for European consumption. This talk, drawn from the book project Seeing Ghosts: The Arts of Death in South Asia, examines four Yama album paintings and shows that colonial-period artists revived older traditions to enliven their subject matter. While European enthusiasms may have directed the selection of themes, painters drew on the color and iconographic protocols of Tanjavur painting, Nayaka era murals, and other precolonial painting traditions, including the political symbolism of the erstwhile Vijayanagara empire. The orchestration of the Yama-Shiva encounter in the albums’ organizational schemes and the related inscriptions also reveal a bhakti orientation.

After the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1834, South Asians were shipped to sugar plantations across the Caribbean as indentured workers. Indentured servitude produced the Indo-Caribbean diaspora, and a new kind of colonial subject—the coolie or migrant worker. The oceans that witnessed these voyages came to be known as kala pani or dark waters. The Madrasis (named after their port of departure, Madras, i.e., Chennai, but hailing from different parts of southern India) are a religious minority within the Indo-Caribbean diaspora. They cohere around the goddess Mariamman, practicing spirit possession, drumming, and healing rituals associated with her. Displaced by indentured servitude, persecuted by the colonial state for their religious practices, and ostracized by Indo-Caribbean and South Asian American Hindu majorities, Madrasis bear the burden of an exceptionally difficult transcontinental history. Since the 1980s, they have been moving to the United States as migrant workers. In this talk, I draw on ethnographic and archival research in North America, the Caribbean, and South Asia to examine how religion, race, and caste shape the transcontinental history of the Madrasi diaspora. I approach the historical intersections of religion, race, and caste from three sites—the dark waters that stretch from the shores of South Asia to the coasts of the Caribbean, sugar plantations on the west bank of the Berbice river in Guyana, and the streets and garages of East NY, Brooklyn.

Our selves are formed in the mirrors of the social world and through empathic bonds of acceptance and warmth with the people who share our everyday lives. We consider the struggles of two people who have undergone sex realignment surgery to become middle-class women yet have maintained public identities as transgendered in order to serve as moral exemplars for this stigmatized minority in Kolkata, India. Manabi Bandyopadhyay serves as Vice Chair-Person of the West Bengal Trangender Persons Development Board, offers many newspaper and TV interviews in which she narrates aspects of her life story, and even braved the stresses of an all-too-brief stint on the reality TV show Bigg Boss Bangla to increase public acceptance of people who transition. Ranjita Sinha is an active advocate for third gender rights who in 1996 began a community-based organization (CBO) for transgender people; campaigns for equal access to health, jobs and education; and in 2023 was included in a Templeton Foundation-funded study of 100 moral exemplars across the world sponsored by California State University. These two have publicly transitioned from man to woman during a time of dramatic social, legal, and political changes in the political and legal situation of transgendered persons in India, and they actively seek to change the social mirrors in which they are reflected. At the same time, they navigate tensions between their publicly presented life stories and often difficult interpersonal relationships that show persistent evidence of a profound but historically contingent gap produced by the ways that they unsettle sexual difference and disrupt social mirrors of the self.