South Asia Friday Talks @ 11

2024-09-27: Parthasarathi Bhaumik, Jadavpur University
Burmese Women and Bengali Men's Dilemma: A Colonial Chapter of Love, Hate, and More. 📹 available.
 

'Burmese Women and Bengali Men's Dilemma: A Colonial Chapter of Love, Hate, and More'.

When the Bengali men emigrated to colonised Burma (1886-1948) as a part of a colonial policy, they encountered Burmese women, and faced an immediate challenge to accommodate them in the familiar  Bengali discourses of womanhood. The lecture would trace the passionate and baffling responses of the Bengali men to the  Burmese women on the backdrop of colonial realities. 

Parthasarathi Bhaumik is a Professor of Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. His recent publications are  Bengalis in Burma: A Colonial Encounter (Routledge,UK, 2021), Nilkar Thomas Macheller Dinlipi ('The Journal of Thomas Machell, an Indigo Planter', Signet, Ananda Publishers, Kolkata, 2023). He worked in the British Library, UK as a British Library-Chevening Fellow, and built a database on ‘Nationalism, Independence, and Partition in South Asia (1900–1950)'. He taught South Asian cultures and history in the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Japan for the last two years. He is presently working on to build a digital archive of the manuscripts of Jibanananda Das, a noted modern poet of Bengali literature. 

2024-10-25: Mara Lina Thacker, University of Illinois Exploring the Gutters: Illinois’ South Asian Comics Collection. 📹 available.

Exploring the Gutters: Illinois’ South Asian Comics Collection

The journey to build the South Asian comics collection at Illinois is as full of twists and turns as the graphic narratives that comprise it. In this talk, I will share the history and evolution of the collection situated within the context of comics production and circulation in South Asia. Then I will showcase samples from the collection to illustrate the behind-the-scenes labor required to process materials and make the collection accessible. 

Mara Thacker is the South Asian Studies & Global Popular Culture Librarian at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. As an Associate Professor, she has cultivated a research agenda on trends in area studies librarianship with a focus on distinctive collections, especially international comics, and public engagement. Mara’s work to build and market one of the largest collections of South Asian comics in a North American research library contributed to her receiving the Library Journal’s Movers & Shakers award in 2017. Mara is also one of the founders and editors-in-chief of the Journal of Library Outreach and Engagement. Mara is currently serving as President of the Comics Studies Society’s Research Librarian Cohort.

 2024-11-08: Debali Mookerjea-Leonard, James Madison University
Writing like a Woman: Poetry, Domesticity, and the Feminine Self. 📹 available.
 

Writing like a Woman: Poetry, Domesticity and the Feminine Self

At a tea party in January 1930, the critic Pramatha Chaudhuri complained that Bengali women authors simply mimicked the style of male writers and lacked a genuinely feminine voice. He discussed the subject with the writer Radharani Devi who disputed his claim; but he remained skeptical. Unable to persuade him, Radharani decided to give Chaudhuri his ask--a feminine voice. Embarking upon a literary experiment, she adopted the nom de plume “Aparajita Devi” and started writing poetry in a markedly “feminine” style about women’s experience of everyday domestic life. Aparajita’s poems were wildly popular!

Examining a set of Aparajita Devi’s poems, my presentation addresses the idea of the authentically feminine: Is it the voice, the diction, or the content that makes Aparajita’s poems “womanly”? I examine how Radharani Devi had deliberated on Chaudhuri’s assertion about the absence of an “authentic” women’s voice in literature and had supplied it, bringing out through the poems the breadth and vitality of the prosaic, everyday womanhood of Bengal. Finally, I examine how Radharani Devi’s poetic ventriloquism had complicated the question of women’s writing by unveiling that the “authentically feminine” voice that the critics demanded was itself no more than a literary persona to be adopted or set aside. 

Debali Mookerjea–Leonard is the Roop Distinguished Professor of English at James Madison University. She is a gold medalist in comparative literature from Jadavpur University, Calcutta, and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. She is the author of Literature, Gender, and the Trauma of Partition and the co-editor of In the Shadow of Partition. Her research has been published in Feminist Review, Social Text, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, and elsewhere. She also translates Bengali poetry and fiction. Her work has been supported by the American Association of University Women, the American Institute of Indian Studies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

2024-12-06: Soumya Dasgupta, University of Illinois Approaching India's Architecture in the Urban Century. 📹 available.

