Update 2018 – Voices of difference: minority positions in a majoritarian world Bios and abstracts Day one Thursday 15 November Welcome remarks H.E. Dr A M Gondane, High Commissioner, High Commission of India H.E. High Commissioner Dr A M Gondane joined the Indian Foreign Service in 1985. He worked in various capacities in the Indian Embassies and Consulates including in Damascus, Baghdad, Vienna, Ankara and New York. He was High Commissioner of India to Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu.

Keynote address Professor G.N. Devy Chair: Professor Nick Evans, ANU Title: Memory, language and aphasia: the future of human speech Abstract: The lecture will present a historical overview of language diversity in India and detail the process of marginalisation of linguistic communities through the colonial era as well as in post-independence India. It will present how the de- notified and nomadic communities—wrongfully branded as ‘criminal tribes' during the nineteenth century—have been struggling to preserve their cultural heritage in challenging circumstances, how the Adivasis have slid down in the matrix of access to higher education and how the indigenous language communities have lost their linguistic rights. The lecture will narrate the context in which the People's Linguistic Survey had to be undertaken and how it was carried out. It will discuss the nature of relationship between diversity and democracy in India

G N Devy writes in three languages, Marathi, Gujarati and English. He initiated the People’s Linguistic Survey of India in 2010, and carried out a detailed survey of 780 living languages in India. He received the Indian Civilian Honour of Padmashri and other awards such as the Lingua Pax Prize and the Prince Claus Award. His major works in English include: After Amnesia (1992), Of Many Heroes (1997), A Nomad Called Thief (2003), The G N Devy Reader (2008), The Being of Bhasha (2014) and The Crisis within: Knowledge & Education in India (2017).

Crises in public goods Chair: Dr Paul Kenny, ANU Assa Doron: Superbugs and sanitation in India Abstract: India is fast becoming a hatching ground for ‘Superbugs’ – the indomitable bacteria that flout even the most powerful antibiotics in the market. The proliferation of these antibiotic resistant bacteria in India is in part the result of inadequate public sanitation, lax waste management practices and poor regulation for ensuring ‘rational’ use of antibiotics. This talk looks at conditions and factors that fuel the emergence of the ‘superbugs’ crisis. It uses a multi- scalar lens to examine how personal practices (open defecation), labour arrangements (waste-picking) and environmental settings (industrial-scale effluents) contribute to a ‘hospitable’ environment for an increased bacterial load and the emergence of Multi Resistance Organism (MRO’s): bacteria that have developed resistance to the majority of available antibiotics. The research undertaken here is an initial attempt to trace the cycle of infection, risk and vulnerability associated with MROs, as it pertains to the most disadvantaged sections of the Indian population. Assa Doron teaches in the School of Culture, History and Language, ANU College of Asia and the Pacific. He is co- author with Robin Jeffrey of Waste of a Nation: Garbage and Growth in India (Harvard, 2018).

Robin Jeffrey: Open defecation and Swachh Bharat – Where ‘Clean India’ is and why it’s hard Abstract: 1

This presentation examines the Government of India’s Swachh Bharat or Clean India campaign, inaugurated by Prime Minister on ’s birthday, 2 October 2014. The prime minister vowed to create a Clean India within five years – by 2 October next year. A major aspect of the campaign is to eliminate open defecation, a necessity or preference for more than half of India in 2014. Connections between open defecation and child mortality and child stunting seem inescapable, and the implications for public health are vast. This presentation examines the progress of the Swachh Bharat campaign and focuses especially on the efforts to end open defecation. Robin Jeffrey is a retired academic who lives in and is a visiting research professor at the Institute of South Asian Studies, Singapore. He is an emeritus professor of both as well as The Australian National University.

