Spring 2012 Lecture Series

India House is located at 825 E. 8th Street (corner of 8th and Woodlawn). Contact us at India@indiana.edu or 812.855.5798

Thursday, January 26 5:30-7:30pm

Maple Room of the Indiana Memorial Union

co-sponsored by The Indiana University Islamic Studies Program

Community, Competition, and Conflict: Claiming Shared Sacred Sites in Secular India
Anna Bigelow, North Carolina State University

Indian secularism is famously fraught with tensions, entanglements, legal and political battles, local networks of exchange, and personal practices. Where should we take the measure of the meaning of secularism? An often-neglected possibility is at the many, shared shrines that populate the urban and rural landscapes of the subcontinent. While Ayodhya, Mathura, and Varanasi are frequently the subjects of study due to the well-known contested spaces in those cities, far more abundant are the shared sites where constituent communities have worked out ways of promoting simultaneous (and often contradictory) practices by a myriad of pilgrims. This talk will look at three shared sites with varying configurations of exchange, interaction, and contestation: the Baba Budan Shah Dargah/Swami Dattatreya Peetha near Chikmaglur, the Hazrat Tawakkul Masthan Dargah in Bangalore, and the Shaykh Sadruddin Sadri Jahan Dargah in Malerkotla. Observing the devotional and spiritual life of these shared places within histories of shifting political and religious authority illuminates how locals and visitors enact and understand the meaning of secularism through their pious practice.

Thursday, February 9 5:30-7:30pm

India House
Military, Healing, and Heart Warfare: Mapping the Counterinsurgency Terrain in Kashmir
Mona Bhan, Depauw University

Recent studies on Kashmiri subjectivity have foregrounded the abusive apparatus of the Indian state that has wreaked havoc on civilian populations and rendered them vulnerable to state tactics of fear and violence (Duschinski 2009; Kaul 2010; Kaul 2011; Mathur 2008, 2011). Such studies are critical for exposing the unfettered impunity the military enjoys in a state that is deeply invested in counterinsurgency warfare against its citizens. But, alongside such violent tactics of social and political repression, the Indian state is also deeply invested in forging what Weber calls "communities of sentiment," national formations that constitute the "political basis on which state authority rests" (Weber 1981 cited in Barkin and Cronin 1994:111). Since state sovereignty is as much about legitimacy as it is about questions of legality or territoriality, this talk pays close attention to the ways military power is made "legitimate" and its credibility restored in a space riven with decades of wars, counterinsurgency, and political unrest. In particular, it pays attention to military's claims to "heal" and "repair" wounded hearts and souls, claims that enable the military to regulate and track not just physical bodies and their movements but also their intimate desires, allegiances, and attachments. This talk focuses on the border district of Kargil where after the India-Pakistan war of 1999, the military launched a goodwill/development operation, popularly referred to as "Operation Sadhbhavna," to win over alienated populations and ensure the viability of a unified Indian nation. My talk demonstrates the various ways discourses of healing, care, and compassion contributed to the steady expansion of a counterinsurgency state in post-war Kargil. The management of "feelings" ––– especially in border regions where questions of national security, territory, and sovereignty are the most pronounced, and where the state is deeply committed to the institutions of violence and warfare ––– is a strategy to monitor "people's subversive interiorities," and, more importantly, to stake rightful claims over their labor and resources as well as their undetermined or amorphous loyalties (Lutz 1997). Instead of expanding citizens' freedoms and offering them substantive opportunities for inclusive citizenship then, the military's "heart warfare" inaugurated new regimes of development, protection, and control, at once binding border populations to the national orders of territoriality and staking claims to their loyalty, allegiance, and patriotism.

