King’s

India Institute Graduate Conference 2021

Understanding Contemporary South Asia

Belonging, Functioning, Renegotiating

29th & 30th June 2021
#KIIGC21




Contents

PROGRAMME .............................................................................................................................. 4

PAPER ABSTRACTS & PRESENTERS’ BIOs ..................................................................................... 8

Panel 1: Interrogating State Interventions, Citizen Demands, & Welfare ............................... 8

Panel 2: Minorities & the making of the 'other' .................................................................... 11

Panel 3: Forging Ideas & Imagining Identities ........................................................................ 15

Panel 4: Migration, Spaces, & Redefining Identities .............................................................. 19

Panel 5: Exploring the Creation and Legitimisation of Public Narratives ............................... 23

Panel 6: Navigating Intersectional Realities: Power & Representation ................................. 26

Panel 7: Digital Worlds: Limits & Possibilities ........................................................................ 29

SPEAKER & DISCUSSANTS’ BIOs ................................................................................................. 33

 29th June 2021

Dear all,

Welcome to the King’s India Institute Graduate Conference 2021 ‘Understanding Contemporary South
Asia: Belonging, Functioning, Renegotiating’!

We began planning the King’s India Institute Graduate Conference 2021 as we completed nearly a
year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Unlike any event in recent history, the pandemic highlighted the
many transformations currently shaping the social and political fabric of South Asia, be it matters of
geopolitics, identity, the claiming of human rights, electoral patterns, or climate change. New forms of
cooperation, dependencies, and strategic reorientation are emerging in the region, resulting in new
opportunities and challenges.

The imagination of nations, institutions, and legitimacy; norms of governance and the assertion of
citizenship; as well as environmental change, are influential characteristics of contemporary South
Asia. Understanding the reshaping of the region necessitates studying tensions related to questions of
belonging and functioning, and associated renegotiations. Belonging, i.e. who constitutes and
influences the polity; functioning, i.e. the institutional architecture and related processes; and
renegotiation, i.e. attempts to reframe and redefine identities, norms, and values.

With this in mind, we decided to bring together doctoral scholars working on projects related to
understanding contemporary South Asia. The relevance and timeliness of the conference theme was
evident in the enthusiastic response we received to the call for papers. As a result, we have put
together what promises to be an exciting and engaging two days of exploring public welfare
interventions, the creation and negotiation of identities, the legitimisation of public narratives, and
the ever expanding digital worlds, within the region.

In addition to the presentation we also have a keynote address, and a workshop on publishing aimed
at early-stage researchers. You will find all relevant information regarding the proceedings of the
conference, details of the presenters and their papers, as well as links to the Zoom sessions in this
booklet. Please note – indicated timings are in BST/UK time zone.

If you have any questions, concerns, or feedback on the conference, please email us at
[email protected].

Finally, we request you to please use #KIIGC21 while posting about the conference on social media.

Once again, a very warm welcome!

Tobias Scholz, Vanita Leah Falcao, Vignesh Rajahmani

Organising Committee
King’s India Institute Graduate Conference 2021
PROGRAMME
DAY 1: 29th June 2021
Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYoceGgpz0tHtwe4v6Op3YC2dKuEM1rGsNx
*Indicates a co-authored paper. The full list of authors is included with the abstracts in the following section.

09:00 – 09:05 Welcome remarks

Panel 1: Interrogating State Interventions, Citizen Demands, & Welfare
Chair: Vanita Leah Falcao (King’s College London)
Discussant: Dr. Louise Tillin (King’s College London)

Can gender quotas improve public service provision? Evidence from Indian local government
Varun Karekurve-Ramachandra (University of Rochester)

09:05 – 10:30 Inequalities, conditional cash transfers, & confidence in local institutions*
Ganesh Gorti (University of Colorado Boulder)

Silicosis, suffering & legitimacy: From the ‘Worker’ to the ‘Citizen’
Shruti Iyer (University of Oxford)

Renegotiating the lived experiences of menstruation: A case study of adolescents who received
sexual and reproductive health training in West Bengal
Sancharini Mitra (Indian Institute of Technology, Madras)
Panel 2: Minorities & the making of the 'other'
Chair: Vignesh Rajahmani (King’s College London)
Discussant: Prof. Christophe Jaffrelot (King’s College London)

Everydayness of belonging in Assam: Understanding state & the citizen-other
Anindita Chakrabarty (Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai)

Statelessness in ‘indigenous’ borderlands
Noel Mariam George (Indian Institute of Technology, Madras)
10:45 - 12:15
Notions of the nation: Hindutva’s objections to Christianity
Mani Sudhir Selvaraj (King's India Institute, King’s College London)

Rethinking postcolonial India: Reflections on the Jama'at-i-Islami, Muslim belonging, & the limits of
Islamism & pluralism
Pratinav Anil (University of Oxford)

Renegotiating the idea of a ‘minority’ - The case of the All India Pasmanda Muslim Mahaz
Salwa Yahya (Freie Universitaet, Berlin)
12:15 - 12:45 Lunch break
 Panel 3: Forging Ideas & Imagining Identities
Chair: Pradyumna Jairam (King’s College London)
Discussant: Dr. Anastasia Piliavsky (King’s College London)

Negotiating identity & belongingness: Exploring the experiences of Muslim women engaged in
entrepreneurship in Delhi, India
Eisha Choudhary (Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi)

Translating the Communist Manifesto in Marathi: A study of the production of the proletariat in
colonial Bombay
Radhika Saraf (National University of Singapore & King’s India Institute King’s College London)
12:45 - 14:15

Reimagining borders: An analysis of Tahmina Anam’s The Golden Age & Fatima Bhutto’s The Shadow
of the Crescent Moon
Jaya Yadav (Department of English, University of Delhi)

Re-imagining the ‘State’: A discursive study of the role of parents in co-producing the project of a
‘Hindu India’ through their educational decisions
Ritika Arora-Kukreja (London School of Economics and Political Science)

An economic analysis of communal violence in India
Rohit Singh (Jawaharlal Nehru University)

Panel 4: Migration, Spaces, & Redefining Identities

Chair: Radhika Saraf (King’s College London)
Discussant: Dr. Kriti Kapila (King’s College London)

Networks, space & belonging: The Marwaris in Manipur, India
S Seigoulien Haokip (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi)

Ebb & flow life of the 'Bhasha Manush': Flooded & abandoned in the 'Atharo Bhati'
14:30 - 16:00 Amrita DasGupta (School of Oriental and African Studies)

Right to the city & socio-spatial justice: Rethinking forced evictions in the hill settlements of
Guwahati, Assam
Rituraj Pegu (Jawaharlal Nehru University)

From gastropolitics to gastronationalism: Understanding the intersectional dynamics of caste &
consumption in post-partition India
Mohini Mehta (Uppsala University)
 Keynote Address & Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global India European Training Network
Ambassadors’ event

16:15 - 17:45 The Political Churn in South Asia & Its Longer-Term Implications
Speaker: Dr. Rani D. Mullen (William & Mary)
Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_e2OuqQFTT_GeGcTe_Xeh-A

Day 2: 30th June 2021

Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZEufuygpjgiHNeu9UAnbDB1YAeCCFvMGI7l