Shaheen Ahmed: ‘Fetishising’ the clean body: the presences and absences in representations of the female consumer in Indian advertisements, 1930 -1980 Abstract: In this paper, I look at advertisements in the period before the liberalisation of the Indian economy as it is crucial to understand the representation of the ‘Indian woman’ in print advertisements in this historical time. In this paper, I shall try to examine two different sets of images which represent the woman consumer. I study two contrasting images of the fetishized female consumer in this paper. The first is the one we notice in the toiletry advertisements, who is marked by a sense of urban carefree attitude which does not hinge on any religious or caste markers, and second, the Hindu housewife of the detergent advertisements. One of my interventions in this paper is the reading of the woman in the detergent advertisements through class and caste identity. Thus, the paper argues that the ‘new woman’ in advertisements was defined and structured by caste as much as class hierarchies. It is through the well-established colonial trope of ‘dirt’ that I locate the woman in detergent advertisements as the upper caste and middle-class Hindu housewife, who by virtue of the burgeoning commodity culture has been able to erase the lower caste woman’s body in these advertisements. I examine how the tropes of ‘Devi’ or goddess and ‘Dasi’ or slave as have been employed traditionally in the Indian social and cultural structure to construct the woman’s body via the prism of caste. The paper will also engage with questions on the absence of the body of the female consumer from the borderland regions and peripheries of the nation-state as well as the colonial imagination. Shaheen Ahmed is a PhD scholar at Monash University. Her major research areas include politics of the image, mass media and advertising, and representation of the woman’s body. Her publications include: The Re-Mapped Dialectics of Contemporary Indian Cinema: Kahaani and That Girl in Yellow Boots in ‘Salaam Bollywood: Representations and Interpretations’ (2016); and The Everyday as an Enactment of the Trauma of Being a Muslim Woman in India – A study of Two Artists in ‘Islam, Sufism and Everyday Politics of Belonging in South Asia’ (2016).

‘Others’ in the post-colony: religious minorities in the Indian subcontinent Chair: Professor Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt, ANU

Joyce Das: Constructing ‘minorityness’: Christians in post-colonial Bangladesh Abstract: This paper examines how the Christian community in Bangladesh is positioned as a religious minority group and how their minorityness has been constructed. I use the term ‘minorityness’ to portray the identity that people or community possess through their experiences of being a minority. By analysing historical accounts, I show that the minorityness of the Christian community is created both by the majority community — predominantly made up of Muslims — and by Christians themselves in the broader context of Bangladeshi society. In order to achieve the above, I examine the community both from inside and outside by exploring how the Christian community is organised, how their governmentality works, and more importantly, how gender works within these broader pictures of their ‘minorityness’. Joyce Das researched the complex area of gender and law amongst religious minority women in South Asia, focussing on the Christian community in Bangladesh. Joyce brings a decade-long experience of working in the development sector in Bangladesh. She is currently working at ANU.

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Sana Ashraf: Blasphemy accusations in Pakistan: familiar others and the enemy within Abstract: Blasphemy accusations and subsequent violence against the accused has become an increasingly concerning issue in Pakistan. There have been more than 1500 recorded incidents of accusations between 1987 and 2017. Most accusations take place between people already known to each other—such as neighbours, colleagues, and sometimes even friends. In my paper, I argue that blasphemy accusations are usually levelled against the familiar others who transgress symbolic boundaries in such a way that they represent the face of the foreign, enemy, absolute ‘Other’. The accused are not only the face of the uncanny other but also ‘the enemy within’ —the ultimate threat to the religious and national identity of the Pakistani Muslims. The ‘blasphemers’ are thus an embodiment of the impurities against which the national identity of ‘the land of the pure’ is asserted. Through ethnographic examples from my fieldwork in Punjab, Pakistan, I will demonstrate that the violent action against those accused of blasphemy is a mechanism of purification of the self and the society by projecting the moral anxieties and internal contradictions of the religious- national identity onto expendable familiar others. Sana Ashraf is a final year PhD student in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at ANU. Her research interests include religious violence, popular justice, legal pluralism, and the impacts of modernity and globalisation on self-hood in South Asia. She has been researching blasphemy-related violence in Pakistan since 2012. She has presented her work at various national and international forums and also addressed Australian public servants on political Islam in South Asia.

Alex Davis: The ‘Modi Doctrine’?: foreign policy performance and domestic identity building Abstract: Recent debate in international relations has touched on whether or not there is an identifiable ‘Modi Doctrine’ in Indian foreign policy. This paper argues that Modi’s foreign policy is revolutionary not for its content but for its performance. Modi utilises the international ‘stage’ to perform his preferred idea of Indianness. This identity is softened so as to appeal to foreign audiences, but its meaning is clear in the domestic context. I examine Modi's performance by looking at two case studies of his international engagements: his diaspora diplomacy and his public diplomacy. Modi’s frequent foreign trips draw heavy attention, through substantial media coverage and through government information channels, ensuring they speak to a domestic audience and the global Indian diaspora. Modi’s foreign policy discourse is therefore embedded in contemporary political debate on the nature of Indian identity, the role of secularism in Indian society and the meaning of India’s nationalist history to contemporary politics. Throughout, I examine the ways in which foreign policy performance positions minorities and majorities in Indian society. Alex Davis is a postdoctoral research fellow at the La Trobe University (Melbourne) department of Politics and Philosophy. His research focuses on identity, history and foreign policy in India. He is the author of India and the Anglosphere: Race, Identity and Hierarchy in International Relations.

