Asian Studies Centre

Zaib un Nisa Aziz (University of South Florida, Tampa) speaks at the Oxford South Asian Intellectual History Seminar on 13 March 2023. For queries, please contact seminar convenor at saih@history.ox.ac.uk At the turn of the twentieth century, the global imperial order was in peril. In cities across the world, revolutionary factions emerged where nationalists deliberated radical, even violent paths to a post- imperial world. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin belonged to and wrote of this world – a world primarily defined by the crisis of the imperial order and the looming question of the future of national communities. As Lenin along with his compatriots seized power in Moscow in October 1917, he announced the dawn of a new era where the empires of the world would eventually fall in the throes of the impending world revolution. My talk, based on my first book project, shows how that his call resonated with all sorts of imperial decriers who saw, in his victory, the possibility of a new world. From Rio Grande to River Ganges, anti-colonialists turned to Moscow to help realize their own political visions. Encouraged by the triumph of Lenin and his party, anti-colonialists tied the end of imperialism to the revolutionary end of global socioeconomic hierarchies. This historical narrative responds to recent scholarly provocations to study decolonization in connected rather than discrete terms and to employ the methodological tools of global history to write new historical accounts, which attend to the ends of empire as a global phenomenon. One of my key intellectual objectives is to think of Asian, African, and Caribbean anti-colonialists not only as itinerant revolutionaries and campaigners but as intellectuals, thinkers, and writers. I demonstrate the many ways in which anti-colonialists interpreted, built on, modified, and otherwise responded to Lenin's critique of imperialism. For many, anti-imperialism now not only meant opposition to foreign rule but also a wholesale rejection of the prevalent global economic order. Hence, inequality and development became an inextricable part of visions of a postcolonial global order. Moreover, this presentation highlights how the inter-war period marks a decisive shift in the intellectual history of decolonization. Zaib un Nisa Aziz is a historian of global and imperial history, with a focus on the British Empire and Modern South Asia. She is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of South Florida, Tampa. In her past and present research, she seeks to push the geographic, temporal and thematic boundaries of the historical study of the end of empire and its aftermath, and is particularly interested in histories of decolonisation, labour and internationalism. Her current book project, tentatively titled ‘Nations Ascendant: The Global Struggle Against Empire and The Making of our World', traces the origins and politics of an international community of colonial activists, thinkers and campaigners, and shows how they came to share ideas about universal decolonisation and the end of empires.

Vikram Visana (University of Leicester) speaks at the Oxford South Asian Intellectual History Seminar on 7 March 2023. Uncivil Liberalism studies how ideas of liberty from the colonized South claimed universality in the North. Recovering the political thought of Dadabhai Naoroji, India's pre-eminent liberal, this book focusses on the Grand Old Man's pre-occupation with social interdependence and civil peace in an age of growing cultural diversity and economic inequality. It shows how Naoroji used political economy to critique British liberalism's incapacity for civil peace by linking periods of communal rioting in colonial Bombay with the Parsi minority's economic decline. Innovating an Indian liberalism characterized by labour rights, economic republicanism and social interdependence, Naoroji seeded ‘Western' thinkers with his ideas as well as influencing numerous ideologies in colonial and post-colonial India. In doing so, the book reframes so-called Indian ‘nationalists' as global thinkers. Dr Vikram Visana is Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of Leicester. He was awarded his PhD in the history of Indian Political Thought under the supervision of Chris Bayly at the University of Cambridge in 2016. He has taught at the University of Cambridge, University of Edinburgh, and the University of Huddersfield, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Global History, Freie Universität Berlin. Dr. Visana's research focuses on Indian political thought from the nineteenth century to the present. His book, Uncivil Liberalism: Labour, Capital and Commercial Society in Dadabhai Naoroji's Political Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2022), is an original and radical reinterpretation of the political thought of Dadabhai Naoroji, and studies how ideas of liberty from the colonised South claimed universality in the North. Dr. Visana has also published on Indian iterations of liberalism, republicanism, sovereignty, peoplehood, populism, and political economy. Ongoing research has articles in preparation for leading political theory journals and edited volumes. These new publications consider contemporary Indian political theory from the mid-20th century to the present with a particular focus on authority, multicultural justice, and majoritarianism in Indian conservative political philosophy and Hindutva. Please note that there were some minor technical errors in the PowerPoint Presentation, with some text omissions due to issues with screen-sharing, where some text boxes would not load. For queries, please contact seminar convenor at saih@history.ox.ac.uk

Sarah Ansari (Royal Holloway, University of London) speaks at the Oxford South Asian Intellectual History Seminar on 31 Oct 2022 South Asia's transition from colonialism to independence in 1947 was undoubtedly one of the most momentous events of the twentieth century. Not surprisingly perhaps, its early postcolonial years have come to exercise a great pull for a range of scholars, who explore this key period, on the one hand, to ask questions about colonial-era legacies or continuities, and, on the other, to identify developments that help to explain what is happening there in the twenty-first century. This paper accordingly explores how - during those early postcolonial years - ideas about, and forms of, citizenship were created or forged by contingent processes of interaction between the ‘state' – its representatives and institutions at different levels – and ‘society' – its citizens in-the-making. Very often, as this paper will highlight, it was the day-to-day realities of the time that directly shaped the broader context in which Pakistanis and Indians engaged with what it seemed to mean, in practice, to be a citizen in post-1947 South Asia. Sarah Ansari is a historian of modern and contemporary South Asia, based at Royal Holloway, University of London. Much of her research has focused on issues linked with religion, identity, migration, citizenship, gender, and the province of Sindh, both before and since 1947. Her latest monograph—co-written with William Gould and entitled Boundaries of Belonging (Cambridge University Press, 2019)—explores the intersections between localities, citizenship and rights as these played out in India (UP) and Pakistan (Sindh) during the decade following Independence. Sarah is also currently President of the Royal Asiatic Society, the first woman to hold this role in the institution's 200-year existence.

Luna Sabastian (Northeastern University- London) speaks at the Oxford South Asian Intellectual History Seminar on 7 Nov 2022. Luna Sabastian is Assistant Professor in History at Northeastern University - London. Prior to assuming this position, she held a postdoc at Cambridge University, from where she also received her PhD in 2020. Her work focuses on modern Indian political thought. She is writing a book titled ‘Indian Fascism?'. Among its highlights is an exploration of Savarkar's Hindutva, gendered violence, and race. Much of the talk will be taken from this chapter. The book further explores a meaningful connection between Indian thought and Nazi ideas of "caste"; the idea and geography of the Hindu Crown; and seismic shifts in the political thought of Hindutva after Savarkar. One of her ongoing side projects focuses on British Indian legal history.

Book Launch with Yasser Kureshi Book Launch - Seeking Supremacy: The Pursuit of Judicial Power in Pakistan In this talk, Kureshi will launch his recently-published book that maps out the evolution of the relationship between the judiciary and military in Pakistan, explaining why Pakistan's high courts shifted from loyal deference to the military to open competition, and confrontation, with military and civilian institutions. In the book Kureshi demonstrates that a shift in the audiences shaping judicial preferences explains the emergence of the judiciary as an assertive power center. As the judiciary gradually embraced less deferential institutional preferences, a shift in judicial preferences took place and the judiciary sought to play a more expansive and authoritative political role. Using this audience-based approach, Kureshi roots the judiciary in its political, social and institutional context, and develops a generalizable framework that can explain variation and change in judicial-military relations around the world.

Talk by Cemil Aydin from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Cemil Aydin (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) speaks at the Oxford South Asian Intellectual History Seminar on 6 June 2022. For queries, please contact seminar convenors at saih@history.ox.ac.uk.

Steve Swerdlow, Neil Clarke, Syinat Sultanalieva discuss human rights violations in Tajikistan, chaired by Faisal Devji

Taushif Kara (Cambridge) as part of the Conference - Expulsion: Uganda's Asians and the Remaking of Nationality The partition of the subcontinent in 1947 presented a unique problem for its diaspora. Trading communities in places like Gwadar often found themselves forced to choose between Indian and Pakistani citizenship but desiring neither, while in colonial Tanganyika many sought British nationality. But attached to the persistent problem of nationality there was also the question of naming, as the once porous category of Indian was now linked to a specific post-colonial state. These communities were often described for the first time as “Asian” as a way to elide this problem. This paper explores the unique genealogy and debates over this novel term amongst the communities in Uganda who considered it for themselves. I focus, however, on the groups that ultimately rejected it and instead decided to claim the name “African” instead, showing that it was at precisely this moment that they were expelled. Taushif Kara is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Centre of Islamic Studies and Jesus College, Cambridge. He obtained his PhD from the Faculty of History at Cambridge in 2021 with a thesis on the Khoja diaspora around the Indian Ocean world. Kara previously studied Islamic history and philosophy at the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London and served as a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Religions and Philosophies at SOAS.

Derek Peterson (Michigan) as part of the Conference - Expulsion: Uganda's Asians and the Remaking of Nationality This essay is about the management of economic liberation in Idi Amin's Uganda. The Economic War transformed petty questions about the conduct of business into thrilling matters of racial liberation. There were a great many scapegoats: first the Asian community, latterly Africans who would not, or could not, follow the official rules. The punishments were draconian: economic crimes were, after 1975, punishable by death. For people in power, the Economic War was a means of making austerity, inhumanity and brutality seem essential, a crucial aspect of their heroic leadership. Derek Peterson is Ali Mazrui Professor of History & African Studies at the University of Michigan. He's the author, most recently, of _The Unseen Archive of Idi Amin: Photographs from the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation_ (Prestel, 2021) (with R. Vokes). Peterson is presently engaged in several curatorial projects focused on the recovery and digitization of endangered film and paper archives in Uganda. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2017.

Shobana Shanker (Stonybrook) as part of the Conference - Expulsion: Uganda's Asians and the Remaking of Nationality Most accounts of Idi Amin's expulsion of Asians from Uganda in 1972 assume that African leaders and the Organization of African Unity were largely silent or unmoved to action. This interpretation assumes that Africans understood the Asian expulsion as a political problem—by contrast, I argue that Africans understood the question of Indian settlers as a fundamental problem of the postcolonial condition, connected to the very definition of African selfhood. I explore the significance of the Indian question around the African continent to the formation of intersecting movements of anticolonialism, antiracism, nationalism, Pan-Africanism (which was a critical antidote to nationalism), and Afrocentrism. Contrary to simplistic renderings of African responses to Idi Amin's anti-Asian racialism, African reckoning with African-Indian entanglements garnered dynamic and long-lasting African cultural responses—even where Indian settlers were few—that produced new African-Indian negotiations on the continent and among African migrants in India. Shobana Shankar is Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies at Stony Brook University, in New York. Her research focuses on cultural encounters and politics in West Africa and Africa-India networks, especially in religion, intellectual history, health, and education. Her most recent book, An Uneasy Embrace: Africa, India and the Spectre of Race (Hurst, 2021), grew out of her meeting with Muslim Indian missionaries in Nigeria, during the course of her research for her first book Who Shall Enter Paradise? Christian Origins in Muslim Northern Nigeria, c.1890-1975 (Ohio University Press). She has also co-edited two collections of essays on religion and globalization. Her recent articles focus on Ghanaian Hinduism, reformism in Nigeria, and Senegal's Afro-Dravidian movement.