Panel 5: Exploring the Creation and Legitimisation of Public Narratives

Chair: Tobias Scholz (King’s College London)
Discussant: Dr. Thorsten Wojczewski (King’s College London)

Receptivity to political messages: The role of local events*
Yatish Arya (University of Warwick)

Communication technology, propaganda & the concomitant implications on belonging: The case of
2020-21 farmer protests in India*
09:00 – 10:30 Vignesh Karthik KR (King’s India Institute, King's College London)

Understanding ‘Project Mausam’: India’s cultural diplomacy in the Indian Ocean
Soumyadeep Guha (Shiv Nadar University, Delhi NCR)

Portraying medieval history: The creation of Indians & invaders
Pradyumna Jairam (King's India Institute, King’s College London)

Religion & public sphere: The role of sacred-sites in political mobilization - Kashmir Valley
Zohra Batul (Jamia Millia Islamia)
Panel 6: Navigating Intersectional Realities: Power & Representation
Chair: Mauro Bonavita (King’s College London)
Discussant: Dr. Srilata Sircar (King’s College London)

How women mobilize women into politics: A natural experiment in India
Tanushree Goyal (Oxford University)

10:45 - 12:15 Taaqat or empowerment(s)? A decade of ethnographic analysis of female assertion in one informal
settlement of Patna
Hugo Ribadeau Dumas (EHESS – CNRS, France)

Adivasi women’s rights to land: Traditional patterns & new emancipatory discourses
Chiara Correndo (Università degli Studi di Torino)

Social disadvantage, economic inequality, & life expectancy in nine Indian states*
Aashish Gupta (University of Pennsylvania)
12:15 - 12:45 Lunch break

Panel 7: Digital Worlds: Limits & Possibilities

Chair: Tobias Scholz (King’s College London)
Discussant: Dr. Sunil Mitra Kumar (King’s College London)

Digital labour inequality in the age of Industry 4.0: A Neo-colonial perspective from Bangladesh
Nazam Laila (SOAS University of London)

Facial recognition technology & voter turnout
12:45 - 14:15 Feyaad Allie (Stanford University)

A suitable sexuality: The public-digital secret of dating apps in Mumbai
Kavita Dattani (Queen Mary, University of London)

Jean Baudrillard in Tamil Nadu & electoral politics in the post-truth era: Memes, simulacrum, & the
2021 Assembly Elections
Guhan Priyadharshan P (Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur)

Networking Reception
This session is intended to provide a space that allows you to informally interact with fellow
participants, in a manner that is reminiscent of pre-Covid networking receptions. It is an opportunity to
14:30 - 15:30 expand your network, and explore your professional curiosities. In break-out sessions, you will be able
to exchange ideas for instance about your current research project, discuss challenges of conducting
fieldwork under the conditions of a continuing pandemic, or follow up on previous panel discussions

Workshop: Publishing as an early-career researcher - Process, Challenges, & Successful
Strategies

Facilitators:
15:45 - 17:00 Dr. Louise Tillin (Director, King’s India Institute & Editor, Regional and Federal Studies)
Dr. Manali Kumar (Post-doctoral fellow, University of St. Gallen & Editor-in-Chief 9DASHLINE)

This session is intended to provide guidance and address issues pertaining to publishing academic work
in journals, and articles in semi-academic and popular platforms.

17:00 - 17:10 Closing remarks

PAPER ABSTRACTS & PRESENTERS’ BIOs


Panel 1: Interrogating State Interventions, Citizen Demands, & Welfare


• Can gender quotas improve public service provision? Evidence from Indian local government
Varun Karekurve-Ramachandra & Alexander Lee (University of Rochester)

"What effect do gender quotas have on the quality of public service provision? We examine the
effect of randomly imposed electoral quotas for women in Mumbai’s city council, using a wide
variety of objective and subjective measures of constituency-level public service quality. The
perceived quality of local public goods is higher in constituencies with quota members, and citizen
complaints are processed faster in areas with more quota members. One mechanism for this effect
is differences in the focus of legislator effort. In their legislative participation, quota members
focus on public goods distribution, while non-quota members focus on individual goods, member
perks, and identity issues. We suggest that men’s more extensive engagement with informal forms
of political action, often criminal and clientelistic, has led to men and women cultivating different
styles of political representation."

Bio: Varun Karekurve-Ramachandra is a PhD candidate in political science at the University of
Rochester with a broad interest in empirical political economy. He uses a wide range of
quantitative methods to study the judiciary, women in politics, political institutions, and
bureaucracies.


• Inequalities, conditional cash transfers, & confidence in local institutions
Ganesh Gorti, Nathan J Cook, & Kirster Anderson (University of Colorado Boulder)

How can we neutralize the negative effects of inequalities on confidence in public institutions
overtime? More specifically, what role do welfare policies play in neutralizing these effects? I
hypothesize that conditional cash transfer schemes that benefit both the individual and the
collective, such as public-works oriented employment guarantee schemes, could be the answer. I
argue that such programmes, through the sense of autonomy that they create, will lead to both
individual benefits and a positive appraisal of public institutions. Further, employment guarantee
schemes that focus on public works and bottom-up prioritization of activities will also lead to
public asset building and positively influence collective well-being and perceptions around the
functioning of public institutions. Using quasi-experimental methods (I employ coarsened exact
 matching and a difference-in-difference-in-differences design), large-N panel data, and the case of
India and the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act– the world’s largest
public-works oriented employment guarantee scheme– I find support for these expectations.
MGNREGA has been successful in neutralizing the negative effects of inequalities on confidence in
local level public institutions overtime (the panchayat and police). Moreover, I also find evidence
that the programme has also had positive spillover effects on confidence in state-level politicians
as well.

Bio: Ganesh Gorti is a PhD student in the Department of Political Science at the University of
Colorado at Boulder. His research focuses on decentralization, local environmental governance,
and welfare politics in the Indian context. He has conducted extensive community level field work
in rural Uttarakhand and Sikkim on issues around social vulnerability to climate change. In the past,
he has also worked on assessing states' capacities to implement climate action plans.


• Silicosis, suffering & legitimacy: From the ‘Worker’ to the ‘Citizen’
Shruti Iyer (University of Oxford)

Scholars of informal labour and the welfare state in India have remarked on the growth of informal
worker movements that have made the state, rather than the employer, the target of their
demands. In doing so, informal worker movements have gone beyond traditional labour law
models of employer responsibility in demanding social security as well as recognition of their
labour from the state. However, these accounts of informal labour organising have paid insufficient
attention to the role of the courts in articulating state responsibility for working conditions, and
have not considered the place of occupational health and safety. This paper presents a close
reading of several Public Interest Litigation (PIL) petitions before the Indian Supreme Court from
the 1980s on, analysing how the figure of the worker suffering from silicosis, an occupational lung
disease, has been constructed in judicial discourse. I trace the shifts in the vocabulary of law which
variously constructed informal workers exposed to dust in the workplace first, as a community
facing unfair working conditions; then, as residents suffering air pollution; and finally, as victims of
a human rights violation that the state was bound to compensate. This paper builds on and
contributes to existing critical scholarship on PIL in India, demonstrating how the Supreme Court
has been subject to varying pressures in its decision-making, issuing a confusing range of orders as
a result. I show that these cases represent an important and contested site of claim-making. The
endpoint of these has been to renegotiate compensation by framing informal workers not as
injured labourers, but as suffering citizens. I also suggest that the route these cases have taken
might offer us reasons to be skeptical of the promise of the ‘public interest’ for informal workers in
India and to reassess the potential of labour law.

