In & Out of South Asia: Race, Capitalism, and Mobility

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How do ethnic, caste, and racial hierarchies in South Asia interact with those elsewhere as people, ideas, and goods move in and out? How are flows and networks of capital reconfigured within existing and new hierarchies of im/mobility? How might a focus on things/people/ideas that move “in and out” help us conceptualize new ways of imagining and engaging South Asia?

These questions urge us to consider mobility and immobility anew. Global pandemics, surveillance regimes, and border fences engender old and new forms of captivity and incarceration throughout South Asia. At the same time analytical and conceptual frames for studying the region have sought to break out of the gilded cage of methodological nationalism and embrace regional and transregional spatial units, such as the recent turn towards Inter Asia, Africa-Asia, and the Indian Ocean. A rich and productive scholarship has emerged from this transregional turn, providing new vocabularies for understanding polity, economy, and sociality in South Asia and beyond.

This conference brings together a set of scholars and practitioners who are thinking across scale and time to explore the particular tension between mobility and immobility in shaping conceptual and methodological itineraries in and out of South Asia. Participants explore the histories and futures of race, caste, and capitalism in South Asia and beyond.

CRITIQUING THE NATION-STATE (I)

Friday, February 25, 9:00 AM–11:00 AM EST

Discussants: Professor Neelofer Qadir (University of North Carolina, Greensboro) and Professor Nurfadzilah Yahaya (National University of Singapore)

Vipin Krishna, University of California, Los Angeles
Languages of Land and Sea: Urdu Philology's 1930 Response to Colonial Ethnolinguistics

Dr. Vindhya Buthpitiya, University of St. Andrews
Dreaming in Cinestyle: Studio Photography and Trans/National Imaginaries in Northern Sri Lanka

Dr. Uttara Shahani, University of Oxford
Caste, Partition, and the Prevention of Exit

Haider Shahbaz, University of California, Los Angeles
“Ignorant, Gloomy, Black”: Racism and the Colonial Beginnings of Modern Urdu Prose

TRANSREGIONAL PLACEMAKING

Friday, February 25, 2:30 PM–4:30 PM EST

Discussants: Professor Smriti Srinivas (University of California, Davis) and Professor Neha Vora (Lafayette College)

Pallavi Gupta, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Capitalizing on Differences: Caste, Capitalism, and the (Re)Production of Clean Railway Stations

Tariq Rahman, University of California, Irvine
There and Back Again: Impossible Citizens, WhatsApp, and Brokering Knowledge About Pakistan’s Real Estate Market

Carmen Ervin, Stanford University
Contours of Belonging: The Gendered Aesthetics of Afro-Descendant Mobility from One French Indian Ocean World to Another

Nithila Kanagasabai, Tata Institute of Social Sciences
Researching from Afar: The Screen as Site

TRADE, MARKETS, CAPITAL

Saturday, February 26, 8:30 AM–10:30 AM EST

Discussants: Professor Andrea Wright (William & Mary) and Professor Ka-Kin Cheuk (City University of Hong Kong)

Dr. Ping-hsiu Alice Lin, Harvard University
A Rolling Stone Gathers Gloss: The Colored Stone Trade Across South and Southeast Asia

Sana Quadri, Independent Researcher
Traders to Tycoons: The Evolution of the Indian Merchant Class in the Political Economy of the UAE

Shikha Dilawri, SOAS, University of London
Tidal Connections: Merchant Itineraries and the Entanglements of Race, Caste, and Capital

RESISTANCE AND SOLIDARITIES

Saturday, February 26, 11:30 AM–1:30 PM EST

Discussants: Professor Darryl Li (University of Chicago) and Professor Gabriel Dattatreyan (Goldsmiths, University of London)

Dr. Sushmita Pati, National Law School of India University
Reimagining the Right to the City: Flows, Fixity and the Limitations of the Citizenship Discourse

James Evans, Harvard University
Global Maoism, Black Power, and Leftist Internationalism in India's Naxalite Movement

Nico Millman, University of Pennsylvania
Racial Capitalism and Caste in R.B. More’s Memoirs of a Dalit Communist

Anisha Gogoi, Jawaharlal Nehru University
Sovereign Dreams and Capitalist Seductions: Anxieties of Postcolonial State Making in an Indian Frontier

CRITIQUING THE NATION-STATE (II)

Saturday, February 26, 8:30 PM–10:30 PM EST

Discussants: Professor Mandana Limbert (CUNY Queens College) and Professor Anneeth Kaur Hundle (University of California, Irvine)

Kelvin Ng, Yale University
The Labor of Self-Respect: Political Equality and Labor Migration, 1929–1940

Darakhsha Qamar, Jamia Millia Islamia University
Aryan Theory and South Asia: The Role of Race in the Development of Cultural and Ethnic Nationalism in India and Sri Lanka in the 19th Century

Arshad Said Khan, University of Alberta
Of Turkman Gate and Lutyens’ Delhi: Hijra Commons and Mobility in Three Texts

