Fall Lecture Series 2011
Thursday, September 8: 12-1 PM
206 Ingraham Hall
Fall Welcome Party!
Thursday, September 15: 12-1 PM
206 Ingraham Hall
CSA Film Series
Allahabad's Mela: The People and Their Great Fair
This film provides the background of Allahabad's January 2001 great
pot (or pitcher) fair (maha-kumbha-mela), offers interviews with Hindu holy
men and some of the millions of lay devotees who come to live in a tent city
and bathe where the Ganges, Jamuna and invisible Saraswati Rivers meet, and
talks with Muslims and members of different occupations about tolerance, justice,
and the mela's culture . (Edited by Joseph Elder from Sudheer Gupta's original
89-minute film SEARCHING FOR SARASWATI)"
Thursday, September 22: 12-1 PM
206 Ingraham Hall
Gowri Ramnarayan
Deputy Editor, The Hindu
Sarpa Satra/Sarpa Sutra: The Mahabharata,
Arun Kolatkar, and an Experimental Play
Gowri Ramnarayan is an award-winning playwright in English, a trained
musician, a veteran journalist, a major theatre critic, and translator of
Vijay Tendulkar's play Kanyadaan. She has a Ph.D in Aesthetics from
the University of Madras (1989 - The Language of Emotion in Art: a Comparative
Study of Some Indian and Western Theories). She is currently Deputy Editor
for The Hindu, a national English daily with 13 editions in India,
and a circulation of over a million copies, writing features, interviews,
profiles and reviews on cinema, theatre, music and literature.
To be followed by a performance at the Mitchell Theater, Vilas Hall
(821 University Ave.) entitled Lost
in Love: A Musical Narrative About Bhakti (Devotion) Sep. 22, 4 p.m.
Thursday, September 29: 12-1 PM
206 Ingraham Hall
Donald R. Davis Jr.
Associate Professor of Languages & Cultures of Asia, University of Wisconsin – Madison
Audio Download
Legal Consciousness in Medieval Indian Narratives
This paper employs the notion of legal consciousness to examine stories about
law and justice in medieval India. Legal consciousness refers both to
ordinary people's awareness of how law operates and to gaps that
exist between what people think they know about the law and what actually
happens in legal matters. Drawing on stories found in collections such
as the Kathasaritsagara and Rajatarangini,
as well as the famous Mrcchakatika of Kalidasa, evidence of literary
depictions of legal problems and their resolution will be used to
gain some insight into contemporary consciousness of law and legal procedures
in medieval India. The conclusions made about erstwhile ideas of legality
and justice will be shown to supplement the understanding of India's legal
history possible from other sources.
Thursday, October 6: 12-1 PM
206 Ingraham Hall
Ajantha Subramanian
Morris Kahn Associate Professor of Anthropology and of Social Studies, Harvard University
Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Social Studies, Duke University
Gifted: Merit and Caste in the making of Indian Technical Knowledge
In India today, the technical sciences are prized as the true measure
of intellectual worth and a proven means of professional advancement. Abroad,
the technical graduate has become the country's greatest export, widely understood
to exemplify India’s comparative advantage in the global marketplace. At the
center of India’s success story are the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs),
a set of institutions founded and administered by the Indian government with
the aim of producing native engineers to help with technologically driven
nation-building. The IITian is seen as a uniquely meritocratic individual
who is gifted with an innate capacity for technical knowledge. In this paper,
I address the production of the IITian’s technical merit by illuminating the
relationship between meritocracy and caste exceptionalism. Using ethnographic
data, I show how IITians have come to deploy notions of autonomy and individuality
to characterize their alma maters as state-free spaces and themselves as self-made
men. At the same time, state and caste haunt their claims, revealing a gap
between the expressed ideology of meritocracy and the affective and political
economic dimensions of their relationship to state and community. Finally,
I argue that the ideology of technical merit that underwrites the exceptionalism
of the IITs has served to occlude a structural critique of caste.
Thursday, October 13: 12-1 PM
206 Ingraham Hall
Qasid Mallah
Professor of Archaeology, Shah Abdul Latif University
Khairpur
Audio Download
Lakhan-Jo-Daro, Sindh: New Excavations at an Urban Center of the Indus Civilization
Indus valley civilization is one of the largest civilization of the world
which covers huge area of South Asia i.e. the entire length of present Pakistan
and parts of India. More than 2000 settlements are recorded with several major
urban centers. The largest settlements so far known are Harappa, Mohenjo-daro,
Dholavira, and Ganweriwala. Recent excavations at the site of Lakhan-Jo-Daro
are revealing this new site as another large urban center.
The settlement of Lakhan-Jo-Daro is located along right bank of Indus River in
a development area of Sukkur City at Latitude 27°.43′.27 North and 68°.50′.51
East degrees longitude. Until now three major mounded areas such as western mounds
central mounds and eastern mounds; collectively all mounds encompass area more
than three kilometer radius. The central mounds are further divided as “A” ,
“B” , “C” and “D” mounds. These mounds have been investigated since 1988 and
six excavation seasons (1994, 1996, 2000, 2006, 2008 and 2009/10 ) have been
launched. In the course of the most recent excavation project important new features
of Indus architecture and artifacts have been recovered that confirm the overall
significance of the site. This lecture will provide an overview of the site and
recent discoveries in the larger context of contemporary studies of the Indus
civilization.
Dr. Qasid Mallah received his MA (1997) and PhD (2000) from the University of
Wisconsin - Madison. His profossional training is in experimental archaeology
(ceramics), with a specialization in servey and excavation. He is currently Professor
and Chair in the Department of Archaeology at Shah Abdul Latif University in
Khairpur, Sindh, Pakistan. He has written numerous articles for international
journals on Indus period archaeological finds and ancient civilization. He is
also the editor of a research journal entitled Ancient Sindh.
