a south asia sagar research journal volume xxvi • 2018 sponsored by the south asia institute, the university of texas at austin SAGAR 2017–2018 CHIEF EDITORS Sundas Amer, Dept. of Asian Studies, UT Austin Charlotte Giles, Dept. of Asian Studies, UT Austin Paromita Pain, Dept. of Journalism, UT Austin EDITORIAL COLLECTIVE MEMBERS Nabeeha Chaudhary, Radio-Film-Television, UT Austin Andrea Guiterrez, Dept. of Asian Studies, UT Austin Hamza Muhammad Iqbal, Comparative Literature, UT Austin Namrata Kanchan, Dept. of Asian Studies, UT Austin Kathleen Longwaters, Dept. of Asian Studies, UT Austin Daniel Ng, Anthropology, UT Austin Kathryn North, Dept. of Asian Studies, UT Austin Joshua Orme, Dept. of Asian Studies, UT Austin David St. John, Dept. of Asian Studies, UT Austin Ramna Walia, Radio-Film-Television, UT Austin WEB EDITOR Charlotte Giles & Paromita Pain PRINTDESIGNER Dana Johnson EDITORIAL ADVISORS Donald R. Davis, Jr., Director, UT South Asia Institute; Professor, Dept. of Asian Studies, UT-Austin Rachel S. Meyer, Assistant Director, UT South Asia Institute EDITORIAL BOARD Richard Barnett, Associate Professor, Dept. of History, University of Virginia Eric Lewis Beverley, Assistant Professor, Dept. of History, SUNY Stonybrook Purnima Bose, Associate Professor, Dept. of English, Indiana University-Bloomington Laura Brueck, Associate Professor, Asian Languages & Cultures Dept., Northwestern University Indrani Chatterjee, Dept. of History, UT-Austin Lalitha Gopalan, Associate Professor, Dept. of Radio-TV-Film, UT-Austin Sumit Guha, Dept. of History, UT-Austin Kathryn Hansen, Professor Emerita, Dept. of Asian Studies, UT-Austin Barbara Harlow, Professor, Dept. of English, UT-Austin Heather Hindman, Assistant Professor, Dept. of Anthropology, UT-Austin Syed Akbar Hyder, Associate Professor, Dept. of Asian Studies, UT-Austin Shanti Kumar, Associate Professor, Dept, of Radio-Television-Film, UT-Austin Janice Leoshko, Associate Professor, Dept. of Art and Art History, UT-Austin W. Roger Louis, Professor, Dept. of History, UT-Austin Dennis B. McGilvray, Professor, Dept. of Anthropology, University of Colorado, Boulder Gail Minault, Professor, Dept. of History, UT-Austin Raza Mir, Professor, College of Business, William Paterson University Afsar Mohammad, Lecturer, Dept. of Asian Studies, UT-Austin A. Azfar Moin, Assistant Professor, Dept. of Religious Studies, UT-Austin Nauman Naqvi, Assistant Professor, School of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, Habib University, Pakistan Paula Newberg, Clinical Professor, Dept. of Government, UT-Austin Stephen Phillips, Professor, Dept. of Philosophy, UT-Austin A. Sean Pue, Assistant Professor of Hindi Language & South Asian Literature and Culture, Michigan State University Martha Selby, Professor, Dept. of Asian Studies, UT-Austin Snehal Shingavi, Assistant Professor, Dept. of English, Ut-Austin Rupert Snell, Professor, Dept. of Asian Studies, UT-Austin R.V.S. Sundaram, Visiting Professor, South Asia Studies, University of Pennsylvania Cynthia Talbot, Associate Professor, Dept. of History, UT-Austin Sanjeev Uprety, Professor, Central Department of English, Tribhuvan University, Nepal a south asia sagar research journal volume xxvi • 2018 Editors’ Note 1 THE SILENT (SILENCED) GAP: 4 Reading the Urdu Gothic through Foucault Matt Reeck THE CHRONOTOPE OF HOUSE: 28 Negotiating Domestic Realms of Memory in the Pakistani Television Dramas of Haseena Moin Nadia Butt “I AM NOT THIS BODY”: 60 Persons, Boundaries, and Bodies in Vaishnava Ritual Practice Holly Walters ARE SATARA VARAN DEVI SINHALA BUDDHIST DEITIES? 92 Vibhisana, A Case Study Sree Padma SOMETHING ABOUT NAMES: 120 Saadat Hasan Manto on Naming, Religion, History, and Progressive Urdu Literature Gregory Bruce AN INTERVIEW WITH CHANDAN GOWDA 138 Contributors 148 EDITORS’ NOTE It has been a few years since Sagar made a shift to becoming a peer-reviewed journal. Marking further growth are the various submis- sions Sagar gets from scholars located globally. Contributors include graduate students as well as established researchers. We celebrate this diversity of voices and scholarship. This year, we decided to broaden our scope and approach, eschewing a theme, in favor of encouraging our writers to explore issues of their choice. The result was a collec- tion of eclectic submissions from all over the globe, encompassing a variety of disciplines and countries in South Asia. This issue contains five pieces, produced by faculty and graduate scholars and translators, each selected after rigorous peer review. The final piece is an interview conducted by one of our collective members with Chanda Gowda, pro- fessor in sociology at Azim Premji University in Bengaluru. Due to the open nature of our call for papers this year, the submis- sions address different questions that at first glance appear to have little overlap or connection. The opening and closing pieces of this is- sue show us the range of authors such as the Urdu short story writer, Saadat Hasan Manto, and the ways in which they use prose to address a number of concerns of the time such as the psychological violence and effects of British