Thursday, February 16, 5:30-7:30pm

India House
Chai Why? The Making of the Indian "National Drink"
Philip Lutgendorf, University of Iowa

This presentation offers a report on my research into the promotion and popularization of tea-drinking in 20th century India. It is inspired in part by recent ethno-historical work on everyday culinary commodities, by anthropological interest in the "social life of things," and by my own recognition of the remarkable role that tea, modified to Indian taste, has come to play in diet, social intercourse, and public culture in a relatively short span of time. My research focuses on the mass popularization of indigenized "chai" through changes in marketing, manufacturing, and consumption, and in eating habits, urban space, and social networks, and involves both archival and field research. In my talk, I will emphasize the role played by advertising images in transmitting the "tea habit" to Indians, both prior to and following Independence in 1947.

Thursday, February 23-Friday, February 24

India House
Please join the graduate students of the Dhar India Studies Program and Indiana University as they present current research and original thoughts on South Asian topics at Manthan: A Churning

Thursday, February 23, 5:30-7:30pm

University Club, Mezzanine Level, Indiana Memorial Union
The Shiva & Ram Avtar Tiwari Memorial Lecture: The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India
Siddhartha Deb, The New School

Siddhartha Deb will read from his nonfiction book about an India that is transforming itself, often at the expense of the great majority. The reading will offer portraits of people caught in this transition in India, from farmers in rural Telengana rioting over seed speculation to a flamboyant management guru in Delhi.

Thursday, March 8 5:30-7:30pm

India House
Cinema and Ideology: Film Societies in India
Rochona Majumdar, University of Chicago

Thursday, March 22 5:30-7:30pm

India House
Diasporic Desires: Making Hindus and the Cultivation of Longing
Shana Sippy, Carelton College

This lecture explores the discourse of desire among Hindus living in the United States. Based on over 9 years of fieldwork conducted in the U.S. and U.K., I examine contexts and strategies of desire and argue that the cultivation of desire is a centerpiece of making Hindu identity in the diaspora. I consider not only longing for the homeland, which most diasporic communities have cultivated, but also the ways Hindu parents and pundits are engaged in the development of other types of desires, the "sanctioned" romantic, the gastronomic, the material, and the spiritual. I suggest that many contemporary practices of Hindus in the diaspora—education, consumption, and ritual— actually revolve around the inculcation and fulfillment of desires, for both children and adults. This work investigates the nature of such desires and the discourse and strategies employed by parents and pundits alike as Hindu subjectivities and communities are created through the cultivation of shared desires. * This also draws on work to consider how Hindu leaders and organizations have emulated Jewish communities, quite explicitly, in their attempts to cultivate collective and personal subjectivities.

Thursday, March 29 5:30-7:30

University Club, Mezzanine Level, Indiana Memorial Union
The Hrishikesh & Sailabala Bhattacharya Memorial Lecture: Sacred Games: Reading Gangsters, Writing Cops
Vikram Chandra, The University of California at Berkeley

Vikram Chandra's most recent novel, Sacred Games, has been described as "a landmark in the history of Indian English literature," "a passionate tribute to contemporary India in all its vigor and vulgarity," and "a terrific, brilliant earthmover of a book." This reading and talk will concern the writing of the book, its description of systemic corruption, and its engagement with the genres of crime and detective novels and films. Sacred Games is currently being developed by AMC as a long-form cable television series.

Vikram Chandra is the author of Sacred Games, Love and Longing in Bombay, and Red Earth and Pouring Rain. He divides his time between Bombay and Berkeley, where he teaches creative writing at the University of California.

Thursday, April 12 5:30-7:30pm

India House
Beauty, Sound, and Movement in South Indian Cinema
Anand Pandian, The Johns Hopkins University

Relying on ethnographic fieldwork with a leading Tamil film music composer, and a team entrusted with choreographing and shooting one of his recent songs, this talk will explore beauty, sound, and movement as forces of attraction in contemporary Tamil cinema. Cutting back and forth between the staging of an international film music concert, and the making of a cabaret "item song," I examine the expression of these forces through diverse yet related bodies: composer, choreographer, dancer, loudspeaker, stage, and the world of attractions that they together compose.

As always, the Dhar India Studies Program's Spring 2012 Lecture Series events are free, and open to the public.