Sonia Qadir, University of New South Wales, Sydney
Thinking (Im)Mobilities on the Margins of Pakistan's Legal Security State

Panel 1: Critiquing the Nation-State (I)

Discussants: Professor Neelofer Qadir and Professor Nurfadzilah Yahaya

1. Languages of Land and Sea: Urdu Philology's 1930 Response to Colonial Ethnolinguistics
Vipin Krishna, University of California, Los Angeles

Abstract: In this paper, I primarily examine the work of Syed Suleiman Nadvi who wrote a text in Urdu philology in the 1930s, in order to respond to colonial ethnolinguistics. Nadvi was, in a large part using language, and vocabulary as an archive of shared ethnos of the Indian and Arabian peninsula, in order to respond to what had by the 1930s become a colonial constriction of ethnolinguistic-economic regions. I trace his text as one, in a set of practices of writing and lexical-formation, that sought to construct dictionaries of itinerant people in the Indian ocean - and further - to disprove autochthony as the basis of nationhood, and instead reinscribe autothallasic practices into ethno-nationalism. Despite the fact that Nadvi's work squarely looks at the Abbasid era, other writers (and travelers) such as Muhammad Kazim Barlas wrote phrasebooks for people traveling from the southern tip of India, and onwards.

2. Dreaming in Cinestyle: Studio Photography and Trans/National Imaginaries in Northern Sri Lanka
Dr. Vindhya Buthpitiya, University of St. Andrews

Abstract: This paper examines the work of photography studios in Northern Sri Lanka. It explores the role of studio photographers as intermediaries of authenticity and possibility, reconciling the desires of their patrons with the demands of the state against a backdrop of conflict-induced dispersal. While the continued necessity and relevance of studios are bound to the production of state-mandated identity photography required for the registration of citizens, studio photography also helps mediate and manifest personal and collective aspirations and imaginings of and for mobility. Decades of armed conflict centred on an ethnonationalist struggle have determined the aesthetic forms and types of photographic practices that emerged from these studios. From portraits embellishing matrimonial brokering to ‘lucky’ visa photographs enabling successful migration, and elaborate wedding albums authenticating marriages that will pass the scrutiny of hostile immigration regimes, postwar studio practices endure. These vex, ultimately, the extant language and frequently binary theorizations pertaining to photography as a tool of surveillance or emancipation. This paper considers how everyday photographies that speak to war and transnational displacement intersect with the demands of state actors and mediate individual efforts to secure new kinds of citizenship that strengthen collective political claims.

3. Caste, Partition, and the Prevention of Exit
Dr. Uttara Shahani, University of Oxford

Abstract: In October 1949, a steamer from Karachi was about to set sail for India when Pakistani police stopped it from leaving and detained approximately two hundred people. Those on board had included several passengers from oppressed castes: sweepers, cobblers, and other labourers. The government of Pakistan detained them on the grounds that they provided essential services. The 1947 partition of India is usually conceived of as fuelling the mass movement of people across borders. But what of those who were forcibly immobilised? Scholars have devoted significant attention to the permit systems the governments of India and Pakistan put in place after partition to stem refugee entry and prevent the return of ‘evacuees.’ However, the prevention of exit became, alongside non-entrée, part of an official strategy of immobility in South Asia, the burden of which was borne largely by oppressed castes. At partition, the labour of non-Muslim oppressed castes came to be seen as a form of national wealth in Pakistan. The new government thus believed that the oppressed castes had to be retained at all costs. On the other side of the border, the paper discusses the Indian government’s indifference to the struggles of the oppressed caste groups trying to migrate to India. Finally, I highlight the ongoing significance of ‘egress and movement control’ regimes in other regions of South Asia such as Kashmir. The paper builds on recent scholarship that sees ‘stuckness’ not only as the inability of those with few resources to migrate but as a feature of the process of migration itself.

4. “Ignorant, Gloomy, Black”: Racism and the Colonial Beginnings of Modern Urdu Prose
Haider Shahbaz, University of California, Los Angeles

Abstract: John Gilchrist - the first professor of Hindustani at Fort William College - gives the following entry for the word, ‘Dark,’ in his A Dictionary, English and Hindostanee: “undhera, tareek, teeru, mŏŏſhkil, mŏŏghluq, pooſheedu, chhipa, jahil, na-dan, ufsŏŏrdu, ſurd-dil, oodas” The last five entries literally translate to: uneducated, unwise, sad, cold-hearted, and unhappy. The association of darkness with derogatory human qualities does not come as a surprise - Gilchrist, in his various philological and lexical writings, repeatedly refers to black people as civilizational inferiors. Furthermore, Gilchrist was interested in comparing ‘black’ people in India with ‘black’ people elsewhere. Hence his orientalist project of studying India and its languages was an inextricably comparative project, linking Indology with histories and narratives of enslavement and anti-blackness in the Atlantic. How did these two discourses of European racialism - orientalism and anti-blackness - intersect at the constitutive moment of the colonial beginnings of modern Urdu and Hindi prose? How did colonial institutions such as Fort William College train the imaginations of colonial administrators as well as colonized peoples to think about race? By focusing on John Gilchrist’s philological writings, I suggest that we need to study the often-overlooked mutual constitution of the discourses of orientalism and anti-blackness at the very foundations of modern South Asian literature. I hope this analysis will lead to a better understanding of the comparative racialist thinking that underpin British orientalism and continues to shape contemporary postcolonial histories and literatures.

