Modern South Asia Workshop Highlights Innovative Research by Junior Scholars

The Modern South Asia Workshop, sponsored annually by the South Asian Studies Council, brought together a group of outstanding junior scholars conducting research on topics of current and emerging interest in modern South Asia.  Emphasizing cross-disciplinary, inter-regional conversations, workshop participants hailed from diverse disciplinary backgrounds, including: History, Sociology, Political Science, Comparative Literature, English, and Religious Studies.

Now in its sixth year, the Modern South Asia Workshop is renowned for the intensive, interdisciplinary discussions of new research conducted by its participants.  The unique character of the workshop is facilitated by the innovative and rigorous selection process used to judge individual submissions.  This year, fifteen participants were selected from a pool of over 150 applications.  Selections were made through blind review, without knowledge of the affiliation, discipline, or name of the individual applicant.  The selection process therefore generated great diversity among participants, with some fifteen institutions within and outside the US represented.  Panel themes were identified based on broad clusters of interests emerging from the paper abstracts.  They included: “Politics of Visual Representation,” “Constructing the City-Space,” “Texts and Practices of Reading,” “State-Society Relations in Postcolonial Context,” and “Self and Religious Subjectivities.”

There was an interest across the papers in thinking through political, economic, social and cultural shifts – how do these shifts occur, why do they take specific forms, what are the consequences of such shifts for politics, for the space of the social and for social relations. Moreover, a number of the papers were specifically interested in the salience of cultural identities for political economy. There was also an interest in questions of agency and action within this broader discussion on political economy. A number of the papers were also interested in examining categories that name difference – tribal, national, regional, and transnational – as well as in the politics of difference. Finally, theoretical questions about state and politics figured centrally in the discuccions.

During the concluding discussion, panelists debated the future of South Asian Studies as a field, and explored the possibility of an emerging regional, theoretical paradigm. Drs. Asiya Alam, Rajashee Mazumder and Sadia Saeed, postdocs at the South Asian Studies Council, offered final reflections suggesting that the absence of a powerful single theoretical orientation was, perhaps, a good thing given the current state of the field.  Pointing to the great diversity of perspectives and interdisciplinary discussions that challenged workshop participants to think in new and different ways, and which generated unexpected, rich, conversations, they emphasized that all this was possible precisely because no single theoretical perspective or regional focus currently holds the field in its grip.  Such plurality, based on rigorous empirical research, is perhaps the distinctive contribution of the Modern South Asia Workshop in shaping the future of South Asian Studies.  The Call for Papers for the 2015 workshop will be issued in the late summer of 2014.