The 40Th Annual Conference on South Asia (2011)

2011 40th Annual Conference on South Asia Paper Abstracts Center for South Asia University of Wisconsin - Madison Aaftaab, Naheed Claiming Middle Class: Globalization, IT, and exclusionary practices in Hyderabad In this paper, I propose that middle class identity in the IT sector can be read as part of an “identity politics” that claim certain rights and benefits from governmental bodies both at the national and international levels. India’s economic growth since the 1991 liberalization has been attended by the growth of the middle classes through an increase in employment opportunities, such as those in the IT sector. The claims to middle class status are couched in narratives of professional affiliations that shape culturally significant components of middle class identities. The narratives rely on the ability of IT professionals to reconcile the political identities of nationalism while simultaneously belonging to a global work force. IT workers and the industry at large are symbols of India’s entry into the global scene, which, in turn, further reinforces the patriotic and nationalist rhetoric of “Indianness.” This global/national identity, however, exists through exclusionary practices that are evident in the IT sector despite the management’s assertions that the industry’s success is dependent on “merit based” employment practices. Using ethnographic data, I will examine middle class cultural and political claims as well as exclusionary practices in professional settings of the IT industry in order to explore the construction of new forms of identity politics in India. 40th Annual Conference on South Asia, 2011 1 Acharya, Anirban Right To (Sell In) The City: Neoliberalism and the Hawkers of Calcutta This paper explores the struggles of urban street vendors in India especially during the post liberalization era. It focuses on the so called “hawker” populations in the city of Kolkata, and highlights the state’s attempts to regulate and control them. It further highlights how hawkers organize their collective resistance against state aggression. I argue that the locus of resistance has changed qualitatively with the liberalization of the Indian economy. This resistance must therefore be situated alongside the capitalist and corporatist attempts to takeover the informal retail sector, within which these vendors are self-employed. Drawing on the work of theorists of urbanism (Lefebvre 1967; Harvey 1973; Mitchell 2003; Chatterjee 2004) social movements, I argue, need to be understood in terms of the contestation of urban space; through an interrogation (and translation) of the notion of “right to the city” for the postcolonial (and neocapitalist) contexts. Drawing on a detailed ethnography of street vendors in Kolkata, and activists and union leaders who claim to represent the hawkers, I argue that the language of “rights” becomes a strategy to legally exclude (in the long term though not in the short) street vendors from specific urban spaces in the neoliberal era. The paper therefore demonstrates the processes through which the radical language of the “right to the city” is co-opted by the state-capital nexus to legally and actively curtail the vendors’ rights to livelihood. 40th Annual Conference on South Asia, 2011 2 Agrawal, Purushottam Rereading Kabir: Vernacular Modernity and Marginalization In the process of creating the asymmetry between the enlightened modern West and the unenlightened colony, recent historians of India often have regarded Kabir and other persons who do not fit this model as exceptions who were ahead of their time and hence were marginalized by their contemporaries and made little cultural impact. In contradictory fashion, many historians have also de-individualized and essentialized Kabir as a member of this or that group: as an illiterate artisan, as a Muslim, or as a Nathyogi. Against the scholarship informed by the colonial episteme, I have read Kabir and his times on the basis of contemporary vernacular sources. My reading brings him out as a self- determined individual whose poetry expresses the ineffable story of his own spiritual quest and his quest for the ontological essence in humans in the process of which he castigated false pretense in the costume of religious and social righteousness. Far from being just obtained from the family tradition, Kabir’s ideas resulted from a self-conscious engagement with various discourses. Against the view of several recent scholars, I have argued that Kabir had a direct relationship with Ramanand and that the currently dominant image of Ramanand is a twentieth- century construct derived from sectarian conflicts. I have shown that the early date generally assigned to Ramanand is a modern fabrication and that a historical relation between Ramanand and Kabir is more probable than improbable. It is anachronistic to read Kabir as a marginalized voice. The prestige and influence he enjoyed despite his humble origins cannot be ignored. With the advent of colonial modernity and the resultant dissociation of sensibility, he was of course later marginalized, along with the whole intellectual tradition of vernacular modernity. This tradition is not persistently opposed to the intellectual discourses in Sanskrit or Persian, but nonetheless has carved out an autonomous existence. Its interaction with ‘great’ tradition was responsible for the creation of what I call the ‘Public Sphere of Bhakti’ and the emergence of vernacular modernity of India. This vernacular modernity is also associated with a social and religious movement that has been called ‘non-caste Hinduism’. Western modernity created its own notion of a static, caste-bound Indian tradition, and this in turn led to a distorted understanding of Kabir and his times. My work seeks to question and challenge this understanding. 