Felix Pal: Making Good Muslims in the Hindu right: preparing for hindu rashtra Abstract: Since the 2014 Indian general election, the militantly Hindu nationalist organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), has found itself in unprecedented proximity to ‘legitimate’ state power. The RSS’ new role requires a rethink of how scholarly fixation on anti-Muslim violence has obscured the RSS’ non-violent programs of Muslim cultural transformation. I argue that scholars must address the RSS’ non-violent attempts at cultural transformation among Muslim communities as actively as they engage with Hindu nationalist communal violence. Based on my fieldwork in North India, in this paper I explore how the RSS seeks power and control in Muslim communities through an instrumental use of its Muslim wing, the Muslim Rashtriya Manch. I argue that through Islamising Hindu nationalist symbols,and the semantic gymnastics of proximity and distance, the RSS pursues slow burning cultural change among Muslims with as much zeal as it does when promoting violence. As the RSS transforms in proximity to state power, there must be a renewed focus on its ‘legitimate’ activities and the ways it seeks partners - and dominance - in the very communities it marginalises.

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Felix Pal is a PhD candidate at the Department of Politics and Social Change at ANU. In 2015 he completed a Bachelor of Arts (Islamic Studies) at the and in 2016 a Bachelor of Asia-Pacific Studies (Honours) (Hindi) at ANU. Recently returned from fieldwork in North India working with the Muslim wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), he explores the diverse relationships between Muslims and the Hindu right.

Sex, gender and the body Chair: Dr Babita Bhatt, ANU Richa Nagar: Gender, movement, and theatre: after playing with fire Abstract: This presentation will draw upon 16 years of co-traveling with members of a movement that began in 2002 as a writing collective of nine women called the Sangtin Writers, and that has evolved into Sangtin Kisan Mazdoor Sangathan, an organisation of 8000 kisans and mazdoors in the Sitapur District of India. It will focus on the ways that the methodologies of the movement have inspired the work of a theatre collective called Parakh. Through examples from Parakh's work in multiple sites, the paper will highlight some of the ways in which the embodied methodologies evolving from the movement have enabled an ongoing critical engagement with gender, caste, violence, and development in ongoing search for socioeconomic and epistemic justice. Richa Nagar is Professor of the College in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota. Her research and teaching blends scholarship, creative writing, political theatre, and community activism to build alliances with people’s struggles and to engage questions of ethics, responsibility, and justice in and through knowledge making. She co/authored or co/edited eight books in Hindi and English. These include: Muddying the Waters: Co-authoring Feminisms Across Scholarship and Activism (2014), and Hungry Translations: Relearning the World Through Radical Vulnerability (in press).

Amanda Gilbertson: From health to pleasure: the politics of sexuality education in India Abstract: In 2007, the Adolescent Education Programme was introduced in government and private schools across India with the primary aim of raising HIV/AIDS awareness. Parents protested, citing inappropriate content, and the programme was banned in several states. In 2018, a second attempt at Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) was launched, this time called ‘School Health Programme’. In the meantime, the need for sexuality education for young people has been a more public topic of interest in India. Several organisations campaign for CSE, run their own sexuality training programmes, and provide information and courses online. In this paper I draw on interviews with young people involved in sexuality education in together with analysis of online material produced by organizations across India to understand how they navigate pressures to stick to the ‘facts’ of anatomy and reproductive health and their aspirations for a more comprehensive rights-based approach that addresses (same-sex) desire, pleasure and consent. Amanda Gilberston has been at the University of Melbourne since 2014, first as a McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences and now as Lecturer in Youth and Contemporary India at the Australia India Institute. She has conducted anthropological research on what it means to be middle-class in Hyderabad, and the feminisms and politics of young gender justice workers in Delhi. Her first book Within the Limits: Moral Boundaries of Class and Gender in Urban India was published by Oxford University Press in 2017.

