How do politics and emotion intersect? How might our understandings of sovereignty change if we account for feelings and emotions? How is gender mobilized in assertions of sovereignty?
Making the Pakistani state and Pakistan-based Taliban her objects of study, Shenila Khoja-Moolji (Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, Bowdoin College) contemplates these questions in her award-winning book, Sovereign Attachments: Masculinity, Muslimness, and Affective Politics in Pakistan (University of California Press, 2021), by paying particular attention to state and non-state cultural productions that shape national publics.
Join us to hear more!
Zahra Ayubi (Religion, Dartmouth College), Marya Hannun (Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University) will be joining the author for this conversation.
This event is sponsored by the Bodas Family Academic Programming Fund | the Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages Program | and the Department of History at Dartmouth College.
With all of the attention given to Britain’s interventions in India, France’s colonial projects in South Asia are often ignored and overlooked.
In Unsettling Utopia: The Making and Unmaking of French India (Columbia University Press, 2021), historian Jessica Namakkal (Duke University) uses French India’s scattered territories to draw attention to the problematic discourses of “good” and “bad” colonialism and examines settler-colonial spaces like ashrams and utopian communities to show how experiences of decolonization linger after the end of imperial rule. Join us to learn more!
Sana Aiyar (History, Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Ananya Jahanara Kabir (English Literature, King’s College), and Jayita Sarkar (International Relations, Boston University) will be joining the author for this conversation.
This event is sponsored by the Bodas Family Academic Programming Fund | the Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages Program | and the Department of History at Dartmouth College.
For decades, India and China have been uneasy neighbors, wrestling over shared claims to the region of Ladakh. From the war in 1962 that established the line of actual control (LAC) to a recent skirmish in summer 2020, questions over how to draw the India-China border continue to plague national interests and international security.
Join the author, in conversation with Ambassador Nirupama Menon Rao (former Indian Foreign Secretary) and Michael Kugelman (Deputy Director and Senior Associate for South Asia at the Wilson Center), to learn more.
Elizabeth Lhost (Dartmouth College) will moderate the discussion.
This event is sponsored by the Bodas Family Academic Programming Fund | the Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages Program | the Dickey Center for International Understanding | and the Department of History at Dartmouth College.
Transcript for Conversations on South Asia with Sana Haroon
https://youtu.be/mIZyrwyor0o
Event Recording: Conversations on South Asia with Sana Haroon
> > Lhost: Alright, everyone, welcome to the February event in the Conversations on South Asia series here at Dartmouth college. It’s wonderful to have all of our guests and panelists today and to have so many friends and colleagues in the audience. I think we’re about to hear a really fantastic conversation calling on people’s different interests, educational backgrounds and experiences and bringing them to bear on Sana Haroon’s latest book—The Mosques of Colonial South Asia: A Social and Legal History of Muslim Worship—which was published in the Library of Islamic South Asia series with I.B. Tauris.
For those of you who are new to the series or don’t know me, I’m Elizabeth Lhost, and I’m a Postdoctoral Fellow here in the Society of Fellows at Dartmouth College and one of the organizers of this, this year’s series, and it’s my great pleasure to be moderating the conversation today.
Before we begin, I would like to acknowledge that Dartmouth College, which hosts the series, sits on the ancestral and unceded lands of the Abenaki people, who are members of the Wabanaki confederacy. I would also like to thank our series sponsors: the Bodas Family Academic Programming Fund, the Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages program, and the Department of History at Dartmouth College. Without their support, this series really would not be possible. I would also like to thank Bruch Lehmann in History and Professor Douglas Haynes for his support and assistance for being such a strong champion of South Asia programming on and off campus.
And I’d also like to applaud and thank Sri Sathvik Rayala, who is our Bodas Family Fellow for the current academic year. And he does a lot of work, promoting and publicizing the series, in addition to hanging flyers up around campus, sending emails, and inviting many of you to attend our events, and managing our Instagram and other social media profiles. He has also been working behind the scenes to prepare the transcripts from some of our recorded events from earlier in the series and to write event summaries for those events that we haven’t recorded and posted. And several of those are already up or are about to be up on our website, and others will be up there soon. So thank you Sathvik and check out our website if you haven’t been there already and if you’ve missed earlier events.
Today we have with us three wonderful distinguished speakers, who each bring a unique set of skills, expertise and experiences to the conversation. I’m really looking forward to hearing what they have to say.
First, we will have Sana Haroon, who is the author of the book we will be discussing. Professor Haroon will spend about ten minutes introducing the book to all of us, followed by comments from each of our two panelists. Sana Haroon is a historian with interests in everyday Islam and Muslim social organization within the territorial and spatial configurations of modern South Asia. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of History and Asian Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, where she has been since 2012. She teaches courses on South Asia in the Indian Ocean World, and India Since 1857, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan in Modern World History, and Faith and Politics in Islam. In addition to the Mosques of Colonial South Asia, Professor Haroon has also published Frontier of Faith,faith, excuse me, Frontier of Faith: Islam in the Indo-Afghan Borderland, which came out in the UK in 2007 and in the US in 2008 and then in paperback in 2012.
She’s written extensively on the northwest regions of South Asia, focusing especially on religious and cultural exchanges in the borderlands between Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran.
She’s written on the Durand Line in an essay titled “Intersections of Religious Revivalism,” published in the volume Alienated Nations, Fractured States. She has written on “Pakistan between Iran and Saudi Arabia”, for the volume Pakistan Today, has an essay called “Competing Views of Pashtun Tribalism, Islam and Society in the Indo-Afghan Borderlands” in the volume Afghanistan’s Islam, and has contributed the essay “The Visibility of Women and the Rise of the Neo-Taliban Movement in the Pakistan North-West 2007-9” in the volume Beyond Swat: History, Society and Power along the Afghanistan-Pakistan Frontier edited by Magnus Marsden and Benjamin Hopkins, who might actually be in our audience today.
After Professor Haroon has introduced the book, we will have comments from Mudit Trivedi and Adnan Zulfiqar. Mudit Trivedi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. His research interests include, excuse me, his research interests include archaeology, the anthropology of religion, conversion, tradition, archaeological theory, archaeometry, glass, Islam, and South Asia. Professor Trivedi completed his PhD at the University of Chicago in 2020 and has been doing what I think is really amazing and very fascinating work at the intersections of archeology, anthropology, and religious studies.
Some of his most recent scholarship includes the essay “Between Archaeography and Historiography: Unsettling the Medieval?” that was published in the Medieval History Journal in May 2021, and he also co-authored the introduction to that special issue on Archaeologies of the Medieval. Professor Trivedi is currently working on a book project called An Archeology of Virtue that explores the archaeology of conversion to Islam, based on archaeological work in the North Indian state of Rajasthan. The book will bring together what’s really an amazing set of material and analyses of architectural, spatial, and artifactual data sets to consider archeology’s secular, modern commitments and the nature of archeological traces, and I’ll add that I’ve had the chance to see Professor Trivedi present some of this work and it’s, it’s really truly remarkable.
Our second discussant will be Adnan Zulfiqar. Professor Zulfiqar is an Associate Professor of Law at Rutgers Law School, where his courses include Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure: Investigations, Police, Prisons, and Protests, and he also teaches courses on Islamic Law.
Professor Zulfiqar’s CV is filled with an amazing range of activities and achievements. In addition to having a JD and a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, he also completed an MA at Georgetown, where he wrote on Frantz Fanon and jihad. And he holds additional certificates from institutes in universities in Pakistan, Morocco, Syria, Jordan, and Yemen. In addition to producing scholarly publications on topics like “Revolutionary Islamic Jurisprudence” and “Jurisdiction over Jihad: Islamic Law and the Duty to Fight, Professors Zulfiqar has also written publicly on topics like “Islamic Jurisprudence for Revolution” and “Prisons, Abolition and Islamic Legal Thought.” Recently, he has also been engaged in a digital project on fatwas in the age of COVID, called “Mapping COVID-19 Fatwas,” which you can check out on the Islamic Law Blog. And I think we can put the link to that in the chat for those who might be interested.
In addition to being a legal scholar, Professor Zulifqar has also used his expertise to help states like the Maldives and Somalia draft and implement criminal codes. And closer to home, he serves on the legal advisory committee of the ACLU Pennsylvania, the Philadelphia office and also serves as a social justice mentor at Rutgers Law School. He is currently working on a book project called Duties to the Collective, which explores how pre-modern jurors utilized collective obligations, fard Kifaya, in Islamic law to promote cohesion. So with that and without wanting to take any more time away from our discussion, I will hand the floor over to Professor Haroon.
> > Haroon: Thank you so much, and thank you for this invitation to present in this wonderful series. I’ve enjoyed the conversations here so far, and it’s a great format. And what a, what a real honor to have Professor Trivedi and Professor Zulifqar engage with my work, so thank you for the invitation to be here, and I’m delighted to present this book, which was long in the making, and I finished in the chaos of the last couple of years and haven’t had much of a chance to talk about or present.
So this, this project was an outcome of a long interest in really examining the spaces of the public in colonial South Asia. These are concepts that I had become interested in in grad school, and they seemed useful and to have a lot of facility for studying the organization of Muslims and Muslim political thought in South Asia, and I thought well what better place to go look for the Muslim public than the mosque. And the incredible outcome of this work, which took me far too long, was that I found that the mosque really wasn’t a public space of the sort that I expected it to be.
So I’m going to share a couple of slides with you just to give you a little bit of a sense of the sites that began to occupy my interest in the study that I took on. This book presents the histories of Muslim expectations in worship in six mosques across the territories of British India. They’re marked with the little dark icons there, along with the cities closer to them and the cities that sort of fueled religious participation and debate about those mosques.
In Tajpur, Bihar, in 1883, a congregation wished to follow the widely subscribed Hanafi style of prayer. In Rangoon, in 1909, worshipers of the Friday Mosque sought to influence the curriculum at the mosque school there. And in Kanpur and Aurangabad, worshipers expressed a belief in the sanctity of the perimeter of the mosque at the junction of the mosque and the road. Muslims in Lahore, in the 1930s, petitioned for the return of a site that had been classified as a gurdwara during the settlement of the Lahore District eight years earlier. And from 1911, local Muslims were accused, local Muslims accused the Hindu custodians of the mosque Imambargah at Kora Jahanabad of trying to cut off worshipers’ access to that endowment.
These cases are significant because each one rose through a system of appeals to the judicial committee of the Privy Council, the final court of colonial appeals. And each of these case files constitutes a rich archive of the mosque site that it pertains to. The decisions in these cases drew on colonial trust law to determine that rights in mosque management belong to the custodian. They upheld administrative practices that assigned the local magistrate the control of the mosque perimeter. And they used documentation, they asserted the inviolability of colonial land management practices that use documentation of the occupancy of land at the time of settlement to characterize sites as religious endowments.
The judgments in these suits reveal Muslim devotionalism in and around the mosques of colonial South Asia to have been subject to the authority of petty officers of the mosque, and the state under colonial law and statecraft. The case files and other historical sources related to these mosques provide evidence of the diversity of Muslim beliefs and religious practices across the region, and they also provide evidence of the rich and complex history of legal activism for worshipers’ rites in mosques.
Migrant Muslims from all over India and local Burmese Muslims worshiped together at this site, the Friday Mosque of Rangoon by the late 1800s. And they expressed different preferences for programming in the mosque. The suit for democratic management of a mosque here drew inspiration from the management style of a mainland mosque in Mauritius and also drew inspiration from procedures for registering, registering societies. In Lahore, the Muslims suit for the return of the Shaheed Ganj Mosque and waqf revealed both the history of Sikh and Muslim uses of this site and the conceptualization of the mosque as god’s land and not subject to proprietary claims.
And the Kora Jahanabad suit documented 200, a 200 year history of an endowment created by a Hindu courtier of the Awadh state, who converted to Islam, but named his Hindu nephews and their successors as custodians of this site. Muslims, seeking to establish Muslim custodianship of this site in the early 1900s, were faced with proprietary claims by these, as I go back to that slide, were faced with the proprietary claims of the Hindu custodians. And by the 20th century, these two competing claims produced entirely different representations of the character of this endowment. The decision in this final suit, which was issued in July 1947, just on the eve of independence and decolonization, was the outcome of two decades of work for new legislation that created provincial, regulatory bodies for Muslim endowments and established standards for financial management and custodial accountability. This new legislation enabled any Muslim and not just worshippers at the sites to sue custodians for management of mosques, and at the same time, courts began to admit expert Muslim testimony about what the devotional uses of mosques should be.
The case studies in this book, which span about 80 years of South Asian history and cover a variety of disputes, some of which we are quite familiar with and others which we may be know a little less about and have appeared less regularly in the literature on South Asia, allow us an opportunity to close the gap between two different assessments of what mosques were and what Muslim endowments, really the social function of Muslim endowments, in South Asia.
There are some who treat the mosque as a space of unrestricted social participation and on the other hand, we have Gregory, Gregory Kozlowski’s argument, that Muslim endowments were sites of social influence by benefactors. Mosques were indeed sites of social influence, but the influence of a series of very unlikely characters. District magistrates and revenue department officials evaluated and adjudicated Muslim claims on public and private land for mosques. Custodians prayer leaders and eventually Muslim associations managed the programs of activities in mosques. Muslims relentlessly organized for more rights in mosques, which was limited in success until the very end of the colonial period.
I hope that this, the contribution that this book makes within the field is to allow a much more localized and located treatment of mosque sites as places of Muslim organization. Hopefully, the, my effort to use micro-histories in engaging and, and thoughtful ways will also do something for that approach to history writing. And, moreover I, I hope that this book sort of opens up more of a conversation about some of the purposes of Muslim organization in South Asia and the shape that, that took the sites on which that occurred.
> > Lhost: Alright, thanks. Mudit.
> > Trivedi: Thank you. Um, I have to start by thanking Elizabeth for picking me out of the legions of many more qualified commentators, so many of them in the audience today for this conversation. And I must thank Professor Haroon, Sana, if I may, for such a rich, engaging, and definitely argued book. The book’s many contentions spoke to me to such an extent that I could talk to an hour and still say very little of all that I find [inaudible] in it.
But to keep to time, I will first try and characterize what I understand that Sana’s significant achievement in a few ways. Then I’ll offer a few very partial, selective reading responses framed as first as lessons for a few lessons from the book for material histories of the mosque, and how those are framed. I have a few comments on legal aspects, but I will reserve them and differ to Adnan’s wisdom. Next, I’ll try and think about the books arguments about secular colonial rule and its implications and close with a few thoughts about the implications for the study of Muslim worship itself.
Now, the Mosques of Colonial South Asia definitely opens new historiographical space via a series of quick maneuvers. The research that the historiography, especially since Kozlowski’s book, has been focused on private waqfs. Assimilating all into that, all histories to that history of waqfs’, as Sana just said, as assertions of social influence.
Be that as it may, I understand Sana is telling us the colonial treatment of mosques, congregations, and disputes, amongst them is another story. This story that we are here to discuss and a story, which is shaped profoundly on one hand by the loss of older order of [inaudible] Mughal imperium and also by the loss of the abolition of the qazis office as a framework for resolving disputes. To tell this story, then, Sana calls into question another historiographical assumption that mosques were in any transparent [inaudible] way a public arena. And against this assumption, she asserts that secular colonial rule fractured the expectations of the post-Mughal namazi, shoring up mutawallis, securing custodianship in an understanding of waqf trusts, and then colonial rule then resolved disputes by recourse, to be or recourse to the originally act of the founder or by ever expanding realm of discretionary powers handed out first to magistrates, then revenue officers, who rented the mosque a fragment of land, the legal subject of urban and revenue governance.
