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Dust on the Throne by Douglas Ober

Tuesday, Nov 12| 12:15 PM – 1:30 PM ET | Zoom

Register to attend:  https://dartmouth.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_B4dheWVFQ9ypfqxUsZuZFQ

You are formally invited to a captivating Zoom book event featuring author Douglas Ober. In his new book, Dust on the Throne, Ober challenges the conventional narrative that Buddhism disappeared from India between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, only to be revived by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar in 1956. Instead, Ober uncovers the crucial yet overlooked role that Indians played in shaping modern global Buddhism long before Ambedkar’s conversion. Drawing on a wealth of archival and temple materials from across South Asia, Dust on the Throne explores Buddhist religious dynamics in the context of colonial expansion, intra-Asian connectivity, and the writings of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Indian thinkers. Ober’s work sheds light on Buddhism’s significant socio-political influence and intellectual legacy in modern Indian history, reframing the place of Buddhism in the subcontinent.

🎙️ Event Details:
📆 Date: November 12th, 2024
⏰ Time: 12:15 PM-1:30 PM
📍 Virtual Webinar
💻 Register Here: https://dartmouth.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_B4dheWVFQ9ypfqxUsZuZFQ

🎙️Speaker

Douglas Ober, Lecturer in History, Fort Lewis College and Honorary Research Associate in the Centre for India and South Asia Research at the University of British Columbia

🎙️Commentators

V. Geetha, Editorial Director, Tara Books

Christopher Queen, Lecturer on the Study of Religion and Dean of Students for Continuing Education (retired), Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University

🎙️Moderator

Reiko Ohnuma, Robert 1932 and Barbara Black Professor of Religion, Dartmouth College

Don’t miss this unique opportunity to register today and join us for a captivating discussion with Douglas Ober. 🌐📖🔍

QR code (leads to registration form) on the poster.  

Watch the zoom webinar recording here (will be updated with the link after the event)

Sponsored by the Department of Asian Societies, Cultures and Languages (ASCL) and the Bodas Family Endowment for South Asian Studies at Dartmouth College. 

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Pious Labour by Amanda Lanzillo

Tuesday, Oct 15| 12:15 PM – 1:30 PM ET | Zoom

Register to attend:  https://dartmouth.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_wHyRtpUmRRCRbbr3BvcW-w

You are formally invited to an illuminating Zoom book event featuring author Amanda Lanzillo. In her new book, Pious Labor, Lanzillo explores how, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, laborers across northern India found themselves negotiating rapid industrial change, emerging technologies, and class hierarchies. In response to these changes, Indian Muslim artisans asserted the connection between their religion and labor, using the popular press to redefine Islamic traditions. Focusing on metalsmiths, stonemasons, tailors, press workers, and carpenters, Pious Labor explores colonial-era social and technological changes from the workers’ perspectives. Amanda Lanzillo reveals how the colonial marginalization of these artisans shapes the ongoing exclusion of laboring voices. Using Urdu technical manuals and community histories, she highlights the materiality and cultural agency of artisans, addressing a significant gap in South Asian history.

🎙️ Event Details:
📆 Date: October 15th, 2024
⏰ Time: 12:15 PM-1:30 PM
📍 Virtual Webinar
💻 Register Here: https://dartmouth.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_wHyRtpUmRRCRbbr3BvcW-w

🎙️Speaker

Amanda Lanzillo, Assistant Professor, Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago

🎙️Commentators

Douglas Haynes, Professor Emeritus, Department of History, Dartmouth College

Razak Khan, Research Fellow in Global History, Department of History, Free University Berlin

🎙️Moderator

Curt Gambetta, Postdoctoral Fellow, Society of Fellows, and Lecturer, Department of Art History

Don’t miss this unique opportunity to register today and join us for a captivating discussion with Amanda Lanzillo. 🌐📖🔍

QR code (leads to registration form) on the poster.  

Watch the zoom webinar recording here (will be updated with the link after the event)

Sponsored by the Department of Asian Societies, Cultures and Languages (ASCL) and the Bodas Family Endowment for South Asian Studies at Dartmouth College. 

