South Asia Seminar Series

South Asia Seminar presentation by Jack Hawley.

In his book A Storm of Songs (Harvard University Press, 2015), Jack Hawley attempts to unearth the historical, political, and performative contingencies that gave birth to the concept of the bhakti movement. It emerges that, starting with the Mughals and their Kachvaha allies, North Indian groups looked to the Hindu South as a resource that would give religious and linguistic depth to their own collective history. Only in the early twentieth century, however, did the idea of a bhakti “movement” crystallize -- in the intellectual circle surrounding Rabindranath Tagore in Bengal. What should we do with the idea of the bhakti movement once we recognize that this portrait of history is deeply conditioned by a history of its own?

South Asia Seminar presentation by Steven Wilkinson.

At Indian independence in 1947, the country’s founders worried that the army India inherited— conservative and dominated by officers and troops drawn disproportionately from a few “martial” groups—posed a real threat to democracy. They also saw the structure of the army, with its recruitment on the basis of caste and religion, as incompatible with their hopes for a new secular nation.

India has successfully preserved its democracy, however, unlike many other colonial states that inherited imperial “divide and rule” armies, and unlike its neighbor Pakistan, which inherited part of the same Indian army in 1947. As Steven I. Wilkinson shows, the puzzle of how this happened is even more surprising when we realize that the Indian Army has kept, and even expanded, many of its traditional “martial class” units, despite promising at independence to gradually phase them out.

Army and Nation draws on uniquely comprehensive data to explore how and why India has succeeded in keeping the military out of politics, when so many other countries have failed. It uncovers the command and control strategies, the careful ethnic balancing, and the political, foreign policy, and strategic decisions that have made the army safe for Indian democracy. Wilkinson goes further to ask whether, in a rapidly changing society, these structures will survive the current national conflicts over caste and regional representation in New Delhi, as well as India’s external and strategic challenges.

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.

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.