Panel 2: Transregional Placemaking

Discussants: Professor Smriti Srinivas and Professor Neha Vora

1. Capitalizing on Differences: Caste, Capitalism, and the (Re)Production of Clean Railway Stations
Pallavi Gupta, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Abstract: Cleanliness facilitates mobility for some by immobilizing others. Thus, the physical and economic mobility of passengers, shopkeepers and railway employees in a station is made possible by the social and economic immobility of cleaning workers. I examine the workings of racial capitalism and caste in the context of urban public infrastructure. Through an inquiry into labor within a key urban public infrastructure, namely the railway station. I highlight how the intersection of labor, gender, and caste create hierarchies among people, across a range of spaces and scales.By centering the experiences of cleaning workers and by focusing on the material conditions of caste, I illustrate how racial capitalism operates in contexts beyond the Atlantic. In doing so, I provide insight into how difference and dispossession become operationalized within urban spaces. I show how capitalism thrives on difference and reproduces urban inequalities in order to accumulate value on a global scale. I extend the application of racial capitalism to the space of the station and examine it in relation to caste, labor, and gender.

2. There and Back Again: Impossible Citizens, WhatsApp, and Brokering Knowledge About Pakistan’s Real Estate Market
Tariq Rahman, University of California, Irvine

Abstract: With an estimated valuation of between US$700 billion–1.4 trillion, real estate is the second largest industry in Pakistan and described by critics and proponents alike as the backbone of the country’s economy. At the same time, global real estate firms are wholly absent in Pakistan due to an entrenched national reputation for political and economic volatility and insecure land tenure. Instead, real estate in Pakistan is what I term a “diasporic market” made up of temporary migrants living and working across the Middle East, Europe, Africa, and North America. Subject to work visa regimes, state surveillance, and racialized discrimination, overseas Pakistanis transfer their wealth to the real estate market in anticipation of an inevitable return home.Based on four years of ethnographic fieldwork in a WhatsApp group for overseas investors, this paper examines the production, circulation, and meaning of knowledge about Pakistan’s real estate market. Knowledge is the condition of possibility for modern capitalism. But in an informal market plagued by endless “scams” and “fraud,” experts do not exist. Following contentious debates over risk, misinformation, and morality, I show how knowledge is brokered between group members through return visits, extended kin relations, and the chatroom’s constant flow of digital media including Google Earth images, drone footage, and leaked copies of maps, case files, and signed government approvals. In a context of profound instability and mistrust, I argue that uneven chains of knowledge transmission and gaps in information, paradoxically, make profit possible. Finally, I show how the lateralization of expertise allows organized agricultural landowners and tech-savvy local activists to spoil potential profits by producing their own knowledge about the market.

3. Contours of Belonging: The Gendered Aesthetics of Afro-Descendant Mobility from One French Indian Ocean World to Another
Carmen Ervin, Stanford University

Abstract: My proposed paper on French coloniality in the Indian Ocean World looks at the structural logics and modes of governance that were institutionalized during France’s departmentalization of La Réunion and Mayotte, and the subsequent effects on racialized labor, religion, and migratory practices between these two French islands of the Mascarene and Comoro archipelagos. My larger ethnographic research interests involve migrant Afro-descendant women’s integration experiences from Mayotte to La Réunion, connecting questions about gendered aesthetics, transoceanic kinship, and diasporic mobility in this contemporary geopolitical landscape. I seek to explore how the gendered politics of integration produce and mediate ideas of modernity and postcolonial subjectivities. Anthropologists have long argued that socially constructed identities present important sites for critical inquiry because these modes of belonging intersect to inform national and global systems of power, which disproportionately impact Afro-descendant people and communities. Although extant studies have focused on the naturalization and reproduction of coloniality throughout the transatlantic region, there is a dearth of anthropological and historical scholarship that recovers and situates the lives of Afro-descendant women and their mobility within the Indian Ocean World, what has also been referred to as the ‘second Caribbean’. As a result, there continues to be a tendency to neglect problematizing the impacts of gendering and racialization processes on economic and social mobility developed within this Europe-in-Africa geography. I seek to fill this gap through my research because such neglect reinforces a disconnection between shared feminist struggles in the spaces where Black and Afro-descendant women’s cultural contributions, narratives, and erasures are being voiced and recorded (or not). As such, the migrant Afro-descendant woman of the French Indian Ocean world presents a critical site of inquiry on race, mobility, and the contours of belonging within a feminist anthropology framework.