Annie McCarthy and Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt: Bleeding in public? Reframing narratives of managing menstruation Abstract: Frightening statistics generated by public health specialists correlate menstrual hygiene with health, and then more broadly with the provision of services such as toilets and education, and portray women and girls living in informal settlements as victims of poor hygiene. This framing makes the “targeting” and “fixing” of these women the key policy challenge. The numbers also reduce structural equity issues to small, typically technical, interventions, such as the provision of toilets, and transform individual experiences of menstruation, placed in specific contexts, into 4

numerical data sets that can describe, identify, and lead to remedying unsafe and harmful menstrual practices. This presentation aims to refocus the attention on the individual woman’s experiences of menstruation. It analyses the gendered challenges of everyday life in informal settlements in Delhi, and traces the experiences of women and girls who must manage menstruation in conditions of extreme congestion. Annie McCarthy currently teaches Global Studies at the University of Canberra. Her doctoral thesis, Under Development: Stories of Children and NGOs in Delhi, India, was recently awarded the 2017 Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA) John Legge Prize for a PhD thesis on an Asian Studies topic. Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt is a Professor at Crawford School of Public Policy, ANU. She is one of the leading global experts in critical research on the length and breadth of gender and community livelihoods in two areas of natural resources: water and extractive industries (mining). Her contributions to broadening the understanding of the gender and the social impacts of large-scale, capitalised mining industries have led to efforts in engendering community development by the mining industry.

Ahonaa Roy: Enduring the carnage: the theory and rhetoric of the benign palimpsest of gender transgression Abstract: The essay makes an attempt to plot the marginal sexual representations in India, seeing in relations of histories of domination and exploitation, to the politicisation of the colonised; developing arguments further to the capitalist and neoliberal subjection. To installs a subaltern consciousness, bring forth a deep and resilient resistance, suggesting the postcolonial critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak reframed to foreground the gendered, caste, class and colonial constitutive elements with a discursive claim of an anticolonial and a critic of globalisation. This further allows to locate the hidden and suppressed account of gender transgressors and transgenderism at large –so as to further politically implicate the ‘local’ and indigenous politics and everydayness in the Indian society. And finally, the essay points out to the larger troubles in the Third World representations of sexual minorities; acknowledging gender non- conformity as perceived as aberrant to the social and cultural purview –further allowing to examine the resistances and subversion of the dominant western model of queer and gender theorisation, so as to articulate the nuances and narratology from the non-West. Ahonaa Roy is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the Indian Institute of Technology (Bombay). She completed her Masters and PhD on the Anthropology of Development from the University of Sussex. She works on the areas of sex and sexuality, masculinity, beauty studies, anthropology of body and the embodiment. She has published several papers on national and International journals.

SARI book celebration: author’s roundtable Chair: Dr Nicholas Farrelly, Associate Dean, ANU College of Asia and the Pacific Participants: Associate Professor Assa Doron, ANU; Dr Amanda Gilbertson, The University of Melbourne; Professor Robin Jeffrey, Australia India Institute; Dr Andy Kennedy, ANU; Dr Paul Kenny, ANU; Professor Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt, ANU; Professor Richa Nagar, University of Minnesota; and Associate Professor McComas Taylor, ANU. Paul Kenny is a Fellow and Head of the Department of Political and Social Change at ANU. His first book, Populism and Patronage: Why Populists Win Elections in India, Asia, and Beyond was published by Oxford University Press in 2017. Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt is a Professor at Crawford School of Public Policy, ANU. She is one of the leading global experts in critical research on the length and breadth of gender and community livelihoods in two areas of natural resources: water and extractive industries (mining). Her contributions to broadening the understanding of the gender and the social impacts of large-scale, capitalised mining industries have led to efforts in engendering community development by the mining industry. McComas Taylor teaches Sanskrit at ANU. His research lies at the intersection of contemporary critical theory and classical Sanskrit narrative literature. He is the author of Seven Days of Nectar: Contemporary Oral Performance of the Bhagavatapurana (Oxford University Press, 2016).