Mishka Sinha (University of Oxford) speaks at the Oxford South Asian Intellectual History Seminar on 7 February 2022 Dr Mishka Sinha is a Research Associate at St. John's College, Oxford, and co-director of the project on St. John's and the Colonial Past with Professor William Whyte. She is a cultural and intellectual historian of the modern period. Her research interests focus on the history of orientalism and the transcultural history of knowledge in the context of colonialism and empire, in particular, the transfer of knowledge from Asia to Europe. Dr Sinha's wider research and teaching interests include the history of books, institutions and disciplinary formations, conflict and collaborations between scholarly traditions, histories of language, translation and text circulations, across Europe, Asia and the United States, and particularly in light of the influence of inequalities of power on knowledge production and consumption, and vice versa. She is also interested in transcultural, oriental and occult influences on literary modernism, and has a long-standing involvement in contemporary Indian art, and art heritage, having worked in the field first as an administrator, and then a performer since 1998. Dr Sinha was a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute, Florence, a Zukunftsphilologie Fellow at the Freie Universität, Berlin, and, most recently, a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Faculty of History, Cambridge which she held in conjunction with a Research Associateship at St. John's College, Cambridge.

J. Daniel Elam (University of Hong Kong) speaks at the Oxford South Asian Intellectual History Seminar on 28 February 2022. Professor J. Daniel Elam is Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. He is the author of World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth: Anticolonial Aesthetics, Postcolonial Politics (Fordham University Press, 2020), and Impossible and Necessary (Orient BlackSwan, 2021), and two co-edited volumes on revolutionary anticolonial writing, Reading Revolutionaries (with Kama Maclean, 2014) and Writing Revolution (with Kama Maclean and Chris Moffat, 2017). His current projects include an anthology of political theory from the Global South, a book about revolutionary sociology, and a biography of his great-uncle.

Milinda Banerjee (University of St Andrews) speaks at the Oxford South Asian Intellectual History Seminar on 24 January 2022 The modern concept of ‘dynasty' is a politically-motivated modern intellectual invention. For many advocates of a strong sovereign nation-state across the nineteenth and early twentieth century, in France, Germany, and Japan, the concept helped in visualizing the nation-state as a primordial entity sealed by the continuity of birth and blood, indeed by the perpetuity of sovereignty. Hegel's references to ‘dynasty', read with Marx's critique, further show how ‘dynasty' encoded the intersection of sovereignty and big property, indeed the coming into self-consciousness of their mutual identification-in-difference in the age of capitalism. Imaginaries about ‘dynasty' also connected national sovereignty with patriarchal authority. European colonialism helped globalize the concept in the non-European world; British India offers an exemplar of ensuing debates. The globalization of the abstraction of ‘dynasty' was ultimately bound to the globalization of capitalist-colonial infrastructures of production, circulation, violence, and exploitation. Simultaneously, colonized actors, like Indian peasant/‘tribal' populations, brought to play alternate precolonial Indian-origin concepts of collective regality, expressed through terms like ‘rajavamshi' and ‘Kshatriya'. These concepts nourished new forms of democracy in modern India. Global intellectual histories can thus expand political thought today by provincializing and deconstructing Eurocentric political vocabularies and by recuperating subaltern models of collective and polyarchic power. Dr Milinda Banerjee is Lecturer in Modern History at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, United Kingdom. He specializes in History of Modern Political Thought and Political Theory, and is Programme Director for the MLitt in Global Social and Political Thought. He is the author of The Mortal God: Imagining the Sovereign in Colonial India (Cambridge University Press, 2018). He has co-edited the volume, Transnational Histories of the ‘Royal Nation' (Palgrave, 2017); the forum ‘Law, Empire, and Global Intellectual History', in the journal Modern Intellectual History (Cambridge University Press, 2020); the special issue ‘The Modern Invention of ‘Dynasty': A Global Intellectual History, 1500-2000', in the journal Global Intellectual History (Routledge, 2020); and the special issue ‘Forced Migration and Refugee Resettlement in the Long 1940s: A Connected and Global History', in the journal Itinerario: Journal of Imperial and Global Interactions (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Banerjee has published two other monographs and several articles on the intersections of Indian and global intellectual history and political theory. He is a founder-editor of a new series ‘South Asian Intellectual History' with Cambridge University Press, a founder-editor of two series with De Gruyter, ‘Critical Readings in Global Intellectual History', and ‘Transregional Practices of Power', and Special Projects Editor of the journal Political Theology (Routledge). He is Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Akeel Bilgrami (Columbia University) speaks at the Oxford South Asian Intellectual History Seminar on 7 March 2022. Akeel Bilgrami got a B.A in English Literature from Elphinstone College, Bombay University and went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar where he read Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. He has a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Chicago. He is the Sidney Morgenbesser Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, where he is also a Professor on the Committee on Global Thought. He has been the Director of the Heyman Centre for the Humanities as well as the South Asian Institute at Columbia. His publications include the books Belief and Meaning (1992), Self-Knowledge and Resentment (2006), and Secularism, Identity and Enchantment (2014). He is due to publish two books in the near future: What is a Muslim? (Princeton University Press) and Gandhi's Integrity (Columbia University Press) and is currently writing a book on the relations between politics, agency, value, and practical reason.

Irna Hofman (Oxford) Malik Kadirov (Media Analyst, Tajikistan) Salimjon Aioubov (Director of RFE/RL's Tajik Service) round table discussion Malik Kadirov Abdumalik (Malik) started his professional career as an interpreter translator in Iraq (1978-1979) and later in Syria (1982-1987). From 1987 – 1990 he served as a journalist political analyst in Tajik State Television. Following the dismissal for his critical reports (1990) Malik joined the Democratic Party of Tajikistan and served for some time as a chairman of its Dushanbe branch. Abdumalik has spent several years investing in scientific research and development of the pharmaceutical product as a co-founder of Zand Ltd, a small Tajik pharmaceutical company. After the end of Tajikistan's civil war of 1992 – 1997 Malik joined the NGO sector as a volunteer for a local NGO, then served for several international NGOs and foundations such as Counterpart International and Open Society Institute. From 2001 – 2009 he served the US Embassy to Tajikistan as a grant manager with the overall portfolio of $700 K. From January 2011 – April 2016 Malik served as Country Director of the Tajik branch of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR), a British NGO that supports journalists in the risky areas around the globe. From May 2016 until January 2021 Mr. Kadirov led an American media supporting non-profit organization Internews in Tajikistan as Country Director. Currently Malik is a Secretary General of the association of journalists Media – Alliance of Tajikistan. Malik is a member of the Union of Journalists of Tajikistan and a well – known political analyst who often provides comments on various in-country and regional sensitive socio-political topics to local, regional, and international media in Tajk, Russian, and English. Abdumalik was awarded with the US Embassy's Meritorious Honor Award for exceptional meritorious performance as a Grant Officer; European Congress of Tajik Journalists and Bloggers' Tajik Journalism Award-2020. Malik is married and is a father of four daughters. Salimjon Aioubov Salimjon Aioubov, Director of RFE/RL's Tajik Service based in Prague. Previously, he was Project Director for RFE/RL's Central Asian Newswire and the Editor-in-Chief of the first independent newspaper in Tajikistan “Charoghi Ruz”, author of several books, most recently, “A Hundred Colors: Tajiks in the 20th Century". Irna Hofman Dr Irna Hofman graduated from Wageningen University and Research in the Netherlands, with a major in Environmental Sciences and minors in respectively Rural Development Sociology (B.Sc.) and Rural Sociology (M.Sc), and received her Ph.D. from Leiden University in January 2019. Her dissertation was titled “Cotton, control, and continuity in disguise: The political economy of agrarian transformation in lowland Tajikistan,” for which she conducted long-term fieldwork in rural Tajikistan. Irna has rich research experience in and on Central Asia. Before initiating her doctoral research on Tajikistan she studied the political economy of agrarian transformation in Uzbekistan, in her role as junior researcher at the Center for Development Research (Zentrum für Entwicklungsforschung (ZEF)), an institute of the University of Bonn.

Aditya Ramesh, Nausheen Anwar, Camelia Dewan, Chitra Venkatramani, Nikhil Anand in discussion Camelia Dewan is an environmental anthropologist focusing on the anthropology of development. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo and the author of Misreading the Bengal Delta: Climate Change, Development, and Livelihoods in Coastal Bangladesh (University of Washington Press). Nausheen H Anwar is Professor of Regional & City Planning, Department of Social Sciences, IBA, Karachi, Pakistan, and the Founder & Director of the Karachi Urban Lab. Nausheen also holds a joint appointment as Research Fellow, in the Cities Cluster, IDS, University of Sussex, UK. Nikhil Anand is an environmental anthropologist whose research focuses on cities, infrastructure, state power and climate change. He addresses these questions by studying the political ecology of cities, read through the different lives of water. His new book project, Urban Seas, decenters the grounds of urban planning by drawing attention to the work of fishers and scientists in climate changed seas. V. Chitra is an anthropologist whose research intersects environmental studies, STS, and visual studies. She is currently working on her first book, which is titled "Drawing Coastlines: Climate Anxieties and the Visual Reinvention of Mumbai's Shore." Chitra is particularly interested in experimenting with comics as an ethnographic medium. Aditya Ramesh is a Presidential fellow in environmental history at the University of Manchester. His current research examines colonial and postcolonial urban spaces, disease ecologies, and rapid environmental change. The research is deeply collaborative, and involves working with colleagues including Bhavani Raman (an early colonial historian), Karen Coehlo (an anthropologist) and Molly Roy (a counter-mapper) and is focused, at least partially on the coastal city of Chennai, formerly Madras, and its many hydro-spheres. Previously Aditya worked on large dams, technocratic governance, and regimes of property in colonial and postcolonial south India.

Panel discussion on researching no human animals in South Asia Muhammad Kavesh is a Faculty of Arts and Science Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto and Discovery Early Career Research Award (DECRA) fellow at the Australian National University. He is the author of “Animal Enthusiasms: Life Beyond Cage and Leash in Rural Pakistan” and co-editor of a special journal issue, “Sense Making in a More-than-Human World." Naisargi N. Davé is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Queer Activism in India and of the forthcoming, Indifference: On the Praxis of Interspecies Being. Radhika Govindrajan is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington, Seattle. She is the author of Animal Intimacies, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2018 and Penguin India in 2019, as well as articles published in American Ethnologist, Comparative Study of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Cultural Anthropology, and HAU: The Journal of Ethnographic Theory. Ambika Aiyadurai is Assistant Professor (Anthropology) at the Indian Institute of Technology – Gandhinagar. She is an anthropologist of wildlife conservation with a special interest in human-animal relations and community-based conservation projects. Her ongoing and long-term research aims to understand how local and global forces shape human-animal relations. She completed her PhD thesis in Anthropology at the National University of Singapore in 2016. She is trained in both natural and social sciences with masters' degrees in Wildlife Sciences from Wildlife Institute of India (Dehradun) and Anthropology, Environment and Development from University College London (UK) funded by Ford Foundation's International Fellowship Program. In 2017, she was awarded the Social Sciences Research Council (SSRC) Transregional Research Junior Scholar Fellowship to examine community-based wildlife projects. Her monograph, Tigers are our Brothers: Anthropology of Wildlife Conservation in Northeast India was published by Oxford University Press (UK). 2021.

A panel discussion on the problems of research in South Asia. Yamini Aiyar (CPR, Delhi), Maira Hayat (Notre Dame), Zehra Hashmi (Brown University), Akshay Mangla (Oxford) join a panel discussion.

A panel discussion on he problems of research in South Asia. Yamini Aiyar (CPR, Delhi), Maira Hayat (Notre Dame), Zehra Hashmi (Brown University), Akshay Mangla (Oxford) join a panel discussion.