Now, Sana has also forever widened the cast of characters who must be included in any [inaudible] of the mosque. Alongside with mutawallis, she reminds us of the place of the khatib, the imam, the muezzin, and the [inaudible]. And there is much archival [inaudible] to be admired in this text around these figures, from fragments of homework that were assigned to students in the maqtab in Rangoon to the story of the activist construction of the Lahore Shab Bhar Masjid. I have profound admiration for the kinds of sources and the histories motivated here. As if this is not enough of an achievement, then the book participates in a wider historiographic movement of new histories from legal archives, which is at once, social, legal and critical. Sana tracks the differentiated recourse to law by particular Muslim communities, their field arguments, the countersuits, and the post-1919 recourse to legislative changes as all one arch of rethinking rights, individual and collective, in the masjid and modernity, of recovering consensus from the fractured spaces of colonial authority.
Now, one quick, unfair way of summarizing the five cases the book charts is by the Joint Committee of the Privy Council, the judicial committee of the Privy Council decisions that Sana tracks. These are, first, that the individuals have no rights in the mosque beyond prayer and access. Second, that they have no innate right in management of waqf, of waqfs. Third, that more broadly, rights when spaces around the mosque cannot be derived from custom, that they must, they enjoyed only at the magistrates’ discretion. And forth, that mosques are ultimately land, vulnerable to adverse possession. And this arc of the book changes until in our fifth case study of Kora Jahanabad, settled as, she points out, only a few days before partition, when Muslim litigious associations win back collective rights. And I want to think about how they win them back.
The appellants, the mosque defenders in this case, do so, ultimately, as very litigious [inaudible]. As Sana says, they have to recast themselves as experts in very telling ways. And what I find fascinating is that they present forms of knowledge that had been admissible by the state, who, because these are subjects who survey, who document, who even map a waqf to the standards of colonial evidence and land, and that has implications for people like me who also map these places. And I’ll say more about that, but most tellingly, they ultimately write a historical reconstruction, not of worship, but of the ruins of the waqf which the state made. This is a story, then, which has implications for all of us and other forms of knowledge we produce about a mosque. Following this victory, this victory comes from pushing aside worship at some level.
And now in the time that remains, I just want to start talking about the implications of what I think we could most broadly learn from this incredible book. One response would be, I think that Sana is asking us to learn to ask ourselves a few questions. First of these might be, what do we think is the temporality of the mosque. What do we think it’s spatial extent is? As we examine our preconceptions, our chronotopes for the mosques, I think Sana is encouraging us also to ask what understandings of dispute, authority, and agreement, what scene of congregation and consensus do, do we allow in our histories of it. Well, in other words what assumptions do we make of haq or hud upon mosque and it’s, all persons within it. Now, to specify what I mean by some of this, in historical terms, all of us are [inaudible] by our best intentions, by the best [inaudible] of history writing to identify, when we introduce, a mosque by its patron. Now this foundationalism in our account guides our evaluation, especially for architectural historians, and it’s typification in style and period, its historical eminence. But I think Sana is asking us to attend to all that follows from the tamam shud of the Mughal dedications and inscriptions. And archeologists and art historians participate in these discourses, which extract the mosque from the city, from them mohalla, from its neighborhoods, from it’s lived communities. Our representations certainly lie between those of the Revenue Board and the All India Shia Conference Activists, which Sana had just put on the screen.
So, I want to pause and think about how few plans we draw ever wonder where is the maqtab, where did the students live, where did the katib sleep. Do we pause to puzzle whether the tazias might have been kept? Most of our plans, and this is important, if there are any surviving arrangements for wudu, they get edited out by the time we get to publication. Now this matters because it matters as all of these accounts ultimately come to stand as evidence in that future where almost all mosques of some parts of South Asia might indeed need to be defended someday in court. Continuity, occupation, adverse possession all have material traces. And a much needed shift is in approach is a first step for an archeology and art history responsive to its own complicites in the history that Sana tells. We will do well to heed these minute traces. They open out material archives of how mosques endure, how they how they witness mortal time.
Now, from these we could state, one of the questions I had throughout with Sana gives us a very concise account of the precolonial moral world of the mosque and a relational sociology of haq and had in that world. I’d ask, I’d like to ask Sana to say more later about what she would like, for us, for those of us who work in the preview to her story. She says a lot about what she expects of us to do for the period post-47, but I would love to hear that. A few comments follow just on how Sana characterizes secularism. Now, the secular strait, in her words, creates the waqf crisis, abolishes the qazi, then it ignores what she calls values arising from devotion in judicial reasoning. And the colonial state declares its commitments to non-interference, neutrality, to try to unburden, in Sana’s words, whatever responsibilities for dispute resolution of managing mosques that come its own way. But as Sana says, it’s critical that the state admits cases and then dismisses religious reasons. It refuses to admit arguments from taqlid, she says, it says it cannot adjudicate this, but then goes on to read all manner of religious practice, text, and testimony as evidence anyway.
Now, in each case, a chain of reasoning emerges from state practice. Is vocalized amin an essential aspect of prayer, is it essentially a prohibited action, the state is asking. Is the mosque out of the [inaudible]? The area for wudu, is it essentially a part of the mosque? And the key then is that even as the colonial state professes neutrality, admission of any claim to waqf involves the indeterminacy produced by the state’s purported lack of authority to rule on religious reason. This space was used, this indeterminate space, was used to build an understanding of what is essential, what’s customary, what was permitted, what’s injurious, and what categories the colonial order will not change, such as property and possessions. Now this remaking of a realm of practices of waqf, the reduction [inaudible] tradition into a vision of religion that fit the secular presumptions of the state occurs through what Hussein Agrama calls the questioning powers of secularism, operating through this indeterminacy and so fuels the ambition of the law and what Sana characterizes as its discretionary, non-statutory powers.
And I wanted to pause and just see a couple of things about how Sana so powerfully asked us to think about the post-1920s era when native elected officials and associations create essentially an extra bureaucratic waqf board, which allow the state to continue to have its moral fiction of neutrality, and I find that fascinating and a move of great relevance for the studies of secularism in South Asia. So my question is really at this point, where do we place the litigious middle-class subject with a liberal vigilance against corruptions of power and where do we behold Omed Ali, the julaha who conscientiously cast himself out of the mosque for his silent passions, to recall just two memorable historical reconstructions from the book.
Now building on Sana’s insight, we could also say how do we complicate the story of secular passion so loudly speaking in a for law in a world so given to mistaking silent prayer. And on that point, I just want to add one historical question, amongst the many insights for the history of worship that emerged from the book. Now, the masjid is not just the scene for the material conditions of possibility and impossibility for worship, but it is the site of salat, it is the place of not just rehearsed spontaneity and [inaudible], but, but where niyat itself is forged. And we come to have a very interesting insight into what Sana casts, in some ways, as unmarked Hanafi or unmarked Sunni rights, to what she calls, a right to silence as it comes up against the [inaudible], the vocalized amin, as it comes up against Shia processions and their vocal marsiya. And it made me think about how this emphatic silence, which people would willingly litigate for, is itself a production of a world where silence and audition were held in a different and particular relation, perhaps arising out of 18th century debates over silence and the wide arc and influence of Naqshbandi and [inaudible] practice.
Now, well, there is much anthropological work on audition, I must thank Sana for her attentiveness and for her directing us to histories of silence. On that point, I think I’m out of time, so I will, I will look forward to learning from Adnan’s comments and only to say that five chapters, five mosques, five accounts of how the adhan constituted publics in the world of mutawallis and magistrates. Thank you Sana for the pleasure of working with you and traveling with you, and this peripatetic account.
> > Lhost: Thanks Mudit, Adnan.
> > Zulfiqar: Okay. So, I want to also begin by thanking Elizabeth, thanking Sana for this wonderful book and and, and right now, after listening to Mudit, you know, I am almost thinking, well, that I kind of just want to hear him comment more and listen to his conversation with Sana because that was, that was an excellent capturing of this book. So, I’m going to do a couple things in the time because I do want to make sure that we have enough time for the audience.
I want to first say, I come to this as probably the least of, having the least expertise in this particular arena than my colleagues here, someone who works on medieval Islamic law and modern but really sort of doesn’t touch too much on colonial South Asia, except for in the cases of kind of jihad resistance. So for me, this was an incredibly rich book in terms of me learning much more about the literature in this field, but the sort of extent of detail, the, the range of sources, and, and kind of the range of context that you covered. I would say that you know as anyone who comes to a book, you come to it, and there are questions in your head that you are exploring for your own research, reasons that, that inevitably start kind of popping out, and you start seeing things in the book that you find more deeply relevant to what you’re doing, and so, in some respects that’s where I want to take this because I found this book especially fascinating in the way that it examined stories and or a story or the stories of Muslim life in the absence of its historic governing authority or its traditional governing authority and parts of that story have been told by others in the context of law and the context of the creation of codes, the participation in, you know, whether one participates in the colonial states, these sort of debates around that and, and the context of jihad or peace or that relationship that should exist.
But the mosque is a space, the masjid is a space to examine the challenges, the opportunities, the contestations of Muslim life under colonial rule in the absence of traditional sort of governing authority. And this adds, oh, I think a wonderful layer to our understanding of this particular period, and I would say, in many respects to our understanding of or opportunities and avenues for the understanding of Islamic history in the post or in the colonial period and on. In particular, this move from sort of a state controlled space in the precolonial period where there’s kind of an oversight function over Friday prayers and the masjid and all of this kind of traditionally articulated in much of the fiqh and sort of substantive law literature to a space of communal authority or more communal authority with these other actors that Mudit mentioned as well kind of rising up raises some very interesting questions for me.
Partly, you know, where is this impetus for communal control coming from within sort of the communities? It’’s simply a desire not to have colonial control in these spaces over the masjid. Why isn’t there kind of recreation of kind of traditional hierarchies in this space as well that you kind of see happening in the jihad context and others where there’s an absence of the traditional state and so that that raised a lot of interesting questions for me that ceding of control to the community then also seems like this very interesting gateway into sectarianism and sort of the growth of sects having now this immense power because essentially ceding control of the masjid means ceding control of the pulpit which and the minbar and which, which, from a legal standpoint means that now the, the Hanafi, Deobandi, or Ahl i-Hadith, then can say that no you, you are required by Islamic law to come, listen to me, and what I have to say something, which you know, is a real, in many respectsm a departure from what we see in kind of the early centuries of Islam. And so that, that raises some interesting questions.
Another interesting concept that Sana used and that kept appearing. and which was honestly, it was new for me, is this idea of Islamic normativity, which seemed to be a more expanded and possibly gentler notion of Islamic orthodoxy, maybe, or you know that’s kind of where I see, so this idea of Islamic normativity was really fascinating to me and what’s fascinating was kind of the idea of it being based on this notion of expectations or societal, you know, expectation as opposed to text or even tradition and, and obviously they’re linked, because you know expectations can arise from text and tradition, often do. But, but you know this, this raises some very fascinating questions, right. In, in the prayer context in Bihar, is the objection to the certain practices, particularly when they’re done by the prayer leader, you know the kind of vocalization of amin, etcetera, is it arising out of kind of deviation from the expectations that existed because of Mughal, Mughal statecraft or whatever else or, or is there also this idea that your prayer will not count if the amin is vocalized or if, if prayer is conducted in a particular way will it not count? And so part of my question, that, that I felt I was curious about is, where is kind of religiosity factoring in here? Where’s the sacred kind of factoring in and how does the sacred figure into these disputes, and is it, are there things that end up becoming hidden when the sacred is being argued in secular space, right? And, and so from that standpoint, as it was very curious to me as to how that exists.
So last couple points. In and, and one thing with regard to orthodoxy or normativity based on expectation or practice expectation, it’s, it’s interesting you know the challenges that that potentially creates within the context of Islam, which seems as though it’s structured to give the text primacy in certain ways. And so, you know, and its Bihar example, of course which, which I found very fascinating because it, it tapped into many of the areas that, that I think about, you know. It’s, it’s interesting because it’s the Ahl i-Hadiths who are kind of these textualists in many respects that are, that are the, the antagonists in this situation and so really puts to the fore this kind of notion of where normativity is based upon.
And, finally, I wanted to talk about the idea of, it, towards the end there’s this discussion of the ulema and their physical absence from the mosque space and from the prayer space, except in these limited ways, you know, where they come in to give a hukm, or maybe a talk and that, in some respects, you know, it seemed to me there was, Sana was making the implication that now their influence was diminished as a result of their absence, the physical absence and, and the presence of these other actors and their physical presence, giving them more influential roles and, and, to some degree, just disaligns with sort of this enhanced role of the community and its control of the masjid space, but I wonder, you know if the ulema has always been absent from the prayer space, right. They’ve never really been in that space. They’re limited sort of engagements, they teach there, they might you know, give a hukm, but they’re very absent, and, and, yet, you know, their influence seems to stem from other places and sort of as these arbitrators of the role of, you know, what is permissible and impermissible, etc. So, I’m curious as to whether, did the ulemas role really changed, like is, and, you know, and can we comment as to their influence being sort of changing as a result of this kind of physical absence. So you know those were things that came to mind.
But I’m going to end it there, and give the audience and Sana the rest of the space, but this was a really a delight to read, and I encourage everyone who has not had a chance to read it to really sit down with it for a few days and enjoy it. Thank you.
> > Lhost: Fantastic, thanks so much Adnan. Sana, would you like to respond to some of those comments and questions while we gather questions from the audience. We have about 20 minutes for discussion, so you should be in good shape to have.
> > Haroon: Great, thank you! Oh, my goodness, thank you so much Mudit and Adnan, if I may, for such meaningful engagement with some of the ideas that I present in this book. So, I’m going to take up just two of the many wonderful points that you raised. The first being and what I really enjoyed was how much you engaged with the arc of the argument that I present. And so I’m going to take up that question that you both raised about the precolonial period and what we do with an, and how I treated that precolonial period.
So, that’s not my area of expertise. I am not fully equipped to work with those records or that history and, and so I purposefully chose not to. But I needed a start point for the study, and I really, I do believe that colonial law fundamentally changed the way in which Muslims worshiped in mosques in South Asia and so the evidence I gathered related to the very late precolonial period, so about 1800 onwards, and I worked with printed texts. And what I was looking for were, and I worked with some maps, and I worked with some oral accounts of and memoirs, which related to that very late precolonial period. And the argument that I put forward in the introduction, and that I am confident holding to is that the expectation, the widely accepted expectation of Muslims in under the late Mughal state and under many pre-colonial states, Muslim precolonial states, was that they in worshiping in mosques were submitting to the authority of the temporal ruler of the sovereignty of the state, of the state ruler. And that is validated in, I validate that in a couple of different ways.
I believe that it’s also true for non-Muslim states for the late, for the Sikh states as well, for the reason that disputes that took place in mosques, even in the Punjab, in late precolonial Punjab, would often find their way to the durbar for resolution, and they were resolved in, it seems from some anecdotal accounts, in creative ways, not necessarily through reference to sharia, but they were certainly resolved by the judicial authorities of those who rulers.
And that is what fundamentally changes in the colonial period. The state no longer wants to be involved. The state no longer has officers who will be designated or deputed to resolve disputes that arise in places of worship and so that’s the shift that takes place is the, is the Muslims as to worshiping, but there’s nobody to solve the problems that arise in moments of conflict and disagreement.
And so, in terms of how do we treat the precolonial sacred, there’s precolonial, there’s so much work to be done, of course, and I’m, all I can say is that there is evidence there, and if we just, possibly some creative approaches that evidence might elicit more substantial understandings of that [inaudible] than what I have offered here.
