Panels SA Conference

South Asia by the Bay Conference Program May 9th-11th, 2012 Panels 1-6: Day 1 Panels 7-12: Day 2 Panels 13-16: Day 3 Concurrent Panels 10.15-11.30 AM May 9, 2012 Obendorf Event Center 3rd Floor, North Building, Knight Management Center 641 Knight Way, Stanford Graduate School of Business Panel #1 The Politics of Identity and Representation in India Panel Organizer: Sharika Thiranagama, Stanford University and the New School Panel Discussant: Sharika Thiranagama, Stanford University This panel examines the politics of identity and representation in India. The papers examine how constitutional identity markers play an important role in political mobilization. Francesca Refsum Jensenius, University of California, Berkeley Representation, Power and Development for SCs in India 1974-2008 Using a unique dataset of the members of each cabinet across Indian states 1974- 2008, this paper shows that while SCs have been guaranteed a political presence in state legislatures through the political reservation system, they have been underrepresented in cabinet positions. In the few cases of SCs getting into positions of power we see a change in the development trajectories for SCs in their area. This suggests that guaranteeing a group descriptive representation, through measures such as reserved seats, is not enough to ensure them substantive representation. If the goal is to increase the substantive representation of groups, measures must also be made to get them access to position of power within the political system. Alexander Lee, Stanford University Caste Identity and Social Change in Colonial India Why do some ethnic groups mobilize politically while others do not, despite the substantial advantages of doing so? And why do some groups, having chosen to mobilize, chose to relate their identity claims to larger systems of ethnic hierarchy which do not necessarily privilege them? This paper answers these puzzle by developing a theory of the political value of social status. It argues that markers of social status serve as costly signals of political power in areas with little 1 information, and that possession of status markers enables individuals to extract resources from individuals without these markers with the threat of coercive sanctions. These non-state interpersonal transfers are an important part of the political economy of pre-modern societies. Some of the implications of these theory are that the level and type of political mobilization are dependent on the resource endowments of groups, their ex ante social status, and the level of political information within the society as a whole. Sanjog Rupakheti, Rutgers University Political Economy of Caste and Rituals: Hierarchy and Power in South Asia The Nepali rulers deployed combination of treatises, maxims and royal orders to regulate caste structures, which were driven by the political-economic imperatives of the eighteenth century state-making projects. After 1854 the Ain broadened the legislative and judicial power of the state to intervene swiftly in matters related to caste, marriage and commensality rules. This paper illustrates how various labor relations within caste structures were embedded in and generated by the process of state-making at a particular historic juncture. Panel #2 Spaces, Encounters, and Politics Panel Organizer: Sangeeta Mediratta, Stanford University Panel Discussant: Sandria Freitag, North Carolina State University The papers in this panel will look at questions of spatial politics. Sophia Powers’ work looks at Khoj International Artist’s Association’s attempt to make art that is both Indian and (post)modern; Ragini Srinivasan looks at intercultural encounters in Kerala’s premier art institution, Kalamandalam; and Azeen Khan looks at the place of displeasure (and broadly, affect) in Pakistan and India based artist Bani Abidi’s work. Sophia Powers, University of California, Los Angeles Village Vanguard: Unraveling the Khoj Conundrum This paper is based on more than six months of fieldwork in Delhi over four consecutive years including a three-month internship at the Khoj headquarters. Based in a small undeveloped ‘village’ in the heart of modern Delhi, Khoj International Artist’s Association supports an artistic community that strives through a diverse and sophisticated set of practices to address the conundrum of how to make art that is both Indian and (post) modern. Yet despite the international elite art-world status garnered in large part through the embrace of alternative art media made hip by Western artistic practice, Khoj has been self-consciously locally oriented and politically inclined since its inception. Artists are not only drawn from the surrounding (non-elite) community, but are encouraged and even required to interact with and address its denizens through their work. Indeed, it is through this agenda that what are understood as originally Western art forms are creatively 2 “Indianized,” and then, somewhat ironically, exported internationally via the biennial circuit. Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, University of California, Berkeley Kalamandalam Calling: Intercultural Encounters and the Transformation of a Kerala Arts Institution This paper thinks with and about some of Kalamandalam’s “resident foreigners,” including Eugenio Barba, Clifford and Betty True Jones, Richard Schechner, Phillip Zarilli, and Marlene Pitkow. How, I ask, have Kalamandalam’s resident foreigners responded to the Kalamandalam call? And how did these intercultural encounters prime Kalamandalam for its 2007 transformation from gurukula to government-run university, a shift, as V. Kaladharan argues, from “religious space to a secular space”? I proceed from the hypothesis that there is a kind of collectivity staged between scholars called by the same objects, housed by the same schools, and educated by the same informants, even as they are dispersed in time and space. Considered collectively, the work of these anthropologists and performance theorists speaks to Kalamandalam’s specific institutional history and suggests ongoing implications of the Western study of Indian classical and ritual arts. Azeen Khan, Duke University The Time of Affect: Bani Abidi and the Postcolonial Sensus Communis This paper brings together Jacques Derrida’s writings on aesthetics and psychoanalysis and specifically his attention to the question of displeasure in the writings of Immanuel Kant and Sigmund Freud in conversation with the work of a postcolonial visual artist, Bani Abidi, who is based in Pakistan and India. In the paper, I suggest that Abidi’s artwork, which indexes the specific historical condition of postcoloniality, offers us – alongside Derrida, Kant, and Freud – a notion of an “aesthetics of displeasure,” wherein displeasure is understood as a category, both aesthetic and psychoanalytic, that undoes any notion of a contained subjectivity. In particular, the paper makes the argument that Abidi’s work, through its emphasis on temporality, and particularly attunement to the rhythms and cadences of waiting in forms of urban belonging in South Asia, allows us to posit a postcolonial sensus communis that is attentive to anxiety as a historically specific affect. The larger argument of the paper is to suggest that questions around visuality and citizenship, or a relation to the public or commons in South Asia, must simultaneously be attentive to the problem of affect. 3 Concurrent Panels 1.30 – 3.00 PM May 9, 2012 Obendorf Event Center 3rd Floor, North Building, Knight Management Center 641 Knight Way, Stanford Graduate School of Business Panel 3 Global and Local Negotiations of South Asian Culture and Identity Panel Organizer: Swethaa Ballakrishnen, Stanford University Panel Discussant: Sudipta Sen, University of California, Davis The last few decades of globalization have ushered in a host of new ways to conceptualize and negotiate the South Asian identity. This panel welcomes papers and research projects that shed light on the various mechanisms that lead and shape these processes. For instance, at the level of the individual, how has the meaning of being “South Asian” changed, especially given the rise of the global South Asian identity? How is this identity accepted and moderated in different contexts? Similarly, how have market, social, cultural and global forces affected the ways in which larger organizational and institutional identities emerge in the subcontinent? Mihiri Tillakaratne , University of California, Los Angeles The Future of Buddhism in America:” Multiculturalism, Ethnic and Religious Identity, and the Second Generation at Los Angeles’ Dharma Vijaya Buddhist Vihara This paper examines how Dharma Vijaya Buddhist Vihara, a Sri Lankan Sinhala Theravada Buddhist temple in Los Angeles, balances adaptation and cultural continuity, and how it is a site for both religious and social congregation. Specifically, this paper explores how the second generation’s formation of ethnic and religious identities is shaped by Dharma Vijaya’s approach to fostering “the future of Buddhism” by encouraging younger generation participation as well as a multicultural congregation. The paper discusses temple history, negotiating multiple layered identities of scholar-practitioner-ethnographer, and the clergy’s role in adapting Buddhism to an American context. It also examines how Dharma Vijaya’s status as a multicultural temple influences the temple on both a daily basis as well as on important festival days. Finally, we will discuss how the influence of the clergy and multiculturalism

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