Manu Samnotra (University of South Florida) speaks at the Oxford South Asian Intellectual History Seminar on 31 January 2022. For queries, please contact the seminar convenor at saih@history.ox.ac.uk Manu Samnotra is an Associate Professor in political theory at the University of South Florida. He is the author of Worldly Shame: Ethos in Action. Worldly Shame examines shame's worldly possibilities through the lens of Hannah Arendt's political writings. Samnotra makes a case both for shame's capacity to orient us towards a shared political world, and for reading Arendt as an anti-colonial thinker. Operating broadly within the frame of Comparative Political Theory, his next project brings Gandhian thought into conversation with liberal and republican conceptions of political dignity.

A discussion with Suzanne Levi-Sanchez, Edward Lemon, Muhiddin Kabiri, Alim Sherzamonov Suzanne Levi-Sanchez (Non-Resident Fellow, School of International Service, American University, Retired (Tenured) Associate Professor, US Naval War College) Edward Lemon (Research Assistant Professor, Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University) Muhiddin Kabiri (chairman of NAT (National Alliance of Tajikistan), chairman of the IRPT (Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan)), Alim Sherzamonov (Politician in Tajikistan)

Ammar Ali Jan (Haqooq-e-Khalq Movement) speaks at the Oxford South Asian Intellectual History Seminar on 17 January 2022. For queries, please contact the seminar convenor at saih@history.ox.ac.uk. This talk will discuss salient features of authoritarian rule in Pakistan. First, the permanent state of emergency that shapes political life in the country fuels arbitrary and whimsical forms of governance. The perpetual violation of the constitution by the ruling classes tells us that rather than viewing the Pakistani state as theocratic, it might be better to suggest that the country's crisis results from the fact that it lacks any political theology or sacred document. Second, the case of missing persons is emblematic of the nature of power in the country as it is the invisible ink through which sovereign power simultaneously reveals and veils itself. Such disavowed forms of violence show that "erasure" remains a central, yet under examined aspect of the exercise of modern power. Finally, the controlled nature of democracy in Pakistan results in a tense dynamic between the form and content of authoritarian rule. For historical reasons, democracy is the necessary form through which authoritarian rule is justified in the country, a contradiction that also opens up important space for oppositional politics. Carefully considering these themes makes it possible to intervene in debates on the global itinerary of democracy and resistance in the time of global authoritarianism. Dr Ammar Ali Jan is an academic and left-wing political activist based in Lahore, Pakistan. Dr Jan has a Doctorate in History from the University of Cambridge, where he worked on the encounter between anti-colonial thought and Marxism in colonial India. His book, Rule by Fear: Eight Theses on Authoritarianism in Pakistan (Folio Books, 2021), explains the political, economic and social roots of authoritarianism in the country, focusing on the structural features propelling the rising militarisation of society. He is a regular contributor to a number of leading publications, including The News International, Al-Jazeera, EPW and The Jacobin. At present, Dr. Jan is a member of the Haqooq-e-Khalq (People's Rights) Movement, an anti-capitalist organisation that is working among workers, farmers, students and women to build an alternative political project. He is also a Cabinet Member of the Progressive International and does a weekly show on Naya Daur. Dr Jan was recently fired from his teaching post and charged with sedition as part of a crackdown against dissenting voices.

Part of the International conference on Maharashtra in September 2021 - Deepra Dandekar, Leibnitz Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin, Germany Baba Padmanji (1831-1906) was a firebrand Christian reformer of nineteenth century Bombay Presidency, who wrote the first ever Marathi novel in 1857, describing a woman's, Yamuna's travels across various towns in Maharashtra, and through her journey, towards marriage and religious conversion. While 1856 witnessed the passing of the Widows Remarriage Act, Padmanji's Yamunaparyatan in 1857, functioned as a socio-legal treatise in its support, written in a fictional format that he insisted, was grounded in research. Padmanji supported Vidyasagar, and expressed his own emotive ideas about women's reform through the metaphor of Yamuna's journey. Yamuna, a young girl, travels all over Maharashtra with her husband Vinayak, and meets many unhappy widows. She understands their plight, and witnesses myriad immoralities surrounding their sexual exploitation, while advocating relentlessly for their remarriage. Yamuna confronts the urgent need for feminist reform in Bombay Presidency that would liberate women from both Hinduism and the hypocrisy of Hindu reformers—something she imbibes after her own widowhood. Her metaphoric travels hardly end with widowhood, as she goes on to remarry and ultimately convert to Christianity. Padmanji relates Yamuna's journey, both internal and external, as a story of feminine moral agency, endorsing the true reformer's need to travel, listen, argue, research, present, and debate ideas, with the larger aim of facilitating self-transformation and social change towards the discovery of true religion. This presentation discusses the layered, non-tangible circulation of Christian reform ideas expressed in Yamunaparyatan, that includes Padmanji's own journey towards conversion and divorce that propelled him to write; Yamuna's journey and encounter with widows and reformers alike; her marital journey with Vinayak, Hinduism, and Hindu families that ends disastrously; and finally, her remarriage and conversion to Christianity that metaphorically heralds the journey's destination.

Part of the International conference on Maharashtra in September 2021 - Eric Ferrie, Independent Scholar, Paris, France At the 14th Maharashtra conference on « sthalantar », I showed that, in the varkari pilgrimage, the way of moving was as important as the destination itself. At the upcoming conference, on circulation, I would like to emphasize the fact that this dynamic aspect of the varkari pilgrimage between saints' and god's places is thus circular. Indeed, I intend to show that this pilgrimage is a complete circle in which the reciprocal and symetrical relation of devotion between the devotee and the saint and Vithoba closes the loop. As such, this pilgrimage should be considered from the angle of procession as well. In this respect, a comparison with other processions in the Vithoba's cult, for instance, the Haridas's kala ritual - in which the temple's priests carry Vithoba's sandals (paduka) back and forth between their temple and the god's one in Pandharpur- as well as the darshan's circulation in Vithoba's and the saint Jnandev's temples will also show how status and religious authority are at stake while considering the notion of circulation in ritual and sacred places. Finally, going through such circulations will allow us to reconsider the relation between hagiography and devotional practice.

Part of the International conference on Maharashtra in September 2021 - Pankaj Jaiswal, SPPU, Pune नवस्वातंत्र भारताला व महाराष्टाला आर्थिक स्थैर्य प्राप्त करून द्यायचे असेल तर शेती विकासाला चालना दिल्याशिवाय पर्याय नाही. त्यासाठी आधुनिक शास्त्रीय पद्धतीने शेती करण्याला अधिक महत्व देने व शेतीचे आधुनिक व शास्त्रीय तंत्रज्ञान सर्व शेतकऱ्यांपर्यंत पोहोचवणे क्रमप्राप्त होते. यासाठी तत्कालीन कृषीमंत्री डॉ. पंजाबराव देशमुखांनी १९६० साली दिल्लीला पहिली इतिहासप्रसिद्ध जागतिक कृषी प्रदर्शनी भरविली. जागतिक कृषी प्रदर्शनी भरविण्याचा मुख्य उद्देश, भारतातील तसेच महाराष्ट्रातील शेतकऱ्यांना आधुनिक शेतीची माहिती व्हावी, संकरीत बियाणांचा वापर कसा करावा, नवीन तंत्रज्ञान समजून घ्यावे, दुसऱ्या शेतकऱ्यांचे शेतीविषयक आचार विचार समजून घ्यावेत, हा होता. या प्रदर्शनीमध्ये अमेरिका, रशिया, इंग्लंड, जर्मनी, पोलंड, इराक, अफगाणिस्तान, सिलोन,म्यानमार, व्हिएतनाम, चीन, मंगोलिया व इराण इत्यादि देशांनी आपल्या ऐतिहासिक व सांस्कृतिक परंपरेचे दर्शन घडविणारे मंडप उभारून स्वदेशीय कृषी व अन्य उद्योगविषयक प्रगतीचे टप्पे आकर्षकपणे या मंडपात प्रदर्शित केले होते. तसेच युनोची आंतरराष्ट्रीय कृषी संघटना, आंतरराष्ट्रीय कृषी उत्पादकांची संघटना यांनीही आपापले प्रदर्शन कक्ष उघडून जागतिक स्तरावर अन्न व कृषी यांच्या प्रगतिकरिता काय काय करता येणे शक्य आहे याचे प्रत्ययकारी दर्शन घडविले होते. याचबरोबर केंद्रीय अन्न व कृषी मंत्रालयाचे विविध विभागांनी व विविध राज्यांनी आपापल्या प्रदेशातील कृषी व इतर उद्योगधंद्यांची शोभामंडपे लावली होती. तत्कालीन दोन महासत्ता अमेरिका व रशिया या राष्ट्रांनी कोट्यवधी रुपये खर्च करून आपल्या राष्ट्रातील कृषी व विज्ञान या क्षेत्रातील प्रगती दर्शवण्यासाठी आकर्षक व भव्य मंडप उभारले होते व त्यांना 'अमेरिकी मेला' व 'रशियन पव्हेलियन' ही नावे दिली होती जी कृषी प्रदर्शनातील प्रमुख आकर्षक स्थळे होती. या जागतिक कृषी प्रदर्शनीला भारताचे राष्ट्रपती डॉ. राजेंद्रप्रसाद, भारताचे पंतप्रधान पंडित जवाहरलाल नेहरू, जागतिक कृषिप्रदर्शनीचे अध्यक्ष डॉ. पंजाबराव देशमुख, अमेरिकेचे राष्ट्राध्यक्ष आयसेन हावर आणि रशियाचे अध्यक्ष बोरोशीलाव्ह, रशियन प्रधानमंत्री निकिता क्रुश्चेव, जर्मनी, पोलंड, नेपाळ, कंबोडिया इत्यादी देशांचे प्रधानमंत्री उपस्थित होते. या सगळ्या मान्यवरांनी आपल्या भाषणात वैज्ञानिक शेती व शेतीच्या आधुनिक तंत्रज्ञानाविषयी त्याच्या उपयुक्ततेविषयी आपले मत व्यक्त केले. भाऊसाहेबांनी भरविलेल्या या जागतिक कृषी प्रदर्शनीमध्ये तत्कालीन काळात उदयास आलेले शेतीविषयक यंत्र (उदा.ट्रॅक्टर, नांगरणी, इंजन), बी-बियाण्याच्या नवीन जाती, गायी, बैल,बकरी व म्हशींच्या संकरित जाती, तसेच विविध पिकांच्या लागवडी संदर्भाची माहिती, इत्यादी गोष्टी प्रदर्शनीत ठेवण्यात आल्या. यामागील उद्देश एकच होता की येथील शेतकर्यांना आधुनिक यंत्राची व आधुनिक पद्धतीच्या शेतीची माहिती व्हावी व आपल्या विशिष्ट गरजा आणि परिस्थिती लक्षात घेऊन आवश्यक तो बदल करून त्याचा उपयोग शेतीमध्ये करावा. डॉ. पंजाबराव देशमुखांनी जगातील कृषी संशोधन, तंत्रशास्त्र, यांत्रिकीकरण, पशुपालन आणि कृषीमालाची गुणवत्ता या जागतिक कृषी प्रदर्शनीद्वारे भारतातील शेतकरी वर्गापर्यंत पोहोचवले. प्रदर्शनीने प्रात्यक्षिके दाखवून विज्ञाननिष्ठा व प्रयत्नवाद शिकविला. भाऊसाहेबांनी कृषीक्रांती करण्यासाठी विश्वातील कृषिज्ञान येथील शेतकऱ्यांपर्यंत आणले. या जागतिक कृषिप्रदर्शनीला महाराष्ट्रातील शेतकऱ्यांनी भरघोस प्रतिसाद दिला भाऊसाहेबांनी सुद्धा महाराष्ट्रातील शेतकऱ्यांना अधिकाधीक संख्येने प्रदर्शनी बघण्यास व नवीन तंत्रज्ञान व पद्धती समजून घेण्यास प्रवृत्त केले. या प्रदर्शनीचा सकारात्मक परिणाम काही वर्षातच दिसून आला महाराष्ट्राच्या शेतकऱ्यांनी नवीन तंत्रज्ञान व आधुनिक पद्धतीचा उपयोग करून अधिकाधिक उत्पादन घेण्यास सुरुवात केली आणि काही वर्षातच महाराष्ट्रात हरित क्रांती घडून आली. महाराष्ट्र हे अन्नधान्याच्या बाबतीत स्वयंपूर्ण राज्य बनले याचे श्रेय हे डॉ. पंजाबराव देशमुखांनी भरविलेल्या जागतिक कृषी प्रदर्शनीला जाते. ही जागतिक कृषी प्रदर्शन म्हणजे भाऊसाहेबांच्या कल्पकतेचे, दूरदृष्टीचे व शेतकऱ्यांच्या हितसंवर्धनाचे प्रतीकच होते. या संशोधनासाठी दुय्यम पुस्तकासह कृषी मंत्रालयातील रेकॉर्डस्, सरकारी वार्षिक रिपोर्ट, विशेषांक इ. चा वापर करणार आहे. Exchange of agricultural technologies If new independent India and Maharashtra want to achieve economic stability, there is no alternative but to promote agricultural development. For this, more importance should be given to modern farming by using modern and scientific technology of agriculture. This modern technology should be passed on to all the farmers. To achieve this goal then Agriculture Minister, In 1960 Dr. Panjabrao Deshmukh organized the first World Agricultural Exhibition in Delhi. The main aim of the World Agricultural Exhibition was to inform the farmers of India and Maharashtra about modern farming, how to use hybrid seeds, to understand new technologies, to understand the agricultural practices of other farmers. In this exhibition, the countries like United States, Russia, England, Germany, Poland, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ceylon, Myanmar, Vietnam, China, Mongolia, and Iran, etc., set up their historical and cultural heritage stalls. Also, UNO's International Agricultural Organization, the International Agricultural Manufacturers' Association had opened their own stalls and demonstrated what can be done for the progress of food and agriculture globally. 'The American Fair' and the 'Russian Pavilion' were the major attractions in the agricultural exhibition. President of India Dr. Rajendra Prasad, Prime Minister of India Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, President of the World Agriculture Exhibition Dr. Panjabrao Deshmukh, Presidents of countries such as US President Eisenhower and Russia's President Boroshilav, Russian Prime Minister Nikita Kruschev, Germany, Poland, Nepal, Cambodia, and others were present. All these dignitaries expressed their views on scientific farming and its usefulness in the modern technology of agriculture. In World Agricultural Exhibition, organized by Bhausaheb showcased information about agricultural cultivars (eg, tractors, plowing, engines), new seed varieties, breeds of cows, bulls, goats, and buffaloes, as well as information regarding the cultivation of various crops, etc. The purpose was to make the farmers aware of the modern machinery and methods of agriculture. Another aim was to take into account the specific needs of Indian farmers and make the necessary changes to use them in Indian agriculture. Through the World Agricultural Exhibition worlds agricultural he introduced new research, technology, mechanization, animal husbandry and quality of agriculture to the farmers of India. Bhausaheb brought farmers to the World Agriculture Exhibition for the revolution in the field of agriculture. Farmers in Maharashtra responded tremendously to this global agrarian exhibition. The positive result of this exhibition was realized in a few years. The farmers of Maharashtra started using more technology and modern methods to produce more and more, and within a few years, a green revolution took place in Maharashtra. Maharashtra as a self-sufficient state for food credit goes to World Agricultural Exhibition organized by Panjabrao Deshmukh. For this paper, government yearly reports, records from agriculture ministry will be used.