40th Annual Conference on South Asia, 2011 3 Ahmed, Manan A Note on Some Medieval Representations of Muslim Capital in South Asia The city is ever-present in Muslim geographer accounts of al-Hind wa'l Sind since the ninth and tenth century. A special emphasis is on the descriptions of the categories of inhabitants, the milieu of the settlement as well as reports on the Jami'a Masjid (central mosque) and the political layout of the city. This paper is an attempt to explicate a sub-genre of visit to the Muslim capital cities in South Asia from the Arab capital of al-Mansura to Lahore, Multan and Delhi. The paper will focus on discrete accounts from the 10th century account of al-Masudi to the fourteenth century visits of Ibn Batutta (d. 1368) and Makhdum Jahanian Jahangusht (d. 1384) to Delhi. In these disparate accounts (a historian, a jurist and a sufi), I will attempt to delineate particular tropes which inform the visit and how they continue to echo in later representations. A special focus will be on the emotive landscape that is sketched through the spiritual and spatial cartography of the capital city. These medieval accounts are precursors (discursively, literally, culturally) to the early modern accounts of the capital city Shahjahanabad and Lahore. As such, in conversation with the later understanding of the capital - whether in bloom or in decline - they reveal varied registers of understanding urban life in South Asia and its relationship to the putative seats of power. 40th Annual Conference on South Asia, 2011 4 Akhter, Majed The engineer as Law: Understanding the contradictions of the Indus Water Treaty of 1960 The Indus Water Treaty of 1960 (the Treaty) seems to be in trouble. Since 2005 Pakistan has increasingly taken disputes with India over implementation of the Treaty to the highest levels of international arbitration –a legal recourse not employed for the first 45 years of the Treaty. Indian and Pakistani media have also put the Treaty under critical scrutiny, and diplomatic tension between the countries in relation to Indus waters has increased. How do we interpret this de-legitimizing of the Treaty? The literature is dominated by state-centered neo-realist analyses that deem the Treaty a success, pointing to the absence of an explicit water war between Pakistan and India. In this paper, I critique this perspective and offer a historical-materialist alternative. Drawing on primary legal sources, media reports, and the agrarian history of Punjab, I argue that the legal-geographical assumptions of the Treaty contradict the ecological reality of the Indus River, and the post-2005 de-legitimization should be seen as the fruition of this contradiction. The argument proceeds in two steps. First, I demonstrate the historical role of technocratic expertise, especially engineering, in shaping water law and administration in Pakistan and North India. Second, I show how the agrarian economy of lowland transnational Punjab and the Treaty of 1960 are related, and predisposed to crisis, through a colonial model of capitalist development that subordinates democratic control of resources to an idea of technical efficiency. The focus throughout is not on the interaction of states, but the co-evolution of ecological, economic, and discursive processes. This paper makes a theoretical and historiographical contribution to scholars attempting to understand the legal, geographic, and political dimensions of the Treaty in the post-2005 context. 40th Annual Conference on South Asia, 2011 5 Alam, Asiya Intimacy against Convention: Marriage and Romance in Syeda Bano Ahmed’s Dagar se Hat Kar This paper will explore the marriage and romantic intimacy narrated in Dagar se Hat Kar, the autobiography of Syeda Bano Ahmed. Born in early twentieth century, Syeda Bano was raised in an elite family of Bhopal and educated at Karamat Husain Girls School and Isabella Thawborne College in Lucknow. She was married on February 5, 1933 to Abbas Raza, a lawyer, based in Lucknow. In an act of sexual defiance, she refused to consummate her marriage on the wedding night insisting on the development of friendship first. Not surprisingly, from the beginning, she remained alienated from conjugal bliss and the poor relations between herself and Abbas Raza showed little improvement in the thirteen years of their marriage.

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