 Bio: Shruti Iyer is a first year DPhil candidate in the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at the University
of Oxford. She is working on a thesis titled ‘Silicosis, Struggle and the State: Reframing
Contestations between Capital and Labour in Contemporary India’. Her doctoral research explores
the impact of the Rajasthan government’s ‘ex gratia’ compensation system for silicosis on the lives
of sandstone miners and quarriers that contract the disease. She asks how we should understand
the development of government compensation for occupational disease, a marked contrast to
employer liability in traditional labour law statutes, and what the experiences of communities who
live with chronic disease and negotiate with the state are. Her research interests are in labour law,
legal and medical anthropology, and social movements. She graduated in Politics, Philosophy and
Law from King’s College London in 2016, and later worked at the Centre for Equity Studies in New
Delhi.


• Renegotiating the lived experiences of menstruation: A case study of adolescents who received
sexual and reproductive health training in West Bengal
Sancharini Mitra (Indian Institute of Technology, Madras)

In many cultures, the biological process of menstruation is viewed as something that women
should feel shame about, and hence all signs that a woman is menstruating is concealed from
others. In certain religions and cultures, including that in India, menstruation is often viewed as a
‘polluting’ process, and is used to curb women’s mobility in private as well as in certain public
spaces. The government of India, through its adolescent health training programme (the Rashtriya
Kishor Swasthya Karyakram), focuses, among other components, on the training of adolescent girls
from rural India on menstrual health. This training is imparted by means of a government-NGO
partnership. In West Bengal, this training is spearheaded by the NGO – Child in Needs Institute
(CINI). This training involves greater community participation to promote better sexual health of
adolescents, including more open talk about menstruation. The CINI training camps, which the
paper focuses on, enables adolescent girls in selected blocks in different districts of West Bengal,
become more aware of their bodies and the biological process of menstruation, and thus break
away from the ‘shame’ associated with menstruation. It was also seen that these girls, in turn, also
started imparting information about menstrual hygiene and other sexual health concerns to their
mothers. Through focus group and in-depth interviews, the study seeks to explore the extent to
which the health training workshops have been able to initiate a dialogue around menstruation
and menstrual health among the adolescent girls, whether it has transformed how they perceive
their bodies, whether these have enabled these girls to critically engage with their own lived
experiences of menstruation, and renegotiate or resist the cultural norms that shape their
menstrual experience.

 Bio: Sancharini Mitra has completed her graduation and post-graduation in Sociology. She is
currently pursuing PhD at the department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras, India. She
is working on the area of body politics activism, with a focus on the critical discourses on
menstruation in India.


Panel 2: Minorities & the making of the 'other'


• Everydayness of belonging in Assam: Understanding state & the citizen-other
Anindita Chakrabarty (Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai)

The paper locates itself in the North-East Indian state of Assam, imagined to be the place of
residence of migrant populations from erstwhile East Bengal and East Pakistan, as well as present
Bangladesh, and explores the subjective construction of citizenship in everyday life beyond its legal
understanding. It seeks to comprehend the dynamism within statist initiatives, and how these
interact with everyday life, disrupting and destabilising a coherent conceptualisation of citizenship.
The paper draws from ethnographic field work that examines the recently executed exercise of
documenting ‘authentic citizens’ through the National Register of Citizens (NRC). It empirically
derives from thematic analysis of primary data, collected through in–depth interviews and group
discussions, and secondary materials through archival sources. The emerging themes engage with
questions on citizenship, residency, identity, belonging, legality and illegality.
The study unveils how individuals’ ethnic and religious identities through a semiotic intersection of
language, religion, appearance, and nationality determine state’s understanding of citizens, and
migrants, or ‘citizen-outsiders’ (Roy, 2010). Citizenship in this sense is understood beyond its legal
parameters as it comes to be lived in the everyday. The NRC may be understood as a social
engineering project to turn the otherwise illegible populations into legible subjects (Scott, 1998).
The initiative marks a shift from the quasi-conventional practice of the Indian state defining Hindus
as legitimate citizens, a paradoxical identity to Muslims. The paper interrogates this meandering of
statist discourses, whereby these emerge as fissured, fragmented, and discontinuous, and here lies
the theoretical contribution of the study.

Bio: Anindita Chakrabarty is presently a doctoral candidate at Tata Institute of Social Sciences
(TISS), Mumbai. Her doctoral research unravels the contestations around identity and citizenship in
contemporary Assam. Prior to this, she completed her MPhil research from TISS, Mumbai wherein
she carried out ethnographic work to understand the notion of undocumentedness of Bangladeshi
migrants in West Bengal. Her disciplinary training is in Sociology and Anthropology, and her
interest areas comprise citizenship, governance, and migration studies.

• Statelessness in ‘indigenous’ borderlands
Noel Mariam George (IIT Madras)

The Chakma and Hajong refugees were pushed into Indian borders from East Pakistan when the
Kaptai dam submerged their lands in the 1960s. A large faction of these refugees were moved into
North East Frontier Association (now Arunachal Pradesh) and were granted citizenship rights by
the Supreme Court in 2015. This was protested by ‘citizens’ of the borderland state. Taking this
case study, I attempt to understand how political claims of tribal autonomy transform into uncanny
claims of indigeneity. Provisions of positive discrimination in scheduled areas that were instituted
to protect tribal communities and ensure certain legal rights over land, sometimes become a tool
by the ‘natives’ to reinforce anti-settler sentiments, against groups that are also marginalized. In
Arunachal, all but one seat is reserved for Scheduled Tribes in the state legislative assemblies,
producing a concept of permanent minorities. This asymmetry in political representation based on
claims to being ‘tribal’, transubstantiates citizenship into a jus sanguinis concept and reinforces
notions of exclusive homelands for ethnically defined groups. The citizenship crisis in the region
depends on the delicate balancing of the interests of ‘tribal communities’ with the interests of
people who undergo forced migration or displacement, who may potentially find themselves
worse off than claimed ‘indigenous people’. In the context where ethnological self-concern has
become an integral part of contemporary articulations of the politics of difference —indigenous,
tribal, and otherwise, why does it matter for tribal communities to assert indigeneity? How do
constitutional-legal categories of minority identity and autonomy transform into explicit
articulations of indigeneity? How are these questions tied to who is deemed native/settler and in
turn, citizen/illegal immigrant?

Bio: Noel Mariam George is a Ph.D. student at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. My
current work focuses on the spatiality of borders in Northeast India. This follows from my
engagement with partition studies and spatiality in South Asia and the question of how identities
gained territorial connotations in the wake of decolonization.