But what I, the other question that, that came up was relating to the, the arc of change that takes place in South Asia. And in here, finally, by the end of the colonial period, we have Muslims, who very clearly perceive, and I believe do perceive their distancing from the patronage of rulers and from the direct paternalistic, perhaps, care of rulers in their capacity as Muslims in those States. They are, much later on, then come back to organize and, and push back against their lack of control over their mosques, and their lack, the sets, state’s lack of attention to their perceived rights in their mosques, and they come to organize through these associations which you already know a lot about. In, in tandem with the responses to and Muslim interest in their rights in mosques, there’s a vibrant and powerful conversation going on about how Muslims can come together in organizations and societies and associations to assert rights in all sorts of ways and to forge a more collective identity. And it is those associations which take center stage in claiming back rights in mosques.
I think, Adnan, you had asked how it is that happens. That happens in tandem, and in, in conversation with Hindu and Sikh and other sorts of associations, Parsi associations, which are doing exactly the same thing. There’s a lot of cross fertilization of ideas and strategies. And of course the post-1920 period of Muslim reorganization for mosque, of Muslim organization for rights in mosques is, is exactly, is happening the same time as Sikh organization for rights in gurdwaras.
So, and just very finely about the ulema, do I imply that they, their influence declined, not so much. What I’m hoping to force a consideration or visit there are forms of authority in and among Muslims, aside from the ulema, and that we can attend to them in different ways, and so caveat is thinking about the authority of the ulema over Muslim society.
> > Lhost: Fantastic, we have some questions that are coming in here. I think, I’ll try to place these in order so that they make sense for the way that you, that you answer them, seeing some of the ones that have come in, but I’m going to start with one from Benjamin Hopkins who asks about your case studies. Can you say more about why you chose these cases, why are these sites the ones that you focus on the book, and why not other ones?
> > Haroon: Absolutely, thanks, thank you for that question. The sites I chose were the cases which made their way to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, and the reason why those cases are so important is partly, and this is from not a sophisticated enough understanding of colonial law but, but, I think I do believe that these cases were significant because their judgments became sort of, their judgments tended to guide other judgments related to mosques and set precedents. But, even more importantly, the Judicial Committeeof the Privy Council case files often run into three or 400 pages, and they’re very nuanced, and they are rich veins of evidence related to the sites that were being contested. And actually, this reminds me of another question that Adnan had raised that how, how, how is it that we can discern an Islamic normativity from these or a sense of an Islamic normativity from these cases. It’s because these case files contained depositions from the Muslims who were contesting, often mosquemanagement or principles of mosque governance. And their depositions express their beliefs and their feelings about mosques. I think that this is how Muslims should pray. I believe that that is how Muslims should pray. And, and, often when they’re probed further and, and asked, well, why do you believe this, and they will sit, express, well, because the khatib of the mosque told me so or because it’s written in the book of the Ahl i-Hadiths. And so you can see that the, this belief in, in Islamic norms is not quite the same as an orthodoxy, but it expresses both the firmly held nature of beliefs about mosques, but also often demonstrates their non-scholarly nature. They’re there, these are lay people expressing their beliefs about mosques.
And so, why these particular case studies, because there is the most evidence about them, and I have been engaged other sources like India documents in the India Office Library, political department documents, and published Urdu texts and Persian texts that comment, maybe a little further, on some of these sites or other similar sites. And I used, I’ve aggregated other evidence around the central case studies, which, which sort of stand on their own and are, in the conclusions that I reach about these sites, are much easier to defend the cause of the evidence that exists for them.
> > Lhost: Yeah, I think what’s a really interesting thing about, and we have a question that’s come in asking you to say more about your sources, but one of the things that I note looking at published reported cases that is that often you get a sense of what the British judges or sometimes the Indian Muslim judges were thinking about various concepts, but so often those decisions don’t include any of the witness testimony, and they don’t include any of the depositions even in translation. So, if you can get to what people are actually saying through other sources, that adds just a completely different layer of information and material. I don’t know if you’d like to say more about sources. We have a number of other questions coming in, as well about.
> > Haroon: Well, I’ll just add very briefly that, in addition to those witness depositions and the published, in the some of the published texts and fatwas even that appear in this case files, there are often a detail site maps, like the one which I showed you right at the end of my presentation and those, these, what’s so wonderful about these cases is that the colonial courts are always evaluating mosque site as land and as features of the built environment, as well as evaluating with some claims in them and some devotional claims within them. And so, it’s, you can, I can, I could really use these case files to constitute the mosque in a variety of ways in this to some of the wonderful points that Mudit had raised earlier about the materiality of the mosque and what’s happening within it.
> > Lhost: Yes, I have one question that’s come in from Irfanullah Farooqi, who asks if you could say more about the chronology, in particular what changes the post 1920s landscape and maybe like to say a bit about how the Tablighi Jamaat or other organizations might have changed, change the way organizations and associations worked with in and through mosques.
> > Haroon: It’s a great question. So the chronology, it begins with the very first mosque case, the first, the first case that goes to the Privy Council. Actually, not the first thing, I might be able to say more if anybody’s interested in how many of these cases did go to the Privy Council, but one of the early ones, the Tajpur Mosque case, which in fact is, I’m certainly not, and I notice this question comes up somewhere else, I’m not the first person to have talked about this case. It appears in Barbara Metcalf’s book many years ago, and a few other people, recently Julia Stevens has also talked about this case.
I take a different, I take a different approach to that evidence. I’m interested in people’s interest in the mosque itself rather than the broader legal arguments pertaining to that site, and I, and it’s the first, it’s the first case, that is adjudicated after the laws of trust and the laws relating to charitable endowment substantially changed. As it was the first case in which the court not only clearly articulates its inability to adjudicate a case and to evaluate Muslim legal claims, fiqh and taqlid, and other approaches to Islamic law, it is also the first case in which the court clearly designates a different authority within the mosque to, to the officials of the state, and it does so by allowing the Ahl i-Hadiths’ argument that the prayer leader can lead prayer within the mosque how so ever he chooses it as long as it is not in a manner that is impermissible under Islamic law. And, of course, that allows the Ahl i-Hadiths a lot of latitude to express, to pray in the ways in which they prefer to do.
But the court’s acceptance that the prayer leader leads within the mosque hall, within the prayer hall, is an important one, and so that is the first of the cases that I look at and the six, the cases that, that up until the very last case that I evaluate, there’s no particular ordering to the decisions that that are issued. The second case that I consider points to the significance of the custodian over the mosque. The third one points to the significance of the magistrate over the mosque perimeter. But there’s a lot of evidence that the custodian was important in 1891 as well, and the magistrate was also important in 1891. So, there’s no particular chronology to those first three cases, but those first few judgments allow us to stagger our attention to them. But those who, perhaps in a sense, those first three really work together in a, in a, to show us the landscape of emerging authority in and around mosques.
And then the last two chapters which look at the case relating to the Shaheed Ganj, and finally, the case relating to the Kora Jahanabad Mosque, they both, both those judgments in a, in a, are, first of all, those cases are taken forward by Muslim associations, and they are influenced by the evidence gathered by Muslim associations. And they both in different ways take into account the testimonies of Muslim experts and who speak to the importance of the mosque. So, I think I addressed the question of chronology.
> > Lhost: Yeah, I’m gonna try to bring two questions together here. They both have to do with space, authority, secularism. And so the first is from [inaudible] Khan, who asks, asks about other Muslim spaces as sites of secular activities of secular politics, whether it’s a Jama Masjid filling in as a place for political activity during anti-CAA protests or mosques in Kashmir being subject to shutdowns by the current Indian government. And then so that’s looking sort of into the present to talk about the way that spaces are functioning, functioning as, as political and secular spaces.
And then the other question is from Ali Imran and asks to, to look to the past, to the precolonial, to think about other places, other sites where the, the power of imperial authority was employed in the sense that durbars were also a space where people would give, would submit to authority. How do those sites kind of map on two sites of worship given that they’re both embedded within these relationships of power between the community and the ruler?
> > Haroon: Yeah, those, those are really important questions, and both, I see evidence of both even in the mosque, some of the mosques [inaudible] that I studied. So, the Shaheed Ganj site, through the 1920s, at in a couple of different instances, actually served as a space for Sikh and Muslim collaboration in an anti-colonial politics. And the same is true of the, the Friday Mosque or the Imperial Mosque of Lahore. Abul Kalam Azad wrote a treatise on how mosques should actually function in precisely this manner of sites of colonial, anti-colonial organization.
So, and so, there is this potential for mosques to serve in this manner, but even the Rangoon Mosque, some of the people who advocated for reform of the management of the Rangoon Mosque really saw the mosque to function as a political space. And, I suppose what I’m saying is that, in many instances, it did, in, but those instances were not sanctioned by colonial law, they could not be defended under colonial law. And so, if a custodian of a mosque sought to close off access of that, to that space for Muslims, who wanted to perhaps hold a political meeting there, they could do so, and they could do so, they were entirely within their rights to do so. And so, the, while mosques may serve many other functions and maybe even capture and reproduce some of those elements of other sorts of spaces or social organization or authority like a durbar, that is, I haven’t looked for that evidence, and I haven’t systematically evaluated how that might happen. I think it’s entirely possible that it happened systematically, but I cannot speak to that, but what I can speak to is that this one structure of our schematization of mosque use did emerge under colonial law, and you can see it functioning in a variety of mosques across Asia.
> > Lhost: Thanks, we have just two minutes, and I’m afraid there are going to be some questions that we don’t quite get to, so I think I’ll end with this one from [inaudible], who asks, asks about whether we might be working toward the emergence of a new paradigm that moves away from understandings of Islam as being sort of bifurcated between scripturalist Islam and Sufi silsilas where we’re sort of seeing more emphasis on and more evidence of grassroots practices and trajectories cohering.
> > Haroon: Yeah, that’s, it’s a wonderful field for study, and I think that we should attempt to look for other sorts, other sorts of patterns of Muslim organization, so I fully acknowledge and agree with the sentiment behind that question and do hope to see other methods presented.
And if I have the last minute, actually, I remember that I didn’t fully address an earlier question about the Tablighi Jamaat and mosques. And I caught a little bit of an earlier question about more contemporary issues related to mosques.
There are a number of possible offshoots of the arguments that I have presented, and one set of offshoots relates to what Muslim organizations, I focus more in Deobandis, but the Tablighi Jamaat would be implicated in this, the Barelvi school would be implicated in this, what any organization has been able to do with the laws pertaining to mosque use and authority within mosques and I believe that the bifurcation, the growth of specifically Deobandi, Barelvi, Tablighi mosques is an outcome of the, the changes that happened in the colonial period where custodians and prayer leaders could defend particular ritual practices by specific ritual practices within mosques. So the, this factionalism that emerges around mosques is, is part of the story that I have told.
And I, and I think that there are other contemporary sites which also capture many of the tensions that we can see from the colonial period.
> > Lhost: Yeah, thanks. So we’re just one minute over time, but on that note, I would like to thank all of our, thanks Professor Haroon for writing this book, giving us the opportunity and a chance to get together today, and thank Professors Zulfiqar and Trivedi for joining us in this discussion, even though both of them seem to think that others would have been better suited. It was great to have both of you here. It was nice to see all of you. And thanks to all of you for coming out today. Our next event will be on Tuesday, March 8 and which will feature Kyle Gardner’s book The Frontier Complex: Geopolitics and the Making of the India-China Border, 1846–1962, and you can already register for that event at the link https://dartgo.org/conversations-gardner, which is in the chat. Thanks everyone!
For those who weren’t able to join us for this event, here’s the recording and transcript. Enjoy!
Transcript for Conversations on South Asia with Mytheli Sreenivas
> > Lhost: Hello, everyone and welcome to the November event in the Conversations on South Asia series here at Dartmouth College. I’m Elizabeth Lhost, a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows and a lecturer in the Department of History here at Dartmouth, and I’m also one of the series co-organizers for this year.
It is my distinguished pleasure to welcome you all to this event featuring Mytheli Sreenivas’s Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India, which was published with the University of Washington Press earlier this year. And event attendees can use the promo code w139 to receive a 30% discount when ordering the book directly from the press. We’re very grateful to have them make this available to attendees of the event. The book is also available as an open access text, which was made possible by generous support from a Project TOME grant. Very exciting to see more works coming out with open access editions for students and scholars who are unable to purchase books. Professor Sreenivas also informs me that, after some pandemic related delays, Reproductive Politics is now available for purchase in a South Asian edition through Women Unlimited. And we have a special link that we will put in the chat very shortly to share with all of you to buy that book directly from the publisher.
Before we begin, I would like to acknowledge that Dartmouth College, which hosts the series, sits on the ancestral and unceded lands of the Abenaki people, who are members of the Wabanaki confederacy. I would also like to thank our series sponsors: the Bodas Family Academic Programming Fund, the Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages program, and the Department of History at Dartmouth College for supporting this program, and I’d especially like to thank Bruch Lehmann and Britny (Town) Marsh for their support with logistics.
Momentarily, I’ll hand over the platform to my colleague Professor Douglas Haynes, who will be introducing our panelists and moderating the Q&A today. But before I do that, I would like to thank our two Bodas Fellows Sri Sathvik Rayala and Bryanna Entwistle, who are working and have been working behind the scenes to make sure the program runs smoothly today, so please join me in acknowledging their contributions.
I would also like to announce that the complete schedule for the conversation series is available on our website, which is sites.dartmouth.edu/southasiastudies and you’ll see a link to the conversation series on the left hand side. And I’d also like to announce that our next event featuring Nicole Karapanagiotis’s Branding Bhakti will take place on Tuesday, December 7 from 12:15 to 1:15 PM Eastern and registration is available at the link dartgo.org/conversations-karapanagiotis, and we’ll also put that in the chat so that you can access it pretty easily.
Finally, for those of you who can never quite get enough of South Asia events in your lives, Professor Haynes has also asked me to announce that on Thursday, this Thursday, just two days from now, he will be hosting a conversation with Kavita Sivaramakrishnan on India’s second COVID wave with reflections on a longer history of epidemics and erasures. So we’ll post information about that event in the chat so that those of you who are interested may attend.
And now, without further delay, on to our panel discussion. Today, we have joining us the author Mytheli Sreenivas, and two discussants. Each panelist will provide roughly ten minutes of comments and reflections on the book, beginning with the author. And then we’ll open up the floor to questions and comments from the audience. When submitting your questions, please use the Q&A feature in the Zoom webinar to submit your questions and now please welcome my colleague Douglas Haynes, who will be introducing our distinguished speakers.
> > Haynes: Thank you, thank you very much. I’m very pleased to be moderating this this event, about a book, I read, several months ago, not just in preparation for this occasion. Besides all the thanks that Elizabeth has already mentioned, I want to thank Elizabeth herself for organizing this event and for all the work she’s done in putting together this Conversation on South Asia series, which I think is really a unique contribution to South Asian studies, not just at Dartmouth, but actually globally. And, and I hope we are able to keep it, keep it going in the years, in the future future years.
Today, we’re pleased to have with us Professor Mytheli Sreenivas, who is an Associate Professor at Ohio State University. Her work focuses on women’s and gender history, and more recently on the history of sexuality and reproduction. Her first book, Wives, Widows, and Concubines: The Conjugal Family Ideal in Colonial India, is the most critical work on the history of conjugality in modern South Asia, and it showed how the advocacy of the conjugal family became central to the constitution of modernity and nationalism in South Asia. And it certainly has been extremely valuable in my own work, which deals with conjugality in advertising.
Her second and latest book, the Reproductive, Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India, the subject of today’s discussion, we’ll hear plenty about that. But it has immediately established itself as the most important study of the history of birth control and reproductive politics in India.
She’s also published numerous journal articles and book chapters, including works on conjugality and reproduction, but also very broad historiographic essays. We have with us two very appropriate commentators to reflect on this work, and we will go in this order.