Approaching India's Architecture in the Urban Century

In this paper, I provide an overview of my ongoing dissertation research that explores the systemic shifts in institutionalized architectural productions vis-à-vis the evolving figure of the architect in urban India since the 1991 economic reforms. Drawing from a range of critical scholarship on capitalism, technology, and postcolonialism, I examine how the rise of neoliberalism, informatization, and political Hindutva alters the systems governing architectural productions, changing the spatial environments of India’s cities. Departing from the more conventional approaches of architectural history, I treat architecture as a planetary process of spatial production distributed over expanded networks of national, supranational, and global political economies and shed light on how the government-realtor-architect nexus is operationalized to advance ideological projects.

Soumya Dasgupta is a Ph.D. Candidate in Architecture. He has a Master's in Urban Design from the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi, and a Bachelor of Architecture from the Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology, Shibpur, Kolkata, India. His scholarly interests include neoliberal developmentalism, digital technocracy, Global South, and South Asia. His Ph.D. dissertation broadly explores the contested systems of architectural production in the context of urban India in the 21st century. He has presented his research at academic conferences, including the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH), Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA), and International Association for the Study of Traditional Environment (IASTE), as well as Ph.D. conferences at Georgia Tech, AA London, and UCLA. Soumya was a Humanities Research Institute Graduate Fellow for 2023-24 and a former recipient of the Illinois Distinguished Fellowship. He loves teaching and has worked as a Teaching Assistant for graduate-level history, theory, and design studio courses in Architecture. He has also served as an external reviewer in various design studios in India, South Africa, and the USA.

2025-01-31: Sonal Mithal, CEPT University, Ahmedabad, India
'Lucknow Queerscapes: Architecture and the Colonial Archive' 📹 available.
 

'Lucknow Queerscapes: Architecture and the Colonial Archive'

In this talk, Sonal Mithal discusses her recent book Lucknow Queerscapes. The talk walks the audience through the book's method of using queer strategies to read archival evidence against the grain and rewrite erased, overlooked, and suppressed histories. It simultaneously extracts parameters from queer studies and redefines them to illustrate ways in which queer architecture can be characterized.

Sonal Mithal is an architect, artist, and educator. She holds a doctoral degree in landscape from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, master’s degree in architectural conservation from SPA Delhi; and a bachelor’s degree in architecture from Lucknow University. She is the co-founder of research and conservation studio, People for Heritage Concern which offers consultancy for conservation and urban revitalization projects, and art projects for the public sector—of which, Restoration of Surat Castle has received the 2019 Smart City Award for economy and culture. She has undertaken large scale public artwork projects such as underground metro stations in Historic Ahmedabad and Surat. Her research and teaching work transects architecture, landscape architecture, queer studies, history, and heritage. Her areas of interest are ecological approaches for climate change; and intersectionality which is central to shaping the built environment. She recently published, A Queer Reading of Nawabi and the Colonial Archive: Lucknow Queerscapes (Taylor and Francis UK 2024) that explores the architectural production in Lucknow from 1775–1857. The research for the book was supported by the Graham Foundation grant for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts (2022). Her upcoming publications include More-than-human ecologies for architectural thinking (Birkauser 2025), and INCLOOSIVE: Public Toilet Architecture (CEPT Press 2024) which address architecture’s contribution to ongoing climate crisis and social justice. Her artwork has been exhibited at Sweden, Taiwan, USA, Venice Biennale 2019, and London Design Biennale 2021.

2025-02-21: Sana Saboowala, University of Illinois
'Stress-Related Narratives in Oral Histories with South Asian Immigrants to the United States ' 📹 available.
 

'Stress-Related Narratives in Oral Histories with South Asian Immigrants to the United States '

This talk explores how oral history can show us how stress and migration narratives operate intergenerationally in South Asian immigrants to the United States. Originally, I was interested in using oral histories to design better, more open-ended surveys, to achieve a more holistic sense of trauma. As I continued this work, it became apparent that the nuanced oral histories provided could not be translated into surveys. Thus, I use a narrative analysis of thirteen oral histories with South Asian immigrants to the United States to understand better how stress and migration interact with memory to shape a person’s life narrative. This work is part of my dissertation, in which I examine, how historical trauma impacts South Asians’ bodies. Hereresearch approach I discuss how memories and stress interact in individual life histories, with the understanding that oral histories operate at multiple scales, presenting specifically on the analysis of the oral histories focused on narratives of stress.

Sana Saboowala is a PhD Candidate in the Program for Evolution, Ecology and Conservation Biology at UIUC. Currently, she uses oral histories and molecular methods to understand how historical trauma and migration experiences impact South Asian immigrants to the United States. Broadly, she aims to take a multidisciplinary traditionally seen as scientific questions, drawing on the humanities to more deeply answer to answer questions that are traditionally seen as scientific more deeply. She also holds a graduate minor in Museum Studies and certificates in Graduate Teaching, Graduate College Mentorship, and Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies. In her spare time, she runs a blog with study tips for undergraduates, reads novels, and eats ice cream.

