ECSAS 2023 – Turin 26-29 July

The Indo-Persian Religious Urbanity of Mirza Ghalib’s Banaras

Banaras is often recognized today through popular media and even scholarly discourse as a metonym for Hindu India, ignoring its substantial Muslim presence and socio-cultural contributions to the city. My translation of Mirza Ghalib’s (1797–1869) Persian long poem in praise of the city, Chiragh-e-Dair (1826), as Temple Lamp (Penguin, 2022) has been a humble attempt […]

Read More… from The Indo-Persian Religious Urbanity of Mirza Ghalib’s Banaras

Rethinking Subversive Cinephilia: Audience and Spectatorship in Pakistan (1979-1999)

General Zia-ul-Haq’s military dictatorship in Pakistan during the late 1970s ushered a period of strict state surveillance and media censorship. During this period, Zia’s authoritarian regime introduced the Motion Pictures Ordinance which was a series of censorship laws meant to regulate onscreen depictions of violence, sexuality, and anti-establishment sentiments. Cinemas in Pakistan would often get […]

Read More… from Rethinking Subversive Cinephilia: Audience and Spectatorship in Pakistan (1979-1999)

Biopolitics of RWA Governance: Imbrications of Sovereign and Governmental Power in Greater Noida

This paper examines how the exceptional governance’ of Industrial Model Township, emergence of residential associations—legitimized through claims of democratic participation and self-representation of local community—and technologies of neoliberal governmentality combine to produce “localized forms of sovereignty” that are “nested within higher sovereignties”. In post-liberalization India, emergence and proliferation of resident associations on the urban landscape […]

Read More… from Biopolitics of RWA Governance: Imbrications of Sovereign and Governmental Power in Greater Noida

Eating Millets in Autumn: Memories of Farming, Crops and Hunger in East Central India.

 Tribal farmers in the Central Indian upland regions grew a range of crops adapted to the short growing season and itinerant lifestyles in the nineteenth century. Away from the institutional authority of imperial kingdom, though not in isolation from trade routes, such communities experienced a transition mid-nineteenth century, when land was enclosed, as farms and […]

Read More… from Eating Millets in Autumn: Memories of Farming, Crops and Hunger in East Central India.

Gender, politics and resistance in transitional societies: a case study of postwar Sri Lanka

Women’s participation in public or private protests (also sometimes referred to as ‘overt’ or ‘covert’ forms of resistance) has often been linked to livelihood concerns, such as access to state benefits, agricultural land and affordable food, or clean drinking water. But in postwar contexts, their contributions to and shaping of political movements tackling structural injustice […]

Read More… from Gender, politics and resistance in transitional societies: a case study of postwar Sri Lanka

Radio’s ‘global’ listening publics in India during the Cold War

 This paper conceptualizes the making of ‘listening publics’ by foreign broadcasting radio stations during the Cold War in India. It focuses on the competitive acoustic registers utilized by radio stations to sketch how ‘bloc’ politics was played out in 1960s-80s, when radio’s presence was ubiquitous. Stations like Radio Berlin International (GDR), Deutsche Welle (FRG), BBC […]

Read More… from Radio’s ‘global’ listening publics in India during the Cold War