The first is Amna Qayyum, who is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs at Yale University. Her primary field of study is twentieth century global history, with a particular focus on decolonization and the Cold War in South Asia and the Muslim world. Her research and teaching interests include the histories of gender, science and technology, development, and Islamic thought. Her current book project, tentatively titled“Demographic States: The Global Biopolitics of Authoritarianism in South Asia,” offers insight into how postcolonial sovereignty intersected it with and disrupted global bio, bio-political projects by situating Pakistan and Bangladesh as critical participants in the production of global demographic knowledge and practices and recently she’s also advised the Government of Pakistan on Covid-19 related human security.
After after comments from Amna, we’ll have comments from Carole McCann, who is a Professor and Chair of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland-Baltimore with an affiliate faculty appointment in the doctoral program in Language, Literacy and Culture Doctoral Program. Professor McCann’s work involved, involves, among other things, transnational feminist theory, transnational feminist science studies, and population/reproductive politics. She has published two books, including Figuring the Population Bomb and Birth Control Politics in the United States, 1916-1945. I’m sorry, that’s, that was two books. And she also co- co-edits the Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives, and she’s joined the editorial team for the 2021 edition. So I’ll be very interested in hearing what Dr. Qayyum and Professor McCann have to say about this, this compelling work, but first we turn to Professor Sreenivas to hear ten minutes of summary of her own, her own work, and then thoughts on her work.
> > Sreenivas: Thank you so much, and thank you so much to the organizers of the Conversations on South Asia series, especially Elizabeth Lhost for organizing this talk and for being so supportive. I’m also really grateful to Carole McCann, Amna Qayyum, and Doug Haynes for engaging with the book, and I look forward to your comments and conversation.
Following Elizabeth, I’ll also start with a land acknowledgment. You know these events seem like they’re happening everywhere and nowhere. But I want to acknowledge the place from which I speak, which is Columbus, Ohio, which occupies the ancestral and contemporary territory of the Shawnee, Pottawatomie, Delaware, Miami, Peoria, Seneca, Wyandot, Ojibwe, and Cherokee peoples. As an employee of Ohio State, I want to honor the resiliency of these tribal nations and recognize the historical context that have and continue to affect the indigenous peoples of this land.
And so, turning to the book itself, as, as Professor Haynes mentioned, I was asked to talk or introduce the book a little bit for folks who may not have, have read it and broadly speaking, it has its roots in how I experienced and learned about India as the child of Indian immigrant parents, back in the 70s and 80s. Overpopulation was my family’s answer to nearly every question I asked when visiting India during my childhood summers, from why the buses were more crowded than what I was used to to why poverty seems so visible to me as the child of American suburbs.
In short, overpopulation was the go-to explanation for why India was the way it was. But more insidiously, it was an explanation that suggested inevitability. How else could India be given its population size?
Revisiting these childhood memories as a historian, I began to wonder about the history of this hegemonic idea that had been my explanation for India for so long. And I started reading some work both in population history and in feminist critiques of population control policy, including, of course, Carole McCann’s work on the gendering of demography. And from here, it was a short step to recognizing, as others have before me, that population was always also a reproductive question. So human numbers are about how many children are born, how many die, and all the social, cultural, corporeal, and gendered practices that are associated with these births and deaths.
Population, in other words, is a reproductive justice issue. Indeed, much of the foundational feminist work on women’s and gender history in South Asia has engaged with reproductive questions, though they’re not always named as such. So, there is importantly, and, of course, the historiography of birth control, including the foundational work of Sanjam Ahluwalia and Sarah Hodges. There’s also a wider range of research that examines reproductive politics, so the controversies around child marriage and widow remarriage, the scandal aroundMayo’s Mother India, the reform of Hindu laws of marriage and inheritance are just some of those examples. So, this was the conceptual space from which I wrote the book.
A question about the hegemonic idea of overpopulation, a recognition that the history of population must also be a history of reproductive politics and a connection between this work and the broader field of South Asian Women’s and Gender Studies. My goal was to write a history of modern India that put reproduction at its center. I believe that many of the core questions we ask about the 19th and 20th centuries, about colonial rule and anti-colonial thought, about inequality and hierarchy, about economic development, about decolonization and post-colonialism, are also questions of and about reproductive politics.
With that goal in mind, for the rest of my time today, I’ll highlight a few interventions that I see the book making. And I’ll talk about each of these in brief and just list them first off. They’re about the question of chronology for a modern history of reproductive politics, the centrality of India to obstensively global change, the place of feminist activism and population control programs that were effectively anti-women, the intersection of histories of heterosexuality with histories of economy and development and, finally, the implications of this history for our current moment of climate crisis and resurgent populationist discourse.
So, my first point is that we need our histories to have longer time horizons. We tend to see population and reproductive politics as mid-20th century concerns. They seem to arise from transnational population control networks and the national developmentalist state, both in India and elsewhere in South Asia and across the Global South. However, I argue in the book that reproduction as a modern political question was first asked and answered in the process of imperial consolidation in the late-nineteenth century. In other words, Malthusian fears that India was an overpopulated place took hold alongside the conditions created when the Indian colony became part of global systems of food and finance, of agrarian production and capitalist markets ushered in by the British Empire. These fears of overpopulation became entrenched in Indian political culture, even though the population itself was not increasing in the late-nineteenth century.
This brings me to my second point about the book’s findings, which concern the place of India in the global history of reproductive politics. Histories of population and reproduction, even those taking a transnational approach, often tend to center the West. The result is that the rest, even if understood to be important, become, in effect, sort of local spaces, where global—that is Western forces—are enacted. Within such analyses, India becomes a preeminent site for global population control measures or—at most—a sight of collaboration between Western and Indian elites. However, in working on this book, I came to see something different, that is, India was not simply a local place for global politics, reproductive politics was enacted. Instead, I argue that historical conditions in India prompted a reproductive politics with global aspirations to take shape. This was true, for instance, in the mid-twentieth century when the International Planned Parenthood Federation was founded in Bombay with the goal of taking the transnational birth control movement in more explicitly Indian directions. And I start the book with an anecdote about that, and for the founders, Dhanvanthi Rama Rau and Margaret Sanger, this meant a focus on population control as the rationale for contraception. There are a lot of other examples, but in short, I’m interested in how Indian conditions helped to define the meaning and purposes of reproductive control transnationally.
This brings me to a third point of intervention. The history of reproductive politics implicates and is deeply implicated in histories of feminism. Many scholars and activists have made clear that the history of birth control was not a simple sort of trajectory from subjection to freedom in any part of the world. Instead, advocacy for contraception, abortion, and maternal and child health sprang from a variety of motivations, for instance Malthusianism and eugenics, sexual radicalism and anti-patriarchal thought, anti-capitalism and socialism, casteism and anti-caste politics. Feminist activists contributed to all these streams of thought about reproductive control. Consequently, there’s no direct line connecting feminist contraceptive advocacy to a progressive politics.
So, my book aims to build on this understanding to show that organized Indian feminists, who’re often overlooked in the history of state-led development, actually, played a pivotal role in putting family planning on the state’s agenda during the early post-colonial decades. And they did so by making it an essential form of economic development to be conducted by middle class women for their subaltern sisters. Recognizing this makes visible a certain kind of paradox. How is it that avowedly feminist activists helped pave the way for state-led population control programs that would ultimately disregard the reproductive health and autonomy of women, especially of Dalit, Adivasi and Muslim women, who are already the most marginalized.
I try to work through some of these thorny questions in the book, and I’m happy to talk about that more in the Q&A. So, the last chapter of the book considers images of the small and happy heterosexual family as they proliferated across public culture from the 1920s to the 1970s. This is my attempt to investigate the sexual politics of India’s family planning machine and, more broadly, to ask about the co-constitution of histories of heterosexuality and economic development. And that chapter takes a lot of inspiration from recent work on Indian sexology and Professor Haynes’s own work has been absolutely pivotal here on sexuality and advertising. I’m interested to identify a politics that mobilized heterosexuality to naturalize certain modes of planning, certain orientations towards time, structures of sexual intimacy and economic rationality, and visions of future consumption. And I have a few examples of these images that I can share in the Q&A as well.
So lastly, the book’s epilogue learns from the words of rural women in Tamil Nadu, women who have historically been the targets of state-led population control, to consider what this history might mean for the current re-energizing of a populationist discourse in the context of climate change. So I’ll pause for now and turn it over, I think to Amna.
> > Qayyum: Mytheli, thank you so much for getting us started and giving us such a rich sort of overview in just ten minutes of the book. Also, many thanks to Elizabeth and Doug for the invitation and for giving us a chance to gather here today, and I’m looking forward to being in conversation with Mytheli and Carole over the course of the hour. So, in the interest of time, I think we only have about an hour, so I’ll get started on my comments.
So, I won’t go into summarizing some of the book’s key takeaways because I think Mytheli has done that so well. But I will signal briefly to some of its main historiographic interventions, which I think we should keep in mind as we discuss the work. So, the first is the ambitious temporal arc of the book as Mytheli mentions, spanning from the 1870s to the 1970s. And this, as Mytheli rightly points out in the book, many projects on population and reproduction, including the one that I’m currently writing, they start with post-war or mid-century histories. So, the book is not only a call to arms for us to write histories of reproduction which cross the temporal colonial-postcolonial divide, but it also expertly shows us how reproduction emerges as a terrain on which to enact a framework of politics across this period from famine to child marriage to, obviously in the post-colonial period, national development. So the book also makes a compelling argument for us to think about what family planning means for different actors who are engaged in supporting it. So, from the straight-up link between population and economic development, to different, differing valences of liberation and welfare.
And Mytheli, I would love for you to speak a little bit more about this difference between family planning as liberation versus women’s welfare and what this does is about differences within elite women and their conceptions of the political economy of reproduction. And I guess with that, uh, I guess I’ve already started on my questions and comments, so I have a few more that sort of bunched together, but please feel free to engage with the ones that you think are more productive.
So, my first question is about the ethical and the religious, and I really, really enjoyed reading chapter five about the happy family and the rich detail and, in particular, engagement with the visual sources and thinking about the normative aspects of family planning. And because this is a book which crosses that sort of colonial-postcolonial temporal divide, what struck me most were how debates and re-configurations around Brahmacharya figured in reproductive and birth control thinking. And from what it seems, is that by in the post-war period, they get wedded to the small family norm, and the focus on sexual ethics is increasingly replaced by ideas of consumption and modernization within the soft small family unit. So I’m wondering if you could reflect on this change that happens in the post-war period in the ethical and religious case made for or against family planning. So is family planning mostly about political economy, or are there figures who continue to make a case for it in ethical terms? And I’m thinking here about the Pakistan case which I’m working on and I focus on sort of Islamic modernists who are actively writing about family planning as an ethical project. So I wonder if there are any similarities that we can also draw on from India. And while we are on the subject of religion, also wondering if you could speak a little bit more about the religious and caste dimensions of the postcolonial population control project. So your book and Sanjam Ahulwalia’s book talks about how Muslim and Dalit reproduction was vilified under late colonialism, but what happens to this in post-1947? And what does this tell us about citizen formation in Nehruvian India? So is it vilification of reproduction now packaged along class lines or is religious and caste identity still overtly or covertly targeted in these projects and how?
And then another set of questions has to deal with your work on the global color line, which you bring out so powerfully how Indian actors, including demographers, involved in this project of creating and resisting the notion of a global color line constructed through you know demographic axes of knowledge and mediating debates over migration, among other things. But I wonder if you could speak a little bit and I guess, this is going to be a recurring theme in my questions, about what happens to the global color line in the post-war period. So at their core, mid-century population control is a racializing project, but I’m wondering if we can think through the valences in which racializing forms of knowledge are deployed in different ways in the post-war period.
And I’ll stop there, one final question about labor. So you bring out a very wide range of actors: feminists, demographers, sexologists, everyday citizens. But I’m wondering if we could think a little bit more about physicians and doctors as well, and how they negotiated their space within a state-led population control project. What relationship did they share with it, and is there a way in which, if we think about labor, so physicians, health visitors and others, we can think about the relationship, rethink some of the relationship between the citizens, the state and population control?
So I think we’ll stop there, and we can have more time for Q&A, and I think should I hand it over to Carole now, yes okay.
> > McCann: Thank you. Thank you very much, and I want to start as well by thanking Elizabeth and Mytheli for and Doug for inviting me to be part of this, and I’m looking forward to the conversation with all of the participants, as well as the panelists.
I think this book provides a really rich analysis of India within the history of the modern population-imaginary, and that’s an imaginary that I would define that constructs human reproductive impacts on past prosperity is the central problem of the modern world. The ability and obligation to regulate the natural forces of population come to signify the modernity of nations and individuals. And the book’s interrogation of this flawed narrative I think deepens our understanding of the role of numbers within the colonial imagination by situating the calculus of life and death and imperial fiscal management, anti-colonial politics, national development planning, and feminist engagements with them. In so doing, I really do think the book effectively reframes the historiography of mid-20th century family planning population control and feminisms, both by expanding the scope of that history and by placing India at the center of that history. And I should situate my remarks by noting that I am not a student of South Asian history. My engagement with India comes through my interest in demography and in numbers as the language with which modern stories of human reproduction and its impacts are told.
My own work focuses on the epistemic and effective commitments population statistics and the work those statistics do in shaping women’s lives, social worlds and futures, and national futures. I argue that understanding the cultural work of population figures is a vital importance for reproductive justice movements, because population statistics are really tricky tools for social justice movements, because they, while they can reveal inequities, they also conceal the politics that brings statistics to life. And I’ve written about demography’s statistical practices that animated the mid-20th century population crisis and how that configured women’s naturalized bodies as the cause of population excess and thus the site of regulation and that those practices underpinning family planning programs build a binary of contraceptively competent and incompetent women and that that structures so much of feminist engagement around the question of family planning and population control and birth control.
And as part of my work, I do, I have critiqued Western demographic research on Indian population dynamics, perhaps, in fact, committing the, the biases that Mytheli points out in terms of focusing on the West. But that is the perspective I bring to my reading of this book. And from that perspective, I particularly appreciate the expansive archive that Mytheli has compiled. It appropriately centers India and the full range of population’s concerns: death, movement, and birth. And I say it in that order because I think that’s the order in which it captured the attention of imperial governments, anti-colonial actors, and postcolonial nations. Histories of statistics note the 19th century was about quantifying mortality and the value of life and, and, but mostly they ignore the role of India and famine management and epidemic management in that history.
Early 20th century, as Mytheli points out, a history of migrations ignores the South Asian voices that spoke against the drawing of that color global color line. And the mid-20th century population discourse made a fetish of fertility rates and changed human reproductivity. Fertility rates were and often still are conflated with growth rates as if routine death and migration no longer mattered, only the natural excesses of women’s bodies mattered. But the Malthusian spectors of mass misery want war and death haunt mid-20th century futurities.
By beginning of the late 19th century, I think the book really illuminates the long history of the framing of the question of reproduction in India in terms of economic scarcity and want. It really helps us understand that deeply inflected imperial, how deeply inflected and by imperial logics the preoccupations with costs and the value of India’s population are.
And from my point of view, it’s critical to trace the impact of that sedimented imperial logic in the enumeration and aggregation practices by which we convert human events of birth, death, and movement into national rates of mortality, fertility, and migration.
I won’t belabor that point, which I have a tendency to do, but I want to, I want to focus on what I think of as a major contribution to the project of excavating the political inflections of population numbers that is, that the book makes through its really nuanced analysis of the affective and political commitments to national well being, pride, and progress, but both by India’s political leaders and feminist family planning advocates. You know, as she notes, family planning was a means to bridge tensions within the national planning process. It enables claims of poverty alleviation without challenging structural inequities, promoting women’s development without challenging patriarchy, and together these smooth the tensions producing politics of dehumanizing women in terms of population control, and I think the careful analysis of the conjuncture, conjunctures and complexities of Indian feminists in this history is, is really very important.