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The Promise of Piety By Arsalan Khan

Tuesday, Oct 1| 12:45 PM – 2:00 PM ET | Zoom

Register to attend: https://dartmouth.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_kB4-x-G9TJiaK8yPOhpQ4A

You are formally invited to an insightful Zoom book event featuring author Arsalan Khan. In his new book, The Promise of Piety, Khan explores the fervent dedication to face-to-face preaching (dawat) among Pakistani Tablighis, practitioners of the transnational Islamic piety movement, the Tablighi Jamaat. This movement argues that Muslims have forsaken their religious obligations for worldly distractions, leading to a moral crisis manifesting in fractured familial, national, and global Islamic relationships. The Tablighis assert that dawat is the sacred means to restore Islamic virtue and bring Muslims back to their faith. Khan delves into how this form of pious relationality, embedded in both ritual and everyday practice, aims to transform private and public life, while also examining the potential and limits of creating an Islamic moral order in the face of political fragmentation and violence in postcolonial Pakistan.

🎙️ Event Details:
📆 Date: October 1st, 2024
⏰ Time: 12:45 PM-2:00 PM
📍 Virtual Webinar
💻 Register Here: https://dartmouth.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_kB4-x-G9TJiaK8yPOhpQ4A

🎙️Speaker

Arsalan Khan, Associate Professor, Anthropology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

🎙️Commentators

Shenila Khoja-Moolji, Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani Chair of Muslim Societies and Associate Professor, Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University

Attiya Ahmad, Associate Professor, Anthropology and International Affairs, George Washington University

🎙️Moderator

Faiza Rahman, Postdoctoral Fellow, Society of Fellows, and Lecturer, Department of Religion

Don’t miss this unique opportunity to register today and join us for a captivating discussion with Arsalan Khan. 🌐📖🔍

QR code (leads to registration form) on the poster.  

Watch the zoom webinar recording here

Sponsored by the Department of Asian Societies, Cultures and Languages (ASCL) and the Bodas Family Endowment for South Asian Studies at Dartmouth College. 

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CFP: Dartmouth Summer History Institute: Illness in Asia: A Comparative History

We invite applications for participation in the third Dartmouth Summer History Institute (Thursday, June 2–Saturday, June 4). The theme for 2022 is Illnesses in Asia: A Comparative History.

The History Institute aims to bring together the most promising young scholars working on the history of Asian medicine and to read workshop pieces of their historical writing as they embark on the transition from dissertation to book. Five to seven senior historians of Asian medicine will join the workshop as mentors and discussants. We are interested in all aspects of illnesses and healing, including their links to political, social, economic, cultural, and intellectual developments. We welcome scholars researching East Asia, Northeast Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. Applicants should be in the process of completing their Ph.D. dissertations or in the early stages of revising their Ph.D.s as book manuscripts. (Students expecting to complete their Ph.D.s in Spring or Summer of 2022 are encouraged to apply.)

Accepted participants will furnish drafts of their work, including an introduction to their monograph project and a working dissertation/book chapter central to or representative of the larger historical intervention to be workshopped. The draft should not exceed 50 pages and must be submitted by April 1, 2022. In addition to workshopping individual pieces of writing, the Institute will include a variety of fora (receptions, dinners, and lectures) to discuss theoretical and methodological issues in the company of invited senior scholars. For information about History Institute workshops held in the past, please visit http://sites.dartmouth.edu/historyinstitute2017/

Participation in the Institute includes travel, board, and lodging. The workshop will be held in person, but the current pandemic will be carefully monitored; adaptation will be made if necessary. To apply, send a CV and two-page abstract describing the project by February 15, 2022, to History.Institute [at] dartmouth.edu. Please contact Professor Soyoung Suh (soyoung.suh [at] dartmouth.edu) with any inquiries.

Organizers

  • Soyoung Suh |Associate Professor of History | Korea Foundation Professor | Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages Program
  • Douglas Haynes | Professor of History
  • Erqi Cheng | Lecturer of History
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Announcement: Welcome our Bodas Family Academic Programming Fund South Asian Studies Fellows

The South Asian Studies Collective is excited to welcome Bryanna Entwistle and Sri Sathvik Rayala as Bodas Family Academic Programming Fund South Asian Studies Fellows for the 2021–22 academic year! Their biographies are below:

Bryanna Entwistle

My name is Bryanna Entwistle, and I am currently a third-year student at Dartmouth College. I’m double majoring in Government and History while minoring in Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages. I was born in Hong Kong and raised in both Mumbai and Singapore, so the region is close to my heart! On-campus, I’m involved in the Sugarplum Dance Troupe, do research on the Vietnam War with the Dartmouth Digital History Initiative, and have engaged deeply with the Center for Social Impact. I’m looking forward to serving as one of the Bodas Family Academic Programming Fund South Asian Studies Fellows for the upcoming school year!