Part of the International conference on Maharashtra in September 2021 - Rahul Sarwate, University of Ahmadabad In this paper, I explore an interplay between sexuality and power by examining the production and circulation of a new moral sensibility in early-twentieth-century Marathi literary culture. In particular, I examine two specific conversations about the relationship between literature, art, and sexuality in the 1930s: A) a debate instigated by a painting titled, Oleti ((A Drenched Woman), which was printed as a cover page for Ratnakar, a literary magazine, in June 1930. Oleti was quite controversial in the Marathi public sphere throughout the 1930s and led to a great number of debates about the relationship between art, sexuality, and obscenity, where the central concern was not the quality of the artistic expression but the moral anxiety about the depiction of female sexuality through the works of art. B) A debate between Bhaskarrao Jadhav, a renowned non-Brahmin intellectual, and Mahadev Shastri Divekar, a Sanskrit pundit of Pradnya Patha Shala, the reformist seminary at Wai, about the supposed celibacy of the Hindu god Hanuman. This debate, though drew upon philology and hermeneutics of reading the Ramayana, ultimately revolved around the relationship between sexuality and morality in the modern Marathi public. I discuss these debates to explore the circulation of new moral aesthetic, as it emerged through the literary and cultural modernity in Marathi, particularly in the post-Tilak age. I seek to show that the materiality of the body, its romantic and sensual fervor was at the very center of early-twentieth-century Marathi literary culture.

Part of the International conference on Maharashtra in September 2021 - Rajeshwari Deshpande, SPPU, Pune This paper is about Acharya Javdekar, a Marathi intellectual from the late colonial period (1894-1955). Javdekar tried to appropriate the ideas of Gandhi and Marx in a formulation that he called Satyagrahi Samajwad. It was a significant theoretical attempt on part of Javdekar to reroute Gandhi. I argue in the proposed paper that it was also an unusual and ambitious attempt to reroute Marx as Javdekar translates the Marxian message for the Marathi/ Indian audience. Javdekar was a nationalist at heart. The anti- colonial nationalism remained the main political project for him. However, I submit that in his ethical project of Satyagrahi Samajwad, Javdekar transcends and subverts the colonial hierarchies of knowledge and power as he enters into a nuanced, transnational conversation with Gandhi and Marx. Marxism had alerted Javdekar of the material basis of social relations and therefore how political struggles in the material realm became a precondition for realization of Swaraj. Most of Javdekar's writings (in Marathi) thus look for spaces to relate and develop Marxism in the Indian context and to link the anti colonial struggle with anti capitalist politics. At the same time, as a rare non-derivative response to the Marxian politics, Javdekar also argues how the concepts of Truth and Satyagraha in Gandhi would enrich the ethical possibilities within Marxism. I argue that Acharya Javdekar's interventions in the form of Satyagrahi Smajwad must be viewed as a rare, courageous (and unfortunately completely neglected) intellectual exercise that began novel conversations in the world of ideas. It must be seen as one of the many attempts of dynamic interactions between situated visions of human emancipation that contributed to the shaping of cosmopolitan thought zones in pursuit of shared and yet historically situated goals of emancipation.

Part of the International conference on Maharashtra in September 2021 -Suraj Thube, University of Oxford ‘Circulation of ideas' in Maharashtra has been a critical site of investigation amongst scholars working from ancient to modern times. Maharashtra's history and culture, like all other regions in India, have undergone massive changes in terms of the way it has been perceived especially in the socio-political realm. As far as modern institutions are concerned, family, kinship and community have been instrumental in molding a peculiar notion of the ‘public'. Along with these, the ‘public-political' domain, especially of the early 20th century, was largely influenced specifically by the moral and ethical judgements of urban educated, upper caste elites of the 19th century. At the same time, apart from the Brahmins, how the non-brahmin, ‘dominant' Marathas used the site of print and its intimate connection with the performative world has largely been an ignored aspect of the circulatory discourse of everyday life in the modern colonial period. The colonial period saw the rise of a variegated set of anti-colonial voices which catered to both nationalist and regional demands. Leading nationalists from Maharashtra like Tilak, who had a significant impact on Pan-Indian anti-colonial struggle, have been well documented. However, the impact of regional leaders on shaping the political consciousness of people both through print and performance amidst the anti-colonial narrative has largely been an underexplored area of research. One such prominent figure was Prabodhankar Thackeray. Known as a prolific writer, journalist, anti-untouchability crusader and someone who believed in the rhetorical power of performative world, Thackeray was a unique cultural polyglot. I propose to study the public persona of Thackeray and how he significantly impacted the domain of both print and performance. This study will be crucial for three reasons. Firstly, Thackeray's support for the assertion of Maratha-Kayastha dominance and resistance to Brahmin hegemony in the public domain is crucial to navigate how the circulation of his ideas through his magazine Prabodhan shaped the discourse on ‘religio-nativism'. Secondly, Thackeray played a pivotal role in bridging the two seemingly distinct circulatory domains of print and performance by using the power of print to disseminate his writings on street plays to a wider audience. More than seeing him as a local figure, Thackeray was a regional figure whose vision for using the circulatory-reflexive power of the print domain made him reach out to remote areas of the Bombay presidency. In this way, I argue that Thackeray started mobilizing new reading and listening audience away from the largely urban belt of the Bombay-Poona region. By this, he used his physical as well as ideational mobility to straddle the urban-rural divide by using his power of oratory as well as his colloquial, accessible writing. I argue that this regional narrative of the vernacular medium needs to be undertaken in order to make a deeper sense of the larger issues of nation and nationalism. The crisscrossing and overlapping nature of Thackeray's political arch will further stimulate debates on unpacking the growing anxiety of power sharing between Marathas and Brahmins. Thackeray's own ambiguous positions on conservatism and Hindu Nationalism whilst championing the cause of anti-untouchability will explore the complexities of the circulatory discourse in the vernacular medium.

Part of the International conference on Maharashtra in September 2021 - Madhura Damle, Presidency University, Kolkata Shimaga (Holi) was not celebrated as the festival of colours in the nineteenth century Maharashtra. It was rather a festival associated with grotesque, obscene and riotous behaviour. The celebrations included bawling, beating mouth, obscene and abusive speech, erotic songs and dances, applying mud, dung and dirt to bodies, smearing faces with gulal ‘like a corpse', strange costume and street processions mimicking funeral/ wedding processions. However, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, there were many attempts and appeals by the Marathi intelligentsia to ‘reform' the festival. The shastras were cited to assert that obscenities were not quintessential in the celebrations; and sports events were organized to divert people from indulging in obscenities even by bahujan associations like Depressed Classes Mission Society of India. Can these reforms be read as diffusion of Victorian morality in India through the colonial laws and the Christian missionary critique? Were they an instance of suppression of cultural expressions of the lower order by the English-educated indigenous gentry (Banerjee, 1987: 1197)? The references in the literary journals suggest that the advocates of Shimaga reforms were aware of carnival-like festivals in Jewish, Persian and European traditions. They invoked Sanskrit texts and traditions, at times, to criticize obscenities in Shimaga, but also knew that the conceptions of obscenity and eros in these texts were different from the Victorian ideas. Thus, the trajectory of idea of obscenity in colonial Maharashtra may not be linear (Victorian society to Indian elite to Indian masses). The existing scholarship has either approached the issue of obscenity from a legal perspective (censorship) or discussed it in the context of gender, sexuality and community (Gupta, 2001) or nudity (Guha-Thakurta, 2004) in art and literature. In case of Shimaga reforms, unruliness and grotesque realism also constitute obscene. Thus, by examining Shimaga reforms as a case in point, this paper seeks to map the circulation of the idea(s) of obscenity in colonial Maharashtra.

