Seminars

  • Founded
    1964
  • Seminar Number
    477

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
Carla Bellamy
carla.bellamy@baruch.cuny.edu

Rapporteur
Kamini Masood
km3599@columbia.edu

Meeting Schedule

10/23/2023 Faculty House, Columbia University
6:00 PM
From Man to Woman: The Trans Self as Moral Exemplar in Bengali Public Life
Katherine Pratt Ewing, Columbia University
Abstract

Abstract

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.


Baishakhi Taylor, Columbia University



01/22/2024 Faculty House, Columbia University / Zoom
6:00 PM
Bearing the Burden of History: Religion, Race, and Caste in the Indo-Caribbean Disapora
Gaurika Mehta, Columbia University
Abstract

Abstract

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.





02/12/2024 Faculty House, Columbia University
6:00 PM

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03/04/2024 Faculty House, Columbia University
6:00 PM
The God of Death: Yama in Company Paintings from Southern India
Subhashini Kaligotla, Columbia University
Abstract

Abstract

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.





04/01/2024 Faculty House, Columbia University
6:00 PM
Eternally Lifting Mount Govardhan
Jack Hawley, Columbia University
Abstract

Abstract

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?