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Day two: Friday 16 November 2018 Chai and chats: an undergraduate conversation Participants: Dr Aditya Balasubramanian, ANU; Dr Alicia Mollaun, DFAT; Dr Meera Ashar, ANU; and Dr Shameem Black, ANU Aditya Balasubramanian is Lecturer at the School of History, ANU. His research sits at the intersection of the intellectual, social and economic history of modern South Asia. His doctoral dissertation concerns the early history of the Right in independent India. He holds an AB from Harvard College and MPhil and PhD degrees in history from Trinity College, Cambridge. He coordinates the Archives of Economic Life in South Asia project for the Harvard- Cambridge Centre for History and Economics. Meera Ashar is the Director of the ANU South Asia Research Institute. Her research interests lie at the intersection of history, political theory and literary studies. Her work addresses questions about identity, self-representation, colonialism and postcolonialism. She is currently completing a manuscript on the controversial nineteenth-century novel, Saraswatichandra and is coediting a unique compilation of Everyday English Keywords in India. Shameem Black is the Director (Acting) of the ANU South Asia Research Institute and the head of the program in Gender, Media and Cultural Studies in the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific. Her research focuses on literary and cultural studies of India and its diaspora. She is the author of Fiction Across Borders: Imagining the Lives of Others in Late Twentieth-Century Novels (Columbia University Press, 2010).

Film screening followed by Q&A with Professor Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt – ‘Precarious labour in stone quarrying in India’

Plenary lecture Dr Sushil Aaron Turbulence: will India’s domestic politics shape its career prospects? Chair: Dr Meera Ashar, ANU Abstract: India's politics at the moment pivots on the dramatic policy changes initiated by the Narendra Modi government and its pursuit of ideological goals which have had a profound impact on the country's public institutions, minorities, universities, the media and its foreign policy. What have been these changes and how do they potentially affect India's democracy and its stature as a major power? The lecture will discuss the domestic and foreign policy consequences of BJP's rule and assess the challenges that India faces in the near-term. Sushil Aaron is a commentator on India’s politics and international affairs. He has formerly been an Associate Editor and lead writer for the Hindustan Times, a Political Adviser at the British High Commission in New Delhi, and has worked at various thinktanks, including the Centre for Policy Research. He has held fellowships, both at the London School of Economics as well as the University of Melbourne. You can follow him on his Twitter handle: @SushilAaron.

The Rise of India in a Changing World Chair: Professor Cecilia Jacob, ANU Andy Kennedy: India’s rise in technology: powerhouse or pretender? Abstract: India’s leaders have long sought to position their country as a leader in technological innovation. In recent decades, the international context surrounding this quest has transformed, particularly as innovation has become an increasingly transnational phenomenon. This presentation will explore India’s emergence as a technological power in this new

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context. It will highlight how India has struggled in this regard, while also noting successes and its untapped potential. Andy Kennedy is Senior Lecturer at Crawford School of Public Policy at ANU. His research focuses on international politics in Asia, with particular interest in China, India, and the US. He is the author of The Conflicted Superpower: America’s Collaboration with China and India in Global Innovation (Columbia 2018) and The International Ambitions of Mao and Nehru: National Efficacy Beliefs and the Making of Foreign Policy (Cambridge 2012). His work has also appeared in International Security, International Affairs, The China Quarterly, Asian Survey, and various edited volumes.

Alicia Mollaun: Australia and India: strengthening ties Abstract: The Australia-India relationship is growing with strengthened strategic cooperation, economic ties and people to people links. This presentation will provide an update on bilateral ties, and what Australia is doing to further progress its relationship with India, including through strategic dialogues, engaging the Indian Diaspora in Australia, and the India Economic Strategy to 2035: Navigating from Potential to Delivery. Alicia Mollaun is an Assistant Director of the India Political Section at the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT). Dr Mollaun has also worked in the Office of Trade Negotiations and on the Pakistan desk at DFAT. She has a PhD from Crawford School of Public Policy at ANU, where she examined the United States’ nation-building and realist ambitions for its aid program to Pakistan in the post 9/11 period.

David Brewster: Between Giants: Sino-Indian Competition - its consequences for the region Abstract: India and China are emerging as major maritime powers as part of long-term shifts in the regional balance of power. As their wealth, interests, and power grow, the two countries are increasingly bumping up against each other across the Indo-Pacific. China’s growing naval presence in the Indian Ocean is seen by many as challenging India’s aspirations towards regional leadership and major power status. How India and China get along in this shared maritime space—cooperation, coexistence, competition, or confrontation—will be one of the key strategic challenges for the entire region. This presentation will explore how growing strategic competition between India and China is having an ever greater impact on countries in the Indian Ocean region. David Brewster is a Senior Research Fellow with the National Security College, at ANU. He has many publications on the Indian Ocean and Indian security. His latest edited volume is India and China at Sea: Competition for Naval Dominance in the Indian Ocean, Oxford University Press, 2017. His next report will be Between Giants: the Sino- Indian Contest for Influence in the Maldives and the Indian Ocean, for the French Institute for International Relations.

