Cinematic media have long been important for remembering and memorializing the 1971 Bangladesh War of Liberation (or, Muktijuddho). They have also been important vehicles for critiquing and reconciling with war’s trauma.
Analyzing Muktijuddho films through Black and transnational feminist frameworks, Elora Halim Chowdhury (University of Massachusetts Boston) considers the power and potential of human rights cinema. As Chowdhury shows, cinematic representations not only portray marginalized experiences but also put those experiences on a global stage.
Film and media scholars Gwendolyn S. Kirk (Indiana University Bloomington) and Alka Kurian (University of Washington Bothell) will be joining the author for this 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.
In Mumbai, the black and yellow taxi is an ubiquitous symbol of the city, its hustle, its grind, and its grit.
Focusing on the hereditary community of chillia taxi drivers, who have sustained the industry for over a century, Tarini Bedi (University of Illinois Chicago) explores how lives, livelihoods, mobility, and modernity are bound together in tangled webs of economics, politics, kinship, care.
How have taxi drivers sewn the webs that bind them to the city? And what are the strings that stitch them together today?
Join us to learn more.
Deepa Das Acevedo (University of Alabama Law School) and Biju Mathew (Rider University) will be joining the author for this 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.
Reiko Ohnuma, Professor of Religion at Dartmouth College, and Mara Einstein, Professor of Media Studies at Queens College, participated as discussants. Elizabeth Lhost, Postdoctoral Fellow at Dartmouth College, moderated the event.
The author began by presenting the main question that drove her research for the book:
How do religious groups reinvent and rebrand themselves to attract new followers?
Karapanagiotis
The book, she explained, is the result of her efforts to answer that question by focusing on how the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) has embraced new strategies for outreach and participation over the past several decades.
Beginning in the 1980s, ISKCON’s devotional base began to shift from being a community of non-Indians to one dominated by Hindu Indians. This shift occurred partly because despite being “culturally different” from American followers of ISKCON, “many Hindu immigrants took religio-cultural comfort in ISKCON temples and felt an affinity to the ISKCON devotees with whom they shared much religious practice,” she explains in the book (41).
many Hindu immigrants took religio-cultural comfort in ISKCON temples and felt an affinity to the ISKCON devotees with whom they shared much religious practice
Karapanagiotis, Branding Bhakti, 41
But the shift in demographics was also one that went against the vision of ISKCON’s leaders, who wanted the movement for Kṛṣṇa consciousness to be truly global.
Following this introduction, Karapanagiotis then described how ISKCON’s self-presentation radically shifted, following this influx of Indian expats, to attract a broader audience. Rebranding the movement as one rooted in mindfulness, yoga, and meditation—and building yoga studios, mindfulness institutes, urban spiritual lounges, and meditative retreats in rural areas to support this vision—ISKCON’s leaders set out to attract new communities of so-called “Western” devotees. Such rebranding efforts were designed to attract younger people and those the community refers to as “Westerners,” efforts—Karapanagiotis relays—that also aimed to be inclusive of non-white devotees and to garner followers from Black and Latinx communities.
In her work, Karapanagiotis admits that moving away from religious ritual towards mindfulness and yoga clearly marks a change from the Gauḍīya-vaiṣṇava, temple-centric origins of ISKCON. Yet adding nuance to ISKCON’s activities, Karapanagiotis suggests that ISKCON’s rebranding has not led to the complete abandonment of traditional theistic worship for many of groups rebranding ISKCON. Rather, these new rebranding strategies, for some, are understood to be “just a stepping stone.” For example, the de-ritualized and de-theologized lounge space that some leaders like Devamrita Swami now use “is just a temporary resting place for them [devotees] to stop until [Devamrita Swami] and other lounge staff believe they are ready to be introduced to and participate in temple ISKCON—complete with its theologies of embodied divinity and the ritual worship of mūrtis (embodied forms)” (116-117).
Thus, Karapanagiotis concluded her introduction to the book by noting that while ISKCON’s rebranding does consist of de-ritualized yoga and meditation spaces aimed at appealing to a younger, Western audience, they sometimes still retain the theistic worship of Kṛṣṇa, rooted in the Purāṇic, temple-oriented Gauḍīya-vaiṣṇava milieu of ISKCON’s origins.
Commentary from media studies scholar Mara Einstein and religious studies scholar Reiko Ohnuma followed the author’s remarks.