4. Researching from Afar: The Screen as Site
Nithila Kanagasabai, Tata Institute of Social Sciences

Abstract: For research scholars across the world, the summer of 2020 posed various challenges not the least among which was continuing to do ‘fieldwork’ despite lockdowns and travel restrictions. Ethnographers, historians, and geographers quickly put together online seminars and roundtables that reflected on the peculiarities of the moment, and possible ways forward for those in institutional locations in the Global North, but whose ‘fields’ were situated elsewhere – most often, in the Global South. As a scholar located in the elsewhere – India, in this case – studying the ways in which knowledges travel between the ‘field’ in the Global South and the ‘metropolitan institution’ in the Global North, the screen became my site.Starting with the premise that ‘space’ is a relational product of social action and its enabling material conditions, this paper turns to the inter-relationality of space and identity, by focusing on digital technology mediating and spatially reorienting uneven urban geographies. The main question that anchors this paper is: how are the relationships between the researcher and field reconfigured via digital technologies.Drawing on in-depth interviews of Indian doctoral students engaging in feminist knowledge production in universities in the United States of America, and unpacking the social media discourse on research from afar, this paper attempts to further the conversations on method and study of South Asia. Dissatisfied with the critical and philosophical uses of the optical metaphor of reflection, which does little in order to disrupt representational claims about objects held at a distance, Barad (2007, 89) advocates diffraction which entails “marking differences from within and as part of an entangled state”. In reading the screen diffractively, this paper unpacks layered stratigraphies of knowledge production through processes of circulation, connectivity, and entanglements.

Panel 3: Trade, Markets, Capital

Discussants: Professor Andrea Wright and Professor Ka-Kin Cheuk

1. A Rolling Stone Gathers Gloss: The Colored Stone Trade Across South and Southeast Asia
Dr. Ping-hsiu Alice Lin, Harvard University

Abstract: For any dealer of gems, the world is the market. Precise numbers are difficult to find, but tens of thousands of loose colored stones, each worth anything from a few hundred to several thousands of dollars, are purportedly traded across South and Southeast Asia. The trade converges in a bustling gem market in the small town of Chanthaburi, along Thailand’s border with Cambodia. Here, dealers of diverse nationalities encounter each other, as they buy and sell gems that then travel all over the world. Over the past three decades, this market has witnessed an increasing number of dealers from Pakistan, a country where resource exploration, extraction, and commodification have combined with conflict to create new forms of livelihood. Drawing upon two years of ethnographic research in multiple gem markets inhabited and visited by these Pakistani dealers, this paper maps out the different sites of this trade, identifying the nodes and networks of an inter-Asian trade. In so doing, the paper explores the reconfigurations of spaces of exchange and mobility in the region, tracing how the formation of certain resource markets and human geographies is tied to the colonial pasts and postcolonial presents of Asia’s resource frontiers.

2. Traders to Tycoons: The Evolution of the Indian Merchant Class in the Political Economy of the UAE
Sana Quadri, Independent Researcher

Abstract: “Merchants travelling abroad for the purpose of business are not considered migrants”, was one reason attributed by the historian Claude Markovitz (2008) for why the movements of Indian merchants to the rest of the world remains an understudied topic. This paper sets out to examine the evolving character of Indian-owned migrant businesses in the UAE since its formation as an independent state in the year 1971. By way of making an intergenerational comparison between the Indian entrepreneurial class that have been operating in the country since long before 1971 to those that arrived during the post-1971 era, this paper will enforce the concepts of merchant networks and of locality, as propounded by Markovits (2000:2008), to study what differentiates the nature of capital accumulation by each generation, and how that has shaped their status within the socio-political hierarchy of both the hosting nation as well as the sending state. This paper will also rely on primary sources such as memoirs, autobiographies, and media interviews of Indian entrepreneurs in the UAE.

3. Tidal Connections: Merchant Itineraries and the Entanglements of Race, Caste, and Capital
Shikha Dilawri, SOAS, University of London

Abstract: Through bringing into view the intersections between colonialism, capitalism, and race or caste, racial capitalism and caste capitalism complicate distinct but related tendencies in social theory. Yet while unsettling orthodox Marxist, postcolonial, and anthropological assumptions, deployments of these concepts can also replicate existing spatial imaginaries. While racial capitalism is primarily understood as an “Atlantic phenomenon” (Ince 2021), conceptualisations of caste capitalism tend to remain subcontinent bound. This paper critiques and attempts to stretch beyond this territorial impasse by turning to the figure of the Indian merchant capitalist. How can this figure act as a vector through which to apprehend race, caste, and capital in the same frame during a period marked by the spread and consolidation of imperialism and global capitalism? Drawing on insights from critical approaches to historical sociology, to address this question I turn to biographies of Gujarati merchants circulating the Indian Ocean and operating between India, East Africa, and Britain in the late 19th and into the 20th century. Through situating the biographies of these 'middlemen' in relation to colonial archival materials and recent interventions regarding merchant capitalism (e.g. Banaji 2021), this paper unsettles existing spatial and temporal ruptures upon which existing theorisations are predicated, offering a lens into the chaotic process of “different relations of power colliding” (Robinson 2007). This involves attentiveness to the level of the formation of social relations, wider developments in the global economy, and the connections between them – evident, for example, in the merchant recruitment of family, caste, and contract-based Indian labour integral to British imperial expansion in East Africa. Ultimately, I argue that such an approach to the merchant can help lend insight into the often-obscured way in which caste capitalism and racial capitalism have worked in service of one another, illuminating the operation of global racial hierarchies.