• Notions of the nation: Hindutva’s objections to Christianity
Mani Sudhir Selvaraj (King's India Institute, King’s College London)

While the literature on Hindu-Muslim contentions in India is substantial, violence against Christians
is scant. This paper seeks to resurrect Galtung's typology of violence (1969 and 1990)- as a way to
analyze anti-Christian violence in the country. This paper considers the structural examples of
violence, particularly the denial of state resources to Dalit Christians. Notably, there is a large
intersection of caste and Christian identity in India. Conservative estimates suggest that up to 70
per cent of Christians (almost 40 million people) in India hail from a Dalit background. This paper
 finds that the denial of state resources to this group because of their faith deprives them of their
constitutionally guaranteed freedom of religion as enshrined in Article 25 of the Constitution;
amounting to structural violence. This paper finds that this structural violence stems from the
Hindu nationalist Ideology known as Hindutva. Hindutva’s objections to Christianity revolve around
conversions which are portrayed in multifaceted ways. Firstly, as a tool of western powers to
meddle with India’s affairs. Secondly, as primarily targeting Dalits and Tribals, considered
vulnerable to the Hindu population. Finally, as being illegal brought about by “force, “Fraud” and
“allurement”, therefore requiring a violent response.

Bio: M. Sudhir Selvaraj is a PhD candidate at the King's India Institute, King's College London,
exploring direct and structural violence against India's religious minorities, particularly Christians. I
also explore these themes in my creative work as a playwright.


• Rethinking postcolonial India: Reflections on the Jama'at-i-Islami, Muslim belonging, & the limits
of Islamism & pluralism
Pratinav Anil (University of Oxford)

This paper plots the postcolonial evolution of India’s foremost Islamist organisation, the Jama’at-i-
Islami, through the pages of its in-house weekly, 'Radiance'. It argues that political circumstances in
postcolonial India compelled the Jama’at to effect a fundamental rethink of its ideology. First, I
survey the thinking of Syed Abul Ala Maududi, the founder of the Jama’at. Then, I explore the
circumstances the organisation found itself in after Partition, and the reassessments its leaders
made of its ideology in the pages of 'Radiance'. Here, I argue that the Jama’at in the early
postcolonial period grew averse to statism, embraced nationalism and secularism, and came to
endorse, if only begrudgingly and very gradually, electoral democracy. As inadvertent, even if
imperfect, liberals holding up a mirror to the state, they shone a light on the illiberalism of the
early postcolonial leadership. I conclude by suggesting that the Jama’at’s mutation highlights the
similarities between India’s purportedly Golden Age of secularism in the fifties and sixties and the
ascendancy of Hindu nationalist majoritarianism from the eighties onward.

Bio: Pratinav Anil, a Clarendon scholar, is completing his doctorate on Muslim politics in
postcolonial India at St John’s College, University of Oxford. Educated at Sciences Po and the LSE,
he has between his degrees briefly worked at the Centre de recherches internationales in Paris and
as a farmhand in the Val-d’Oise. His 'India’s First Dictatorship: The Emergency, 1975-1977' (Hurst),
co-authored with Christophe Jaffrelot, is out now.



• Renegotiating the idea of a ‘minority’ - The case of the All India Pasmanda Muslim Mahaz
Salwa Yahya (Freie Universitaet, Berlin)

For various political/historical reasons, the official definition of a minority in India has chiefly been
on religious grounds. This paper will analyse the attempts of the All India Pasmanda Muslim
Mahaz, (AIPMM) (English: All India Backward Muslim Front) a loose coalition of lower-caste Muslim
groups, to renegotiate this idea of a minority identity in India. The AIPMM makes certain claims of
backwardness viz-a-viz the state as well as within the Muslim community. Founded in 1998, Patna,
Bihar, it raises demands for appropriate state welfare policies for backward Muslim groups,
especially for Dalit Muslims. The AIPMM contends that quite similar to the Hindu community, the
Muslim community is also divided into hierarchically placed caste groups. The AIPMM argues that
the conception of a religiously defined minority, which has characterized the Muslim community
since Independence, has failed to serve the interests of the most marginalized groups within the
community. The preoccupation of the traditional Muslim leadership with minority identity issues
has taken attention away from the issues of material deprivation that the bulk of the community,
the pasmandas (backward castes) face. Further, the AIPMM argues that the idea of a Muslim
minority conceals the internal divisions within the community. Therefore, it pushes for a
renegotiation/reconceptualization of the concept of a religious minority identity in favor of identity
categories which take socio-economic position (class/caste) into consideration. Utilising data
collected through ethnographically informed and archival field work across three cities of India,
this paper will try to chart out AIPMM’s creative attempt to renegotiate a key concept of Indian
politics- the idea of a minority. In doing so, it will also comment on the postcolonial state’s
understanding of social justice and secularism, both of which have had complicated relationship
with the idea of religious minorities.

Bio: Salwa Yahya is a Doctoral Fellow in Political Science at the Berlin Graduate School Muslim
Cultures and Societies, Freie Universitaet, Berlin. Salwa finished her B.A. in Political Science
(honors) from St. Xavier's College, Kolkata after which she did her M.A. in Political Science from the
Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She then went on to earn an
MPhil in Social Sciences from the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC). In her
MPhil thesis she explored the evolution of the Indian Union Muslim League into a political party in
the post-independence Indian context and its attempts to maintain the distinctiveness of the
Muslim identity in the Parliament. Her overarching research interest lies in studying the modes of
political and civic participation that Muslims of India have adopted to exercise their political
agency. This apart, Salwa is also interested in feminist philosophy and political theory.




Panel 3: Forging Ideas & Imagining Identities

• Negotiating identity & belongingness: Exploring the experiences of Muslim women engaged in
entrepreneurship in Delhi, India
Eisha Choudhary (Jamia Millia Islamia)

Over the past few years, there has been an increase in the incidents of hate crimes, reported cases
of lynching and communal violence outbreaks targeting Muslims in India. The anti-Muslim rhetoric
has created a climate of fear among Muslims which has urged them to moderate their choices, of
housing, work, and everyday living in the country. For Muslim women, the intersectionality of
multiple identities further presents unique challenges and creates an overlapping system of
discrimination.
While Muslim women are pushed to the margins of socio-economic life, they are gaining visibility
in the public spaces by venturing into entrepreneurship. In doing so, they are not only challenging
the hegemonic representations and discourses around Muslim women, but also negotiating and
asserting their right to work and belonging to the city which they call their own. Through in-depth
interviews, the paper explores how Muslim women are negotiating their multiple identities,
gender, religious and entrepreneurial amid India’s altering political discourse on secularism,
religion, and citizenship rights of the minorities. As concerns of Islamophobia rise in India, this
paper shall help in bringing forward the experiences of a marginalized group in practicing faith,
embracing identity, and engaging in economic sphere as equal citizens. The paper also aims to
highlight the strategies that Muslim women adopt to work and belong to a south Asian city which
considers them the oppressed ‘other’.

Bio: Eisha Choudhary is a doctoral candidate at Department of Social Work, Jamia Millia Islamia
University, New Delhi. Her research is about Muslim women entrepreneurs in Delhi, where she is
exploring the intersectionality between entrepreneurial, gender and religious identities creating
opportunities and challenges for the minority group in the capital city. Eisha is fascinated by work
on gender, development, and work. Apart from her research, she is also inclined towards
advocating for Human Rights for minorities and vulnerable sections of the society. She has a
particular interest in participatory research tools and organizing workshops on the same. In the
past, she has written media and journal articles on Muslim women particularly. When she is away
from the research field, she is either engaging in conducting workshops on art based therapeutic
process with underprivileged children or is volunteering by designing programs for non-
governmental organizations.