Drawing upon her expertise in media and marketing, Mara Einstein, while noting ISKCON’s earlier rebranding from Hare Krishna, asked whether ISKCON’s rebranding, as Karapanagiotis frames it, is actually rebranding. The shift away from ritual activity toward yoga and meditation is not necessarily a rebranding of Gauḍīya-vaiṣṇavism or of Kṛṣṇa devotion. Instead, at least as Einstein’s reading of Branding Bhakti suggests, ISKCON’s marketing efforts have actually produced a new product—one that allows so-called “Western” participants to side-step or bypass Hindu religious content.
An expert in Buddhist traditions, Reiko Ohnuma’s subsequent discussion centered around the similarities between ISKCON’s rebranding efforts and those of Buddhist movements in North America. Similar to how parts of ISKCON are now dedicated to a de-ritualized mindfulness movement aimed at connecting with a Western audience, Ohnuma noted that Buddhists in America have employed similar strategies to adapt to this new context. In many ways, these efforts to make Buddhism fit with North American spirituality overlap with the efforts (and struggles) of ISKCON’s leaders, though these Buddhist movements tend to emphasize elements like scientific rationality over spirituality. These changing emphases, Ohnuma suggested, created divergent practices among “Western” converts to Buddhism and Asian immigrants practicing Buddhism in North America. How these differences manifest in efforts to define and determine who counts as “Buddhist” overlap with questions of race, nationality, identity, and authenticity that Karapanagiotis also observes in the ISKCON community.
These broader questions that arise from Branding Bhakti‘s examination of ISKCON’s efforts to attract more devotees speak to the continuing importance of race, religion, identity, and community in the twenty-first century—and demonstrate Karapanagiotis’s rich contributions to these debates.
Can race and caste be juxtaposed? Can they be replaced? What is the future of oppressed groups in light of anti-caste and anti-racism struggles? Is there a new idiom that could connect disparate groups oppressed by their color, class, and caste? This lecture will discuss these issues as it discusses the contemporaneity of the 21st century. It will explicitly address Isabel Wilkerson’s intervention in a much longer intellectual history of connecting caste and race in both the United States and South Asia.
About the Speaker:
Dr. Suraj Yengde is currently a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. He holds a research associate position with the department of African and African American Studies, a non-resident fellow position at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, and is part of the founding team of Initiative for Institutional Anti-Racism and Accountability (IARA) at Harvard University. He has studied on four continents (Asia, Africa, Europe, North America), and is India’s first Dalit Ph.D. holder from an African university (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg). Suraj is the author of the bestseller Caste Matters and co-editor of award winning anthology The Radical in Ambedkar. He has published in multiple languages in the field of caste, race, ethnicity studies, and inter-regional labor migration in the global south. Currently, he is involved in developing a critical theory of Dalit and Black Studies. He has been named as the “Most influential Young Dalit” by Zee and has received many other awards and honors.
This event is hosted by Professor Douglas E. Haynes.
“An 1858 photograph by Felice Beato of a mosque in Meerut where some of the rebel soldiers may have prayed” (Wikimedia Commons)
The following participant’s report was submitted by Sri Sathvik Rayala, a ’24 at Dartmouth College, interested in South Asian History, Politics, and Economics.
On September 29, 2020, the South Asia Studies Collective at Dartmouth College hosted its first event in the new “Conversations on South Asia Series,” featuring Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst, Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Vermont, discussing her book Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion: Religion, Rebels, and Jihad (I. B. Tauris & Company, 2017). Following the theoretical frameworks presented in the book, the conversation centered on the racialization and minoritization of Muslims in the Indian subcontinent, particularly following the 1857 Rebellion against the British East India Company. During the event, which was moderated by the series coordinator, Elizabeth Lhost, Morgenstein Fuerst discussed several points related to her argument about the racialization and minoritization of South Asian Muslims and its implications for the study of race and religion today—drawing from and extending the central arguments of her recent book.
The event began with a brief presentation by Morgenstein Fuerst outlining her argument that the Rebellion of 1857 marked a shift in how people, particularly the British colonial officials, talked about and saw Muslims and their religion. In particular, Morgenstein Fuerst suggested that the 1857 Rebellion caused British colonial officials to question the loyalty of Muslims, who they believed were religiously obligated to conduct “jihad” against the Crown’s rule. As Morgenstein Fuerst explained during her presentation (and elaborates in the book), one British official, Sir William Wilson Hunter, went so far as to claim that “Muslims are a problem to be solved” for the Crown, a remark that inherently and quite explicitly placed Muslims squarely in the camp of traitors to the Crown. Indeed, throughout Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion, Morgenstein Fuerst examines how Hunter framed this “problem” in his assertions that “it is hopeless to look for anything like enthusiastic loyalty from our Muhammadan subjects” (59). Simply put, Morgenstein Fuerst argues that the British saw South Asian Muslims, particularly those in North India, as inherently violent, disloyal, and untrustworthy—despite the evident loyalty of figures like Syed Ahmed Khan, another figure whose writings and reflections on 1857 feature in Morgenstein Fuerst’s work.