Panel 4: Resistance and Solidarities

Discussants: Professor Darryl Li and Professor Gabriel Dattatreyan

1. Reimagining the Right to the City: Flows, Fixity and the Limitations of the Citizenship Discourse
Dr. Sushmita Pati, National Law School of India University

Abstract: As India halted grindingly at 8 PM on the 25th of March 2020, after Prime Minister Modi’s declaration of probably one of the harshest lockdown in the world; migrant workers, most of whom are daily wage earners were forced to walk all the way to their homes without food or water. The issue of migrant workers, who are not necessarily “vote banks” for the destination states, and sometimes not for their source states either; probably stared India in its face for the first time in history. Mobility has been a fact in human history (Tumbe, 2018). Circular or seasonal migrants, who move across their homes and the cities, even more so (Breman, 1996). Citizenship on the other hand, needs fixity. The state making project has historically needed people to settle down and have introduced a regime of documentary proofs trying them to places, material goods and identities. In the case of the migrant workers having to walk for hundreds of kilometers may be too stark, but not an aberration. Being away from their “homes”, most migrants find themselves unable to access subsidized ration or other state benefits and most importantly their ability to vote. The question of migration has always been at odds with statemaking (Scott, 1998; Cohn, 1996). Nation states, borders, documentary regimes have worked to map people onto fixed geographical boundaries(Zamindar, 2007; Mezzadra and Neilsen, 2013). However, the fact of migration has constantly undercut and challenged these regimes. The experience of different kinds of migration has transformed the nature of the discourse across Global North and Global South. I argue that while housing rights in the north has to a great extent taken ‘flows’ into account, the question of housing rights in India has been looked at through the lens of ‘fixity’. I argue that primarily because of the experience of immigration and financialisation of property since the 19th Century in the global north has allowed for a more fluid imagination of who lives in these cities and what kinds of rights need to be articulated for them. Rent strikes, eviction observatories and even anti-surveillance campaigns have attempted to create a far more dynamic understanding of housing rights at the cusp of rights of immigrants, the structural injustice of financialisation and race (Roy et. al 2016). In the case of India, given that property is not financialised in the way it is financialised in the global north, and the experience of migration has also mostly been internal, the right to housing has long been framed through the lens of citizenship. I argue that this narrow fixed framing of citizenship as the basis of housing rights has precluded the Indian discourse on housing rights from making radical claims on the right to shelter.

2. Global Maoism, Black Power, and Leftist Internationalism in India's Naxalite Movement
James Evans, Harvard University

Abstract: India’s Naxalite movement emerged at the height of the Cold War as a distinctly South Asian manifestation of Mao Zedong Thought, or Maoism. The malleability of Maoism—an ideology that advocated for violent revolution in the countryside as crucial to winning political victory—suited the movement’s leaders in their aims to consolidate and promote their own political power. The Maoist label often attributed to the group, however, obscures alternate international sources of inspiration, most notably those of the Black Power movement in the United States and the broader international Left in the 1960s and 1970s. Rather than taking Maoism as a singular source, the Naxalite leaders took a pluralistic approach to influences from other movements and ideologies whose broad aims aligned with the Naxalite mission. This presentation argues that by exploring the mechanism of how the Naxalites fused Maoism with other local and global sources of inspiration, Maoism exceeds nation state-centric explanations that consider it as a Chinese ideology. Instead, by examining how Maoist ideological syncretism occurred between and among different leftist organizations, distinct from the Chinese Communist Party’s own interpretation of Maoist dogma, Maoism appears as less of a distinctly Chinese phenomena, and more of a Cold War iteration of earlier expressions of anti-imperial, anti-colonial, and anti-oppression movements. By considering the Naxalite movement from the perspective of the transnational networks that used Maoism as one component in a shared revolutionary vocabulary, new potential interpretations are revealed as to how these networks not only evolved, but also why they have persisted in South Asia far beyond Maoism’s lifecycle in the PRC.

