India Update 2018 – Voices of Difference: Minority Positions in a Majoritarian World Bios and Abstracts Day One Thursday 15 November Welcome Remarks H.E
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India 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 Narendra Modi on Mahatma Gandhi’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 Melbourne and is a visiting research professor at the Institute of South Asian Studies, Singapore. He is an emeritus professor of both La Trobe University 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. 2 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.