One point I would want to question, while I agree that and use the same, the 1952 founding of International Planned Parenthood Federation, as that that India is central to shaping the population policy, I also wonder if the analysis leads us to give insufficient weight to the crowds of American demographers and funding that and the weight of that on shaping the definition of and the solution of India’s population problems in the, from the 1950s to the 70s. And I’d be really happy to talk about that, because I think it’s important to consider how we can both center India as a shaper of global policy and fully account for those neo-colonial interventions.
To conclude, as my interest always comes back to how feminist might navigate the terrain of population politics towards justice, I want to highlight that final provocation of the book that I think warrants much further discussion on our part. The epilog brings the human scale back in through the contrast between the promise of future prosperity and family planning programs, contrast it with the precarity of the present that oral history participants cite as underpinning their reproductive decisions. I think that notion of the precarity of the present has the potential to draw our attention back to the structural inequalities and patriarchal constraints that population statistics, population control, family planning discourses alike allied. And in so doing, I think you can open space to effectively challenge the current, the terms of current reproductive politics under late stage capitalism, and I really hope we can talk more about that.
Thank you. Doug. Oh sorry.
> > Lhost: I was gonna say Mytheli, I’ll give you a minute to respond to some of those questions and comments briefly if you’d like while we gather questions and answers from the audience and for those of you who are in the audience, you can submit questions through the Q&A feature.
> > Sreenivas: Great, I will try to keep my comments pretty brief and hope to cycle back to many of these questions, but first of all, thank you for such a rich sort of engagement with the book and some really wonderful questions for me to keep thinking through, and I think for us to think through together, so thank you for that. Um I think there’s a, as Amna herself pointed out, there’s a number of questions that you raised that are essentially around what’s the relationship between the colonial and the post-war or postcolonial and what changes and what are points of continuity, and I think that’s a really excellent question on a whole, whole number of levels. I’m not going to take up all of those levels, but I sort of welcome for their conversation on that, but I think one one place to think about it has to do with the question that you raised about religious, caste, and class dimensions. And this is something that I’m really kind of curious to keep thinking about because the late colonial period, as many people have shown, I mean certainly Sanjam’s work but also Charu Gupta’s work and others, you know have really sort of made clear that the kind of communal demography that characterize the 1930s and 1940s, has a long life into into sort of postcolonial India and what I was interested in, and we see that long life now right with the, with the really like, I don’t know it was it was communalized before I don’t even know what to call it now, right. I mean it’s sort of like, I don’t know, hyper communalized in the current moment and context right and the sort of current vilification of Muslim populations, in particular, but Dalit populations as well, and I think, so I’ve been wondering about this, in part, because the explicit discourse and rhetoric that I found from the 1950s and 1960s tended to avoid the kind of, the kind of language that we see reemerging from the 1980s and especially 1990s. And I’m trying to figure out what to do with that, like there were these moments that appear once in a while, and I talk about them, where I find them, in the book, you know where some of the the women family planners who go out to talk about you know sort of talk family planning to rural women will sometimes get frustrated and make these kind of side comments about who’s accepting and who’s not accepting family planning. But yet a lot remains I think sort of unsayable in these discourses, and I, this is sort of more of a question than an answer, but I’m sort of not just thinking about pre and post-47 but thinking about this moment of the 1950s and 1960s and national development discourses and what it, what it opens up and what, what it leaves unsaid or kind of under the surface, just as a thought.
And because I said I would keep my my things brief, I’ll just come to one other point that comes from from Carole’s comments having to do with the place of sort of American demographers and their commitments in these policies, which I would absolutely, I would absolutely agree with and kind of reflecting back on the book, I think, part of, part of the longer chronology, I hope, sort of allows me to situate the American presence, which was my goal, in terms of recognizing that these politics come from a set of collaborations and not only, right, from from a kind of an American intervention.
But, that being said, I think there’s a lot of room for something that I’ve been thinking about in some future writing and I’m hoping some maybe collaborative writing if folks are interested in in these questions, I am really wanting to be able to situate this shift in the 50s and 60s within a more effectively transnational frame that sort of looks at multiple places over time and and thinks through what a truly transnational history of this process might look like that sort of locally grounded.
So I just want to put that out there for folks who are interested. That’s certainly a project that I would really like to engage in, but I’ll pause there for now, if there are other questions.
> > Haynes: Okay, I don’t think we have questions, yet, but I had, I have reading this book, I had a, had a number of of questions. I guess the one I would like to ask is is about the epilog which Carole mentioned and and where you bring in the oral interviews and, and I wondered whether you know how does the question that really occurs to me is how, how does one engage the perspective of the subaltern and subaltern women in this, in this process and clearly the adoption of reproductive technologies does become more widespread, but a sense is that maybe it has very little to do with the discourses, the elite discourses that you, you talk about through much of your book and so how do we get at how ordinary people are perceiving the issue of reproductive technologies and, and other aspects of the birth control process. So this seems to me the real, a real gap that we have in our in our understanding of the politics.
> > Sreenivas: Yeah, thank you for that. Um I spent a lot of time, when I was writing this book kind of like worried about this exact question because you’re absolutely right. These are a set of elite discourses that operate in a particular space with you know so that some of these, you know, Indian demographers are far more likely, of course, to be talking to American and other demographers than they are to be actually kind of engaging with sort of grassroots or folks on the ground.
So yes, I think that gap remains, and I think the reason that the epilog exists, was in part to recognize that gap, but I think the, the thing that enabled me to write the epilogue was to, was to stop looking to these alternative voices for critique or an alternative perspective. Which is not to say that these alternative perspectives don’t exist, I really think they do, but rather to kind of stop asking the oral history work to sort of solve my archival problems. Right and to say, well, no way there, there must be like, there must be a critique and as someone once pointed out to me like earlier earlier in the work, you know, it’s a tall order to ask for such a thing, because, of course, if you have been confronted by this discourse, potentially for your whole life, and you are constantly told that your reproduction is the problem, and you’re constantly going back to the medical sort of institutions, right, you’re constantly, every time you encounter a doctor or health care practitioner you’re getting the same message it really does become a taller to ask for something different, and so.
I, once I stopped that search and instead tried to listen to a little bit more of these voices, it at least enabled me to think about how the sort of the, the end product, in other words, the sort of reproductive control, right, the that’s evidenced in sort of the big demographic data about declining fertility rates in India now, that that big story doesn’t necessarily mean the winning out of the sort of ideologies of modernity and consumption that are underpinning family planning discourse, that there’s a lot of room between those two which I was, I was trying to get up.
> > Haynes: We have at least, we have a couple questions in the Q&A now from [inaudible] Bhandari. He says, thank you for this wonderful session I was wondering if you could comment on how much of these reproduction policies were an attempt by the postcolonial state to sanitize history and mythology by proposing the main the main ideal was a heterosexual couple, with emphasis on reproduction, whereas mythology show the richness of sexualities and love and sex for passion as well that’s, the first question. And, and in the second question is that goes beyond perhaps goes beyond the focus of book, but how would you explain, forced sterilization drives as by Sanjay Gandhi, were these policies and politics foreshadowing the, these brutal interventions so.
> > Sreenivas: Yeah, thank you for, for both of those um, and the second one is maybe easier for me to answer than the first, but on the question of the forced sterilization under the Emergency, one of the arguments in the book is, is trying to, is one that all of the structures and ideas that, that were enacted in the Emergency predated the Emergency. So, although it is true that the Emergency Period was much more draconian in its sterilization policy, and it turned towards male sterilization, think that’s significant, nevertheless, all of the you know the, there was already an existence of sterilization camps prior to the Emergency. There were sort of targets and quotas prior to the Emergency, so all of the things that we associate with that already sort of pre-existed it. And so I think what I’m interested in is how the Emergency sort of rightfully you know gets sort of figured as the sort of worst forms of population control, but often leaves all of the other structures and ideological underpinnings sort of off the hook. And in fact helps to normalize, I would argue, female sterilization in its wake, which we still see in the disparate rates of male and female sterilization across South Asia.
So yeah, I think that the heterosexuality question in regard to sort of like sanitizing is super interesting, and I really want to think about that, think about that a little bit more. I don’t really have an answer. I don’t know if actually Doug does. When I’m sort of thinking about sort of earlier histories of sexology and sort of cleaning up certain myths and ideas about Brahmacharya, but I do think that one of the sort of interesting points that you know Ishita Pande makes, for example, in thinking through how certain ideas like Brahmacharya get sort of reconfigured in the space of the modern, right, and she argues about Brahmacharya becoming a life stage, which I think is and Doug talks about this as well, and I think this is sort of maybe one way to go right. I don’t think what’s happening is a sort of a total rejection of those earlier visions, but how they get sort of categorized into these modern spaces, so that they can neatly fit that way, right, so like Rama and Sita, for example, becoming sort of the ideal monogamous couple, sort of rewritten along those lines.
> > Haynes: We have a couple more more questions. Okay. Okay. I’m sorry. I’m trying to see if there’s two different questions or one.
So one question from Sushant Kumar is, is the role, about the role of scientific authoritarianism or scientism on behalf of the pre, pre and post-independent state institutions in shaping Indian population policy. So, I guess it’s a question area that is being posed here. Could so could you talk about that, and we have another question after that.
> > Sreenivas: Sure um. Yeah, so I think, I think this probably touches on Carole’s work as well, in regard to demography, so please feel free to chime in, but I think what, I think what I was interested in was thinking through the sort of scientific certitudes around development and the way in which population figures as a variable within demographic or population discourses and as Carole also pointed out sort of some of the affective connections that are made to that vision.
So the book, you know, doesn’t spend a huge amount of time sort of talking about sort of science, with a capital S per se, but what I am more interested in is how do people, how does that vision, right, that sort of a set of ideas about demographic transition theory, for example, as an idea that all societies are supposed to pass through this demographic transition and that it’s possible to do top-down interventions to accelerate that transition, I’m interested in how that becomes figured in public discourses as like an ideal to have attachment to, right. How do you have pride in the notion of controlling population, right? How does that have the small happy family become the site of desire that is, that acts as if that the sort of the scientific discourse sometimes acts as if that’s not happening, but I think is actually, you know, central to sort of translating these claims on the ground. And one of the things that I’ve been struck by just in sort of talking about the book with, with folks both inside and outside of sort of academic context is how often people have said to me well this, this helps me to understand, especially those who are maybe not historians, this helps me to understand like why I grew up with the ideas that I did, and I think that speaks to this question of like the kind of affective attachment to the small family that has its roots in a particular kind of science set of scientific authorities, but that that, that becomes real in people’s lives through these other set of mediations.
> > Haynes: From Muhammad Ali Imran. He says, I was wondering if the panelists could speak more on if and how post-partition, these national development discourses have diverged. I think he means between India and Pakistan in particular. Correct me if I’m wrong. How do you mediate geopolitical definitions and perhaps divergent yet co-constituent, constituted histories in understanding the sexuality and reproductive rights, especially in the case of Pakistan, India?
> > Sreenivas: Yeah, I wonder if that’s a question that Amna and I would have to answer jointly.
The first thing that occurs to me is like well you know go to her talk later because it’s um because that’s where I’m hoping to learn more about this. So I, you know, I don’t know the answer to that question because I, it’s not something that I was able to particularly focus on. I guess, I could sort of start us off, though, in terms of thinking about where, if the earlier history of this book which focuses on the 19th century and pre-1947 are making a claim that I think is relevant for thinking about South Asia, more broadly, right, which is that the neo-Malthusian idea about population in South Asia or in colonial India takes hold well before there is any rise of population, so that any population rise is always sort of ready, always has a ready framework within which it can be situated and explained and intervened in. That I think is a history that is probably shared. I think there is a sort of a, I wonder about the questions of divergence that emerged, for example, between sort of the other set of demographic debates about West Pakistan and East Pakistan and the role of that you know in 1971. I think there’s sort of huge, huge places or moments that could push towards a kind of a divergent response.
But I don’t know, I don’t know if Amna, you know, you want to speak to that at all. Not to put you on the spot.
> > Qayyum: I will, I can just put in a comment or two because it’s, it’s a, it’s a really good question, and it’s something I’m working through throughout the project. I think one of the places where we do see divergences is, which I sort of alluded to earlier, is sort of the ethical dimensions of population control, and I think in Pakistan because the locus of sovereignty is not just you know in a straight-up relationship between sovereignty and national development, Islam also emerges as a locus of sovereignty given sort of Pakistan’s peculiar formation. Population control, then, is not while it might be about economic development, there’s also a case that is deeply normative or ethical that is being constructed in Pakistan for it, which then leads to it being sort of politicized and resisted by multiple actors. So I’ll put the ethical in there, and I’ll leave it for that, and this is something you know we can talk about more in our shared conversations later.
> > Sreenivas: Yeah and, if I can just come back on one piece of this, on the ethical question, because I know you raised it before, and I didn’t address it. I’m also thinking about what are, your questions are sort of prompting me to think what are the ethics of development itself, right, and so to not situate those as necessarily as as separate sets of discourses and questions and, and going back to my affective attachments point, right, what kind of attachments to the nation as a site of the development process, I think, become, is, this is, there’s an attempt to mobilize that set of affective attachments as opposed to, not opposed but, but in a way that I don’t see the kind of trends that you’re suggesting here about an ethical attachment that’s perhaps exists outside of or beyond the nation state in the national space. So maybe that’s just another, another point that we might want to think about.
> > Haynes: A kind of related set of questions is why did, why did the convergences remain in many cases and do, why are there, why are there continued overlaps despite the different ideologies of the, of the state?
We do have several questions now, so from Haley Swenson. I’m just going to ask the first one here. So climate and disease seemed to be the chief concerns of the colonial, colonial proto-population control project. Can you speak to the way the precarity of the present creates or makes difficult opportunity for an alternative to population control rooted in both climate and reproductive justice?
> > Sreenivas: Yeah, thank you and hey Haley, um I think yeah, and this also relates to I think Carole’s points earlier about precarity and sort of thinking about that in relation to this, so. For those who are not constantly following the climate change in population discourse, I will just sort of put out a little background, which is that the resurgence of, you know, so, so in the 1990s, in large part due to feminist organizing and activism, the language of population control sort of fell out of favor, as probably many people know, and was sort of substituted with claims around reproductive health and health and rights. And you know Mohan Rao and others have talked about how that transition occurs at this moment of simultaneous, the demise of the Soviet Union and the rise of neoliberal capitalism globally and so that the promise of the rejection of population control is never really fulfilled.
That’s all by way of saying that, but that the ideologies sort of remain and have kind of come back now, in the context of climate change and, once again, we find that those who are at the, at the margins and who are rendered most vulnerable are also those rendered both responsible for or are seen as responsible for climate change and rendered as responsible for fixing it. You know Kalpana Wilson, who just did a brilliant talk, I went to last week sort of outlined the stakes of, of how this, how this happens in the context both of the rise of authoritarian nationalisms that in the Indian context sort of demonized Muslim women, in particular, but are very much part of sort of global development discourses that sort of use the claim of climate change to call for greater contraceptive usage by women in the Global South so.
All that by way of saying, so anyone who looks at these histories, I think will have to, I guess I’ll set back and say so there’s a question of crisis, right, that, that in the 1960s, the claim of a population bomb, right, became the crisis that enabled all kinds of you know coercive interventions in people’s bodies and especially women’s bodies. And so now again we’re confronting a crisis, this one, a real one, of global climate change and what I see as the sort of real importance of not, the failures of the population bomb were that it was neither true nor did, did the the control measures that were designed to deal with it, were they successful on their own terms, which was lowering fertility rates. And I think that’s a good and important story for us to remember, now that if you’re sort of truly to confront climate crisis, we can’t look to these sort of like false stories about who’s responsible for causing it or who’s responsible for fixing it and that, that, and there I think that addressing the question of precarity of people’s lives and livelihoods as being the crisis of climate because, as opposed to their fertility, I think, becomes the sort of central intervention that that we need to make.