3. Racial Capitalism and Caste in R.B. More’s Memoirs of a Dalit Communist
Nico Millman, University of Pennsylvania

Abstract: This paper examines the recently translated Marathi-language Memoirs of a Dalit Communist: The Many Worlds of R.B. More (edited by Anupama Rao and translated into English by Wandana Sonalkar) in relation to debates about racial capitalism and Indian caste hierarchies. This Dalit memoir, I argue, theorizes caste and practices of Untouchability as a precolonial form of racism that unevenly articulate with emergent class formations in Bombay during the early twentieth century. Through detailing his travels between rural Maharashtra and urban Bombay, as well as his involvement in Ambedkarite anti-caste movements and communist politics, More shows a variety of ways in which British colonial racism, Hindu caste discrimination, and capitalist exploitation and dispossession mutually reinforce one another. This memoir enables critics to reexamine several key debates about race and caste, on the one hand, and about the geographies of racial capitalism, on the other. I pursue this line of inquiry by scrutinizing the legacy of Oliver Cromwell Cox’s 1948 Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics, which argued from a Marxist perspective that racial formations exclusively developed in tandem with the growth of an Atlantic Ocean-centered capitalist world-system. However, Cox excluded Indian caste structures from the category of race and characterized caste as ‘feudal’ or ‘pre-capitalist.’ Isabel Wilkerson challenged Cox’s formulations in her 2020 blockbuster book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, which attempted to rethink the category of race vis-a-vis the category of caste in a comparative perspective. However, review essays of Wilkerson’s Caste have rightly critiqued her book's political liberalism (Charisse Burden-Stelly) and its limited geographic focus on Anglophone North America at the expense of more careful attention to colonial casta formations forged within global histories of the Iberian Empire, which connected the Spanish Americas to Portuguese India (Hazel V. Carby). I claim that R.B. More’s memoir provides a crucial supplement to these debates. Through the form of the autobiography, it theorizes a materialist understanding of caste structures and their overlaps with racialized class formation in India, a perspective missing from these conversations. This conference paper concludes with reference to recent social movements that are beginning to illuminate the global dimensions of caste. Black, Dalit, and Sheedi political solidarities across India, East Africa, and the United States are generating new views about the overlaps between anti-Black racism and anti-Dalit casteism in the light of the George Floyd uprisings; socialists like Álvaro García Linera have noted the resurgence of oligarchic casta racism in the 2019 coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia. By reading More’s Memoirs, the debates surfacing in the wake of Wilkerson’s Caste, and these social movements within a single frame, we can begin to grasp hitherto underexplored global dynamics that turn on the question of caste.

4. Sovereign Dreams and Capitalist Seductions: Anxieties of Postcolonial State Making in an Indian Frontier
Anisha Gogoi, Jawaharlal Nehru University

Abstract: At the eastern territorial ends of the world’s largest democracy, neatly squeezed between South Asia and South East Asia’s once fluid borders lies a frontier space, the North Eastern region. It is a space that the post-colonial Indian state strategically tucks away with an unending saga of military violence and an apathy that dominantly stems out of racial indifference. A cause of embarrassment to India’s democratic fabric, it is from this frontier space that demands for sovereign statehood and independence have been raised even before India woke up from its colonial slumber. Composed of ethnic and tribal groups of Burmese, Mongoloid and South East Asian descent, they are treated as a racial aberration to mainland India’s Hindu and Muslim population groups. Post independence, most groups of the frontier sought the restoration of their earlier pre colonial sovereign realms. And even those who didn’t in a decade or two of being part of the Indian nation realized their subordinate status in the novice nation’s list of priorities. Culturally and linguistically most groups were already excluded from the imagination of an Indian citizen. As rebellions and insurgency fired their way through, the Indian state found the region’s Achilles heel as a resource frontier. Material and monetary seductions are a sure way to dampen the revolutionary spirits of a space seeped in poverty. The post colonial state using covert tactics did just that by acting as a parasitic state to use Obika Gray’s term for extracting resources by creating new regimes of ex militant groups, rebels who are in a state of ceasefire and elites from the core ethnic and tribal groups. This parasitic approach of the post colonial state sees the formation of predatory groups who rely on violent and illegal forms of rule thus maintaining the negotiated peace by making material gains. This has led to the dispossession and appropriation of community land, depletion of forest reserves and everyday instances of the state engaging in extra judicial violence with blatant disregard to human rights in the region. As the capitalist spectre of Chinese Communism looms over this Indian frontier, the post colonial state once again relies on the legacies of colonial state making to ease its anxieties by metamorphosing into a parasitic entity.

