Attend in person or via Zoom: https://myumi.ch/W6drV

This conference will bring together graduate students at the University of Michigan from all disciplines, featuring panelists discussing papers on the theme of “New Directions,” rethinking key ideas in scholarship pertaining to South Asia. In the last decade, South Asia has witnessed the contours of democracy change, the economic center of gravity shift eastwards, and an unprecedented influx of climate and political refugees. Reflecting on recent global events, how can we meaningfully situate South Asia in the world?

OPENING REMARKS (10:00 AM – 10:15 AM)

PANEL 1 (10:15 AM – 11:45 AM): Literary Critique in Context
Aditya Bhattacharya (doctoral student in Asian Languages and Cultures), Sarvadamana Bharata in the Mahābhārata and the Abhijñānaśākuntala: The Puru Prince in the Changing Politics of Legitimacy
Shreya Dutta (doctoral student in History), Navigating the Unfamiliar? Rethinking Babu Satires in Late Nineteenth-Century Bengal
Gurkirat Singh Sekhon (doctoral student in English and Women's and Gender Studies), Is the Post- in Postsecularism the Post- in Postcritique?

CATERED LUNCH (11:45 AM – 1:00 PM)

PANEL 2 (1:00 PM – 2:30 PM): Networks of Prints and Visual
Nathan Omprasadham (doctoral student in English Language and Literature), The Editor as Nexus: Sri Lankan Literary Networks and the Politics of Patronage in Post-war London
Srimati Ghosal (doctoral student in Comparative Literature), Magazine Manifestoes: The Formation of Third-world Literary Aesthetics through the Magazine Format
Arighna Gupta (Ph.D. candidate in History), Visualizing Rebels and Collectives in Early-colonial Company Paintings, 1780–1840

COFFEE BREAK 1 (2:30 PM –2:45 PM)

PANEL 3 (2:45 PM – 4:15 PM): Political and Legal Lives of South Asia
Avina Kohli (doctoral student in Asian Languages and Cultures), State Publicity and Pedagogy in Postcolonial India
Vishesh Chander Guru (doctoral student in Anthropology), Troubling Crime: Insanity, Law, and Reason in (Post)colonial India
Saifullah Nasar (Ph.D. candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology), title TBA

COFFEE BREAK 2 (4:15 PM – 4:30 PM)

KEYNOTE ADDRESS (4:30 PM – 6:00 PM): Documentation as Political Practice: From Contemporary Nostalgia for the Left to the New Evidentiary Politics in 1970s South India

Five decades ago, the Andhra Pradesh Radical Students Union launched the Go to Villages Campaign, in which groups of university students were sent to rural Dalit settlements, where they were tasked with documenting the conditions of life and labor. In that same decade, anthropologists and sociologists like Clifford Geertz and Joseph Gusfield fundamentally transformed the social sciences by newly centering attention to writing. This talk asks why Telugu South India similarly saw the emergence of new socio-political writing and documentation practices in the 1970s, highlighting four examples: the Jana Natya Mandali’s (People’s Theatre Troupe) new documentary song-story compositions; AP State Harijan Conference reports; documentation produced by the RSU’s “Go to Villages Campaign”; and the Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee’s introduction of regular “fact-finding missions.”

Lisa Mitchell is Professor of anthropology & history in the Department of South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Hailing the State: Indian Democracy between Elections (Duke University Press 2023; Permanent Black 2023) and Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India: The Making of a Mother Tongue (Indiana University Press 2009; Permanent Black 2010), which received the Edward Cameron Dimock Prize in the Indian Humanities. Her research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Wenner-Gren Foundation, Fulbright, European Research Council, American Institute for Indian Studies, and the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. In 2020 she was a recipient of the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching.

If there is anything we can do to make this event accessible to you, please contact us at tinagrif@umich.edu. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.