colonialism on the subcontinent (Reeck), to the prob- lems Manto had with the direction the progressive movement amongst the Urdu intelligentsia during colonialism (Bruce). These pieces also bring to mind Partha Chatteree’s work, particularly The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. The diversity of ways in which the British Raj affected the subcontinent and how it contin- ues to manifest itself in this postcolonial era is something that Manto was well aware of. Sagar’s theme of ‘space’ last year is also prevalent in these two pieces as well as Nadia Butt’s exploration of the home and its significance as depicted in Pakistani serial dramas. In a similar vein, Holly Walters’ piece addresses the reimagining of bodies, desires, and space in Vaishnava ritual practice. Examining the corporeal and non- corporeal bodies through the presence of images and practice of rituals, she depicts how images populate religious spaces creating a link be- tween the practitioner and non-corporeal presence of the deity. In con- versation with this article is the piece by Sree Padma which explores the veneration of deities in Sri Lanka in Buddhist religious practices. Padma investigates how non-Vedic and non-Buddhist groups situate themselves into the fold of Vedic and Buddhist practicing communi- ties. Our sincerest thanks go to the South Asia institute, particularly, for- mer Director Kamran Asdar Ali, Asssisant Director Rachel S. Meyer, and accountant Soheila Omrani for their never-ending support of Sagar. We also thank former Chief Editors Saif Shahin, Jeff Wilson, Andrea Guti- errez, for their assistance, designer Dana Johnson for his work over the years on print and digital volumes, the student members of our Edito- rial Collective, and the faculty members of our Editorial Board. Sincerely, Sundas Amer, Charlotte Giles, and Paromita Pain Chief Editors, Sagar: A South Asia Research Journal VOLume xxvi • 2018 THE SILENT (SILENCED) GAP: Reading the Urdu Gothic through Foucault Matt Reeck The University of California, Los Angeles 4 THE SILENT (SILENCED) GAP ABSTRACT Michel Foucault’s Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique suggests that the defi- nition of deviant psychological profiles is as much about the operation of state power and the tyranny of Enlightenment rationality as about the norms of psychological reality. Foucault’s discursive and institutional history illu- minates how two stories from the Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto’s 1948 volume Chughad, “Miss Tin Wālā” (“Miss Tinman”) and “Parhiye Kalimā” (“God Save Us from Our Sins”), can be read as allegories of colonial oppression. Ashis Nandy’s history of the psychology of British Indian colonial subjects also speaks to how Manto’s stories are more than pulp fiction. Rather, their violence and terror dredges up the psychological damage incurred from dis- cursive and institutional oppression during colonialism. These unhinged mo- ments of the Unheimlich articulate gothic excess and expose gaps in the dis- cursive and institutional authority of British colonialism. t the heart of every excess is silence. Or, as Michel Foucault writes in Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique, “madness is A at work, at the very heart of reason and of truth.”1 Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique can be read as a theoretical companion and paratext to gothic literature. Not only are its themes those of the gothic—norm and excess, reason and madness, text and subtext, vio- lence and passion—but also its historical and textual evidence comes from testimonies at the bounds of psychosomatic experience. In the case of the gothic, a silence intervenes in its characteristic moments that defy reason. A bevy of scholarship explains how these moments 1. Michel Foucault, Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 25. Translations will generally follow Richard Howard’s translation Madness and Civilization (New York: Norton, 1966). Page numbers, however, refer to the French version listed above. >> PHOTO COURTESY NUSRAT JALAL 5 MattMATT REEREECK of unreason transfer affect from text to reader.2 Its physical and emo- tional architecture overwhelm the reader with estrangement and vio- lence. But it is also possible that these moments of the Unheimlich express the compression of a type of logic being routed through its narrowest passage. This tension of the Unheimlich, the apparent de- feat of reason by the forces of hysteria, brutality, and violence, might be read as the silent gap that when allowed to speak would supply the logic to unite the seemingly irreconcilable. The gothic is not, however, strictly a European narrative mode. Marshall Brown criticizes the overly parochial thrust of scholarship of the gothic that confines the “international compass” of the Roman- tic gothic to “national schools.”3 Patrick McGrath likewise argues for the expansiveness of the literature, a “mad dream to be dreamt in a thousand forms.” 4 In fact, the presence of the gothic in South Asian literature and film has not been treated in scholarship aside from one 2. The Gothic is a healthy scholarly literature.