Panel 5: Critiquing the Nation-State (II)

Discussants: Professor Mandana Limbert and Professor Anneeth Kaur Hundle

1. The Labor of Self-Respect: Political Equality and Labor Migration, 1929–1940
Kelvin Ng, Yale University

Abstract: In the interwar period, a world of Tamil vernacular print emerged as the foremost vehicle for the articulation and dissemination of various political aspirations. This coincided temporally with the movement of several million Tamil migrants between the 1880s and the 1930s to British Malaya, where they labored as dockworkers and plantation laborers. In the Madras Presidency, the weekly Kuṭi Aracu [People’s Government] and the daily Viṭutalai [Freedom] became closely associated with the social and political program of the Self-Respect Movement under the leadership of E.V. Ramasamy Periyar; in British Malaya, such newspapers as Muṉṉēṟṟam [Progress] and Tamiḻ Muracu [Tamil Drum] were successively established by such reformers as G. Sarangapany to challenge the Brahmin dominance of the Tamil public sphere. This paper locates the conditions of possibility for these claims for political equality within an imperial political-economic space of labor interdependencies, by historicizing the depth and durability of the category of “labor” within the political and ethical claims of the Self-Respect Movement. In insisting on the centrality of labor and capitalism—and specifically, the experiential terrain of Tamil labor migration—to the epistemological and sociohistorical conditions of these political imaginaries, it argues that labor emerged as a social mediation that constituted the grounds for a principle of reciprocal equity in social relation. Through a close-reading of news reports, speeches, and opinion editorials by several historically- and historiographically-marginal actors in Tamil vernacular newspapers across Madras and Malaya, it argues that the production of shared political subjectivities across these two spaces was impelled by a vernacular politics that upheld equality as the central problematic of the political. This multi-layered space of intellectual production, it further argues, brings into view a wider set of relationships: those between state, caste and community; between nation, diaspora and minority; and ultimately, between the religious and the political.

2. Aryan Theory and South Asia: The Role of Race in the Development of Cultural and Ethnic Nationalism in India and Sri Lanka in the 19th Century
Darakhsha Qamar, Jamia Millia Islamia University

Abstract: The Aryan theory having its origins in the works of a group of European orientalist scholars like William Jones, H.T Colebrook, and later expanded on and developed by Max Mueller is the theory asserting the common racial origin of the speakers of ‘Aryan’ languages- called so because they were believed to have been derived from the primitive languages, spoken by The Aryans. The European Orientalists were first intrigued by the similarities between Farsi, Sanskrit and certain European languages. They took this to mean that the people who spoke them must have had common racial origins and imagined into existence an ancient race of people called the Aryans. The theory claimed that the descendants of the Aryans had over time become geographically dispersed, but were united by a glorious past full of outstanding intellectual achievements, superior cultural practices and moral habits; basically representing the absolute zenith of the development of a civilization. It is a theory that has since been discredited several times by several historians who have debunked the idea of linguistic similarities being suggestive of racial affinity. Yet, at the time of its inception, it was hugely influential, especially in the European colonies. The paper will introduce the Aryan theory as part of the Orientalist project of producing knowledge about the Orient or the East- sweepingly general terms used by the European scholars to refer to the countries that were their colonies. The Aryan theory therefore was to aid the scholars in the colonies in rediscovering their past and it proved to be hugely influential to the indigenous intelligentsia. The scope of the paper will limit itself to only looking into the specific cases of India and Sri Lanka. Indian reformers of 19th century India like Raja Ram Mohun Roy, Dayanand Saraswati, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyaya, Govind Ranade were deeply influenced by the Aryan theory and went about developing a new Hindu identity that was befitting the descendants of the great Aryan race. This identity however soon got conflated into a nationalist identity. This was a kind of cultural nationalism and took its cues from the Aryan Race Theory. It was inherently exclusivist in nature as well as gendered and casteist. According to this parochial nationalism- founded on the principle of hindu majoritarianism- muslims and lower castes did not qualify to be Indians at all, since they weren’t descendants of the ancient Aryan race. In line with Aryan values, these cultural nationalists sought to define what real manhood and womanhood looked like. This made way for the creation of a masculine, nationalist identity that glorified conquest, courage, valour and spirituality as opposed to weak, lazy, effeteness. A similar process was underway across the Palk Strait, in a country then known as Ceylon. In the 19th century, in an attempt to counter the imposition of the imperial culture, the majority ethnic community of the Sinhalese started a cultural revival of sorts- a project that drew credence from the Aryan theory as well. Similar to their Indian counterparts, the major proponents of this project, like the educationist Anagarika Dharmapala, sought to create the vision of a golden Sinhala past. This involved the propagation of the myth that the Sinhala were actually descendants of Aryans from North- India- a chosen people who were tasked with the responsibility of protecting Buddhism. This not only proved their uniqueness as a special, chosen group of people, it also distanced them racially from the Dravidian Tamils who served as the ‘other’ in the creation of the hallowed Sinhala-Buddhist ethnic nationalist identity.The central aim of the paper is therefore to explore at length the different ways that the Aryan racial ideology influenced the development of the exclusionary Hindu cultural nationalism in India and the Sinhala-Buddhist ethno-nationalism in Sri Lanka respectively and rendered invisible the lives of the minorities in the story of the creation of the nation. In doing so, it hopes to establish a link between the racist foundations of such parochial forms of nationalism and the political violence, unrest among the religious and ethnic minorities as a result of their social, economic and political marginalization by the state and extreme polarization that characterizes both these countries today.