> > Haynes: Elizabeth, we have time for one more question? Yes, okay for this comes from, there are several questions, there are a couple of questions, but I think we’re only going to have time for the first.
Aprajita Sarcar, as she says, I’m asking questions that come, are coming from my work. So, so thank you for the discussion. My first question is about archival traces. I have Durba Mitra’s book Indian Sex Life in mind when I ask how to work with excessive stress on the heterosexual nuclear family and the erasure of all other forms? As a second tied question, would framing the Indian nuclear family to be a product of Hindu aggrandizement limit its creative meanings?
> > Sreenivas: Yeah, those are both really good questions for which I probably don’t have answers, to be honest. But I think, I guess on the, on the first question, you know, I guess I would sort of humbly say that when I was sort of working on my book, really all I felt I could do was to sort of make that history of heterosexuality visible um as opposed to a taken-for-granted norm. But also to think about one of the, one of the struggles I had in, in writing the book right is comes with this sort of universality that you’re talking about that makes it seem as if there is no history there.
But secondly that ironically, separates that history, from all the other things that we think are associated, in this case with colonial and postcolonial development. So, I guess my attempt was to to historic size, by putting those in conversation, right, that the history of economic development has to grapple with the question of heterosexuality and not sort of leave that as a, as an unquestioned assumption, so I, again I don’t think that fully answers the question, but I that’s, that’s sort of where I was, where I was starting from.
> > Lhost: I think now, unfortunately, we are at time, so I would like to ask everyone to join me in thanking our, our author and our discussants, and Professor Haynes for leading what has been a very stimulating and a wide ranging conversation. Just thinking about where reproduction goes, it takes us in so many directions from political economy to climate change and everything else going on these days.
So, I would like to just announce once more that our next event will be on Tuesday, December 7, and we’ll be talking about Branding Bhakti. And with that, I would like to thank Mytheli for agreeing to participate and for being a stellar author in terms of promoting and publicizing this event, in addition to putting together comments and participating. So thank you all for joining us today, and I look forward to seeing you again at the next event.
> > Sreenivas: Thank you so much, and just really quick, I know we didn’t get to all the questions, so please feel free to like shoot me an email or tag me on Twitter. I’m happy to keep talking okay.
> > Haynes: I hope you’re still able to see comments and the questions and, and in the, in the chat there before, before you depart so.
> > Lhost: I will, I’ll save the chat and I can send it to you, Mytheli.
> > Sreenivas: Oh, that would be great. Thank you.
For those who weren’t able to join us for this event, here’s the recording and transcript. Enjoy!
Transcript for Conversations on South Asia with Abhishek Kaicker
>> Lhost: All right, hello everyone and welcome to the first event in the Conversations on South Asia Series for the 2021 academic year here at Dartmouth College. I am Elizabeth Lhost. I am a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Dartmouth College and also a historian of modern South Asia, and it’s really my pleasure to be moderating this conversation today. I imagine that it will be a very stimulating and productive conversation since Abhishek has written such a wonderful and detail-filled book The King and The People, which was published with Oxford University Press in 2020.
Before we begin, I would like to acknowledge that Dartmouth College, which is the host of this series, sits on the ancestral and unceded lands of the Abenaki people, who are members of the Wabanaki Confederacy. I would also like to thank our series sponsors: the Bodas Family Academic Programming Fund, the Asian Societies, Cultures and Languages program, and the Department of History for supporting this program.
And I’d especially like to thank Bruch Lehmann and Britny Town for their support with logistics. I would also like to thank our series co-organizer Professor Douglas Haynes for his tireless support and also to acknowledge the support and assistance we’ve received this year from two of our undergraduate Bodas Family Academic Programming Fund Fellows: Sri Sathvik Rayala and Bryanna Entwistle. They are working with us this year to make the series more accessible and also more successful, we hope.
We have a fantastic lineup of authors and books, who will be joining us for this series this year. Our next event in the series for those who are anxious to put it on the calendar and also to get registered will be Tuesday, November 9th with Mytheli Sreenivas’s Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India.
If you’d like to get a jump start, registration for that event is available at the link https://dartgo.org/conversations-sreenivas and very soon, we should have that link in the chat for all of you.
And then, in December we’ll be hosting Nicole Karapanagiotis for a discussion of her book Branding Bhakti:Krishna Consciousness and the Makeover of a Movement.
And so we’ll have those links in the chat for you so that you can access them more easily.
Today we have Abhishek Kaicker, who is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Berkeley in the Department of History there, and he’s a historian of Persianate South Asia from roughly 1200 to 1900, with a focus on the history of the Mughal Empire. Interested in intellectual history, the history of concepts, early modern global history, religion, politics, and continuities in pre-colonial on post-colonial South Asia, Kaicker has recently published his first book, which is the subject of our discussion today, The King and the People: Sovereignty and Popular Politics in Mughal Delhi. He has also written essays concerning the Mughal Empire, including “The Little Conquest of the Red Fort,” “Petitions and Local Politics in the Late Mughal Empire: The View from Kol,” and “The Promises and Perils of Courtly Poetry: The Case of Mir ‘Abd al-Jalil Bilgrami (1660-1725) in the Late Mughal Empire.”
So, once we get started, the author will spend about 10 minutes introducing the book and its central claims to all of us, and then following his conversation, we’ll have commentary, questions, and reflections from two discussants. Tiraana Bains will be our first discussant. Tiraana is the Modern Intellectual History Postdoctoral Fellow in Dartmouth’s Department of History. She is a historian of South Asia, Britain, and the British Empire, and her research focuses on questions of empire, statecraft, labor, and political economy as it concerns both South Asians and the British. Her recent publications include “Thinking the Empire Whole” and “Reconnecting the Global British Empire: Response to Critics.” She is currently working on her book Instituting Empire: The Contested Makings of a British Imperial State in South Asia, 1750-1800, which looks at the growth of British imperialism in and around the Indian Ocean basin.
Our second discussant then will be Fariba Zarinebaf, who is a Professor of History at the University of California, Riverside. She primarily researches the Middle East, particularly the social and urban history of the Ottoman Empire and Iran from the early modern to modern periods.
Professor Zarinebaf [has] published several books, including Mediterranean Encounters: Trade and Pluralism in Early Modern Galata and Women on the Margins: Gender, Charity, and Justice in the Early Modern Middle East. Her Crime and Punishment in Istanbul, 1700-1800 book filled a crucial gap in Ottoman Studies and is directly connected, I think, in part, to the discussion of urban politics and the the rise of cities in this time period that [we] will be talking about with Abhishek’s book today. She has also published numerous articles, including “Capitulations and the Rise of an Ottoman Bourgeoisie: A Command Economy in Transition?” and “Policing Morality: Crossing Gender and Communal Boundaries in an Age of Political Crisis and Religious Controversy in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul.” So, once the three panelists have shared their comments, we will then open the floor to questions from the audience.
You should have access to the Q&A feature at the bottom of the webinar, and we will do our best to make sure the author and the commentators have a chance to answer your questions. And now, without further delay, please welcome Professor Kaicker.
>> Kaicker: So, shall I begin? Great well, thank you so much Elizabeth for the invitation to virtually visit Dartmouth. I wish it were in-person and am very sorry not to be in a beautiful campus in the fall. And thank you to Fariba and Tiraana for your responses that I’m eager to hear, much more eager to hear than my own very soon scattered comments. And, just a quick welcome to all of the people who are attending today. I see many familiar names, ranging from the entirety of my academic career from college, from the very beginning of college, to the world of Twitter. So I’m very glad that you’re all here, and I hope that what follows will be stimulating discussion, so let me just say a few words about this book, which began, I think, as all first books do as really an undergraduate question or a question that you know began to appear to me at the beginning of graduate school, which was simply this you know, can there be a history of ordinary people in the Mughal Empire. Is this something that is possible? Where are the people in the history of the Mughal Empire?
And, in some ways, of course, this is you know a self evident question that has been answered extensively in the Marxist historiography of South Asia. So I would you know only like to remind you of the just immensely important work of historians, such as Irfan Habib, who has shaped our fields completely in talking about the mass of the population of South Asia, the peasantry and their importance and that history in the Mughal period. And yet it always seemed to me that there was something crucial missing from the treatment of the agrarian landscape of South Asia. Surely it is true, of course, the South Asia, then, and even to some extent now it’s predominantly an agricultural region. Yet at the same time, we were always told the cities, such as Delhi and Lahore and Agra, were among the largest metropolises in the world. So what was the nature of urban experience and the nature of urban politics in these places in the 17th and 18th centuries? And this is not merely an idol question simply because of the fact that, on the one hand, over the last 20 or 30 years there’s been an increasing emphasis in the history of a global and connected and in modernity in which cities have appeared as absolutely central nodes of the kind of political transformations, preceding the kind of political transformation, so by the end of the 18th century would constitute the structure of the modern world as we know it. I mean the two great revolutions, and particularly the aura or the shadow of the French Revolution hangs temporarily in both directions across from 1789, and it’s something for all of us to grapple with, those of us who are interested in questions of modernity and politics in other parts of the world.
So this this question, you know, lay at the heart of my inquiry, and I was inspired, of course, by the work of professors, Zarinebaf, for instance, you know who could answer and address these questions in very direct ways and very impressively by recourse to a large extent powerful archives. And when I looked through, for instance, Fariba’s bibliography, I could only stare with envy at these large number of administrative records of the city of Istanbul of the kind that simply don’t exist for very particular historical reasons for Delhi and presumably for other places in South Asia too.
So, one of the main problems was that there was no archive as such to answer the question and that I had to constitute my archives. And when I started constituting the archive, when I turned to the sources that were available to me, I was confronted with an immediate problem, because these were literary sources. And they did not necessarily address the questions that I was interested in. They were written almost invariably by elites, and for these elites, there was an absolute and implacable condescension and dislike for what they referred to as the [inaudible] bazaar right, “the people of the market and the street.” And so the question was basically an interpretive question. In what ways and how could I possibly use these kinds of sources to talk about urban politics, about people’s lives in the city? When I started reading these sources, I discovered also the uncomfortable fact that they were absolutely filled with instances of political violence, but political violence that was expressed almost always in a religiosity and so what looks like extreme religious bigotry and warfare litters the pages of accounts of urban life in the 17th and 18th century. And this is something of which I think historians have long been aware in South Asia, and it’s something that makes them uncomfortable, but the cause of the discomfort, really is the present political circumstances of South Asia, not the historical realities themselves right. And so again, you know, turning to the historiography of my former colleague [Dwinelle?] Hall, Natalie Zemon Davis and her just absolutely brilliant essays from the 1970s made it possible for me to start thinking more seriously about the kinds of religious violence I was seeing in these pages and to begin to recognize that this was in fact not merely religious violence, but it was political violence and as I did this, the very question of what is the religious, and what is the political became increasingly confounded for me.
A second question that became immediately apparent to me was that a lot of this violence, when it is expressed in archival sources, addresses the figure of the king and Delhi, of course, is a peculiar city because the king lives in the city of Delhi, but it’s never done it became clear to me that there was a kind of organic tie-up in elite conceptions, but perhaps also to some extent in popular life, between the figure of the king and the figure of the people. And the people here are, of course, a literary artifact in our texts that I think they also correspond to a reality that I hope that I’ve been able to uncover to some degree in this work. And one way, of course, to get at the reality of these literary artifacts was to focus on the space of the city where even literary artifacts begin to acquire a kind of highly concretized reality in spatial context. So thinking about space became a way to ground the literary in particular kind of things.
And, in looking at the figure of the King, I realized that the question that created the basis for the working and the emergence of the people as political subjects was the act of sovereignty itself, the performance of sovereignty. And again, I think, in South Asia, we have long suffered from a poor historiography on questions of sovereignty, and so we use the word very, very loosely. I’m guilty of it myself, and we have not thought sufficiently about what it means to talk about sovereignty when we talk about politics, and this is of course a larger problem of the question of etic and emic concepts as they come from the historiography of Europe to the rest of the world and are applied here and Mughal historians have, and I think again I include myself in this criticism you know, particularly, particularly careless in the importation of concepts from European historiography to South Asia. But it occurred to me that thinking more seriously about sovereignty in the case of the Mughal Empire, in its own terms, raises important problems.
And one of the problems was that there is no such physical object as sovereignty, rather, there is a discourse. There were ways in which Mughal authors talk about the emergence of the constitution of political power, and the people were always part of this vision in some way. What’s interesting about the 17th and 18th centuries, is the economic transformations of the Mughal empire mainly the pouring in of new world silver created new material conditions in which assertive urbanites could actually begin to address the king. And as a discourse of sovereignty shifted, particularly in the 17th, in the second half of the 17th century, towards a kind of Islamic formal legalism which again has many parallels in the Ottoman empire the people began to assert themselves in new and complicated ways, so you know the book then traces the emergence of the arc of these people into political subjects [inaudible] and begins and ends with two major acts of political violence. That, I think, outline and lay out the possibility broadly of the historical journey of a populace into a people right, of a group of people, of, uh, you know the masses as such into political actors. In a world in which there was no formal conception of that possibility and I think this is something that speaks more broadly to questions or historiography in Asia, in Europe, and elsewhere, so I’ll stop here.
>> Bains: Alright, so I’ll go ahead, then and I’ll begin by quickly thanking Elizabeth and Douglas and the student assistants for helping put this together, and, of course, Professors Kaicker and Zarinebaf for agreeing to participate in this conversation. So I will begin my speaking briefly about where we can locate this important new book The King and the People in historiography of the Mughal Empire, but also South Asia, more generally, and then I’ll pose a few questions, of course Abhishek you should feel free to pick up on whatever you might find interesting and for those of you who haven’t had a chance to read the book yet, some of these questions might point in the direction of the range of themes that are discussed so as many of you will be familiar. In recent years, in the past decade there’s been a wealth of new literature on Mughal South Asia and the Mughal empire. And really innovative efforts to try and expand the ways in which we usually conceptualize Mughal political authority. These include works by Munis Faruqui, who has really thought through the ways in which we can think beyond the person of the Mughal Emperor himself and think about princely households as important political institutions, and particularly the role to play outside imperial capital, especially when they’re waging succession battles, wars of succession, across various Mughal provinces.
Equally, Supriya Gandhi’s work, her recent book has focused on the figure of Dara Shikoh and how a princely figure who will never end up becoming Emperor, how he participates in Mughal intellectual and cultural life. Others such as Audrey Truschke and Rajeev Kinra can have turned to more middling figures, including that of say a Hindu munshi or a scribe Chandar Bhan Brahman, who, nevertheless, are able to participate in the project of Persianate literary sophistication as well as a projection of Mughal imperium. And in many ways The King and the People is also building on this attention to cultural and intellectual history to this attention to literary texture and how Persian poetry and other forms of discourse are circulating, both in the Mughal court but also outside. That being said what this book is doing is also fundamentally different, which is rethinking Mughal state formation by really taking popular politics and everyday conversation seriously.
One could say that the traditional or more conventional way of doing Mughal history would be to really see the way the Mughal states sees people and the way the Mughal state envisions the countryside. The introductory chapter in The King and the People is titled “Seeing the People.” But this book is really going beyond just seeing the people. It is also attempting to demonstrate how the people, how Mughal subjects themselves might have conceptualized and challenged or defended the Mughal state so really how is it that people see the state how is it that the denizens of Delhi imagine the figure of the Mughal Emperor and the connection with their own lives and livelihoods between imperial authority and themselves.