Part of the International conference on Maharashtra in September 2021 - Kumud Dileep Kanitkar, Independent Scholar, Mumbai Changing Iconography on temple walls reflects ‘currents' of thoughts. As a study-tool of socio-religious history, it has an added advantage. Carved images can be destroyed but not ‘corrupted' thus no ‘copying errors' like Manuscripts. In medieval times majority of people were illiterate. They could come to the temple site but not everyone was allowed entry. Under the circumstances, Preceptor priests made use of sculptures on outer walls of temples to illustrate tenets of their sect (Non-verbal mass communication). Iconography of three medieval temples is illustrated to make the point. • Ambarnath temple, Ambarnath. • Bhuleshvar Temple, Malshiras. • Aundha Naganath Temple, Aundha. Ambarnath iconography illustrates Shaiva Siddhanta theology, and includes many Brahma images, proving Brahma was still in worship in this era, further substantiated by contemporaneous life size images of Brahma found in Nalasopara and Thane. Surya has been absorbed into Shaiva pantheon and relegated to a minor deity, small image of Surya on the adhishthana, not on the main wall. A hint of this trend is seen at Modhera Surya temple, Gujarat. The temple has Surya in the sanctum but the hall has two parts, one has twelve Adityas on the wall, the other has twelve (‘dvadasha') Gauris! Bhuleshvar temple shows the influence of Nath ideology. Characters portrayed here fight their own battles rather than seek divine help. As a last resort they use seemingly unethical means, whether in Mahabharata or Ramayana episodes. Rama shooting at Vali from behind a tree is one such example where circumstances left Rama no choice. At Aundha Naganath, sculptures of a woman leading an Elephant brigade line the balustrades of porch steps, a remarkable acceptance of “Woman Power' for that era.

Part of the International conference on Maharashtra in September 2021 - Chetan Sahasrabuddhe, BN College of Architecture, Pune The eighteenth century was a period of cultural change for most of the region that we know today as Maharashtra. What people today understand as the culture of Maharashtra was built, rebuilt, written, rewritten, codified, and sometimes even fabricated in the eighteenth century. The proposed paper attempts to examine this period from an architectural perspective. The newly formed Maratha elite, an outcome of the newly opened opportunities of social mobility that Shahu's regime provided from 1720's onwards, were the chief agents of rapid changes in the material culture of that century. The new Maratha elite, aided first by the demise of the Deccan sultanates and the later weakening of Mughal rule, rapidly redrafted the political contours of the subcontinent. However, culturally, it was a different story altogether. A case in point is provided by Mahadji Shinde's attempts to rebuild the Kaśiviśvanatha temple in Varanasi in place of the Alamgir mosque built by Aurangazeb. The religious zeal of Mahadji was thwarted by the local Bramhins who did not wish to upset the tenuous balance of power that existed in the city between the Hindus and Muslims. Fortunately, sense prevailed and Mahadji had to abandon the project. In a strange twist, material culture generally and architecture specifically, in the Maratha heartland of the eighteenth-century was defined more by Mughal court culture than anything else. And as Mahadji's example illustrates, concerns of political legitimacy meant that there was little choice that the Maratha victors had other than accepting the cultural dominance of the vanquished. Before we hastily attribute the cultural compliance of the Marathas to just political exegesis, it is worth reading Nanasaheb (Balaji Bajirao) Peshwa's letter written while on a campaign in Hindustan (north India). In this letter, young Balaji sang praises of almost everything in the north comparing it unfavorably with his home country in Dakśina deṣa. The conflict between his habitus and the cultural capital he was aspiring to acquire was never more evident than in this letter and is perhaps symptomatic of what the new Maratha nobility was feeling. The personal migration of his clan from the Konkan to Desh, a simultaneous in-migration of craftsmen from Gujarat and Rajput territories, exposure to regions of strong cultural identities such as Odisha and Karnataka, and a continuation of existing traditions of sultanate and pre-sultanate architecture…all participated in the circulation of cultural ideas, material forms and architectural elements. This paper will attempt to map the circulation of forms and ideas in the practice of architecture in eighteenth-century Maharashtra. From the Mughal cypress column and multifoliate arches in residences and temples, Bijapuri guldasta finials in temples, carved wooden brackets of Gujarati tradition at one end of the scale - to the Karnataka-inspired agrahar neighborhoods settled next to the very Arab-derived kasba at the other end; this century presents us with a bewildering range of architectural experimentation. The multifoil arch and the cypress column, so often depicted and seen as the cultural identity of the Mughals are, in the final analysis, just one, albeit important example of cultural appropriation by the Marathas, among other things!

Part of the International conference on Maharashtra in September 2021 - Dhanmanjiri Sathe, Azeem Premji University, Bangalore In tune with the 73rd Constitutional Amendment, Maharashtra passed its own local governance law in 1993 which put in place local, elected governing bodies in the rural areas called the gram panchayats. Under this, 27 per cent of the gram panchayat seats and the posts of sarpanch (i.e. the head of the gram panchayat) were to be reserved for the SCs and STs; and 33 per cent for women. Later in 2011, the share of women was increased to 50 per cent. This Amendment was made with the idea of including the hence-forth marginalized sections in the grass-root level decision-making practises. The objective was also to bring about first a presence and then preferably upward mobility, of the hence-forth disregarded sections in the political spaces and processes. In this paper we try to explore to what extent this has happened? To that end, in this paper, we compare the dalit-women (D-W) sarpanchs, who undoubtedly belong to the lowest rung of India's society with the upper caste- male (U-M) sarpanchs who belong to the upper-most end of the Indian society. After surveying 26 D-W sarpanchs with the same number of U-M sarpanchs, in the Sangli and Kolhapur districts of Maharashtra, we arrive at the following results. On the whole, we find that while becoming a sarpanch does give the D-W a certain kind of upward mobility, this mobility seems to be somewhat constrained. We find that the U-M sarpanch is significantly better off as compared to D-W sarpanchs with respect to material assets (like land, other assets like TV, vehicles etc); and with respect to non-material assets (like education, who operates the bank account). Also, in the context of discrimination, the D-W sarpanchs have to face much more discrimination (like being called by first name in a derogatory manner, not allowed to sit on the sarpanch chair). The U-M sarpanchs are much better politically connected as compared to the D-W sarpanch. Interestingly, we find that effective participation as a sarpanch is better in case of U-M sarpanchs than in case of D-W sarpanchs. A further delving into the significant factors explaining this are the discrimination faced by D-W sarpanchs, higher ownership of non-material assets by the U-M sarpanch and then the higher assets ownership of material assets by the U-M sarpanchs (in the given order). Thus, we find that daily discrimination i.e. insults, humiliations that the D-W sarpanchs face play an important role in their less effectiveness as a sarpanch. We have preliminary evidence that shows that the ‘environment' in which a dalit-woman sarpanch is working has an important negative bearing on her performance. This arguably limits her political mobility also and therefore there is a need to improve her working environment.

Part of the International conference on Maharashtra in September 2021 - Manjiri Bhalerao, Tilak Maharashtra Vidyapeeth, Pune Since ancient times, Maharashtra has been a corridor to join the north with the south or the western world with the eastern. This is seen through the roads and ancient trade routes joining different parts of the country. The flourishing international trade of this period (c. 1st century BCE to 3rd century CE) had led many people to enter this territory and some to go out of it. As a result, along with the exchange of goods there also was the exchange of concepts and ideas bringing some of the foreign concepts in this land. This circulation of the concepts and their acceptance in the society can be easily seen on the extant religious monuments in the form of some images of animals or some symbols. These symbols, though originally Greek, were considered as auspicious and were depicted on the facades and other parts of the contemporary monuments. A study of these symbols and the associated donors, has many a times revealed that he was a foreigner. These examples include the depiction of sphinx, the triskelion, griffin and many such depictions of animals and symbols that were not and still are not a part of the native religious mythology. However, their place in the major religious monuments played an important role in the contemporary cultural life. This paper aims at enlisting such depictions, studying their original meaning, searching the antiquity of these motifs in India and their provenance, analysing associated Indian contexts, and finally the reasons for their depictions or popularity among the ancient population.

Part of the International conference on Maharashtra in September 2021 - Noopur Desai, Asia Art Archive in India, New Delhi The circulation of images in various forms and media, from reproductions in periodicals to exhibitions as well as construction of public sculptures, has played a crucial role in (re)shaping the aesthetic imagination as well as the public sphere in Maharashtra in the post-independence period. These have emerged as sites of construction for visual modernity in the region. By looking at the intersection of politics and aesthetics, this paper focuses on a case study of a biographical note on a Dalit sculptor Khanderao Sawant published in Manohar, one of the Marathi periodicals, capturing the manifestations of artistic engagements and political affiliations through understanding the process of building one of the early public sculptures of Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar. The paper aims to trace the emergence of iconic images of Dr. Ambedkar in the form of public sculptures by combining two important modes of circulation of ideas around Dalit identity formation and aesthetics. First, through the construction of a monumental public sculpture and development of visual iconography amid formation of urban aesthetic practices in the region. And second, the dissemination of these ideas through publication and circulation through periodicals, specifically in this instance, a literary periodical. Drawing on the art historical analyses of the regional discourse on modern art through the lens of circulation, the paper analyzes the formation of counterpublics by examining the interconnections between urban aesthetics and art writings.

Part of the International conference on Maharashtra in September 2021 - Rupali Mokashi, Ulhasnagar, Thane Human migration is the movement of people from one place to another with the intention of settling permanently or temporarily at a new location. The migration of humans has been an outcome of different reasons. Religion played a pivotal role in resettling of the learned Brahmanas in early medieval India. Learned Brahmanas formed a sacerdotal class having a repository of Vedic and sacrificial knowledge. As custodians of knowledge, their expertise was required in the society. The class of learned Brahmanas is very clearly defined and extolled in the sacred texts. Patanjali quotes in Mahabhashya, ‘penance, study of the Vedas and birth in a pure race can make a Brahmana but he who is devoid of tapas and Vedic study is a Brahmana only for name sake.' Manu advocates that a Brahmana should assiduously study the Vedas alone, for that is the highest dharma and everything else is inferior dharma. Hence for the subsistence, pratigraha or receiving gifts from worthy persons was a permissible means of their livelihood. Simultaneously, various sacred texts acclaim donations to be given to the learned Brahmana, as that would place the donor in the celestial world. Offering dana has been eulogised as the principal aspect of the religious life during the Kali age. Various smriti texts reiterate that the gift of land was the most meritorious of all. In the light of such textual testimonies, this paper will try to analyse the land grants received by the learned Brahmanas residing in ancient Karad and its manifold impacts, especially migration. A thorough check to the preceding land grants in Maharashtra will enable an appropriate historical perspective. The Rashtrakuta and Shilahara inscriptions spanning over a period of four centuries, divulge various important aspects like the exact purpose, merit accrued thereof and geographical details of these donations. The duties and prerogatives of the donee Brahmanas will be studied at length. The antiquity of Karad will be given a thorough check. The land grants given to the Brahmanas initiated them to accept the add on role of the agriculturist. The subsequent change in the approach in the smriti literature will also be appropriately analysed.

