Abstracts 31st Annual Conference on South Asia October 10-L3,2002 Center for South Asia flniversity of Wisconsin-Madison Abeysekara, Ananda, Virginia Tech and State University Postcolonial Religion and Public Criticism In this paper, I am concerned with questions of the following sort: How might we conceive of the study of postcolonial religion as a site of criticism? In other words, how might we think of the practice of writing about postcolonial culture and religion - in this case Buddhism, monkhood and identity in Sri Lanka -- as constituting a politics of criticism? How can such a politics of criticism be construed as an ethic of intervention in the postcolonial formations of identity and difference, religion and secularism, self and other? By looking at the conjuncture of a recent dabate, I will suggest that such a criticism/intervention can prove helpful to rethinking and reimagining new public spaces in which different practices of pluralistic and democratic being and belonging - albeit contingent ones - can be cultivated and sustained. Agha, Sameetah, Pratt Institute Representing War: Colonial Accounts and the British-Pukhtun Encounter The North-West Frontier (a mountainous tribal area bordering Afghanistan and Pakistan) occupies a unique site in the history of British colonialism. Despite almost a hundred years (1849-1947) of bloody confrontations and continuous warfare, the British failed to conquer the region or subdue its inhabitants-the Pukhtuns. The British-Pukhtun encounter led to some of the hardest and biggest military campaigns fought in the history of colonial warfare. One of these wars, Malakand, later became famous due to the presence of a young subaltern named Winston Churchill, who went on to write his first book about it. Despite over a hundred military confrontations with the Pukhtuns, the British did not win this war. Because of the uniqueness of this colonial encounter we see the emergence of a peculiar colonial historiography. We see fragmented accounts with major gaps. We see an emphasis on isolated incidents, incidents which would reclaim the superiority of the British soldier. Even if this historiography is viewed as a one-sided colonial monologue, it leaves major questions unanswered and ends up employing a variant orientalist discourse. Providing a brief background into colonial historiography, this paper examines representations of the British-Pukhtun wars that emerge from official, confidential documents. If contemporary writings that were meant for the public do not tell the whole story, how did the British represent these wars to themselves? An accurate depiction would have necessitated confronting and justifying their failures on the Frontier. Based on archival and field research, this paper explores this question and in the process attempts to reveal the construction of a strange and particular discourse of colonial warfare. Ahmad, Hena, Truman State University Food as Metaphor of Class Distinction in Subcontinental Culture While writers ranging from Anita Desai to Arundhati Roy have examined class distinction in their novels, Kamila Shamsie uses the metaphor of food as a defining characteristic of class in a unique manner. Her refreshing postmodern novel, Salt and Saffron (2000), is a marked departure, in many ways, from earlier subcontinental fiction. This paper will examine the ways in which this novel represents an ordinary occurrence, the preparation of food, with an attention to detail, encountered daily in subcontinental homes, but not brought out before in fiction. It employs the metaphor of food to frame its discourse around a family's upper-class prejudice. An examination of class distinction in the subcontinent, then, poses certain questions immediately: How is snobbery based on fear, on fear of squalor, and on fear of powerlessness? How does food serve to collapse class difference? How does the novel both underscore and undercut class division and prejudice, paradoxically? This paper will attempt to address these questions. Ahmed, Anis, New York University Bangladeshi Literature in the Global Tango Recent scholars have censured the allegedly retrograde national focus of contemporary Bangladeshi literature that renders it 'stylistically noncompetitive with the spectacular experimental fiction of ... hybridity and postcoloniality'. This paper will read a recent Bangladeshi novel, Shahidul Jahir's Shey Ratey Purnima Chhilo(1995) which on the surface can seem to be another nationally preoccupied novel. The astounding violence of the opening scene which wipes out the village patriarach Mofizuddin with his whole family has an uncanny allegorical resemblance to the murder of Bangladesh's Father of the Nation Sheikh Mujib. Yet, the story that unfolds is hardly a national allegory in any obvious way. Rather it is a meditation on the nature of an autochthonous sovereignty, and the diverse manner in which it is contested. The text foregrounds events that highlight the local community's ability to organize itself (during and after violence) in ways that resist easy definitions of tradition and modernity, local and national. But it does so to neither celebrate nor to condemn the autonomy of the local, but to reveal the deep ambiguity that lies at the heart of all agency. The purpose of this paper would be to suggest modes of reading vernacular literatures that shed light on the complexities of social change and violence in localities and perspectives that are not prominent in global or commonwealth literatures. By pointing to this politics of address this paper will hope to open up the discourses of globalization, literature, and violence in some minimal way to the plenitude of alternative modernities. Ali, Kamran Asdar, University of Texas, Austin Reading Pulp Fiction: Domesticity In Contemporary Pakistan Using an example from popular women's writings in Pakistan, the paper is an attempt to comprehend how middle and lower middle class women articulate notions of family, individuality and sexual mores in a rapidly changing social and economic milieu of contemporary Pakistan. In short, I will explore how Urdu women's magazines and digests tend to inform and represent domestic life. This is not by any means an exhaustive survey of the literature. My examples will, however, suggest ways in which popular writings for women need to be understood and analyzed beyond established reading practices of harlequin romances and popular women's writings in the West. No doubt, these writings do reflect and reinforce women's traditional roles as daughters, wives and mothers, and predominantly portray women as sexually naive, passive and submissive in their relationship to men. Yet my discussion of female narratives from a recent Pakistani Urdu digest will argue that such writings need to also be read as transgressing and challenging societal norms. I admit that such texts retain the traditional and conservative facade of the genre. Their close reading, however, illuminates how this faithfulness to idiomatic priorities may yet contain within itself a critique of social expectations. Amarakeerthi, Liyanage, UW-Madison Poetics of Storytelling in Ummagga Jataka and its Use of Substories Ummagga Jataka is the longest tale in Book of Sinhala Jataka, which contains five hundred forty some stories of Buddha's former lives. Jataka stories are exceptional in that they tell two similar stories within a single 'story'. This twin-story structure holds one story from Buddha's present life and another story from one of his former lives. These stories are similar to each other in their theme and events and sometimes, in their size. Ummagga Jataka follows the same structure but differs from others with its many substories. In this paper, I analyze the complex narrative structure of this Jataka, treating it as a sophisticated literary work that signifies a certain fully developed narratology, which is not available to us today. Unlike classical Sinhala poetry, the classical prose narratives do not have extant theoretical works on their craft. Therefore, in order to unveil the poetics of storytelling we have to carefully analyze the extant stories themselves. Ummagga Jataka provides us with a paradigm for such a study. Since narrative structures of South Asian classics have not been adequately studied, those texts have not gained enough attention from the rich scholarship on narratives of other cultures. My paper will be an attempt to remind ourselves once more of that needed attention. Aryasinha, Ravinatha, School of International Service, American University War and Peace in Sri Lanka: The Scope and Limits of International Action in Conflict Resolution The protracted armed struggle waged against the Sri Lanka government by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam ( LTTE) which seeks the creation of a separate state in north- eastern Sri Lanka, is presently enjoying its most stable ceasefire in over a quarter century, and preparations are underway for preliminary direct talks in May, 2002 in Bangkok. The Norwegian Government, with support from other powerful Western states and India, has played a crucial role in bringing about the truce. In the context of previous unsuccessful attempts at finding a settlement, this paper will asses as to what extent the present peace process is a result of international action, in contrast to other domestic and regional circumstances. Issues including, recent political and economic developments in Sri Lanka, the loss of image and proscription faced by the LTTE from several governments