So what you, and of course I guess the reason why it hasn’t been done is really due to the limitations of the archive, and as Abhishek has just outlined for us what he really had to do was reconstitute a fragmentary archive. Those of you who are familiar with Nandini Chatterjee’s recent work Negotiating Mughal Law, you will see in that particular piece of scholarship another model for how we might try to bring together a Mughal archive to think through the question of agrarian economy and zamindari landholding in a space such as Malwa. What Professor Kaicker has done is really read official chronicles against the grain, drop on fleeting bits of poetry and even look at materials such as imperial newsletters or akhbarat that have survived in unlikely places such as Sitamau in Madhya Pradesh and so really it’s an act of recovery bringing all this material together, and if you haven’t read the book yet one of the bits that I enjoyed the most is this book’s attention to 18th century jokes and the art of telling a joke across multiple languages, one that operates across Persian and Hindi which might seem very crass but, in fact, contains a kernel of political critique at its heart. In doing all of this, Professor Kaicker is also, in many ways, addressing some of the biggest, weightiest questions at the heart of South Asian historiography. For a long time historians of the subaltern studies collective have asked the question of what is the place of the people, how can ordinary people be constituted as historical subjects.
In his classical essay, “Prose of Counterinsurgency,” Ranajit Guha has discussed the ways in which we can take popular resistance seriously and not simply treated as mindless action akin to a natural disaster and the King and the People is very much engaging with that. There’s also engaging with a very difficult and I suppose inevitable question of imperial transition. How do we explain Mughal decline and the establishment of British colonialism in the subcontinent? And Professor Kaicker is responding to this by really arguing that we need to turn the pre-1757 moment to the pre-Battle of Plassey moment and take seriously the so-called lesser Mughals who are often consigned to a single chapter in South Asian textbooks, though I’m not sure what is being taught in India anymore. And again what this book is really doing is arguing for taking seriously this rich Persian archive as well as archive of vernacular languages which, even for the scattered nevertheless gives us a great wealth of detail about how ordinary people might conceptualize questions of political authority.
So I’ll now turn to some of the questions that I have and I guess my first major question is really the question of geography and region. This book for obvious reasons, as Abhishek has explained, focuses on Delhi. It is the imperial capital, it is where the emperor himself is located. And we do get brief snippets, of course, of what’s happening in Lahore, Surat as well as Ahmedabad, but I’m curious about how popular politics is in those cities and the sort of second cities of the empire, or even smaller, more provincial towns might be unfolding in a slightly different way, due to the absence of the emperor. And the book makes the case that, outside of Delhi, much of the nobility had already managed to create a firmer hold in some of these other places and other regions of the empire, so how is it that this is playing out in different places, is there a slightly different vocabulary that gets deployed outside of Delhi in other regions and equally in terms of thinking about the peasantry in the countryside, how do conflicts in a space, such as Delhi, inflict those in rural spaces and vice versa? Um my second question really speaks to the theme of commerce and economic transformation in the early modern world at large, but in Delhi and South Asia in particular, especially since intensifying commerce is really at the heart of the causal story in this book. It is how, it is how you, explain why the population of Delhi, when Mughal subjects are becoming more assertive, you note the consumption of new commodities, such as coffee, as well as how the consumption of such commodities is creating new spaces for sociability as well as political critique. Commercial prosperity is clearly producing new tensions and ideas. Poetry itself has become a commodity that has a market value during this time period.
In some ways, it seems the Delhi in the 1720s is quite like London in the 1720s, but what I was hoping for was perhaps more discussion of how Mughal subjects and officials during the period are managing and reflecting on commercial transformation and increased commercial vitality. What are the financial mechanisms and innovations that are coming into being at this time of the new relationships of credit and debt? And really what are some of the new economic ideas that are emerging, and how are these economic ideas or economic ideologies reframing social relations, creating new solidarities based on say, trading networks, even creating new alliances across elite and non-elite groups? Are there forms of association of life that diverged from more traditional patterns of communal belonging and kinship? And again, I suppose, on the team of commerce and economic transformation, I think this book can also serve as an excellent resource to rethink the history of labor, especially in urban settings. This book is already providing great detail about various professional communities, caste groups as they operate in Delhi, and the labor that they provide to keep the city running. And, in most of the instances and case studies discussed in the book, many of these communities, such as the shoemakers, come together to invoke the justice of the king and make demands based on particular violations in particular moments, but I’d be curious if there’s a broader discourse about laboring conditions about economic change. Even concerns about their own place in Delhi’s economy and the wider economy of Hindustan and the Mughal empire. And I’m sure the sources don’t really lend themselves to this, but I’m curious if you could excavate more of this or pick out some of these things. And finally, I’ll close with a question of selfhood and self-fashioning.
There’s a rich literature on earlier periods on how ideas of gender and imperial masculinity and femininity are constructed say during the reign of Akbar, for instance, and I’m curious how changing political realities and socioeconomic relations in the late 17th and early 18th century are producing similar changes. And the book already provides very rich insights into how non-elite women are participating in political life, but I’m curious about how discourse around gender might be shifting if at all. And finally, especially given all the recent work on conceptions of the Persianate, I’d be curious if you see these non-elite actors as participating in the same kind of Persianate world that elite bureaucrats participate in as they move across Central Asia, Iran and Hindustan.
Or are these non-elite actors participating in a very different version of the Persianate world or do you think the category of Persianate or Persianate itself I mean, of course, invoking Mana Kia’s recent work here might not apply in quite the same way. So I’ll stop there, and I look forward to the discussion after but many thanks. This is, of course, an excellent book, and I’m really delighted to have had the opportunity to engage with it.
>> Zarinebaf: Okay, thank you so much for all those wonderful comments, so I’m going to provide my own feedback from a very different perspective, you know, one that is outside Mughal India. But I first wanted to thank Dr. Elizabeth Lhost and Dartmouth for inviting me to take part in this very interesting book workshop and conversation and offer my own feedback as a non-specialist and a historian of Ottoman and Safavid urban life. The book contributes in an important manner to the city of Delhi and its social transformation in the 18th century.
It begins with the occupation of Nadir Shah of Iran, his plunder of Delhi and the brutal treatment of the populace, causing a major rebellion in 1739. He used a systematic event to weave together the changing political dynamics and notions of legitimacy and justice to shed light on the relationship between the ruling class and the populace of Delhi. He argues that this period witnessed frequent reshuffling of the power structure. The long 17th century that is sometimes quite violently at the hands of a more assertive nobility or a faction within it, as well as the populace at large. He reads chronicles against the grain and avoids explanations solely based on social and economic factors, I think in part as he himself admitted due to the [inaudible] of archival material for this period, but I may be wrong. Let me now shift to to my own specialty as a historian of early modern Safavid and Ottoman Empires and see whether we can see some connections.
The 18th century has long been the black hole of Ottoman and Safavid studies and viewed as the height of Ottoman decline and Safavid collapse. Marshall Hodgson in his, in the third volume of his Ventures of Islam referred to this era, as the period of deluge, decline and the rise of the West, which he observed in these in all these three gunpowder empires. As he noted, and I agree with him in general, in all the three gunpowder empires, he observed a growing factionalism within the court circles dominated by grand wazirs, the haram and the palace guards. This was also an age of pleasure and peace after long wars and territorial losses, particularly for the Ottoman Empire in the late 17th century. In Istanbul, Sultan Ahmed III, who reigned between 1703 and 1730, and his ground wazir Nevşehirli Ibrahim Pasha loved organizing tulip festivals in their newly built waterfront mansions called sada bad and it’s really interesting that all these names, you know, are very familiar for these spaces. In Isfahan, Shah Sultan Husayn built the Farahabad suburb for his pleasure and preferred the company of women and the cup to the working to working with his soldiers and bureaucrats.
I think similar things were going on in Delhi. Though these could simply be gossip and gripe by chronicles, in all three empires, we also observe the growing power of the nobility, what Abhishek calls an assertive nobility, the pasha and ulema households, who enriched themselves at the expense of peasants and artisans and took advantage of the growing weakness of the central government. According to many observers, foreign and local, corruption was rampant in both empires. We also witness the rise of puritanical, some would call fundamentalist, Islamic movements, led by preachers who called for the persecution of minorities, Jews and Christians, Shiites and Sunnis. And Sufi tariqas, imposing sumptuary laws on women and minorities and ordering the closing of taverns and coffee houses. This was an age of social, economic, cultural and religious prices characterized by climate change, famine inflation, unemployment, as well as urban upheavals. But new research in the Ottoman archives has shown that this was also a period of urban growth, expansion of trade, building activity by the ruling elites, migration, and the settlement of Europeans in port cities. The size of the three capitals, Isfahan, Istanbul, Isfahan, and Delhi exceeded 500,000, and our cities expanded beyond the walls into new suburbs. However, this brief age of pleasure and peace in Isfahan and Istanbul was violently disrupted by the Afghan invasion of Iran in 1722.
The rough treatment of Sunni tribes by the Safavid Georgian governor of Kandahar was the trigger for the Afghan plunder of Isfahan. The weakness of the court to contain further uprisings worsened the crisis. The Afghan invasion of Iran, the brutal takeover of Isfahan after a long siege, the bloodbath that followed in the palace and the city brought about the dramatic collapse of the Safavid Dynasty and the permanent decline of Isfahan from a major Islamic imperial capital to a provincial town in 1722. The Ottoman armies subsequently took the entire Western Iran while Peter the Great of Russia took part of the Caucasian provinces and the silk growing regions along the Caspian Sea. Now, this is going to be the subject of my next book. The triple division of Iran in 1725 led to the rise of Nadir Shah from a very humble background to power in Khorasan. His coronation and long campaigns against the Ottoman Empire, the Afghans, and Mughal India to restore the Persian Empire. Nadir’s defeat of Ottoman troops in Tabriz and the Ottoman withdrawal from Western Iran in 1730 triggered the most violent uprising: the Patrona Halil rebellion in Istanbul led by disgruntled janissaries, the city’s artisans, Albanian migrants and workers, and some Ulema households, so the preachers also played a key role in this event. This rebellion led to the takeover of the city by the rebels for several months. It was almost like the French Revolution. The destruction of all the tulip parks and mansions and the mistreatment of European traders. It also ended the reign of Sultan Ahmed the Third and his favorite grand wazir and son-in-law, who was cut to pieces and murdered and dragged through the streets of Istanbul. The Tulip Age had come to a violent end in Istanbul, eight years after the plunder of Isfahan by the Afghans in 1722. The fate of the Ottoman capital in 1730 at the hands of Albanian rebels was not too dissimilar from the plunder of Safavid Isfahan by Afghan rebels in 1722. You might also argue that Delhi also experienced a similar fate in 1739 and later in 1750s at the hands of Afghans and somewhere between the Safavid and Ottoman examples.
I think Abhishek’s opening chapter sets the stage to connect the rebellions of 1739 in Delhi to events in Isfahan and Istanbul, and I might even say in Tabriz in 1722 and 1730. At the same time, I also believe that to better understand all these developments, it might be helpful to integrate the study of imperial borderlands into that of the rest of our empires. For example, you know if you were to focus on events in the Afghan borderland, you know between these two empires or in Azerbaijan, for that matter, and what was going on as, as you know, these two empires, the Safavids and the Mughals, were trying to assert their control over these regions, how would we you know, otherwise evaluate you know what was going on in Delhi, in Istanbul and in Isfahan?
So while you know I completely agree with Abhishek that you know historiography of Mughal India and, for that matter, Safavid Iran and Ottoman Empire, you know, have not paid much attention to the role of the people, if he expanded the notion of the people right to peasants, you know as Tiraana brought up, to traders, as well as you know, to these tribes, you know who inhabited the edges of their empires, to the provinces, you know further further away. Might we also reconsider you know the notion of legitimacy, the notion of justice that obviously you know the rebels, you know in Kandahar or Herat, you know were trying to also address to these rulers and you know we’re kind of you know exhausted so so, in other words, you know what I’m really calling for is you know to kind of expand the scope scope of the subaltern right, you know the kind of center-periphery dynamic and also look at you know this kind of ground up ground up historiography maybe from the peripheries to the center rather than just focusing on our cities so kind of moving beyond you know urban urban centers and imperial capitals to other cities to other towns, to the peripheries of the empire. So I’m going to stop there, and I look forward to your comments.
>> Lhost: Thank you all for those comments. I think I will give Abhishek a couple of minutes to respond to any of the comments or questions that were presented to him before we move to questions from the audience. So if you have any questions, please remember to put them in the Q and A. We’ll start to sort and share them as we go along, but Abishek would you like to respond?
>> Kaicker: Yeah, I’m sorry that my internet connection is a little bit unstable, so I may have missed some aspects of the questions, but I hope that we can have a broader conversation and resume these things because I think that the points that both Fariba and Tiraana have raised were really interesting.
So you know, on Tirana, first, I think what you’ve really done is outline an entire course of research for the 18th century in South Asia, and I hope that you know someone will undertake it, maybe even you. But I think that you know because I, these are questions that were absolutely central and deeply interesting. So you know, to take the question, for instance, of the changing economic understanding of the period among actors is something that I would love to know more about, and I don’t know very much about it. It was possible, for instance, to read the [inaudible] poetry of the city, to be able to track the rise of certain kinds of groups and then you know the discomfort caused by the rising elites of the period.
But, of course, the question of the actual administration and management of the trade that fuels the empire is a much trickier affair, and I think it’s something that will probably require focus on the locality outside the city, particularly Bengal, particularly connection between Delhi elites, families of Delhi elites, and Bengali traders. This is, some of my work is going in this direction now, but I’d also like to sort of mention the upcoming work of young scholars, that is, Sudev Sheth who is thinking very seriously now about economic transformations and new systems of thinking that trade. And again, you know there’s much that we can learn from the Ottoman historiography so, for instance, the very idea of ijara, you know, as a potentially you know, a powerful or important financial instrument, rather than merely a form of the destruction rent forming, that is, you know merely a form of agricultural destruction, you know, is sort of staple of the Ottoman historiography for several decades now, but has yet to be seriously taken up, except for people like Shalib. So I think that there’s you know very much to do on that score. There’s, of course, the question of, a very important question of potential changes in the way that gender itself might operate in these urban spaces, and I think again that there’s very much to be said about that, but that will require a return to a linguistically challenging and interesting archive.
My only, you know, my only response to I think these, you know, phenomenal points, I think, the only, the only response that I can offer to one key point that you make Tirana, is the question of you know other cities and other places. So it’s certainly true that I think other places have other particular dynamics, right. Lahore I think is a very interesting city and it’s an interesting city because it’s clearly has a very large and deep theological infrastructure and communities of ordinary people who are deeply engaged with Islamic piety from the early 17th century onwards, if not even earlier. So it’s true that I think that looking at different cities will lead to different portraits, but I think that what this book revealed for me was the possibility of making an argument about a general form of politics in pre-modern South Asia, which I think is important, and I think is actually very important because it remains to the present. And that’s mainly to say that the divide between the religious and political in South Asia is a colonial divide, and it’s a move to depoliticize the workings of ordinary politics in the heartland of the Mughal empire, which were always very threatening to the emergence of the nation’s colonial state. And this again is a book project that I’m on. But I can, I think, I can make the case that thinking seriously about the question of the categories of what is religious and what is political in South Asia will remind us that there is no neat line between those two categories in South Asia. And there isn’t a neat line today right, and so you could make the case of the colonial state itself and the attempted depoliticization of the colonial state, and then the attempted liberal political order of the postcolonial states of South Asia, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh have never actually managed to subsume the complex relationship between questions of the divine, access to the divine, and the workings of politics in the present, right. But my plea would be that in these sorts of situations which think of Islam in general as not just a religion but also a language of politics, a way of doing urban politics, and I think this insight potentially holds across the region.
And I would love to see how it is engaged in other places. And you know, to Fariba, you know, thank you so much for sort of laying out this broader context, which was you know, always in the back of my mind. You know you, you pointed out some of the limitations, I think, of like working in a purely urban space, and I think here part of the question for me was simply being able to make a kind of argument which required a certain amount of slave hands. It’s very convenient for me that the city of Delhi was built by the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan in his own name. And therefore, the city itself represents in core Mughal ideology, to which its urban subjects can respond. This is obviously not true of Istanbul in the same way, so here was an act of convenience for me.