Part of the International conference on Maharashtra in September 2021 - Devkumar Ahire, SPPU, Pune In the colonial state many things were created, constructed and formed. This is why complex social realities appear to have come into shape in the colonial situations. The complex relationship between the 'civil rights' given by the state of the law and the 'religious freedom' inherited from the colonial complex seems to have solidified the Communalism. Due to print capitalism, education system and nationalism, 'traditionalism' took shape in the framework of modernity. It combines religion and politics. All of these changes can be systematically understood through the Cow protection movement. Cow and cow slaughtering has been one of the most shocking aspects of Colonial Indian politics. This question came under British rule as the greatest threat to the country's peace. Because cow slaughtering was a religious right for all Muslims and for Hindus, religious freedom was at stake. The question of cows intensified due to the confusion of the laws of the princely states, customary practices and the confusion of British laws. In the pre-colonial period, the cow appears to have been used as a political instrument of the ruling class. But during the colonial period when the cow protection movement started, the cow became the instrument of mass political mobilization. At that time, the cow became the instrument of mass political mobilization. As a result of this, On the occasion of the cow protection movement, communalism was swiftly promoted and the transmission of communalism went from city to village as well as from elite class to the Subaltern mass. Nagpur in the Marathi region has been called the heart of this movement. It had its own printing press and full-time male- female activist campaigning for the spread of the movement. Through free books, cultural events, leaflets, leaflets, the movement is expanded and penetrated in various fields. The focus of research paper will be on Cow protection movement of Maharashtra so references of Marathi newspapers, biographies, autobiographies, magazines and other sources will be used.

Part of the International conference on Maharashtra in September 2021 - Durga Kale, University of Calgary, Canada The coastal villages in Maharashtra have maintained a porous existence with the cultural influence flowing from the mainland (desh) and from the regions connected by maritime trade of the medieval period (c. 900-1700 CE). The genealogical records of the medieval period dominated the literary and social inroads of establishing connectedness in various spheres of activity. The genealogical records preserved in Muslim community along the Konkan coast highlight a network of circulation within the greater Indian Ocean trade network. This paper focuses on a genealogical manuscript produced during the medieval period that highlights geological and spiritual networks in Maharashtra and beyond. Highlighting the flow of Sufi spiritual traditions, the text anchors the family in Maharashtra as a part of a diasporic nexus of the 13th century CE. My paper proposes an interdisciplinary analysis using oral histories, documented history through literary survey and a cursory study of material culture in Konkan to situate the genealogical document. One of three such documents revealed in my recent field-study in Konkan, I propose metanarratives of the time that may have fostered a specific literary production such as the genealogical text in discussion. Although my paper does not delve into the dating or material analysis of the document itself, the networks presented in this Arabic document purport the idea of a connected Muslim identity for individuals from Egypt, Arabia and Swahili coast, who made their home in medieval Konkan.

Part of the International conference on Maharashtra in September 2021 - Neelambari Bharat Jagtap, Shivaji University, Kolhapur Western Indian ports and towns played a dominant part in promoting trade and commerce since the early centuries of the Christian era. Many ports and towns dotted the coastline and the interior, between which developed a wide net-work of road-routes and inland waterways; these towns greatly expanded their commercial and industrial activity from the first century B.C. In this context of trading world in the Arabian Sea includes the ports and towns along the Mediterranean, Greece and Rome, and the coast of Egypt and Arabia. We do see power contestations and the lure of the commercial wealth of Konkan. The Nizamshaji of Ahmadnagar controlled in North Konkon, with frequently changing control due to their confrontation with Mughals. The South Konkan, was under Bijapur sway until the 1640‟s when Shivaji, the Maratha King1 began to take control of this region. It was in such a complex political situation that the Europeans were forced to man oeuvre. They made their ways in the Indian commodity trade in particular and in intra-Asian trade in general, as can be seen by checking the course of trade in the Konkan coastal ports such as Vasai, Thane, Chaul, Dabhol, Rajapur, Vengurla and Karwar. The Europeans looked at the Konkan ports, basically as economic hinterlands. But these ports also constituted as political hinterlands. Hence, one finds these Europeans looking for ports where they could carry out trade and ports where the native political control could be negotiated for trading concessions. However at the same time the hinterland powers were scared of losing power over these ports, therefore we find constant attempts to put restrictions on the Europeans. The necessity of administration and military setup in these ports in order to impose control. Hence there is an expansion in these units, which meant that the size of the towns expanded with its commercial networks. For example, Shivaji tried to do this in 1659 at Rajapur and later the Angres in the 18th century. The economic focus of the Europeans shifts from one port to another, and then we find a change in the fortunes of 1 the port and it find the alternative to continue the old trade, for example with the decline of Surat and Dabhol trade, we find Rajapur Karwar as upcoming ports. Another aspect of this circulation of commercial interest was also trading world of Arabian sea that necessitated a formation of alternative economic zones and networks and Konkan Coast becomes an accurate example of this. Thus European dominance in the Konkan responded in major shift in patterns of its port markets and patterns of hinterland commercial networks. The other point to create strong holds on Indian subcontinent was the Indian and Indonesian trade being complementary to each other‟s if not mutually exclusive. Many new factories were also opened on the east coast of India to obtain cloth for Indonesia when great famine had affected Surat in 1640‟s. On the other hand, some of the commodities available in the mainland factories such as calicoes, indigo, silk, saltpeter and sugar found an expanding market in England. This could have been secured only with the strong hinterland networks with safe outlets in form of ports. Such kind of trading policy and network of Intra Asian Trade is found in 17th century and to fulfill these needs one find English establishing strong hold on Indian subcontinent despite confusing and not so secure political support or conditions prevailed in India at time. However this certainly gave boost to development of new ports, market towns and commercial networks. At the end of the 17th century, figure of trade from Asia stood at as much as 95 percent. Thus this paper will study the port hinterland Dynamics with case study of Rajapur, Chaul, Dabhol, Thane and Karwar. Will unfold the various aspects of trade, circulation of commodities that brought Transition in urban patterns in Deccan and Konkan towns in 17th & 18th Century.

Part of the International conference on Maharashtra in September 2021 - Nishant Gokhale, University of Cambridge On 26th February 1819 Cheel Naik, a Bhil chief, was executed without trial on the orders of John Briggs, Collector & Political Agent in Khandesh. Briggs was the first holder of this office and was an army officer serving the English East India Company (“Company”). Khandesh was one amongst several vast territories in western India which had been recently conquered from the Marathas and placed under the “Sole Commissioner for the Settlement of Territories Conquered from the Peishwa” (“Commissioner”). The Collector & Political Agent reported directly to the Commissioner and both officers became key interlocutors between the Company and various communities in this region. Despite the Company's longstanding but fraught relationship with law in Britain, this engagement rarely guided actions of its officials in India. My research furthers recent imperial history scholarship which seeks to understand law through practises and writings of officials on the ground. Focusing on judicial records of capital cases, the paper contends that the ambiguous legal environment of the Commissioner's territories was informed by both English law and perceived governmental practises of the Marathas. This paper situates Cheel Naik's execution as one amongst several carried out in the Commissioner's territories by a plurality of Company legal-- and often questionably legal—fora. While the Commissioner envisioned establishing a “government of order” for the territories under his charge, its precise nature was never clearly articulated. Despite the haziness surrounding this notion, studying the Company's structure, penological and disciplinary practises in the Commissioner's territories reveal some of the oddly specific elements of this iteration of order. This paper not only provides a window into the Company's internal dynamics and law's role in its institutional culture, but also provides insights into various communities which engaged--- albeit in diverse ways--- with the Company's legal system in early 19th century Maharashtra.

Part of the International conference on Maharashtra in September 2021 - Prashant, University of Exeter, UK The paper uncovers women's kidnappings and forced marriages and investigates the Peshwa government's approaches and responses as well as the legal categories used for recording such crimes. Although kidnappings were committed for different reasons, abduction for the purpose of forced marriage was most common, for which the documents exclusively examine Brahmins. The state documents, which examine non-Brahmins for kidnapping, generally do not record the intent of the act. Therefore, the paper believes that non-Brahmins possibly also committed such kidnappings for the purpose of forced marriages, and also that some of these kidnappings could be elopements, but the government and/or caste assemblies concealed this and only recorded the kidnapping and not the reason to protect the honour and purity of the communities as well as preventing religious conversions. Although the intent of the kidnapping committed by non-Brahmins was not recorded, the paper argues that such kidnappings committed for forced marriages were more frequent in Brahmin communities. Since under the Peshwas' enforcement of the Shastric traditions only Brahmins were asked to practice dowry, it is possible that this led to a shortage of females in their communities as parents would abandon/kill them to avoid the fee. Such scarcity of females must be the main reason for kidnapping, as obtaining a dowry would have been desirable for any Brahmin, further encouraged by the knowledge that their marriages would not be dismissed once fully celebrated and that they would not be punished severely, all due to the Peshwas' enforcement of Shastric traditions. Hence, the paper also asserts that the Peshwa's pursuit of Shastric traditions encouraged crime and violence against women. The paper reveals such concerns by examining manuscripts and published Marathi documents issued by the Maratha state.

Part of the International conference on Maharashtra in September 2021 - Michihiro Ogawa, University of Tokyo, Japan Circulation of Silver Coins in the Period of the Transition from the Maratha rule to the British rule In the eighteenth century-Maharashtra, a number of gold, silver, copper coins were circulated. Among them, a silver coin (rupee) was the most powerful. Various sorts of rupees, whose value was different from one another, circulated. The kind of the current rupees varied according to area and according to purpose, such as the payment of taxes. Even in one pargana (sub-district), various kinds of rupees circulated. This complex situation partly explains how silver, which gathered into India in the global trade, was used within India. Goldsmiths and money-changers called shroff played the role of exchange of various rupees in this situation. The commission which was entitled as batta was charged on their role. The government officers like kamavisdars at the pargana level also paid batta for their official works. By use of documents on this kind of payment, which are kept in Pune Archives, this paper considers how various sorts of rupees were used for different purposes at the local lever under the Maratha rule. Reports on the preliminary surveys of the new land revenue settlement (Ryotwari Settlement), which started in the late 1820s, tell various rupees continued to circulate under the British rule. Native peons and staffs in the Bombay Presidency demanded not the Bombay rupees, which were newly issued at the Bombay rupees, but current rupees at the local level such as Ankushi rupees for their salary. Even after it was enacted in 1844 that the coinage of India was standardized into the Company Rupee in the whole territory of the British India, some sorts of rupees still circulated and money-changers actively worked in this situation. This paper studies the complex situation of monetary use under the Maratha rule and its gradual change under the British rule focusing on its local circulation at the local level.