Urban Incoherence: Promises and Contestations Chair: Dr Shameem Black Chaitanya Sambrani: City, nation and world in the work of Gulammohammed Sheikh Abstract: With particular reference to the work of Gulammohammed Sheikh (b. 1937), the paper will consider the voice of the visual artist in commenting on aspirational as well as physical forms of contemporary urban development in India. Since the mid-1970s, a consistent stream in Sheikh’s wide oeuvre has centred on historically inflected re-- imaginations of cities and towns in his native . Many of his paintings and installations over the last four decades have returned to the urban environments of Surendranagar, Baroda and Ahmedabad as part of a lifelong project of producing a world of narrative imagery predicated on diversity, multiplicity and difference. Bringing an encyclopaedic grasp of European and Asian art history to bear on representations of the local, Sheikh’s reconfigurations present cross-overs between provincial and cosmopolitan belonging in an assertion of postcolonial claim to world-citizenship. In tracing the manner of transition from city to nation to world and back again in Sheikh’s

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work, this paper will highlight the production of counter-narratives and alternative trajectories about urban experience and political conditions in contemporary India. Chaitanya Sambrani is interested in linkages between modern art and nationhood in Asia, as well as contemporary art’s relationships with tradition and with urban development. His curatorial projects include: Place.Time.Play: Contemporary Art from the West Heavens to the Middle Kingdom (2010); and To Let the World In: Narrative and Beyond in Contemporary Indian Art (2012). Current projects: At Home in the World: the Art and Life of Gulammohammed Sheikh (forthcoming 2019), and Lao-Australian artist Savanhdary Vongpoothorn (2019). He teaches at the School of Art and Design, ANU.

Gigi Scaria: Imagined spaces, constructed realities Abstract: My presentation will start with a brief introduction of my current artistic engagement. I will offer observations about architectural and social spaces, how they are understood or dealt with in different cities in India with a primary focus on Delhi. My major focus will be to share my understanding of how we deal with various realities in a single day of urban living in a place like Delhi. The images in my presentation will provide an introduction to various projects and interventions in the city of Delhi. The images of art works will be a selection of photographs, paintings and sculptural installations I have made during the past 10 years. Towards the end of the presentation I will show a few video works which address the notion of a future city. These explore how a world of contradictory class and caste structures fuses into ideas of urban living, while enforcing distinctly detached living condition within what are supposed to be socially inclusive spaces. I will end the presentation with a few remarks and questions on the immediate future of postcolonial urbanity in a time of rising nationalism. Gigi Scaria is a Delhi based artist. Scaria’s practice in painting, sculpture, photography and film explores his interest in issues of urban development, particularly issues surrounding migration, economic development and urban architecture. His recent exhibitions include: All about this side, Aicon Gallery, New York (2017); and Ecce Homo: behold the man or how one becomes what one is, Vadehra Gallery, New Delhi (2018).

Rupali Gupte: Spatial interrogations of contemporary Indian urbanity Abstract: Landscapes of Indian urbanity have thrown up bizarre configurations of urban space and form that are usually spoken about through frameworks of informality, mess, difficult inhabitations etc. Through our field-work we have come to understand that this urbanity has a different logic and that new conceptualisations of space and form are required, which are consistent with its logic. Through some snapshots the presentation will sketch out the nature of urbanity in contemporary India and further put forth our efforts of conceptualisation through two works; first, ideas around ‘transactional capacities’ of space and second through our curatorial practice, asking the first questions around space, called ‘When is Space? Conversations in Contemporary Architecture and Urbanism’. Rupali Gupte is an architect, urbanist and artist based in Mumbai. She is an Associate Professor at the School of Environment and Architecture. Her work crosses disciplinary boundaries and takes different forms - writings, drawings, mixed-media works, story-telling, teaching, conversations, walks, spatial interventions and curation. Much of this work involves extensive research on contemporary Indian urbanism with a focus on architecture and the built environment; cultural aspects of urban economy and property; tactical practices; housing; and urban form.

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