Seminars
South Asia
Year Founded 1964
Seminar # 477
StatusActive
The University Seminar on South Asia seeks to broaden and deepen understanding about the region of South Asia by providing a forum to discuss ongoing research as well as special topics related to the complex and multiple societies of South Asia both past and present. Drawing together scholars from many different disciplines, the seminar fosters cross-disciplinary discussion and perspectives on a broad range of questions and concerns. In recent years, the seminar has deliberated on such issues as: religion and politics, the political function of violence in South Asia, national integration, language and community, South Asian identities in pre-colonial times, religious iconography, and many other topics. The University Seminar on South Asia is a merger of the University Seminar on Tradition and Change in South and Southeast Asia (founded in 1964) and the University Seminar on Indology (founded in 1993).
Chair/s
Carla Bellamy
Rapporteur/s
Ankush Bhuyan
External Website
Conference Registration
Meeting Schedule
Scheduled
Faculty House
Abstract
In 1993 Uma Chakravarti published the seminal article “Conceptualising Brahminical Patriarchy in Early India: Gender, Caste, Class, and State,” examining how sexual control over women was integrally linked to caste hierarchy and the maintenance of “high”-caste standing. A key source for Chakravarti was Tryambaka’s legalistic digest Guide on Women’s Dharma (Strīdharmapaddhati). This digest was written by the minister Tryambaka (1665-1750 CE), who was employed at the Maratha Court of Tanjavur—one of the few remaining centers of Sanskrit literary activity in the eighteenth century. In this talk, I disambiguate conceptions of “brahminical patriarchy” as eternal and consistent since the time of Manu (100-200 CE). I revisit Tryambaka’s unusual early modern text, investigating what it means for Tryambaka to address “women” as a collective social group and participate in creating a new genre of legalistic literature in Sanskrit. Tryambaka’s Guide on Women’s Dharma (Strīdharmapaddhati) displaces the traditional focus of Sanskrit legalistic literature on the social and ritual obligations of elite, dominant caste men. Attending to Tryambaka’s notions of the “essential nature” (svabhāva) of women, their capacity for listening (śravaṇa), and the contours of appropriate and inappropriate intimacies (sparśa), I show how Tryambaka’s practices of reading and citation construct a new conception of the social responsibility and coherent identity of women as a social group.
Scheduled
Abstract
Showing all 2 results
Past Meetings
Scheduled
Zoom
Papers in Honor of Professor Frances W. Pritchett
Speaker/s
Pasha Khan, McGill University
Amy Bard, Independent Scholar
Owen Cornwall, UC Berkeley
Abstract
Scheduled
Faculty House
The Work of Religion: Violence, Trauma and Refusal in the Lives of Muslims in Hindu India
Speaker/s
Zehra Shama Mehdi, Columbia University
Abstract
Between the banality of state violence that deems Muslim lives progressively less human and the secular emphasis on patriotism to redeem their contested humanity lie the lived realities of Muslim experience in contemporary India. Unattended if not denied. Neglected if not ignored. This talk speaks to some of these violent realities as it formulates the first ethnography of Muslim persecution and attempts to delineate the psychological imprints of Hindu nationalism on Muslims. Drawing on two years (2019-2021) of ethnographic interviews and participant observation with Muslims in Old Lucknow (North India, Uttar Pradesh), the talk explains ways in which religion becomes a psychological repository through which state persecution is articulated, worked through, and psychically refused. Extending the psychoanalytic definition of ‘work’ as a psychological process of meaning making, I submit that the ‘work of religion’ is the psycho-political process by which Muslims meaningfully use religion to make sense of their victimization and transform their personal suffering into acts of assertion. For Muslims under an oppressive regime that pervasively dehumanizes them as enemies of the nation, the ‘work of religion’ emerges as the means through which they stay psychologically alive and politically active. Focusing on experiences, narrative and stories of anti-Muslim state violence, the talk redirects the anthropological emphasis from political actors of Hindu nationalism to its permanent adversaries, tracing a subaltern narrative of Muslim survival.
Scheduled
Faculty House
Islam Comes Alive After Every Karbala – Shifts in the Nature of Muslim Authority in Hindu Nationalist Times
Speaker/s
Anand Taneja, Vanderbilt University
Abstract
One of the consequences of the obsession of the Hindu right-wing with Islam and Muslims has been the unprecedented presence of Islam, even if negatively, in common public discourse in India. The debate about what Islam is, and what role it has to play in Indian, and Muslim life, has consequently become more vital and plural. In this talk I will look at how this unprecedented public presence of Islam has brought about shifts in the nature of religious authority in India. Looking at the work that went into making possible the hitherto unprecedented practice of Shia and Sunni Muslims praying together, this paper discusses how shifts in religious life are brought about by two modes of religious authority working in tandem: the strategic silence of the traditional ‘ulema, and the networked hyper-visibility of young Muslim activists.
Showing all 3 results