• Translating the Communist Manifesto in Marathi: A study of the production of the proletariat in
colonial Bombay
Radhika Saraf (National University of Singapore and King’s India Institute King’s College London)

During the period of radical politics in colonial Bombay, Indian communists used translation as a
key mode of imagination and political action to negotiate the tension between caste and class in
their struggle to create a unified working-class movement. A central text of this process was the
Kamyunista Jahirnama, the first Marathi translation of the Communist Manifesto in 1930-31 by
Gangadhar Adhikari, one of the accused in the Meerut Conspiracy Case of 1929. In this paper, I
argue that the Jahirnama plays a crucial role in the very creation of the category of the proletariat
– the revolutionary vanguard class – in the context of colonial Bombay, and is marked by the
Bombay Marxists’ struggle to define kamgar (worker) in relation with dalit (‘untouchable’). Given
that the term dalit was not commonly used to denote the depressed classes in the 1930s, the use
of the term dalit and the multiple ways in which it is used in the Jahirnama signifies an attempt to
redefine both kamgar and dalit, even as the Jahirnama presents itself as a moment in which a
reconciliation of the caste and class question seems plausible. However, in mistranslating the
meaning of freedom and revolution, the Bombay Marxists demonstrate a tendency for a labour
fetish, which would adversely impact their address of the caste and minority question and delimit
the revolutionary thrust of the communist movement. If this failure becomes stark in light of
contemporary attacks on citizenship and concomitant identity-based assertion, the Jahirnama is a
first instance of foreclosure of constitutional protection for political minorities despite the tenuous
link between property and citizenship, but also a potent discourse for radical change and bridge
between the caste and class question, rendering its continued relevance as a text that must be
read, re-read and reclaimed.

Bio: Radhika Saraf is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Sociology, National University of
Singapore and India Institute, King's College London under the joint degree programme. She is
working on the translation of Marxism in colonial Bombay in the interwar years. In her thesis, she
argues that even as Bombay Marxists rejected the telos of universal history and were crucial actors
in the constitution of universal Marxism, their understanding of revolution and freedom as a single
all transformative moment in time resulted in a fetish of labour, itself a consequence of Soviet
Orientalism. This rendered an insufficient analysis of and attention to the question of political
minority in the context of colonial Bombay, thus delimiting the revolutionary thrust of the
communist movement. She has previously worked in elementary education policy and as a
journalist in India.

• Reimagining borders: An analysis of Tahmina Anam’s The Golden Age & Fatima Bhutto’s The
Shadow of the Crescent Moon
Jaya Yadav (Department of English, University of Delhi)

South Asia’s political borders have been demarcated, deconstructed and reconstructed over time
through invasions, colonial rule, and more recently through a series of wars fought namely
between India and Pakistan. A violent history emerges from the era of the British Raj, which carved
arguably three new independent nations, namely India, East, and West Pakistan. Focusing on the
evolution of the ‘national’ border of erstwhile East Pakistan which became ‘international’ in 1971,
one finds questions of representation vis-a-vis altering discourses on ‘belonging’ based on
emergent nationalism, especially in contemporary South Asian fiction. In my essay I will be
interrogating the ‘permeable’ borders between Pakistan and Afghanistan, based on the Durand
Line, and the one between Bangladesh and India, which also functioned as an ideological and
physical boundary between East and West Pakistan. Fatima Bhutto’s novel, The Shadow of the
Crescent Moon highlights the issues of the Pashtun community who have been marginalised by the
State and the army. Their struggle against hegemonic modes of nationalism pushes them towards
resistance as they articulate a transnational identity with the ‘Other’ side of the border. Similarly,
in Tahmina Anam’s The Golden Age, the alienation of the Bengali community within the space of
East Pakistan is reflected through the violence by the Pakistani army during 1971. The text
delineates the shifts in the region, which transcend ‘national’ man made borders, and seek
identification elsewhere. The novel shows the reader a first hand account of the war through
various characters who join the Mukhti Bahini, and others who flee to West Bengal on the Indian
side to aid the resistance. Deconstructing the contexts of each is important to (re)locate themes of
conflict, identity, and gender in the region through newer concerns and reflections on the
construction of borders and national identities.

Bio: Jaya Yadav is a PhD scholar of the University of Delhi, working on contemporary South Asian
Literature. Her MPhil Thesis was on Amitav Ghosh's The Calcutta Chromosome and the Ibis Trilogy.
She has done her Bachelor's from Lady Shri Ram College for Women, and Master's as well as MPhil
from the University of Delhi. She possesses a deep interest in the interdisciplinary aspect of
literature and its role in questions of identity, history and politics. Her work also focuses on issues
of class, race and gender, especially in conflict zones. She grew up in Turkmenistan, England and
Nepal, before relocating to India for university and continues to connect with diaspora from these
nations. She is currently a Senior Editor at Strife Blog and Journal, Department of War Studies,
King’s College, London and also teaches at Janki Devi Memorial College in New Delhi.

• Re-imagining the ‘State’: A discursive study of the role of parents in co-producing the project of a
‘Hindu India’ through their educational decisions
Ritika Arora-Kukreja (London School of Economics and Political Science)

This pilot study seeks to investigate the role of citizens in legitimating and reproducing the
prevailing state-idea/discourse of national identities and political exclusion by exploring parent’s
positioning towards the politicisation of education, and locating them as the key agents and
reproducers of the dialogue through an analysis of their educational strategies and responses to
interpellation. More specifically, it demonstrates how political discourse cannot remain limited to
the analysis of political actors and institutions. Rather, with parents being key stakeholders in
education discourse, they have the ‘power’ to shape and reproduce macro-discourses of
discrimination, national-identities and instrumentally, legitimise the ‘state-idea’ - and what or who
the state should represent - through their everyday discourse. Through their collective response as
a community, Muslim parents’ explicit decisions to continue to educate their children in “good
quality” schools irrespective of ‘saffronisation’, their implicit construction of a citizen-centred ‘we-
group’ and the framing of national identity destruction as a concern for “our country”, they partly
de-legitimise the state-idea of a ‘Hindu India’. In contrast, the argumentation strategies adopted
by Hindu parents implicitly differed from that of the former, whereby the national ‘Indian’ identity
was discursively produced/reproduced, transformed, and destructed to construct a mono-religious
‘Hindu India’. The findings of this study indicate implications for the nation’s secular fabric. Are we
entering a period of desecularisation, in which there is a reimagining of what it means to be an
Indian?

Bio: Ritika is an ESRC Scholar and PhD Student in International Development at The London School
of Economics and Political Science, where she explores the nexus of political psychology and
education to explore segregation in India’s classrooms. Ritika graduated with an MPhil in Education
and International Development from the University of Cambridge. During her time at Cambridge,
Ritika conducted an emancipatory primary research project in India which sought to understand
the political forces underpinning the re-imagining of the education system. She also holds a BA in
International Development from King's College London, during which she directed her research
towards analysing grassroots democratic institutions and informal political networks in India's
poorest settlements.