2025-04-11: Megha Anwer, Purdue University
'Screening Precarity: Pathaan and the Muslim Question in Neoliberal India ' 📹 available.
 

'Screening Precarity: Pathaan and the Muslim Question in Neoliberal India '

Dr. Anwer explores how Hindi films released post-2010 mediate precarity in contemporary India, and what that mediation reveals about both India polity and the social life of the movies. She argues that these films are contentious cinematic terrains that record India’s transition from the glee and gusto of liberalization in the 1990s, to a nation contending with the failures and inadequacies of neoliberalism’s promises, and ascendency of the material-affective redressals offered by Hindu nationalism. Her talk will conclude with a close textual engagement with Shah Rukh Khan’s blockbuster Pathaan (2023), to delineate the possibilities and limits of how marginal identities are shaped, scripted, and screened when neoliberalism and authoritarianism enmesh.

Megha Anwer is Associate Dean for Research and World Readiness and Clinical Associate Professor at the John Martinson Honors College, Purdue University. As a theorist of literature and visual culture, her publications range from investigations of nineteenth-century photography, to analyzing the social structural inequities of race, gender, class, and caste as they manifest in global cinema and postcolonial literatures. Her scholarship incorporates perspectives and theories from urban studies, critical race studies, feminist studies, postcolonial studies and violence studies in a global and transnational context. Dr. Anwer’s co-edited volume, Bollywood’s New Woman: Liberalization, Liberation, and Contested Bodies (2021) was published by Rutgers University Press. Her publications have appeared in multiple journals and anthologies, including Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies, Feminist Media Studies, The Journal of Postcolonial Writing, among others. Her co-authored book, “Screening Precarity” will be published by Michigan University Press in Fall this year. Her talk today is based on this book project.

2025-04-25: Deepasri Baul, University of Illinois 

The Festival, the Mohalla and the City: Bakr-Id Riots and the politics of urban space in Delhi, 1924-26

In 1911, the colonial state in British India began to build a new imperial capital in the vicinity of Shahjahanabad, the existing city of Delhi. The new city was visualized as a space of order and symmetry. It simultaneously heralded new practices of governance, to produce both a disciplined cityscape and pliant urban subjects. However, within a decade, this vision of order was seriously disrupted by recurring “disturbances” on the festival of Bakr-Id between 1924 and 1926. 
    A close look at the Bakr-Id riots reveals that it was not just the Imperial Delhi Committee that was actively modifying the urban landscape of Delhi in the mid-1920s. Ordinary residents of the city were equally engaged in reshaping the boundaries of their own neighborhoods. In this presentation I show how rival Hindu-Muslim groups, used congregative rituals of the festival as a pretext to effect incremental changes in the spatial practices of the city through carefully controlled but cumulative acts of collective violence against one another. In a rapidly transforming urban landscape, I read this popular politics of collective intimidation as an attempt to assert community claims over contested public spaces in the city.
 

Deepasri Baul is assistant professor of South Asian History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She writes about the constitution of colonial cities through the intersecting lens of
religion and urban space. Her PhD is from the Centre for Historical Studies, at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. Deepasri has taught at Lady Shri Ram College for Women and St. Stephen’s
College in the University of Delhi. She has been a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IISER, Mohali, and Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in the Humanities at the Asian University for Women in Chattogram, Bangladesh. Deepasri’s work has been published in Studies in History and in Caravan Magazine. Currently, she is working on her book manuscript titled, Divine Interventions: Religious Conflict and Urban Space in Late Colonial Delhi.

2025-09-12: Epsita Halder, Professor of Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. ‘Book talk on Reclaiming Karbala: Nation, Islam and Literature of the Bengali Muslims’ 

‘Book talk on Reclaiming Karbala: Nation, Islam and Literature of the Bengali Muslims’ 

Epsita Halder's book Reclaiming Karbala explores how the Karbala event is remembered and reinterpreted in Bengal through multilingual expressions. She focuses on the efficacy of the Maidan-e-Karbala region, a site of public mourning and performance, as a space where historical and mythical narratives are continually reshaped. Karbala is a recurring, ritualistic, living history of Bengal that has been documented across time and space, and Halder’s book on Karbala further demonstrates the power of ‘storytelling’ in making that faith and history tangible. This lecture will look into multilingualism and the efficacy of region as categories of discussion, and make conversations with recent debates in World Literature.