Sri Sathvik Rayala

Greetings! My name is Sri Sathvik Rayala, and I am currently a second-year student at Dartmouth College with a multi-disciplinary interest (politics, international affairs, economics, history, philosophy, and religion) in South Asian Studies. I am presently intending to double-major in “Government Modified with Economics and Philosophy” and “Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages” with a focus on South and Southeast Asia. On-campus, I’m involved with the World Outlook, the Dartmouth Undergraduate Law Journal, and the Dartmouth Political Times, and I’m also part of two off-campus academic reading groups concerned with the study of Vaishnava traditions and Manipravalam texts of South Asia. I’m eagerly looking forward to serving as one of the Bodas Family Academic Programming Fund South Asian Studies Fellows with the South Asian Studies Collective for the 2021–22 academic year.

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Announcement: Publications by our members (Summer 2021)

The South Asian Studies Collective at Dartmouth has the following publications and announcements to share.

Anthropology Professor Sienna Craig and collaborators published the preliminary results of their SSRC-funded research into the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on members of New York City’s Himalayan communities in the following essays:

MALS program graduate, Aneeq Ejaz, published a review, titled “How we reached here,” discussing SherAli Tareen’s book, Defending Muḥammad in Modernity in Pakistan’s The News on Sunday (August 8, 2021).

During the past year, History Professor Douglas Haynes has continued to work on the history of advertisement and consumption. His new publications in this area include an essay on “Vernacular Capitalism, Advertising and the Bazaar in Early Twentieth-century Western India,” in the volume he coedited with Ajay Gandhi, Barbara Harriss-White, and Sebastian Schwecke (read the announcement about that volume here), along with contributions to two other volumes:

He also published an article on how Gandhi formulated his concept of celibacy in interaction with the emerging field of sexual science and the birth control movement: “Gandhi, Brahmacharya and Sexual Science, 1919–38,” South Asia: A Journal of South Asian Studies, 43 (2) (2020): 1163–78. https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2020.1826644. He is currently finishing a book on professional advertising in the interwar period.

To support a new project on the formation of the Indian Institutes of Management in Ahmedabad and Calcutta in the 1960s—and their impact on the character of managerial capitalism in India—Professor Haynes was also awarded a four-month grant from the American Institute of Indian Studies.

Postdoctoral Fellow Elizabeth Lhost published an essay, “Of Horizontal Exchanges and Inter-Islamic Inquiries,” as part of a recent Kitabkhana forum on Faiz Ahmed’s Afghanistan Rising. The piece provides a methodological reflection on Ahmed’s book by analyzing Indian Mufti Kifayatullah’s 1924 fatwa on the question of women’s education in Afghanistan. The essay is available in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 41(2) (2021): 257–61. https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-9127180.

Dr. Lhost also continues to work on a digital database project tied to the legal history of the Indian Princely States, which received a grant from the American Institute of Indian Studies Digital India Learning Initiative. This database, known as IP-SO-LHA (Indian Princely States Online Legal History Archive), is planning to launch the results of its first phase of work in Fall 2021. Dartmouth History students Matthew Krivan and Womsikuk James have been key contributors to project.

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April 13: Lecture by Suraj Yengde

“Caste as Race, Race as Caste: The Value of Thinking Across Cultures in Combating Racial Injustice”

A Lecture by Dr. Suraj Yengde , Senior Fellow, Harvard Kennedy School

Tuesday, April 13, 2021 | 4:00 PM (EDT)  |  Zoom

Event Description:

Can race and caste be juxtaposed? Can they be replaced? What is the future of oppressed groups in light of anti-caste and anti-racism struggles? Is there a new idiom that could connect disparate groups oppressed by their color, class, and caste?   This lecture will discuss these issues as it discusses the contemporaneity of the 21st century. It will explicitly address Isabel Wilkerson’s intervention in a much longer intellectual history of connecting caste and race in both the United States and South Asia.

About the Speaker:

Dr. Suraj Yengde is currently a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. He holds a research associate position with the department of African and African American Studies, a non-resident fellow position at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, and is part of the founding team of Initiative for Institutional Anti-Racism and Accountability (IARA) at Harvard University. He has studied on four continents (Asia, Africa, Europe, North America), and is India’s first Dalit Ph.D. holder from an African university (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg). Suraj is the author of the bestseller Caste Matters and co-editor of award winning anthology The Radical in Ambedkar. He has published in multiple languages in the field of caste, race, ethnicity studies, and inter-regional labor migration in the global south. Currently, he is involved in developing a critical theory of Dalit and Black Studies.   He has been named as the “Most influential Young Dalit” by Zee and has received many other awards and honors.

This event is hosted by Professor Douglas E. Haynes.