• An economic analysis of communal violence in India
Rohit Singh (Jawaharlal Nehru University)

Hindu and Muslim communal violence is amongst the most prominent and brutal events in post-
independent India, perpetuating since the traumatising event of partition in 1947, eventually
 leading to two different sovereign nuclear states, primarily based on religion. The incidences of
communal violence in independent India have been a blot on the nation's secular fabric and
continue to haunt the policymakers and civil society who long for peace, harmony, and amity. In
the paper, we analyse the economic, demographic and spatial factors which may accentuate
communal riots in chosen Indian states for the period 1980-2018. Our economic variables are the
state gross domestic product, income inequality index and state level of gross domestic product at
1980 prices level. Further, we use the percentage of the Muslim population in states and literacy
rates as demographic variables. The study uses the novel approach of spatial analysis to analyse
the clustering of riots in various Indian states. Our study finds that the low GSDP growth rate of the
states is a determining factor in explaining the more common occurrence of a communal riot in
India and reveal evidence for non-linear relation of the Muslim population with riots. However,
urban inequality and literacy rate fail to register statistical significance in our identification
methods. Our study also finds clustering of incidences of riots in certain regions of chosen Indian
states pointing towards the long-existing inherent causes of violence.

Bio: Rohit is currently a doctoral student at the Jawaharlal Nehru University and was a
Commonwealth Split-site doctoral scholar at the University of Sussex for 2020-2021. He is currently
working on an analysis of political extremism and refugee migration across the globe. In addition,
his interest areas are working on Hindu-Muslim communal violence in India, its economic,
demographic and spatial causes and analysis since 1950.

Panel 4: Migration, Spaces, & Redefining Identities


• Networks, space & belonging: The Marwaris in Manipur, India
S Seigoulien Haokip (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi)

Societies are usually organised based on certain principles and practices. Often, identifying such
underlying principles is key towards understanding different social phenomena and historical
realities. This paper attempts to explore the relations between networks, space and belonging with
specific focus on the Marwaris in Manipur. For example, how do the Marwari mercantile networks
reproduce across different space-time contexts? How do such processes shape the manner in
which notion of belonging is being articulated in a borderland space? Also, in what ways are the
socio-cultural practices of the Marwaris connected to their economic activities? Broadly, through
ethnographic study based on fieldwork conducted at two different sites in Manipur (Imphal and
Churachandpur), this study engages with the connection between Marwari mercantile networks in
abstract space-time, and its empirical manifestations in real space and time. As such, it primarily
focuses on processes of adaptation and place-making through which the Marwaris create their
 home in different geographical locations. In other words, the paper highlights how place-making,
for example, temple construction is related to mercantile networks and vice versa. It also analyses,
for example, the nature of relationships between different socio-cultural practices such as
marriage, kinship ties, recreational activities, rituals, etc. on the one hand, and economic practices
including business activities and commodity of trade on the other hand. These processes, however,
are also connected to broader questions. For example, elucidating how the Marwari mercantile
networks get reproduced across geographies, the paper tries to understand how networks relate
to distinct spatial configurations such as frontiers and borderlands. Or, by studying the complex
relations between identities, territory, borders and belonging, is it possible to explain the unfolding
trajectories of capitalism(s) in South Asia in general, and North East India in particular?

Bio: S Seigoulien Haokip is a Junior Research Fellow (JRF) at Special Centre for the Study of North
East India (SCSNEI), Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. He has recently submitted his
MPhil dissertation entitled, “Merchants and Borderlands: Trade, Culture and Place-making in
Manipur, India” to JNU. His research interests include economy and society, merchants and
borderland studies. S Seigoulien Haokip is currently a provisional PhD candidate at SCSNEI, JNU.

• Ebb & flow life of the 'Bhasha Manush': Flooded & abandoned in the 'Atharo Bhati'
Amrita DasGupta (School of Oriental and African Studies)

The Sundarbans—world’s only mangrove tiger land, straddling between India and Bangladesh, was
in news very recently owing to its devastation by the super cyclone Amphan. The event sparked an
unresolved debate hinged on the fact that the removal of humans from Sundarban should save the
mangroves—Kolkata’s first line of environmental defence. Regarding which, two points had been
highlighted. First, government-led evacuations can lead to violence and murderous situations, like
Marichjhapi (Ghosh 2020). Second, “planned retreat” might save the islands from the escalating
water levels but might not allow them to leave behind the burdens of socio-economic
marginalisation and the migrants might face denial of basic services (Bhattacharya and Mehtta
2020). Nonetheless, the vulnerability of living in Sundarbans is historically evident and continues to
multiply by rendering the islanders as climate exiles. Climate Exiles are those who are forced to
move from their homes owing to severe environmental conditions. The Women of Sundarbans
face two faceted evils: one climatic another societal or religious. The escalation of sea-levels
renders the land water divide soluble. Thereby, forcing the humans and non-humans of the area
into a direct conflict. The paper aims to use ethnographic data, photographs, interviews, and
archival materials in the form of news reports to study the impact of climate and religion in
compelling the female islanders to migrate in search of better living conditions or be trafficked into
sex work. In so doing the paper shall attempt to build an answer towards how these women
 identify themselves: trafficked women, animal-attacked widows, sex workers, or climate exile. It is
imperative to evaluate if certain identities overlap. If yes, how?

Bio: Amrita is a PhD student at the Department of Gender Studies, SOAS University of London.

• Right to the city & socio-spatial justice: Rethinking forced evictions in the hill settlements of
Guwahati, Assam
Rituraj Pegu (Jawaharlal Nehru University)

Over the last decade, the notion of ‘right to the city’ has received increasing attention and debate
in urban research, policy, and public discourse as a facilitator of socio-spatial justice. The alarming
lack of basic services, dire living conditions, spatial inequalities, and the growing concerns about
struggles and contestations over space in the city demonstrates the urgent need to connect urban
space to the question of justice. In the Global South, the growth of informal settlements or slums is
a widespread phenomenon accompanying the growth of urban populations. The lack of an
appropriate regulatory framework for planning and development of urban environments has often
necessitated the eviction of informal settlements. Following the growing number of international
actors promoting the ideas of spatial justice and citizens’ rights found within the influential ‘right
to the city’ paradigm, the Indian urban context is an arena where dynamic urban movements and
anti-eviction grassroot struggles have developed in recent years. The research intends to draw out
the normative implications of socio-spatial justice by exploring the idea of a right to the city, an
idea that has received little academic attention in the context of Guwahati city. Contextualizing my
research in multiple spaces and employing a mixed-methods approach, the study focuses on the
strategies, livelihood practices, and relationships that residents employ in order to claim their
rights amidst temporal and spatial uncertainty. I argue that, in a neoliberal setting where new
voices are taking on the language of socio-spatial justice and rights to express changes in the claims
and ethical demands of the inhabitants of the city, a right to the city encompasses not just a right
in itself but potentially a more fundamental collective demand that includes material, social and
psychological wellbeing given the nature of forced eviction in the hill settlements of Guwahati City.