To provide evidence of this view, Morgenstein Fuerst opened her talk with a photograph of a mosque in Meerut taken by Felice Beato (see inset above), an Italian-British photographer, in 1858. The caption of this photograph, taken just a year after the 1857 Rebellion, read “a mosque in Meerut where some of the rebel soldiers may have prayed.” Analyzing this photo and its caption, Morgenstein Fuerst pointed out that there was no evidence to support the caption’s claim and that its glib reference to “rebel soldiers” perfectly encapsulates how British views framed Muslims of North India as disloyal and people prone to rebel due to their supposed religious commandments. Extending the photo’s implications, Morgenstein Fuerst suggested that instead of viewing this mosque as just a mosque, Beato made an unfounded interpolation to consider it a site that in some fashion aided rebellion, clearly indicating an implicit view that Muslims are supposedly commanded by Islam to conduct “jihad” against their British rulers. It is worth noting that Morgenstein Fuerst acknowledges that stereotyping of Muslims occurred before 1857 too, but that in the aftermath of 1857, two processes emerged that have immense ramifications today: minoritization and racialization.
To support her central arguments further, Morgenstein Fuerst explained her decision to use minoritization and racialization as theoretical frameworks. Minoritization, as she explains it in Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion, “does not refer solely to the demographic realities of a particular location, but instead to the systematic process by which elites deny power or access to a group through the implementation of power, be that local, linguistic, economic, or political” (6). In brief, minoritization is the process by which elites from a dominant group deny marginalized or minority communities access to various resources, strip them of power, or make them even more powerless. This was the experience of Indian Muslims in the post-1857 period. The process of minoritization impacted both rich and poor Muslims alike. To the surprise of some in the audience, as Morgenstein Fuerst explained, even wealthier and well-connected Muslims experienced minoritization as they, too, lost access to resources and positions that provided them with a stable place in society.
Racialization—a process precipitated by the British that adversely affected Hindus and Muslims and the second core concept in Morgenstein Fuerst’s monograph—accompanied the process of minoritization. In Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion, Morgenstein Fuerst describes “racialization” as “the process through which a group is made or marked as a race; it is the process through which individuals are made manifest as both belonging to one cogent group as well as possessing those inherent, hereditary, and prognostic characteristics” (7). British colonial officials racialized Muslims as inherently violent, dangerous, traitorous, and untrustworthy. (They equally racialized Hindus but classed them as weak, subservient, and effeminate.) Racialization, which Morgenstein Fuerst suggested during the “Conversation” was developed in part to further divide and inflame communal relations between Hindus and Muslims, still has ramifications today, reverberating in modern American politics as Islamophobia, for instance. To use Morgenstein Fuerst’s words in Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion, “a lasting and evident aspect of contemporary discourse about Muslims directly evokes assumptions that became solidified, popularized, and primary as a result of the Great Rebellion of 1857” (158).
By drawing attention to the emergence of “minoritization” and “racialization” in photographic, administrative, and scholarly sources, Morgenstein Fuerst draws parallels between anti-Muslim rhetoric surrounding questions of loyalty and rebellion in British India and discourses that evoke similar concerns today. For scholars and students interested in the origins of racialized and minoritized conceptions of Muslim minorities, her book, Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion: Religion, Rebels, and Jihad, is a recommended read.
(Page numbers refer to the paperback edition of the book.)
The Conversations on South Asia Series returns on December 3, 2020 for the second event of the year, featuring Dinyar Patel’s Naoroji: Pioneer of Indian Nationalism (Harvard University Press, 2020).
To stay up to date with the series, follow us on twitter (@sasiaconverse) or subscribe to our email newsletter for updates about future events: https://tinyurl.com/y24fdrbx .
The Conversations on South Asia series is supported by the Bodas Family Academic Programming Fund | Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages Program | Department of History | and the Dartmouth College Society of Fellows.