3. Of Turkman Gate and Lutyen’s Delhi: Hijra Commons and Mobility in Three Texts
Arshad Said Khan, University of Alberta

Abstract: I would like to propose a paper on the mobility of the literary Indian hijra subject against the backdrop of Old and New Delhi. Hijras are a South Asia specific marginalized transfeminine community that has long been defined through stereotypes, and disenfranchised since the British Raj. In contemporary India, hijra identity is being ideologically claimed by Hindu nationalism. Narratives like Arundhati Roy’s novel, ‘The Ministry of Utmost Happiness’ (2017), Mona Ahmed and Dayanita Singh’s life narrative, ‘Myself Mona Ahmed’ (2001), and Khushwant Singh’s novel, ‘Delhi’ (1990) offer diverse perspectives on how the hijra subject speaks back to hegemonic captures and constructs alternative political frameworks. I will examine hijra practices of community building and symbolic investments as subversive forms of national and civic belonging as represented in these works. In the anthropological view, the outcast hijra subject finds refuge in the traditional hijra gharana (household), a hierarchical kinship structure. Fiction and life narratives offer a more radical potential through their constructions of dynamic hijra commons as emergent urban locations for hijras and other marginalized people to fortify against persecutions. These narratives discuss uneven affinities and unexpected forms of solidarity that not only exceed the confines of the gharana but project varied intersections of class, caste, and religion against the ethno-fascist singularity of Hindu Nationalism. I will examine how these stories enact localized cosmopolitanism, and articulate dissent contra ideologically charged violence. I will also analyze how these narratives revisit the failures of the declining statist ideology of Indian secularism, and offer potentialities for integration from the margins.

4. Thinking (Im)Mobilities on the Margins of Pakistan's Legal Security State
Sonia Qadir, University of New South Wales, Sydney

Abstract: This paper unpacks the operation of Pakistan’s contemporary legal security regime by focusing on the surveillance and regulation of mobility faced by two racially and politically marked communities in Pakistan: Pashtuns and the people of Gilgit-Baltistan. It does so by (i) highlighting the use of specific laws to control the movement of both activists and ordinary people rendered suspect, for example Maintenance of Public Order Ordinance 1960, Anti-Terrorism Act 1997, the Rented Premises Act 2009; and, (ii) by paying attention to the postcolonial State’s unease at the cross-border connections of these communities and “other” imaginative geographies that they make claims to, as well as their connections and solidarities within the State’s borders. In doing this, the paper suggests that control of mobility may be understood as one of the key vectors of the postcolonial state’s legal security-scapes.

Jatin Dua
Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Michigan

Jatin Dua is a socio-cultural anthropologist whose research focuses on maritime piracy in the Indian Ocean and projects and processes of governance, law, and economy along the East African coast. His book, Captured at Sea: Piracy and Protection in the Indian Ocean, published with the University of California Press (2019), is a multi-sited ethnographic and archival engagement with maritime piracy and contestations over legitimate and illegitimate commerce in coastal East Africa. Focusing on the ransom economy of Somali piracy, his book places this threat of violence (its management and perpetuation) as central to global mobility to see how a variety of actors from pirates and diya kinship groups in Somalia, to naval ships and Indian dhow captains at sea as well as insurance agents and security consultants in London create and regulate order and disorder within economies of piracy and counter-piracy. His current research projects continue this emphasis on maritime worlds and their entanglements with law, sovereignty, economy, and sociality in the Indian Ocean and beyond.

Anisha Padma
Doctoral Student in Anthropology and History, University of Michigan

Anisha Padma is a doctoral student in Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan. Her research examines the multiple histories and scales of racial formation, specifically the ways in which “Africa” is central to constructions and contestations of racial identity, by engaging with Hyderabadis of Afro-Arab descent and more recent African arrivals to Hyderabad. More broadly, questions on the mobility of people and ideas and the dynamics of the hinterland and the coast animate her work.

Irene Promodh
Doctoral Student in Sociocultural Anthropology, University of Michigan

Irene Promodh is a doctoral student in Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on the vernacular Christianities of the Indian Ocean world, particularly those practiced by dominant-caste Syriac Orthodox Christians and historically subordinated Pentecostal Christians, as they circulate between their places of work in the Arabian Peninsula and their home societies in Kerala, south India today. More broadly, she is interested in transregional mobility, the politics of caste and conversion, moral ambition and conflict, and ritual speech. She has also worked on sound and media, with a focus on south Indian radio networks and the work-leisure worlds of migrants in the Arabian Peninsula.

Swagat Pani
Doctoral Student in Anthropology and History, University of Michigan

Swagat Pani is a doctoral student in Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on regimes of mobility in the Persian Gulf and their intersections with financial technology and expertise. Swagat has a background in policy-making in international relations, and has worked for international organizations including the Middle East and West Asia Division (MEWAD) of the Department of Political Affairs at the UN headquarters in New York.