This lecture is part of the Pakistan
Lecture Series sponsored by the American Institute of Pakistan Studies
Thursday, October 27: 12-1 PM
206 Ingraham Hall
Akinori Uesugi
Independent Scholar
Audio Download
Excavations at the Harappan Cemetery at Farmana: New Insights on
Relationship Between the Harappan and Local Cultures in the Ghaggar
Plain, Haryana, India
The socio-cultural relations between the Harappan culture and local
cultures during the Harappan period (2600 - 1900 BC) is one of the important
issues in understanding the social structure in the urban phase of that period.
The burials provide a number of clues for this issue. A Harappan cemetery
at Farmana in the eastern half of the Ghaggar plain that was excavated during
2007 and 2008 has provided many information relevant to this issue. This paper
will overview the evidence for the relations between the Harappans and locals
through the Farmana cemetery as well as some evidence from other sites related
to this issue.
Thursday, November 3: 12-1 PM
206 Ingraham Hall
Jeffrey Samuels
Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Western Kentucky University
Audio Download
Toward an Aesthetic of Monastic Recruitment: The Monastery as an Avenue for Upward Mobility?
One theory that is often used to account for monastic recruitment
in South and Southeast Asia posits that boys become monks because monasteries
provide them with an avenue for social mobility. While monasteries may provide
children with a level of education that may not otherwise be available to
them, reducing monastic recruitment to an individual’s or a family’s economic
wants and needs masks how aesthetics, social bonds, and emotions affect monastic
culture in general and the recruitment process in particular.
Turning to conversations with Sri Lankan monastics, ordinands, and their parents,
I seek to nuance the upward mobility thesis. In doing so, I will suggest that
accounting for the place that affective-aesthetic bonds have in the recruitment
process challenges not only our understanding of monastic recruitment, but also
the model of generalized economic exchange that is sometimes used to describe
how Buddhist institutions are formed and sustained.
Prof. Samuels' research interests center on the intersection of religion
and culture in contemporary Sri Lanka and Malaysia. He recently published
a monograph titled Attracting the Heart: Social Relations and the Aesthetics
of Emotion in Sri Lankan Monastic Culture (University of Hawaii Press).
Since 2006, He began a new book-length project examining the social history
of Theravada Buddhism in Malaysia. Besides publishing one book and co-editing
another book (with Anne Blackburn) on Buddhist texts and practices in South
and Southeast Asia, he has published more than two dozen articles, book chapters,
and book reviews.
This lecture is supported by the University Lectures Committee.
Thursday, November 10: 12-1 PM
206 Ingraham Hall
CSA Film Series
Dadi and Her Family: A Rural Mother-In-Law in North India
This film focuses on a grandmother (Dadi) in a Jat farm family in
Haryana. Dadi is committed to preserving her family consisting of her husband,
her sons, her daughters-in-law, and her grandchildren, all sharing their incomes
and expenses. During the film Dadi contrasts the behavior of daughters-in-law
today with daughters-in-law in her day, organizes household work as well as
celebrations, and describes the ultimate dependence of women on the men to
whom they are given in marriage. Dadi and her family recognize, but cannot
fully control, the constantly changing forces holding the family together
as well as threatening to break up the family and to divide and separate the
family property.
Thursday, November 17: 12-1 PM
206 Ingraham Hall
J. Mark Kenoyer
Professor and Chair of Anthropology and Director of Center for South Asia, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Audio Download
The Role of Marine Shell in Ornament, Art and Ritual of the Indus Civilization: An Ethnoarchaeological Perspective
This lecture will present an overview of the role of the marine shell,
specifically Turbinella pyrum, which has been called the Sacred Conch shell,
by some scholars. The shell was used extensively during the Indus civilization
circa 2600-1900 BC, to make ornaments, inlay and various ritual objects. It
continued to be used for the production of various types of ornaments in later
historical times and is still used in modern Bengal. The unique feature of
this shell is that it is found only in the waters of the Indian subcontinent
and this allows the study of the distribution of finished objects throughout
South Asia and beyond. The talk will highlight recent discoveries of this shell
in the Indus region and present a brief discussion of the ethnographic studies
carried out by the author in Bengal and most recently in Bangladesh.
Thursday, December 1: 12-1 PM
206 Ingraham Hall
Shelley Feldman
President of American Institute of Bangladesh Studies and Director Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies& Professor, Development Sociology, Cornell University
Audio Download
Constructing States and Citizens: Partition as a Social Project
Discussions of the 1947 partition of South Asia often presume the
dramatic and violent division of the subcontinent as the basis for the formation
of a Muslim majority and Hindu majority state: East and West Pakistan and
India. In this paper, I reframe this popular understanding of partition through
an exploration of the myriad ways in which states unfold as social projects
as, for example, through the promotion of regulations regarding who is and
is not recognized as a citizen of the nation. I examine such regulations and
attend to the practices that constitute the making of home and belonging,
including the significance of social as well as territorial claims of borders
and boundaries.
Thursday, December 8: 4-6 PM
336 Ingraham Hall
Censorship and Scholarship: The Indian Case of A.K. Ramanujan's "300 Ramayanas"
Vinay Dharwadker, Professor, Languages and Cultures of Asia
Sandeep Kindo, PhD student, Languages and Cultures of Asia
John Stavrellis, PhD student, Languages and Cultures of Asia
Recent developments in India stemming from the removal of A.K. Ramanujan's "300
Ramayanas" from the Delhi University history curriculum raise issues of local
politics, scholarly freedom, censorship, and the Indian constitution. This
panel discussion will map the key developments and players, comment on the
essay itself, and highlight legal issues relevant to the controversy.