Part of the International conference on Maharashtra in September 2021 - Rahul Magar, SPPU, Pune Gifts from Marathas 'Gift' is a powerful word in diplomacy. In history Gifts are a symbol of power and prestige; throughout the time it always has been a tool to honor or insult someone. We can assert that gifts have extraordinary political value. Some estimates can be made about the political, economic and social position of the giver and the recipient. It is interesting to study the reasons why gifts were given, which items are considered worthy, how the nature and value of gifts were changed according to the political position of the giver and the receiver. At the various stages of the Maratha rule, one can see how the importance of this monarchy changed with the exchanges of gifts with other monarchs. The proposed research paperwill study how gifts to special reference to Marathas were circulated in 17th and 18th century South Asia? What techniques were used for this circulation? How diplomatic relations were closely linked to the circulation of gifts?How gifts worked as tool to get cultural and psychological legitimacy? We can see this circulation through various incidents, for example, Jaswant Singh who was in the service of Mughal came to Deccan in C.E. 1667. He gave a richly present, consisting of three horses, three Khasas, one thardar headdress and ten camels to Shivaji. In return, Shivaji gave one horse and some money to three emissaries. In 1667 Sambhaji when he visited prince Muazzam he stayed with Jaswant Singh who also received two horses, one pair of panchua and one than of cloths. Examples like these will help to understand the circulation of gifts and its various dynamics. For this paper, along with secondary sources, some primary documents from Peshwa daftar, Rajasthan state archives and English factory records will be referred परकीय संबंधामध्ये किंवा मुत्सद्दीगिरी मध्ये नजराणे शक्ती आणि प्रतिष्ठेचे प्रतीक आहेत. ऐतिहासिक काळापासून एखाद्याचा सन्मान करणे किंवा अपमान करण्यासाठी नजराण्याचा नेहमीच एक साधन म्हणून वापर झालेला दिसून येतो. इतिहासामध्ये नजराण्याला विलक्षण राजकीय मूल्य आहे. यावरून नजराणा देणारा आणि स्वीकारणार्याच्या राजकीय, आर्थिक आणि सामाजिक स्थितीबद्दल काही अंदाज बांधले जाऊ शकतात. नजराणे का दिले गेले, कोणत्या वस्तू नजराणे म्हणून देण्यायोग्य मानल्या गेल्या, देणार्यांच्या आणि स्वीकारणाऱ्याच्या राजकीय स्थितीनुसार नजराण्याचे स्वरूप आणि मूल्य कसे बदलले याचा अभ्यास करणे रोचक आहे. मराठा राजवटीच्या वेगवेगळ्या टप्प्यावर नजराणे देणारे आणि स्वीकारणारे अश्या दोन्ही राजसत्तांचे महत्त्व कसे बदलले ते पाहता येणे शक्य आहे. प्रस्तावित संशोधनामध्ये १७ व्या आणि १८ व्या शतकात मराठ्यांच्या विशेष संदर्भात दक्षिण आशियामध्ये नजराण्यांची देवाणघेवाण कशी होत असे? या देवाणघेवाणीच्या व्यवहारात कोणते संकेत रूढ होते? नजराणे देणे, घेणे आणि मुत्सद्दीपणा यांचा काय संबंध होता? सांस्कृतिक आणि मानसिक वैधता मिळविण्यासाठी नजराण्यांचा वापर कसा झाला? या सर्व बाबींसंबंधीचा अभ्यास आपण विविध संदर्भसाधनांच्या साहाय्याने करू शकतो. उदाहरणार्थ, मुघलांच्या सेवेत असलेले जसवंत सिंह इ.स. १६६७ मध्ये दख्खनमध्ये आले. त्यांनी शिवाजीला तीन घोडे, तीन खास (वस्त्रविशेष), एक थारदार शिरस्त्राण आणि दहा उंट नजराणा म्हणून दिले. त्या बदल्यात शिवाजींनी तीन दूतांना एक घोडा आणि काही पैसे दिले. १६६७ मध्ये संभाजी जेव्हा राजपुत्र मुअज्जमला भेटले तेव्हा ते जसवंतसिंग यांच्याकडे राहिले. संभाजींना दोन घोडे, पाचुआची एक जोडी (वस्त्रविशेष), आणि काही कपडे देण्यात आले. यासारख्या उदाहरणामुळे नजराण्यांची देवाणघेवाण आणि त्यातील विविध बाबी समजण्यास मदत होईल. या संशोधनासाठी दुय्यम साधनांसह पेशवे दफ्तर, राजस्थान राज्य अभिलेखागार व इंग्लिश फॅक्टरी रेकॉर्ड्स मधील नोंदी यांचा प्राथमिक संदर्भसाधने म्हणून वापर केला जाईल.

Part of the International conference on Maharashtra in September 2021 - Gopa Sabharwal, University of Delhi Following the widespread dispersal of the Marathi speaking communities over an area much wider than that occupied by the present state of Maharshtra (the formally designated home state of the Marathi speakers – this paper focuses on the Marathi speaking people resident in what was earlier Belgaum (now Belgavi), a region that lay at the margins of two linguistic cultures Kannada and Marathi. This sizeable Marathi speaking diaspora have a long history of settlement in this region but were left out of the formal grouping of Marathi speaking areas following the linguistic reorganization of Indian states post independence. They were placed instead in Karnataka the home land of Kannada speakers, on the other side of the border and have ever since, lived in a situation of so near yet so far in many respects specially their cultural and linguistic identity. Their lives in Karnataka have led to a continued tussle between them and the Kannada speakers at various levels social, cultural, political and economic. They have deep ties with the mother state so to say but also have a hybrid culture of their own with intermarriages with the Kannadigas and emotional ties to the land they are settled on. Following an earlier in-depth study of various aspects of ethnic identity formation of this group of settlers in Belguam (in 1993), the current paper intends to look at how the articulation of their linguistic identity and its manipulation by various stakeholders has progressed over the last two decades. It seeks to set out the many dimensions of articulation of ethnic identity and political, economic and educational agendas and the reactions to these by various agencies formal and informal. The recent establishment of the alternate State legislature of Karnataka in Belgaum and the renaming of the town to Belgavi are cases in point.

Part of the International conference on Maharashtra in September 2021 - Anagha Bhat Behere, SPPU, Pune Annabhau Sathe, a noted Dalit activist and writer in Marathi travelled to the (then) Soviet Union in year 1961. Upon returning, he wrote a travelogue titled “Maza Russia cha Pravas” describing the Soviet state, as he saw it. The travelogue was unusual in many ways and enjoyed an iconic status in the genre of travelogues in Marathi. It is also a very important cultural and historical document as it offers glimpses of life in the (then) Soviet Union. I translated the travelogue into Russian in 2019. While translating it into Russian I was struck by certain ideological and cultural exchanges that occurred between Annabhau, the (then) Bombay, especially its labour movement and how it drew ideological sustenance from the Russian and early Soviet literature, how Annabhau had reached the Soviet Union through translations of his works and how Annabhau's travelogue about the Soviet Union in Marathi brought the Soviet Union closer to the Marathi reader. Translating it into Russian, in my opinion becomes another turn in the back and forth movements and exchange of ideas, images and cultural artefacts. The country which was visited by Annabhau Sathe, namely the Soviet Union has disappeared today from the globe. When Annabhau Sathe visited the Soviet Union, the ordinary Marathi reader harboured a lot of misconceptions about the Soviet Union. Annabahu has tried to dispel them through his travelogue. A Russian citizen today may review them critically but s/he will have to concede to them in principal. Today the travelogue appears to be more interesting for the Russian reader, so as to assess, evaluate and measure up the image of Soviet Union in Annabhau's travelogue with the lived through reality of Soviet Union.

Part of the International conference on Maharashtra in September 2021 - Aishwarya Walvekar, JNU, New Delhi Nostalgia is often defined as a ‘yearning for a past' (Boym), which circulates across time through memories materializing in oral cultures, texts and scriptures, theatre and performances. The circuit of its circulation is completed when that nostalgia materializes in the genealogies of its tradition and ‘surrogate' (Roach) and diffuse into different forms. The icon of Shivaji has been circulating across the political, social, cultural landscapes of Maharashtra since the seventeenth century and is appropriated by the different castes and ideologies. The economy of the circulation of the icon of Shivaji is vast and spread across different forms and mediums. Janata Raja, a three hour play by B. M. Purandare circulates the icon of Shivaji through its form of historical pageantry – catering to thousands of audiences at once on a large scale as well as involving the public sphere in the process of its embodiment. Open to all, the cast of the play is comprised of untrained enthusiasts eager to embody through the recorded voice and costumes a nostalgia of the seventeenth century past. In doing so, the idea of sovereignty is challenged due to the ‘dual-time' that the theatrical performance creates. This paper attempts to understand nostalgic past and its materialized presence in theatre circulating through the bodies of the actors and reorganizing the public sphere by its propagation. It argues that one needs to address historicism through the idea of circulation rather than a unidirectional approach by analyzing the case of Janata Raja

Part of the International conference on Maharashtra in September 2021 - Aditya Panse, Independent scholar, London भारतावरच्या इंग्रजांच्या राजकीय अंमलाची सुरुवात पेशवाईच्या पाडावानंतर, म्हणजे इ० स० १८१८ सालापासून झाली. याचं स्वरूप प्रामुख्याने वसाहतिक होतं, म्हणजे प्रवासाचा, स्थलांतराचा प्रवाह प्रामुख्याने ‘ब्रिटनहून भारतात' या स्वरूपाचा होता. याचबरोबर, एक उलटा प्रवाहही होता, तो म्हणजे भारतातून ब्रिटनमध्ये जाणाऱ्यांचा. एकोणिसाव्या शतकाच्या उत्तरार्धाला महाराष्ट्राचा ‘प्रबोधनकाळ' किंवा ‘पुनरुत्थानकाळ' (renaissance) म्हणायला हरकत नाही. या काळात इंग्रजी शाळांतून शिकलेली, ‘वाघिणीचे दूध' प्यालेली, पहिली पिढी बाहेर पडली. मराठी मध्यमवर्गाचा उदयही याच पिढीपासून झाला असे म्हणता येईल. इंग्रजी शालेय शिक्षणामुळे या पिढीने हळुहळू तत्कालीन इंग्रजी समाजाची मूल्ये अंगिकारायला सुरुवात केली. मुद्रित पुस्तकांना ज्ञानस्रोत म्हणून मान्यता मिळणे यालाही याच पिढीपासून सुरुवात झाली. या शिक्षित पिढीने अन्य अर्थांनीही मराठी समाजात बदल घडवून आणायला सुरुवात केली. समाजाच्या जुन्या धारणांत बदल होण्याचा, नव्या धारणांचा उदय होण्याचा, असा तो काळ. भारतातून ब्रिटनमध्ये, अर्थात ‘विलायतेत', जाणाऱ्या प्रवाशांची संख्या या काळापासून वाढली. या प्रवासाची कारणे विविध होती : उच्चशिक्षण, सरकारी कामे, कोर्ट-कज्जे, राजकीय / सामाजिक उपक्रमांत भाग घेणे, याबरोबरच ‘टूरिझम' हा हेतू घेऊनही प्रवास केलेले सापडतात. स्वातंत्र्यपूर्व काळ घेतला, तर विलायतेच्या प्रवाशांमध्ये १८४२ साली प्रवास केलेल्या रंगो बापूजी गुप्त्यांपासून लोकमान्य टिळक, न. चिं. केळकर, आचार्य अत्रे, दादासाहेब फाळके, बाबासाहेब आंबेडकर, बा. सी. मर्ढेकर यांपर्यंत अनेक ठळक नावं सापडतात. या प्रवाशांनी प्रवासादरम्यान किंवा प्रवासानंतर लिहिलेली प्रवासवर्णने तत्कालीन नियतकालिकांतून प्रसिद्ध होत असत. या प्रवासवर्णनांच्या समकालीनत्वामुळे मौखिक इतिहासाचा उत्तम स्रोत म्हणून या प्रवासवर्णनांकडे बघता येईल. यांना वर वर्णिलेला सुशिक्षित वाचकवर्ग मिळाला, त्यामुळे धारणाबदलांच्या या प्रक्रियेत या स्वातंत्र्यपूर्व प्रवासवर्णनांचा मोठा वाटा असणार असे विधान करता येईल. मराठी समाजामध्ये असलेल्या विलायतेसंबंधीच्या ठळक धारणा काय होत्या हे स्वातंत्र्यानंतरच्या प्रसिद्ध प्रवासवर्णनांतून शोधता येईल. वरील विधान, अर्थात ‘मराठी समाजात विलायतेबद्दल असलेल्या धारणांचा आणि स्वातंत्र्यपूर्व प्रवासवर्णनांचा काही परस्परसंबंध आहे का?' हे तपासणे हा या संशोधनलेखाचे प्रमुख उद्दिष्ट आहे. प्रस्तुत संशोधनलेखात मराठी प्रवाशांनी लिहिलेल्या विलायतेच्या प्रवासवर्णनांचा अभ्यास करण्याचा मानस आहे. या प्रवाशांचा परिसंचार ज्या देशकालपरिस्थितीत झाला त्याचे खालील पैलू तपासण्याचा हेतू आहे: १. सामाजिक निरीक्षणे: राजकीय पारतंत्र्यात असलेली व्यक्ती (पक्षी: प्रवासी) आपल्या जेत्याच्या राष्ट्राकडे कोणत्या नजरेने बघते? प्रवाशाच्या राष्ट्रवादाच्या धारणेवर या सामाजिक निरीक्षणांचा कसा परिणाम झाला? त्यांना वर्णद्वेषाचा अनुभव आला का? राष्ट्रवादाच्या भावनेला सामाजिक अनुभवांतून खतपाणी मिळालं का? २. एतद्देशीय इंग्रजांबद्दलच्या धारणा: प्रवाशांची एतद्देशीय इंग्रजांबद्दलची मतं काय होती? एतद्देशीय इंग्रजांची या प्रवाशांप्रती वागणूक कशी होती? एतद्देशीय इंग्रजांकडून मिळालेल्या वागणुकीमुळे या धारणांत काही बदल झालेला दिसतो का? या मतांचा मराठी समाजाच्या धारणांच्या जडणघडणीवर कसा परिणाम झाला? ३. इंग्लंडस्थित भारतीयांबद्दलच्या धारणा: या प्रवाशांची इंग्लंडास्थित भारतीयांबद्दल काय मतं होती? ती मतं पूर्वग्रहाने प्रेरित होती की निरीक्षणांवर आधारित होती? या मतांचा मराठी समाजाच्या धारणांच्या जडणघडणीवर कसा परिणाम झाला? प्रवाशांच्या आणि त्यांच्या प्रवासाच्या काही घटकांचा, वैशिष्ट्यांचा परिणाम वरील गोष्टींवर पडू शकतो. त्यामध्ये येतात प्रवाशाचे (अ) लिंग, (आ) प्रवास करतेवेळीचं वय, (इ) आर्थिक परिस्थिती, (ई) प्रवास करतेवेळीचं सामाजिक स्थान, (उ) व्यवसाय, (ऊ) प्रवासाचे कारण, (ए) प्रवासी ज्यात वावरतो ते सामाजिक वर्तुळ, (ऐ) प्रवाशाची राजकीय मतं, वगैरे. संशोधनाशास्त्राच्या परिभाषेत (अ) … (ऐ) हे स्वचल (independent variables) मानले तर त्याचा परिणाम (१) .. (३) या परचलांवर (dependent variables) पडेल. या परस्परसंबंधाची मांडणी या संशोधनलेखाद्वारे केली जाईल.