Bio: Rituraj Pegu is a PhD Candidate at the Centre for the Study of Regional Development,
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. He holds an MPhil in Geography from Jawaharlal
Nehru University. His area of research relates to the study of the complex relationship between
urban landscape and humans. He is specialised in regional development and planning and his
works centres around urban planning and development, peri-urban informality and socio-spatial
justice in the cities of the Global South.

• From gastropolitics to gastronationalism: Understanding the intersectional dynamics of caste &
consumption in post-partition India
Mohini Mehta (Uppsala University)

Food provides a link between social actors and their cultural past. Its presence is cherished, and its
loss is lamented in the narratives and the memories of people (Gabaccia, 1998; DeSaucey 2010:
434). It comes across as a strong medium of assertion of agency for the groups whose history is
rarely discussed in the popular discourse. Culinary practices reflected through recipes and the
process of consumption are an important medium to study the erstwhile colonial, and decolonizing
societies. Recipes function as a crucial tool for the process of nation building, and often they are
‘constructed’ to bring to the table (quite literally) a vision of a post-colonial nation state, keen to
assert its geographical boundaries and ethnic membership. This paper will look into the idea of
gastropolitics (Appadurai, 1981) of the displaced families who came to India after the Partition, to
explore how the cultural and political development around production, preparation and
consumption of food among the communities which resettled in India led to the entrenchment of
identity politics in the country. The legacy of the culinary micro enterprises, and of Article 48 of the
Indian constitution (prohibiting cattle and milch slaughter) has played a significant role in defining
the Hindu right wing politics in contemporary India. Using recipes, archival sources and popular
audio-visual material, this paper intends to look into the quotidian history of these developments,
and their manifestation and impact in the present day India. The entrenched interplay of caste,
gender and class will be critically analyzed to read political sanctions involving food and
consumption. The social impact, cultural transition and political authorization/prohibition of food
consumption will map how the gastropolitics emerging from families and communities post the
Partition of the country has contributed to the gastronationalist (DeSaucey, 2010) sentiments for
(and against) meat consumption in India.

Bio: Mohini Mehta is a doctoral candidate at the department of Sociology, Uppsala University. Her
research interests include culinary anthropology, gender, social memory and oral narratologies.
She has previously worked in the development sector in the fields of gendered non-formal
education and life skill training. She is interested to explore the discursive histories of women and
their negotiation with patriarchal structures through recipes and stories around food. She holds a
Master's degree in Sociology and Social Anthropology from Central European University (CEU),
Hungary, and a Master's in Social Work (specialization in Women Centred Practice) from Tata
Institute of Social Science (TISS), India. She has previously worked as the Writing Tutor at Ashoka
University, India.

Panel 5: Exploring the Creation and Legitimisation of Public Narratives

• Receptivity to political messages: The role of local events

Yatish Arya & Apurav Yash Bhatiya (University of Warwick)

How do local events and political propaganda interact to change voting behavior? We study this
question in India, using soldier deaths and Prime Minister Modi's propaganda associated with them
during the 2019 election campaign. First, we do text analysis of Modi's speeches to show that he
increases nationalistic propaganda in his speeches immediately after a soldier's death in
secessionist conflict in India. We then go on to show that vote share of the Modi's right coalition
increased by 5.6 pp in the home electoral constituencies of the soldiers who died in secessionist
conflict. However, vote share of the right remained unchanged for soldier deaths in conflict due to
Left Wing Extremism, an issue not part of Modi's propaganda. Moreover, we show that in 2014
election, soldier deaths even in secessionist regions don't change vote share of the right. To
understand these findings, we build a model based on Memory, Attention and Choice (Bordalo et
al, 2020). We argue that local soldier's death becomes a memory which affects voting behavior.
However, the memory is recalled only if a politician makes an election issue out of them. The
model gives other predictions which we find to be consistent with the empirical findings.

Bio: I am a PhD candidate in economics at the University of Warwick. I grew up in a small town in
India and completed my Masters from the Delhi School of Economics, before joining the economics
department at Warwick. My research is based on political economy of India. In particular, I try to
incorporate insights from behavioral sciences to understand how people behave in economic and
political settings.

• Communication technology, propaganda & the concomitant implications on belonging: The case
of 2020-21 farmer protests in India
Vignesh Karthik KR (King's India Institute, King’s College London), Vihang Jumle, & Ajay Chandra
Vasagam (Independent Researcher)

Strategized and effective political messaging through prominent media platforms (conventional
and social) have played an integral role in the electoral success of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)
in 2014 and the party’s continued dominance in the public sphere. Although there is some
acknowledgement to BJP’s use of social media, and of late conventional media platforms to
perpetuate its politics, it has not garnered adequate academic scrutiny. BJP’s media strategy, that
pivots around identity and the resultant feeling of belongingness, in fact, based on some evidence,
is also believed to be powered by the same organizational strength and grassroots reach that BJP
often commands on the (offline) field. At this juncture, we posit the farmers’ protests in response
 to three farm legislations passed in mid-2020 by the Union Government of India and how the BJP-
pliant conventional media amplified the narrative of the protests projected in social media. Using
data on mainstream TV debates and Twitter between 17-January-2021 and 17-February-2021, we
show stark overlaps in the conversations on Twitter and conventional TV debates, pointing at a
concerted effort in constructing a certain narrative around these protests, often that suited the
government’s position. We observe that such a concerted effort on TV media platforms coupled
with strong party presence, denies a level-playing field to the protesting groups in disseminating
their grievances. As a result, the sense of belonging is questioned from within and outside, thereby
preventing such aggrieved communities from reaching out to other communities and forge
solidarities effectively. In fine we argue that such practices orphan aggrieved communities
irrespective of the gravity of their plight and enable the making of a considerably moderated public
sphere, which is in turn antithetical to democratic ideals.

Bio: Vignesh Karthik KR is a PhD student in the India Institute, where he started in January 2019. He
has a MA in Modern India from King’s and a BCom from Loyola College, University of Madras,
Chennai, India. Before starting his PhD, he worked as a legislative research consultant for over
three years in New Delhi. He was associated with Youth Forum on Foreign Policy, a youth-led
initiative in the field. He also briefly interned with the National Commission for Scheduled Castes
commissioned under the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, and Goldman Sachs. His
research interests include identities in democracies, the idea of nationalism and its manifestation
in everyday life, animal rights and foreign policy.

