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.