Epsita Halder is Professor of Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. She is currently a research Fellow at the Max Weber Kolleg, University of Erfurt, Germany (2025). Epsita researches and publishes on the Muharram-complex and Shi'i identity formation in the Bengali-speaking regions s, eecially focusing on Kolkata and Dhaka. She was the visiting fellow at the Max Weber Kolleg, University of Erfurt, Germany (2022), and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London (2018).

Her monograph, Reclaiming Karbala: Nation, Islam and Literature of the Bengali Muslims (Routledge, 2022), on Muslim cultural nationalism and literary modernity in colonial Bengal, received the Book of the Year Award of Iran (2025) and a book award from the Indian History Congress (2023). She has edited and co-translated two anthologies of short stories by the Bengali Muslim authors, Stayed Back, Stayed On (2025) and The Open-Winged Scorpion and Other Stories (2021).  Her first curatorial endeavour, ‘Every Land is Karbala’, a multidisciplinary art show, was showcased at the Arthshila Gallery, Santiniketan, India (February 8 – March 9, 2025).

2025-10-10: Mukhtar Ali, Associate Professor of Islamic Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, USA. ‘Sufi Poetry: Readings in Mystical Verse’

‘Sufi Poetry: Readings in Mystical Verse’

This lecture offers a curated selection of readings from the works of four major figures in the Sufi poetic tradition: Rūmī, Ḥallāj, Saʿdī, and Iqbāl. Each poem will be read in original Arabic, Persian, and Urdu and presented in translation, accompanied by commentary that situates the work within its historical, literary, and spiritual contexts.

Mukhtar Ali is an Associate Professor of Islamic Studies, specializing in mysticism (Sufism) philosophy and ethics. His areas of interest include Arabic and Persian literature, Qurʾānic studies, theology, Traditional Ch,inese Medicine and comparative religion. He is the author of Philosophical Sufism: An Introduction to the School of Ibn al-ʿArabī (Routledge, 2021) and The Horizons of Being: The Metaphysics of Ibn al-ʿArabī in the Muqaddimat al-Qayṣarī (Brill, 2020) and his forthcoming work, Inscriptions of Wisdom: The Sufism of Ibn al-ʿArabī in the Mirror of Jāmī, is a study on Ibn al-ʿArabī's masterpiece, Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam through the lens of Jāmī’s Naqd al-nuṣūṣ fī sharḥ Naqsh al-Fuṣūṣ.

He has also translated two works in contemporary Islamic metaphysics, Dr. Akram Almajid's The Law of Correspondence (2021) and The New Creation (2018). His research explores theories of knowledge in Islam, examining the epistemic modalities that shape the Islamic intellectual tradition—reason, revelation, and mystical experience—while also engaging with empiricism and postmodern epistemology. Framed as a philosophical inquiry rather than a historical survey, his work investigates methods of epistemic justification and validity, critically examining the authority of scripture, hadith, and law through the lens of reason in religious thought.

2025-11-14: Adam Newman, co-director of Graduate Studies and Assistant Professor in the Department of-Religion at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, USA. 
‘Glorification of the Solitary Liṅga: Myth, Kingship, and Political Landscape in Medieval Rajasthan

‘Glorification of the Solitary Liṅga: Myth, Kingship, and Political Landscape in Medieval Rajasthan’

Glorification of the Solitary Liṅga: Myth, Kingship, and Political Landscape in Medieval Rajasthan, traces the religious and political history of the Mewar kingdom in southern Rajasthan, India, from the tenth century to the late fifteenth century. Through an examination of Hindu Sanskrit literary works and royal architectural sites, I investigate how landscapes, literary productions, and imagined identities mutually contributed to the production of political power and religious authority for the royal court of Mewar. This is the first-ever study of several major Sanskrit literary works, including inscriptions and textual narratives, emerging from the kingdom of Mewar during the medieval period.

Adam Newman is the co-director of Graduate Studies and Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at the University of Illinois. His research interests include Hinduism, the religious and political history of South Asia, Sanskrit literature, Purāṇas, sacred space and landscape, and religious conceptions of the body. Some of his recent publications include a book chapter (2023) “Body, Community, Cosmos: A Śaiva Siddhānta Rite of Initiation.” in Y. Kornberg Greenberg and G. Pati’s edited volume of The Routledge Handbook of Religion and the Body, and an article (2022) titled “Lineage in its Spatial Context: Epigraphy, Geography, and the Formation of Political Unity in Medieval Mewar” published in the  Journal of Hindu Studies.