Seminars

As a child, I often accompanied my mother for all the rituals and other obligatory duties she performed as a Jogini. People called my mother Devudu Chinnakka, i.e., Goddess Chinnakka. As a child, it didn’t take long for me to realize that the sacred ascription to her name was a burden of being a Jogini. In the villages of Telangana, women dedicated to local goddesses were known as Joginis, married to the goddess and remaining unwed. The village had a saying: "Jogu daniki Urantha Mogalle" (Every man in the village is a husband to a Jogini). After she came of age, as the night descended, the vulturous men preyed on her vulnerability. In the name of tradition, she was stripped of any right to protect her modesty, and her untouchable caste status silenced her voice. Strangled by tradition and suffocated by caste and patriarchy, she used silence as a weapon to survive and assert her dignity. By using autoethnography as a method, I present the story of my mother’s life as a Jogini and her lifelong struggle to protect herself and the paths she wove for us to escape the village's quagmire. Intertwined with my mother’s suffering was the experience of my family’s ostracization and the endurance of physical and financial punishments for trespassing caste boundaries. This is a story of family matriarchs who fought the powerful men in the caste and the village and survived, refused to give in, and asserted their lives and dignity.

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.

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.

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.