Last month, in September 2019, Prof Kancha Ilaiah, during his visit to Berkeley, cited Prof Hansen’s assertion which pitched the “caste question,” i.e., the problem of Brahminism, against the “Kashmir issue,” i.e., theproblem of Indian coloniality in Kashmir, to claim greater urgency for the former. This received loud hums of approval from the room full of people gathered in Stephens Hall. In this paper I argue that such a framing is not only simplistic and ahistorical, but that “unmarked” or “non-intersectional” liberatory impulse — including that from (unmarked) “feminism” — is indelibly inscribed within supremacies and structures of power. I will argue that the Indian Occupation of Kashmir is critically inflected by Brahminism: the “casteist” oppression of Kashmiris inscribed in law, our dehumanization being de jure. Simultaneously, the Brahminical oppression of DalitBahujans, Adivasis, and Pasmanda Muslims is inflected by coloniality: remembered and reinforced through the uncritical celebrations of “Aryan” conquests over the indigenous peoples of South Asia, our dehumanization being de facto. Liberation for Kashmiris and for those oppressed by caste not only need not be turned against each other, but are inextricably intertwined.

Huma Dar’s paternal family was ethnically-cleansed from Srinagar, Kashmir in 1948 for demanding plebiscites under the UN Resolutions. Her maternal family, exiled from Kashmir after accepting Islam during the Dogra regime, fought for Independence from the British. With an interdisciplinary background in South Asian Studies, Dar has lectured in the departments of Gender & Women’s Studies, Ethnic Studies, and South Asian Studies at University of California at Berkeley and in the Department of Critical Studies and Philosophy at California College of the Arts, amongst others. Dar’s work is focused on the intersections and co-formations of race, religion, class, caste, gender, sexuality, and national politics of South Asia and South Asian diasporas, centered on intellectual and political activism for social justice, especially in Indian Occupied Kashmir. Her published work includes “Cinematic Strategies for a Porno-tropic Kashmir and Some Counter-Archives” in the Journal of Contemporary Theory; “Of Niqabs, Monsters, and Decolonial Feminisms;” “Can A Muslim Be An Indian and Not A Traitor or A Terrorist?” in Shared Idioms, Sacred Symbols, and Articulation of Identities in South Asia; and “A Rescue Project Initiated by the Oppressors: Why the Exercise of Caste(ist) Privileges Can Never Annihilate Caste, Or What’s Wrong With the Navayana project on AoC” in Hatred in the Belly: Politics behind Appropriation of Dr. Ambedkar’s Writings, and pieces in several edited volumes focused on South Asia. Dar is a feature writer at Pulse Media, a collaborative political, activist, and academic weblog, and is a published poet. She is a founding member of the UC Berkeley Center for Race & Gender and Townsend Center working group on “Muslim Identities & Cultures,” and organized the feminist conference, Boundaries in Question on the theme of “Women and War,” both at UC Berkeley. Dar is a feature writer at Pulse Media, a collaborative political, activist, and academic weblog.

Wrecks of Ancient Ships and Cargoes in the Pre-Modern Indian Ocean: Bearings on South Asian History: A Talk with Ranabir Chakravarti

Wednesday, November 6, 2019, 4-6pm

Computer Science and Engineering Building (CSEB) room 4262

Dr. Chakravarti is a Professor of Ancient History at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India. He specializes in the economic and social history of early India with a particular interest in the history of maritime trade in the Indian Ocean (prior to c. 1500 CE). Chakravarti has authored and/or edited: A Sourcebook of Indian Civilization (Orient Longman, Hyderabad, 2000), Trade in Early India (OUP, New Delhi, 2005), Trade and Traders in Early Indian Society (Manohar, New Delhi, 2007, second edition), Indo-Judaic Studies in the Twenty First Century, a View from the Margins (Palgrave MacMillan, New York, 2007) and Exploring Early India up to c. AD 1300 (Primus, New Delhi, 2016). Chakravarti is a recipient of the Commonwealth Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University. He was also a Fellow-in-Residence at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study. In 2011, Chakravarti was elected President of the Ancient India section of the Indian History Congress.

Polluting the Ganges: A Book Reading and Discussion of Ganges: The Many Pasts of an Indian River with Sudipta Sen

Monday, November 18, 2019, 4-6pm

Geisel Library, Seuss Room

Ganges: The Many Pasts of an Indian River by Sudipta Sen (Yale University Press, 2019) is an exploration of the idea of a cosmic, universal river at the interstices of religious belief, historical geography, and ecology jeopardized by climate change and environmental pollution. Comment by Dr. Matthew Herbst, Director of the Making of the Modern World Writing Program.

Co-sponsored by: the UC San Diego Library, SAI and the South Asian Studies Minor Program, the Eleanor Roosevelt College Making of the Modern World Writing Program, and supported by funding from the International Institute.

Sudipta Sen is Professor of History at the University of California, Davis. A scholar of India and the British Empire, his work has focused on the early colonial history of British India. He is the author of two books, Empire of Free Trade: The English East India Company and the Making of the Colonial Marketplace (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998) and Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India (Routledge, 2002).

Expendable Bodies and Ethical Crisis: A Talk with Saveetha Meganathan

Wednesday, December 4, 2019

Computer Science and Engineering Building (CSEB) room 4262

This paper presents an ethnography of the Koya tribal community in the context of ‘the practice of bioethics’ in Khammam district of Telangana (South India), with respect to a Post Licensure Observational Study of the HPV immunization programme. The paper includes a discursive attempt at understanding the donor and recipient relationships of aid in the public health sector in India.

Saveetha Meganathan is a Visiting Scholar at the UCSD Institute for Practical Ethics and a research scientist at the Tata Institute for Genetics and Society in Bangalore, India. She has consulted for Give2Asia, a nonprofit helping communities meet philanthropic goals. At the Institute, Saveetha will research the ethics of gene drives as it relates to India.