Yale Hosts First Modern South Asia Workshop

On the weekend of April 10 and 11, the South Asian Studies Council at Yale will be hosting the first Modern South Asia Workshop. The workshop will examine the unpublished work of junior scholars who attempt to challenge theoretical or methodological conventions about South Asia from the fields of music, political science, history, sociology, and anthropology.

The workshop will open Saturday morning with a panel on gender, chaired by Neloufer de Mel, Visiting Scholar in the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Department at Yale. The gender panelists are Basuli Deb, Assistant Professor of English at Quinnipiac University, Svati Shah, postdoctoral fellow in the Program in the Study of Sexualities in the Department of Women’s Studies at Duke, and Nandini Deo, Associate Professor at Lehigh University. Deb will present “Cast(e)ing the Literature of Criminality: A Gendered Reading of the Genealogy of Legal Violence.” Shah, who will be joining the faculty of the Department of Women’s Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in the fall, is presenting a paper on sex work, migration, and labor in Mumbai. Deo, presenting “Transnational Networks and the Mobilization of Religion and Gender in India,” received her PhD from Yale. Her dissertation was on organizational politics of religious nationalist and feminist NGOs and her current research focuses on the ways in which religious and gendered identities are politicized within contemporary India.

The second panel on Saturday will examine the issue of music in South Asia, featuring Aditi Deo, Matt Rahaim, and Justin Scarimbolo. Deo, from Indiana University, will present on the Shraddha in North Indian classical music epistemology. Rahaim will become Visiting Assistant Professor of Music and Asian Studies at St. Olaf College in the fall and has studied Hindustani vocal music under the guru Vikas Kashalkar of Pune, India. His presentation will examine the role of the harmonium in Indian classical music. Scarimbolo, a PhD candidate in Ethnomusicology at UC Santa Barbara, has studied and played Hindustani classical music on sitar for over a decade. Scarimbolo will discuss the shift from Hindu to Muslim dominance in Indian classical music.

Saturday’s discussion will conclude with a panel on South Asian cinema. The panelists, Aparna John, currently pursuing an PhD in Cinema Studies at New York University, and Soumitree Gupta, a PhD candidate in English at Syracuse University, will be presenting respectively on Indian avant-garde cinema and the motif of ‘return’ in women-centric partition cinema.

The workshop on Sunday will feature two panels, with the first being the topic of marginalized subjectivities with panelists Vasudha Bharadwaj from the University of Rochester, Antara Datta of Harvard, and Shankar Ramaswami from the University of Chicago. Bharadwaj’s research interests include postcolonial theory, the politics of language, and theories of nationalism, multiculturalism, and secularism, will be presenting a paper on Ambedkar and the Schizophrenic Nature of English in Modern India. Datta’s presentation subject is the subcontinental repatriation of 1973-1974. Ramaswami will discuss factory work in contemporary Delhi.

The subject of the afternoon panel is landscapes. Llerena Searle, a PhD candidate in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, researches the construction of global landscapes in Indian cities and the creation of an international market for Indian real estate. Her paper is titled “Conflict and Commensuration: Quality Construction and the Internationalization of Indian Real Estate.” Diya Mehra, a PhD candidate in Anthropology at the University of Texas, will present “Reconfiguring the World Class City: The Middle Class, Kristeva and Abjection.”

The workshop will conclude with a discussion led by Professor Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan, Chair of South Asia Studies at Yale, and Professor Anand Yang, Director of the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. The discussants and chairs for the panels are drawn from Yale faculty and visiting scholars and include Ashish Chadha, Amita Baviskar, Nandini Sundar, and Shreeyash Palshikar.

At the invitation Professor Sivaramakrishnan, the workshop has been planned by several South Asian Studies faculty led by Charu Gupta, Visiting Associate Professor in South Asian Studies and History, who hopes that the workshop will become an annual event. Professor Gupta would like the workshop to become an attractive forum for up and coming scholars of modern South Asia to discuss and frame questions about the study of the region in new ways across many disciplines. Charu Gupta will be the discussant for the panel on gender.

The workshop is free and open to the public and has been funded by support from the Council of South Asia Studies and the Betty and Whitney MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies.