38 Annual Conference on South Asia Paper Abstracts
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38th Annual Conference on South Asia Paper Abstracts Aaftaab, Naheed A Quality Worker: IT workers and adapting to new global economics My paper explores how workers in the Hyderabad’s IT (information technology) industry understand and negotiate their career and job options during the economic down of 2009. How do they imagine their future careers, their place within an international work force, and what this means in terms of creating an image of Hyderabad as an urban, IT hub? In Hyderabad the development of “HITEC City,” a suburb of Hyderabad where IT companies are concentrated, is part of imagining an urban center where high-rise shopping malls and gated communities accompany the growth of the IT industry. However, as the effects of the 2009 economic downturn are being felt, IT workers are searching for ways to identify themselves. The slowdown has been accompanied by a major corporate fraud case, which could mean the end of one of the top five IT company in the country (and only major IT company started in Hyderabad) employing around 50,000 workers. Image and branding are important concerns for the city, the industry and individual workers as they consider the place of Indian corporations in the global market. For the IT workers participating in my study their options are not outside of a neo-liberal economic model of international dependency or a return to pre 1991 protectionism. Rather, their aim is to survive the downturn by remaining employed, even if it means salary cuts, demotions, or changing specialization. This is accompanied by a narrative of moving from providing cheap labor in the global market to providing quality products. In many ways these become the exemplary neo-liberal worker, who through specialization carve a niche for themselves in the market by using the available information and expertise to present a specific image of themselves to the market. Within this view there is little space for those outside of this economic process whether it is those in the informal sector or the college recruits that will not be employed. The only way for those on the outside to succeed in this economic model is to find a way into the system. Using data from interviews and participant observation, I will explore the ways those within the IT industry are creating an identity or image of themselves as neo-liberal workers, and the exclusionary practices that are part of this identity formations. Abbas, Hassan Dr. Israr and Javed Ghamidi: Religious Discourse in Pakistan and the Debate on the Nature of the State Dr. Israr Ahmad, born in 1932, came under the influence of Allama Iqbal and Maulana Abul A’la Maududi as a young student. After the creation of Pakistan he worked for the Islami Jamiat-e Taleba and the Jamaat-i Islami but resigned from the latter organization in 1957 because of its involvement in electoral politics. He continued to give lectures on the Quran for which he had gained considerable fame. In 1967 he published his renowned tract, “Islamic Renaissance: The Real Task Ahead”, where he called for an Islamic renaissance by revitalizing the Imam, the “true faith and conviction” especially amongst the intelligentsia. For the last forty years he has also been involved in reforming society in a practical way with the aim of establishing a “true Islamic State or the System of Khilafah”. He headed his organization, the Tanzeem-i Islami, until ill-health forced him to relinquish its leadership in October 2002. Ahmad’s idea that the teachings of the Quran and of the sunna of the Prophet “must be implemented in their totality in the social, cultural, juristic, political, and the economic spheres of life” is contrasted by Javed Ahmad Ghamidi, born in 1951, who is also a well-known Islamic scholar, exegete, and educationist. Like Ahmad he is also a former member of the Jamaat-i Islami but was expelled in 1977. He is labeled a modernist for his insistence on the historical contextualization of the Prophet’s revelation, for his hermeneutics, and for his belief in ijtihad. In this his conclusions are similar to the Islamic modernists. His conception of the state is that it is based on the law of the land as determined by the majority of the people. The differences between the two on the nature of the state in Pakistan epitomizes the debate in the wider public as to what it exactly means to live in an Islamic state. Both have been and are widely viewed in the media and have a following in the diasporic Pakistani community. Agha, Sameetah Stories from the field: Writing the Margins and the Problematic of History This paper revisits my extensive historical fieldwork on the Pukhtuns in the North-West Frontier of Pakistan in order to contribute to our understanding of how historical knowledge of the region is produced. While this region has become a flash point in International Affairs yet again and the focus of US imperialism under President Obama, it continues to raise relevant historical questions about the constructions and representations of the history of its inhabitants. Through a critical examination of photographs and Pukhtun oral narratives about military encounters, this paper probes the incongruities and multiplicities that comprise historical knowledge when representing military history in Pukhtun tribal areas extending from the colonial period to the present. Ahluwalia, Sanjam Transnational Debates on Suppression of Traffic in Women and Children in the early 20th Century and its Impact on the Sexual Landscape of Colonial India The paper seeks to provide a historical context to debates around prostitution and trafficking, focusing on colonial and princely India in a global context. The paper will examine the articulation and reception of the League of Nation protocols for the Suppression of Traffic in Women and Children in the early 20th century. It will focus on how different participants – the British colonial state, Indian princely states, and middle class Indian women’s organizations – shaped the terms of the debates around prostitution and trafficking, and sought to navigate the tensions or conflicts between international, national, and regional articulations of these issues. In doing so, the paper reflects on the discursive mechanisms of an emerging interconnected transnational understanding of the subject, with multiple participants in the west and non-west. Ahmad, Hena South Asian Feminism and Nationalism: A Twenty-First Century Examination Towards the end of the 20th century the concept of nation expanded to mean not just the geopolitical entity but a group that supports or advocates a national culture. More particularly, “national” implied those agendas and discursive and cultural practices that were complicit with a patriarchal hegemonic culture. Critical writing concluded that nations and nationalisms have been imagined based on myths with implications that pointed to “woman” as cultural construct. The concept of nation bears reexamination today because the relationship of women to nation is multi-layered, complicated by the political contexts in which it is situated. South Asian women writers, such as Anita Desai, Arundhati Roy, Kamila Shamsie, Attia Hosain and Kamala Markandaya both resisted and reinscribed, in the latter half of the twentieth-century, the idea of the national. These women writers challenged the nation when the national was seen to mirror patriarchal ideologies that defined the traditional cultural taboos on women’s freedoms and supported national identity when confronting the colonial imperial threat. It can be argued that the political and social realities of the decades in which they were writing shaped their framing of women within the confines of a patriarchal matrix. While grappling with existing ideologies of nationalist discourse, these South Asian writers critique what they allow us to see as a “postnational” world. The aim of this paper is to examine specific texts by these writers, permeated by a consciousness of the general cultural oppression of women. As exemplified in these texts, interventions in the dominant discourses of patriarchal ideologies subvert women’s disempowering self-images and oppose dominant cultural practices that subordinate women to patriarchy. Through juxtaposing oppressed women, resigned to their fate, against those who question and challenge that oppression, this paper examines how these writers carve new images for women, exploring possibilities for them to break away from social prescriptions. Alamgir, Jalal Democratic Erosion and Representational Crisis in Bangladesh Politics This paper argues that a representational crisis--the hope of political representation but its lack in practice-- underlies the steady democratic erosion experienced in Bangladesh from 1991 to 2008. The study highlights three aspects of the crisis: electoral representation, as measured by the divergence between voting preferences and electoral outcomes; accountability representation, as assessed by decision-making accountability within democratic institutions and the major political parties; and violent representation, as manifest in contested issues that have spurred terrorist incidents in the country. The study concludes that democratic consolidation in the country will require stronger institutional capabilities to address each aspect of political representation. Ali, Daud Inscriptional Prosopographies: Merchant Lineages in Medieval South India Inspired by the work of James Heitzman on the generational life histories of title holders in the Chola period, this paper