Join us to hear Sharika Thiranagama, Assistant Professor of the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University, speak on "Civility and Intimacy: Post-War Transformations in Sri Lanka" as part of the University of Chicago's South Asia Speaker Series. The Sri Lankan civil war ended brutally in 2009. Alongside the triumphant and troubling extension of Sri Lankan state sovereignty over the war zone areas, new possibilities and old ghosts animate everyday life in post-war Jaffna, one of the former disputed zones. This talk will discuss and contrast narratives about emerging forms of civility around two different kinds of post-war life, the first about inter-ethnic civilities between Tamils and Muslims and the second about intra-ethnic caste disputes with Tamil neighborhoods and families.
Pursuing a multi-sited approach to the study of global intellectual history, this paper studies the interrelation, friction, and entanglement that developed between two distant centers of intellectual modernism located in Calcutta and Berlin, beginning in the late nineteenth century. The paper argues that the apparent peculiarity of German and Indian engagements from the 1880s-1950s actually serves to reveal deep characteristics of global modernist knowledge production, cutting across colonial, racial, civilizational and historiographic divides. By following traces of intellectual diaspora and entanglement, Kris Manjapra employs a critical transnational optic to challenge conventional notions about the boundaries of national identity, the global production of racial thinking, the uses of international comparison, and the sources of modernist thought. This is a South Asia Seminar Series led by Kris Manjapra, Associate Professor of History at Tufts University.
A discussion led by Jyoti Puri, Professor of Sociology at Simmons College of Arts and Sciences. Delving into the struggle against the anti-sodomy law, this presentation juxtaposes the historic 2009 Delhi High Court ruling decriminalizing homosexuality and the subsequent 2013 Supreme Court decision recriminalizing it. Seeing these state institutions through the lens of sexuality, the discussion accounts for the diverging judicial outcomes. In so doing, it unravels the contested understandings of state and sexuality in post-liberalized India. This event is free and open to the public.
Dan Slater
Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Chicago
Party Cartelization, Indonesian-Style
Democratic opposition has not emerged as quickly as expected in Indonesia, because presidents have shared power much more widely than expected. The introduction of direct presidential elections in 2004 has gradually led to a sharpening of the government-opposition divide; but this shift is neither complete nor irreversible. Accountability relations between voters and parties thus remain surprisingly tenuous in Indonesia, more than fifteen years after Suharto’s dictatorship collapsed.
Adam Ziegfeld
Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, George Washington University
India's 2014 General Election: Earthquake, Tremor, or Politics as Usual?
Media coverage of India's 2014 election widely touted the BJP's victory as representing a seismic shift in India's politics. However, a closer look at prior election results in India, the nature of the 2014 verdict, and broader concepts in the study of voting behavior suggest otherwise. At best, much more evidence is required before 2014 can be considered a major realignment in India's politics. Equally likely, the 2014 election will ultimately be understood as representing only a modest change in the electoral landscape and reflecting many common patterns observed in democracies around the world.
Adam Auerbach
Assistant Professor, School of International Service, American University
Clients and Communities: The Political Economy of Party Network Organization and Development in India’s Urban Slums
India’s urban slums exhibit dramatic variation in their levels of infrastructural development and access to public services. Why are some vulnerable communities able to demand and secure development from the state while others fail? Based on ethnographic fieldwork and original household survey data, Auerbach finds that party networks significantly influence the ability of poor urban communities to organize and demand development. In slums with dense party networks, competition among party workers generates a degree of accountability in local patron-client hierarchies that strengthens organizational capacity and encourages development. Dense party networks also provide settlements with a critical degree of political connectivity. The study contributes to research on distributive politics, the political economy of development, and urban governance in India.
This talk will consider the unusually agentive status that early seventeenth centuryMughal painters enjoyed as the depicters—as opposed to inventors—of the Mughal emperor Jahangir’s oneiric experiences. In doing so, it argues that Mughal artists, among other makers of the book (calligraphers, binders, illuminators), played an integral and hitherto under appreciated role as producers of and participants in the imperial aura.
Marathi Varkari and Ramdasi kirtan was brought to Tamil-speaking South India during the earliest phases of the establishment of Maratha power in Thanjavur at the end of the seventeenth century. These practices survived largely through institutions known as Ramdasimaths in Thanjavur city and nearby Mannargudi, which received patronage from Marathi-speaking desastha Brahmins in the region and also from the Thanjavur court itself. In this presentation, I consider the process by which Marathi kirtan was “indigenized” by the Tamil smarta Brahmin community in Thanjavur by focusing on the development of a uniquely cosmopolitan practice that today is known as “bhajana sampradaya.” e codication of this multilingual, hybrid musical practice was no doubt a mirroring of the Thanjavur court’s own culture of literary polyglossia. e poems of Namdev, Chokhamela, Tukaram, Janabai, Samarth Ramdas and others are brought into a world of not only uniquely “South Indian” ragas and singing-styles, but also into a the distinct ritual and mnemonic culture of Tamil Brahmins that includes life-cycle events, temple-style domestic puja, purity laws, and contemporary identity politics. Today, the memory of Marathi kirtan is put to the service of the public identity of segments of the Tamil Brahmin community, largely through one of the community’s most cherished expressive forms, namely “classical Karnatak” music, fully inected with all its nationalist socio-historical resonances. I argue that the making of modern Karnatak music and the caste-based aesthetic it engenders cannot be disassociated from its Marathi kirtan and bhajana roots. I propose a complex genealogy for Karnatak music that foregrounds the co-opting of Marathi musical and literary traditions and takes seriously the powers of polyglossia in the world of music.