But I think you’re absolutely right, and I think that much greater attention and engagement with trying to integrate the city into the countryside around it is obviously something to be decided right. So, for instance, it was recently pointed out to me by one of my distinguished colleagues that the river in Delhi is more or less absent from my work. And that’s a very major oversight. I can only plead a certain imposition in an arbitrary imposition of the limited framework as a way of trying to get a grip around archival sources that, as you know, are complex, and we should leave it at that. And you know I’m afraid Fariba that I also missed some of your last comments, because of my poor Internet connection. So if you could remind me, we could continue the conversation.
>> Zarinebaf: Yeah, well, um yes, first of all, I also wanted to kind of point out how integrated in the 18th century these three empires were through . . .
>> Kaicker: Yes.
>> Zarinebaf: precisely through, you know, trade, especially the Safavid and the Mughal empires empires. And I must say that, you know, on our side, there’s absolutely no interest in what’s going on in the Ottoman Empire and Mughal Empire, in both empires. I’m probably the only historian who works on Ottoman-Safavid connectivity. So the 18th century is a period when you know not only trade with the West, you know where the Ottomans, you know, and the Safavids, but also with the East. So these capitals are integrated they are connected. They’re also connected through their borderlands, and I think we need to really pay attention to imperial borderlands and contest them. Contestations over these borderlands, what’s going on in in in the Afghan borderland, I think is crucial in the 18th century, you know, as Isfahan is trying to assert its control and as Delhi is trying to do the same thing.
And then you have this big rebellion that affects Delhi and Isfahan, and it leads to the fall of them. The Safavids, right, and then the Ottomans don’t want the Afghans to get to their borderlands. You know, so they move into Western Iran to avoid having to deal with the Afghans. Right, so I think you know, this is really the wider question is, is really crucial to sort of try to figure out what is going on at this moment, which I think you paint you know that with so much you know kind of dynamism and, and it’s wonderful that you open your book with this chapter. I think it’s really great, and you ended with with another Afghan you know sort of invasion of Delhi, right, in 1759. So why the Afghans, what’s going on in that borderland, what’s going on between Isfahan and Delhi, so those were you know, the latter part of my comments.
>> Kaicker: Right and again, you know, there are wonderful young scholars, who are now working extensively on the history of the Afghans from the you know 15th to the 19th century, so I’m really delighted that this is a vibrant and major historiographical push in our field. It’s really a wonderful move, but I think you know, I think that the destabilization occasions by Afghanistan in the middle of the first third of the 18th century leads to the collapse of the Safavids and the Mughal empires. And I think you know it can be argued that the Afghans are actually more important in disrupting the Mughal Empire than the British are in 1757, right. And so I think that the you know that that the, the you know the world, I mean, in a sense, we have to come to terms with the world historical importance of Afghanistan not just in the 21st century. And you know there’s a reason that I think that we keep returning to it on our map as we teach, absolutely.
>> Lhost: Abhishek, we have a couple of questions that have come in. First, Pamela Price asks whether you can elaborate on your concept of sovereignty that you develop in the course of the book or perhaps elaborate the idea of the discourses of sovereignty. And then, if you would like to, David Lelyveld is also wondering whether you could talk a little bit about what carries over into the British period, particularly with reference to the 1857 Rebellion and British claims to imperial sovereignty in South Asia after that.
>> Kaicker: So I think that you know my claim about sovereignty is this: you know, I think that in South Asia, we have tended to use the word sovereignty merely as a stand-in for kingship, and we have a sort of anthropological sense of this stand-in for kingship that seems to simply suggest that everyone is playing at the games of kingship. And it’s interesting to sort of you know, read these claims against the very thick literature, and I’m thinking of people like Richard [inaudible] my colleague and Berkeley and others, you know, who really make the case that the ideal of sovereignty is something that is historically invented in the late 16th century for particular purposes. It is a claim. It is a claim that is routinely contested. This invented idea suggests that there’s some emanating force that actually permits and allows the constitution of politics and government as such, and it’s not there for merely a standing for kingship. So much more interested in the question of you know what is the thing that makes it possible for a Mughal emperor to make a world historical claim. And here the main actor would not be the emperor himself, but the ideologues/intellectuals at his court that marshalled diverse, intellectual, cultural, religious and social resources to create a language in a way of talking about the proper and orderly disposition of power and centering it at the Mughal court in opposition to other locales and places, right.
Now this language becomes a widespread language. So, obviously, it becomes very important at the court of Akbar in the 16th century, but it is enunciated repeatedly and changed productively over the 17th century in very dramatic ways. And so Shah Jahan’s discourse of sovereignty, I make the case, his greatest enunciation in that discourse is, in fact, the creation of a city in his own name, and I think I can show that the urban fabric of the city directly represents the ideological values that are central to the empire, because it is a new construction. But the discourse changes with the coming of his son Aurangzeb to the throne, and here it requires a much more legalistic and Islamic tint. And that is also productive for the emergence of the practice of popular politics, so there’s a kind of dynamic relationship between these expressions and claims to power and the proper ordering of the world that are never rejected by the people to whom they are applied, right. And I think that is important to remember that there is, you know, the story of sovereignty and popular politics is not a story of only resistance. It is also a story of acquiescence and engagement, and in that sense, it is more than merely resistance in the market sense. It is politics as such, right, And, therefore, the people of the city because precisely of their engagement with the intellectual questions at the heart of sovereignty are not people. They are, in fact, political. They are in politics. So that’s the that’s the that’s the question of sovereignty. And what was the second question, Elizabeth could you please remind me?
>> Lhost: Yes, the second question has to do is what carries over when the British start to make claims or start to take over claims to imperial sovereignty—or to being the sovereign—in the subcontinent, whether they adopt some of the same language or same terms or same ideologies and how it might be different, and maybe even you could talk about what carries over, if there’s anything that carries over, into the post independence period.
>> Kaicker: Right, well, I mean, I, you know, I, David obviously knows much more about this than I do, and I’ve learned so much from his work over the years, but it’s very, very clear that, for instance, you know, if you read the Urdu account or the Persian accounts of the arrival of the mutineers in Delhi, from those perspectives, it looks like an 18th century urban riot, right, where the mutineers arrived, and the first thing they do is approach the king, and they say we demand justice, and our justice is that we would like to extricate all of the Europeans. Why must they be extricated? Because they are damaging religion, right. Because they’re attacking the [inudible]. So this is a very classic enunciation in a very familiar language. Sorry. Am I audible? Am I coming through?
Okay, yeah.
>> Lhost: Yes, the sound is coming through.
>> Kaicker: Okay, I think, I may have some internet issues.
Okay, then. I think that you know, there is also a sort of longer, deeper history that carries through to the 20th century, and I can’t you know, obviously, it’s not possible to have a fuller discussion of that at this moment, but I do want to say, for instance, you know the profound importance of the satirical poem in South Asia as a means of doing politics, as a means of political communication is something that does not end in the 18th century. And so you know, for those of us in South Asia who you know will pick up a phone and open WhatsApp and go to a WhatsApp group and are immediately inundated by a stream of political poetry, doggerel, and satire should suggest that there is, in fact, a deeply historical genealogy to the ways in which actual political communication and work happens in the region, and that is a historical genealogy that is infected by technology, obviously, but clearly has much richer and deeper histories, than the political order of the so-called, you know, liberal democratic state, of which the vineyards anyway fading fast in the present and I think of both Pakistan and India in this case.
>> Lhost: Thanks, Abhishek. We have a question from Taha Rauf who asks how you would describe the position of the khanqahs in the language of politics. Would you consider these institutions part of decentralized nodes of power that are either cooperating or competing with a more centralized political central, center—Mughal or otherwise or is there some sort of dichotomy? Where do they fit into this discourse? And the person posing the question says it is framed in reference to Richard Eaton’s work on Bengal.
>> Kaicker: Right, thank you. I’m just going to turn my video off to see if I can improve my sound and video quality. This is a good question. I don’t really know. I have an article coming out on religious institutions in Delhi in the 18th century, in the 17th and 18th century in the near future, where I make the case that the fortunes of commercialization which sweep the city also have a transformative impact on religious practice and religious institutions in the period. You know, I think much more can be said about the place of the khanqahs, but it’s very clear that there are different kinds of khanqahs, there are different kinds of political actors and orders. So you have very elite Sufi lineages in the 18th century, you know the Chishtis in Delhi, for instance, who have a very particular sets of religious practices. And then it seems that there are other Sufi lineages that speak much more directly to warrior groups and low lying urban groups, such as the Naqshbandis that I think in are particularly important important in Delhi in this regard, and it’s not an accident that Naqshbandi [inaudible] seem to be particularly associated with political uprisings in the late 17th and particularly the early 18th century in Delhi and Lahore. And again, of course, there is a direct connection, I think, to the Ottoman and Safavid empires, particularly the Ottoman Empire. I’ve long wondered about whether it might be possible to trace more tightly relations of political ideas moving between these spaces. It occurs to me, of course, that you know if there were rebels in Delhi in 1729 or 31 who were imagining new forms of doing politics altogether the ideas that came to them that they would have picked up in the [inaudible] in Delhi would have been from been from the Naqshbandi soldiers and travelers who came from Istanbul and could talk about the 1703 Uprising. So, so it occurs to me that there is a landscape of interconnection there, but I think that is yet to be revealed.
>> Lhost: Thanks. We have just a couple of minutes left so I’m going to try to group two of the questions that have come in, and the first one raises a question about archives and the way that in in historiography on South Asia, we tend to talk about the absence of the archive, the loss of the archive, and this person asks, in some ways, how, how your work grapples with this, but also how, as historians, do we transgress the idea that Anjali Arondekar has put forth, that we’re kind of obsessed with the epistemological preoccupation of the loss and the impoverishment of the archive—so, allowing what we don’t find in the archives to drive some of the questions that we ask—to drive the way that we talk about the history. How do we sort of square that with with what you’ve done in your work, maybe finding alternative archives or creating other archives or looking to sources that have been in plain sight for a while and just thinking about them in other ways?
And then, second, Sana Haroon asks whether you could say more about the non-elite actors who come through some of your reading of the sources. Who are they? How do they, how do they come to engage with the state? How do you engage with them in your work? And then who, who still remains hidden, even when we’re doing this sort of alternative reading or looking at sources and other ways, who, who still escapes some of the archival traces or the written, the written traces?
>> Kaicker: So, I mean to just touch on Sana Haroon’s question, you know, the last chapter or the second to last chapter of my book, really is a detailed exploration of an uprising of shoemakers, Muslim shoemakers, in the city of Delhi. And I think you know, in some ways, you know, it is possible under certain very limited conditions to be able to talk about very particular low lying actors in the urban space in the city. But that is only under very particular conditions. The only time when shoemakers will enter the pages of Persian prose, right, the beautiful pages of Persian prose is when they do something so reprehensible that elites are forced to write about them against their will, right, because everybody knows that you don’t sully the beautiful page of language with mention of unmentionable people, right. So in a sense that becomes an opportunity to actually think about the profoundly transgressive nature of low level actors and their political power, but it only becomes possible under very limited conditions.
The question of the loss of the archive . . . it’s certainly true, you know there’s no denying the fact that the Mughal archive does not exist in the way that it was constituted, right. I’ve been you know examining again with wonder this massive collection of the, you know, thousands of recently published pages on a single library catalog from the Topkapi Palace in the 16th century.
We are very far from being able to do that.
It’s also the case, I think, that some of the archives of the city of Delhi were destroyed again by Afghan invasions but also all the other actors who were doing things in that period, and I think obviously colonial rule has much more to do with this than we like to think.
At the same time, it seems to me that you know, the question of the loss of the archives as a sort of emotional response for South Asians, and for South Asian scholars and not necessarily one grounded in physical reality. And I simply say that, you know, as someone who spent a lot of time at places like the National Archives of India and the Salar Jung Museum, and you know the Khuda Bhaksh Museum and the Raza Rampur Library, which have literally thousands of manuscripts from our period that are waiting to be read, right. And until we read them, until we read them extensively, I think it is really difficult for us to make claims about what is and what is not in the archives. So I think that you know, we need to recommit ourselves to an archival practice in South Asia, and we cannot let inconvenience be the thing that prevents us from going to the archive and making statements that probably are not held up on an evidentiary basis.
>> Lhost: Thank you for that. I think that’s a, that’s a good point to end on that we all need to take ourselves back to the archive to find out what they say before we start to talk about what they don’t say.
I would like to thank Abhishek and Tiraana, and Fariba for joining us today for this inaugural first event in our Conversations on South Asia series. And for those of you who missed the announcements at the beginning, our next event will be in November with Mytheli Sreenivas’ new book on reproductive politics.
So follow us on Twitter @SAsiaConverse, look us up on the website, and join us for our upcoming events. Thank you everyone.
For almost a century, the multinational Tata Group has been at the top of India’s corporate pyramid. Producing everything from steel, to salt, to software, Tata—whose subsidiaries today operate in one hundred countries worldwide—has been remarkably agile and adept at navigating changes in markets, economics, and politics.
What has fueled Tata’s success and sustained its growth? And how can Tata’s history help us understand the influence of global corporations today?
Join us on Tuesday, January 11 from 12:15–1:30 pm (ET) to hear author and historian Mircea Raianu (University of Maryland), in conversation with Meghna Chaudhuri (Boston College), Stefan Link (Dartmouth College), and Osama Siddiqui (Providence College), discuss Tata’s past and what it holds for capitalism’s future.
Elizabeth Lhost (Dartmouth College) will moderate the discussion.
The Conversations on South Asia Series is sponsored by the Bodas Family Academic Programming Fund, the Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages Program, and the Department of History at Dartmouth College.
Today, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) runs over five hundred centers, dozens of vegetarian restaurants, thousands of local meeting groups, and has millions of followers around the world.
How has ISKCON marketed itself to attract devotees using mantra lounges and yoga studios in Philadelphia and New York? What has it done to rebrand the movement and to recast its message to attract new followers? Nicole Karapanagiotis(Religion and Philosophy, Rutgers University-Camden) explores these questions in Branding Bhakti: Krishna Consciousness and the Makeover of a Movement (Indiana University Press, 2021).
Join us for the next Conversations on South Asia series event on Tuesday, December 7 from 12:15–1:15 pm (EST) to hear the author answer these questions.
Mara Einstein (Media Studies, Queens College) and Reiko Ohnuma (Religion, Dartmouth) will be joining the conversation, moderated by Elizabeth Lhost (History, Dartmouth).
Event attendees can use the promo code SAVE30 to receive a 30% discount when ordering a copy of the book from IUPress.org.
The Conversations on South Asia Series is sponsored by the Bodas Family Academic Programming Fund, the Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages Program, and the Department of History at Dartmouth College.
Were Mughal Delhi’s city-dwellers docile sheep the emperor ruled over, or did even the humblest of them assert claims to participate in public affairs? How did politics, economics, and religion shape their claims?
Following events in the imperial capital from its founding to its devastation at the hands of Iranian invader Nadir Shah in 1739, Abhishek Kaicker (University of California, Berkeley) explores the interplay between popular politics and royal authority in 17th-century Shahjahanabad (Delhi) in his latest book, The King and the People: Sovereignty and Popular Politics in Mughal Delhi(Oxford University Press, 2020).
Join the author, in conversation with Tiraana Bains (History, Dartmouth) and Fariba Zarinebaf (History, UC-Riverside), to hear more.
Elizabeth Lhost (History, Dartmouth) will moderate the discussion.
Wednesday, October 13, 2021 from 12:15–1:15 pm (eastern)
The “Conversations on South Asia” series is sponsored by the Bodas Family Academic Programming Fund, the Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages Program, and the Department of History at Dartmouth College.