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Announcement: Professor Sienna Craig publishes new book

Anthropology professor Sienna Craig has published The Ends of Kinship: Connecting Himalayan Lives between Nepal and New York with the University of Washington Press Global South Asia series.

The description reads:

Ends of Kinship book cover. River bank scene with woman wading in the water. “For centuries, people from Mustang, Nepal, have relied on agriculture, pastoralism, and trade as a way of life. Seasonal migrations to South Asian cities for trade as well as temporary wage labor abroad have shaped their experiences for decades. Yet, more recently, permanent migrations to New York City, where many have settled, are reshaping lives and social worlds. Mustang has experienced one of the highest rates of depopulation in contemporary Nepal—a profoundly visible depopulation that contrasts with the relative invisibility of Himalayan migrants in New York.

“Drawing on more than two decades of fieldwork with people in and from Mustang, this book combines narrative ethnography and short fiction to engage with foundational questions in cultural anthropology: How do different generations abide with and understand each other? How are traditions defended and transformed in the context of new mobilities? Anthropologist Sienna Craig draws on khora, the Tibetan Buddhist notion of cyclic existence as well as the daily act of circumambulating the sacred, to think about cycles of movement and patterns of world-making, shedding light on how kinship remains both firm and flexible in the face of migration. From a high Himalayan kingdom to the streets of Brooklyn and Queens, The Ends of Kinship explores dynamics of migration and social change, asking how individuals, families, and communities care for each other and carve out spaces of belonging. It also speaks broadly to issues of immigration and diaspora; belonging and identity; and the nexus of environmental, economic, and cultural transformation.”

The New Books Network calls the book

[A] beautifully rendered account of a community in flux, caught in the interstices between the remote, high-altitude landscapes of windswept Mustang and the bustling, multi-cultural cityscapes of New York City.

– New Books Network (NBN)

Listen to the complete New Books Network podcast interview here.

Professor Craig has also created a companion website with teaching resources and other materials related to the book.

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Announcement: Professor Douglas Haynes publishes new edited volume

History professor Douglas Haynes, along with co-editors Ajay Gandhi, Barbara Harriss-White, and Sabastian Schwecke have published a new edited volume called Rethinking Markets in Modern India: Embedded Exchange and Contested Jurisdiction with Cambridge University Press.

With contributions from David Rudner, Nikhil Rao, Projit Bihari Mukharji, Douglas E. Haynes, Sebastian Schwecke, Mekhala Krishnamurthy, Aditi Saraf, Andy Rotman, Ajay Gandhi, Matthew S. Hull, Roger Begrich, Barbara Harriss-White, and J. Jeyarangan the book is a rich addition to the literature on markets, capitalism, and exchange in South Asia.

The book description reads:

Book cover image. Market scene with sun in background. Cover at top. Peach colored.“To people operating in India’s economy, actually existing markets are remarkably different from how planners and academics conceive them. From the outside, they appear as demarcated arenas of exchange bound by state-imposed rules. As historical and social realities, however, markets are dynamic, adaptative, and ambiguous spaces. This book delves into this intricate context, exploring Indian markets through the competition and collaboration of those who frame and participate in markets. Anchored in vivid case studies – from colonial property and advertising milieus to today’s bazaar and criminal economies – this volume underlines the friction and interdependence between commerce, society, and state. Contributors from history, anthropology, political economy, and development studies synthesize existing scholarly approaches, add new perspectives on Indian capitalism’s evolution, and reveal the transactional specificities that underlie the real-world functioning of markets.”

Ritu Birla praises the book as follows:

Working across South Asian history and ethnography, this volume builds creatively on the existing literature on vernacular capitalism and market governance with rich data and diverse approaches to customary and underground transactions. Exploring finance, small-scale industry and agricultural commodities, as well as advertising, risk and trust, the essays delve deeply into the local contexts of market practice in India, productively reactivating debates on the temporalities, performatives and regulation of ‘the bazaar.’

— Ritu Birla, University of Toronto

and Thomas Blom Hansen writes:

India’s rise as an ‘emergent market’ in the global economy has prompted much hype around a ’new’ India. In this volume, anthropologists and historians of India demonstrate with great authority and insight that markets in India are old and deeply entrenched in complex social and cultural institutions. Anyone who wishes to understand the dynamism of contemporary Indian capitalism must understand such institutions and exchange relations and this volume will be a rich resource in this quest for scholars in many fields.

— Thomas Blom Hansen, Stanford University

Check out the publisher’s website to see the full table of contents and to read more advance praise for the volume.