Part of the International conference on Maharashtra in September 2021 - Sachin Ketkar, MS University, Vadodara Though bhakti is often understood as criticism of rituals like the pilgrimages, travelling as part of pilgrimage (tirth-yatra) or religious travel (parikrama or bhrman) has played an essential role in circulation of bhakti tropes, ideological beliefs, genres, and texts in the trans-regional vernacular sphere in South Asia. While the nativist understanding of bhakti assumes that it was as assertion and celebration of monolingual desi identities in opposition to the hegemony of Sanskrit ‘margiya' traditions, South Asian scholars like Sheldon Pollock see it as a part of the process of ‘vernacularization', or “the historical process of choosing to create a written literature, along with its complement, a political discourse, in local languages according to models supplied by a superordinate, usually cosmopolitan, literary culture” (1998). Furthermore, postcolonial travel studies very often have limited themselves to the East-West travels, and do not pay significant attention to intra-South Asian travel practices before colonialism. The paper argues that the experiences of trans-regional travelling to other ‘deshas' in South Asia by influential Marathi composers such as Namdev (late 13th and early 14th century), Eknath (late 16th century) and Ramdas Swami (mid-17th century) have played a critical role in not only shaping not only their own poetics and cultural politics, but also contributing to significant cultural change in the society. Apart from composing in the north Indian languages and establishing ‘santa' tradition in the north, Namdev is credited to have introduced ‘nirguna bhakti' to Marathi by some scholars, and Eknath, who often visited Varanasi, wrote the first important Marathi Ramayana, thus inaugurating a strong Rama bhakti tradition to which Ramdas Swami belongs. According to some hagiographies, Ramdas is believed to have been inspired by more militant devotionalism of the sixth Sikh Guru, Guru Hargovind whom he is believed to have met at Srinagar, Kashmir and stayed at the Golden Temple at Amritsar. After his travels, he is believed to have composed works such as ‘Asmani Sultani' and an early modern Hindu patriotic utopia named ‘Anandwan Bhuwan'. These inter-vernacular experiences produced what Durisin (1984) terms as ‘genetic contactual interliterary relations' that would profoundly impact the development of Marathi literary tradition by establishing a multilingual vernacular hagiographical canon of bhakti by the eighteenth century that would include santas like Kabir, Dadu and Narsinh Mehta, among others, thus creating ‘the multilingual local' to use Francesca Orsini's term in a different context, in early modern Marathi (2015). Understanding this inter-vernacular circulation of the santas complicate the conventional understanding of precolonial south Asian vernacular literatures and cultures based on simplistic and vertical binaries of the Sanskrit cosmopolitan margiya and the parochial desi, as well as the notions that the vernacular compositions were derivatively modelled upon the superordinate Sanskrit cultural forms. It also complicates the modern and monolingual nativist reading of the cultural history of the subcontinent. While the conventional conceptualization of world literature has often understood ‘the world literature' in opposition to ‘the national literature', more recent theoretical paradigms of world literature that emphasize circulation (Damrosch) and histories of larger interliterary processes (Durisin) allow us to read ‘bhakti' literature as a world literary phenomenon.

Part of the International conference on Maharashtra in September 2021 -Roy S. Fischel, SOAS, University of London The study of western Maharashtra in the early modern period presents a special challenge to modern-day historians. More than anywhere else in India, even in the poorly documented Deccan, historical writing in Maharashtra has been meagre and at best patchy. Particularly problematic is the first half of the seventeenth century, a period during which no official historiography has been produced. This substantial lacuna is closely linked to the sociopolitical processes that took part in shaping the region, highlighting the connections between historical processes and historiographical practices. This paper aims at exploring the practice of history writing in the western Desh around the crisis of the early seventeenth century. I suggest to examine it in relation to three interlinked sociopolitical issues. First is the continuous predominance of Persian chronicles (tārīkh) as the major genre of self-conscious history writing. Second is the association of writing in Persian, and in the tārīkh genre, with the circulation of migratory elites. Third is the role of royal patronage in both history writing and circulation. With these three elements, I argue that the practice of history writing depended on certain sociopolitical conditions, whose persistence necessitated the association with networks of circulation and production. Once those were disrupted, historical writing itself has ceased, leaving us with a daunting void.

Part of the International conference on Maharashtra in September 2021 -Prachi Deshpande, CSSS, Kolkata This paper attempts a reconstruction of networks of circulation of early modern Marathi literature. It examines the manuscript archives of the Ramdasi sampradaya, which the early-twentieth-century historian Shankar Shrikrishna Deo collected from various Ramdasi mathas in Maharashtra and beyond, and which are currently housed in the Samartha Vagdevata Mandir in Dhule. The Ramdasi sampradaya, which counted primarily Brahman scribes among its followers, emphasized the daily labours of writing as part of its devotional discipline. It generated a large manuscript corpus of Marathi poetry, including Varkaris, Ramdasis, as well as the so-called Panditi poets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. South Asian literary historiography has foregrounded the material contexts of literary practice on the one hand (such as Sheldon Pollock's framework of script mercantilism), and its multilingual, multiscriptual environments (for example Francesca Orsini's catchphrase ‘the multilingual local'). The Ramdasi materials – in pothi and bada formats, in mostly Nagari but also occasionally Modi script, in many languages besides Marathi, and from diverse literary traditions - provide a rich empirical standpoint from which to engage with this historiography and its methodological arguments. Focusing in particular on the circulation of Panditi poetry, and on the “multilingual local” of Thanjavur, I suggest that Ramdasi networks of kirtan performance and devotional copying came to serve as critical nodal points in interactive circuits of text and performance, linking devotees and poets of different stylistic and devotional persuasions, as well as their extended administrative patrons and dependents in Marathi as well as other languages. They were critical to the making of an enduring manuscript archive, and allow us to picture an emergent Marathi literary public that was at once local, trans-regional, and multilingual, sustained through particular skill-sets of oral, literate, and performative skills.

Part of the International conference on Maharashtra in September 2021 - Mario da Penha, Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA In the eighteenth century, hijras in the western Deccan saw themselves primarily as bhikaris or beggars – constituents in a network of initiation-based monastic orders that sought alms and survived on charity. This form of mendicancy – which also counted gosavis and fakirs among its ranks – was a ritualized vocation that emphasized a life of uprooted-ness through the act of wandering. Itinerant beggars like the hijras often benefited from the chivalrous sanctuary and monetary largesse of successive Maratha regimes, receiving from them inams of land and vatans to collect prescribed, mandatory levies as alms. This paper draws upon Marathi archival legal and revenue records in the Modi script to map the lives of peripatetic hijra households in the pre-colonial period. It traces the overlapping physical and metaphysical journeys that monastic mendicants embarked on and the differing contexts around them. Hijras and their collaborators, the mundas, traveled between their vastis or residences and ritual centers such as the samadhi of Dnyaneshwar at Alandi or the temple of Bhavani at Tuljapur. Their lineages also performed cyclical annual movements to collect dues from designated patrimonies under their care, granted or guaranteed by state officials. Further, as people displaced from the mundane life of samsar, but who had not yet extinguished the ‘self' through the radical act of samadhi, hijras circulated as ritual mediators between the two. Like other monastic mendicants, they connected devotees in the countryside to mausolea such as dargahs and samadhis by transferring benedictions from the latter to the former for a government-regulated fee. These ritual transactions allowed hijras the subsistence required to withdraw from the world of samsar and live monastically.

Part of the International conference on Maharashtra in September 2021 - Madhuri Deshmukh, Oakton Community College, Des Plaines, USA Whereas “the oral forms of the pavāḍā, lāvanī and kīrtan have typically been sung by travelling specialists,”as the conference Concept Note puts it, the grind-mill songs were composed and sung by women in their homes. Accordingly, the grind-mill song tradition is likely to evoke images of a static, timeless and unchanging “folk culture.” In fact, however, the songs of the grind mill—as a genre— record a dislocation particular to the experience of women: their movement from the natal to the conjugal home, from one village and family to another. This movement of women through marriage might be one way in which the songs of the grind mill traveled, as they seem to have, from one village and region to another. This paper will argue that the verse tradition inspired by the labor of the grind-mill traveled well beyond the confines of the domestic space and circulated widely across the genres of Maharashtrian culture, most notably, poetry. Women's movement from māher to sāsar— represented in poignant songs about the vanvās of Sītā and the homelessness of Janābāī— encapsulates the experience of exile that seems to undergird the widely expressed desire in bhakti poetry for a māher in Pandharpur. Indeed, the journey to māher is the central metaphor for the annual vārī or pilgrimage to Pandharpur, evidence of the influence of the grind-mill songs in crafting the geography of the bhakti imagination. By drawing on the comparative examples of the African-American tradition and European poetry, this paper will delve into the history of the ovī, the dominant poetic form in Marathi literature until the eighteenth century, and the abhaṅga, the dominant form of bhakti poetry, to uncover the circulatory routes between women's oral compositions—their songs—and the development of written poetry in Maharashtra.