• Understanding ‘Project Mausam’: India’s cultural diplomacy in the Indian Ocean
Soumyadeep Guha (Shiv Nadar University, Delhi NCR)

The maritime orientation of India in the recent years is a shift from its previous obsession with land
frontiers in the northwest. As India’s economy boomed after liberalisation in 1991, it turned
towards the sea for protection of lines of communication as much of its trade is seaborne. In
addition to investment in hard power and boosting State-to-State ties, India announced ‘Project
Mausam’ in 2014 in order to invoke cultural ties between the countries in the Indian Ocean Region
(IOR). The project was initiated by the Ministry of Culture which mandated the Archaeological
Survey of India to implement it along with the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts and the
National Museum. In this paper, I interrogate ‘Project Mausam’ to demonstrate India’s efforts at
(re)-creating an Indian Ocean community. The discourse of ‘revival’ is central to this effort as India
looks back at its pre-colonial past and imagines an entanglement that saw the spread of ‘Indic
civilisation’ along the Indian Ocean. The project is an attempt to create a romanticised narrative of
pre-modern globalisation and overlap it with discourses of peace, international harmony and
dialogue. This paper traces the roots of such an imagination back to the Indian anti-colonial
 nationalist leaders and knowledge communities associated with the idea of ‘Greater India ’in the
early twentieth century. Like China, which has mobilised the historical ‘Silk Road’ to advance its
strategic goals, India intends to use ‘Project Mausam’ to legitimise its involvement in the IOR. The
project is a platform for circulation of ideas so that India can strengthen its claim of being a
‘civilisational state’, a recurrent theme in the study of International Relations (IR) popularised since
the end of Cold War.

Bio: Soumyadeep Guha is a Doctoral Candidate at the Department of International Relations and
Governance Studies, Shiv Nadar University. His doctoral research is interested in looking at the
diplomatic life-world of India's first foreign secretary, K.P.S. Menon and his contributions to making
of Indian diplomacy and foreign policy. Through archival work, he aims to make both theoretical
and empirical contribution to the ongoing academic work on retrieving twentieth century India's
diplomatic history, positing diplomats as key actors in the making of world politics. His research
interests, broadly, are historical international relations, histories of the British empire in Asia and
Non Western IR theory.

• Portraying medieval history: The creation of Indians & invaders
Pradyumna Jairam (King’s India Institute, King's College, London)

This paper seeks to analyse how the Bharatiya Janata Party constructs its narrative of Medieval
Indian History in the school history textbooks of Rajasthan to further its ideological goals. Using
discourse analysis in State prescribed history textbooks, the paper, employing Krijn Thijs' concept
of the 'master narrative' that conveys which communities enjoy intellectual hegemony, delves into
how ‘heroes’ and consequently, ‘villains’ are presented in the textbooks, and how the history so
written, focuses more on hagiographical depiction of protagonists, rather than a critical
interrogation of events and processes. The focus would be on the wholly positive representation
accorded to Hindu kings, contrasted with wholly negative, and often stereotypical portrayals of
Muslim emperors. It stresses, that the BJP resorts to historical omission, decontexualisation and
even blatant falsification in order to spread its ideology. The focus here will be on the
homogenization of the Rajput community and the Battle of Haldighati. Finally, it stresses how
other communities, particularly Sikhs, are weened from their own religious identity, and brought
within the 'Hindu' fold, when it comes to defending the 'Indian' nation from external aggression.

Bio: Pradyumna recently submitted a PhD in Contemporary India Research at King's College on
'Hinduising the Idea of India': The BJP and the Writing of School History Textbooks in Rajasthan. He
is a former schoolteacher of History and Political Science from 2012 to 2016 in New Delhi, India. He
has an MPhil in International Relations and M.A. in Modern History from JNU, New Delhi.

• Religion & public sphere: The role of sacred-sites in political mobilization - Kashmir Valley
Zohra Batul (Jamia Millia Islamia)

The engagement of religion in political movement adds further credibility to the struggle and
commands participation that is difficult for the believer to disregard. The political leaders in
Kashmir Valley, from a range of positions, have drawn legitimacy by linking the movement for self-
determination not just to Islam but also to its icons—shrines and mosques. Besides, owing to the
enduring conflict in Kashmir and limited space available for dissent, mosques and shrines have
emerged as the predominant sites of political mobilisation. By employing ethnographic research
and critical discourse analysis, this study attempts to demonstrate that mosques and shrines
perform a notable role in the resistance movement, for they facilitate the articulation of an
oppositional discourse to the statist narrative. The article further states that the use of sacred sites
and other religious symbols has favoured an Islamic framework in the struggle of Kashmir
nevertheless it is not essentially an Islamic movement in terms of its goals and convictions. These
concerns are explored within the broader context of the ways in which different religious
nationalisms intersect with movements for self-determination in the public sphere of the non-
western countries.

Bio: Zohra Batul is a Ph.D. researcher, at the Department of Political Science at Jamia Millia Islamia,
New Delhi. Her main research interests are Religion, Public Sphere, Gender Politics, Conflict and
Political Mobilization with a focus on South Asia (in particular Kashmir). She has published with
Economic and Political Weekly (EPW), Contemporary South Asia (CSA), LSE Engenderings (blog),
Greater Kashmir and other local and national newspapers.

Panel 6: Navigating Intersectional Realities: Power & Representation

• How women mobilize women into politics: A natural experiment in India
Tanushree Goyal (Oxford University)

Female representation is expected to increase women’s political participation through
demonstration effects. Yet, in low-income patriarchal settings, demonstration effects cannot lower
family constraints on women’s mobility, and low baseline awareness limits the scope of agency.
This paper presents a novel argument that accounts for these political economy constraints. I
argue that female representation has mobilization effects. Female politicians simultaneously lower
family and party-organization constraints on women to recruit female citizens as grassroots party-
activists. Consequently, female-led mobilization puts female party-activists at the helm of ground
campaigns, shrinking the gender gap in partisan contact; receiving partisan contact mobilizes
women’s political participation. I use mixed-methods approach to provide evidence. I combine
 quantitative evidence from the natural experiment of randomized gender quotas in Delhi and
detailed qualitative evidence from representative citizen and elite surveys, which together
supports this argument. Female representation has spillovers through female-led party building
which equalizes recruitment and mobilization - two key functions through which parties
perpetuate gender inequality.

Bio: Tanushree is a PhD candidate in Politics at the University of Oxford. Her research interests lie
at the intersection of comparative politics, gender, and development with a regional focus in South
Asia. She uses mixed methods research, combining detailed fieldwork methods with natural,
survey and quasi- experiments to examine important questions in the field of representation and
accountability. In particular, her research sheds light on deeply consequential yet overlooked
aspects of gender and caste-gaps in political opportunity and examines “how” descriptive
representation alters access to political opportunity and development for marginalized groups. She
is also interested in how cultural norms (such as superstitious beliefs) and persistence of inequality
in the economy or status shapes gender inequality.


• Taaqat or empowerment(s)? A decade of ethnographic analysis of female assertion in one
informal settlement of Patna
Hugo Ribadeau Dumas [EHESS - CNRS (France)]

This article questions the relevance of the concept of “empowerment” in the context of women
residing in informal settlements in Patna, India. The term, socialized by non-governmental
organisations, happens to be misleading, if not condescending. It silences pre-existing forms of
power, which women self-describe as “taaqat” in Hindi. Drawing on original ethnographic work
spanning a period of nine years, the article deconstructs the stellar rise – and the fall – of one
female slumdweller, who managed to build a solid house for her family and ended up as a
candidate in local elections during that timeframe. The article empirically demonstrates that power
and powerlessness can take different shades: it may be collective or individual, public or private,
material or symbolic, temporary or permanent. While most of these forms of power are likely to
consolidate each other, disempowerment at one level may also cohabit with strong agency at
another. The concept of “empowerment” precisely fails to capture this multidimensionality. After
suggesting to generalise the use of the plural form – “empowerments” – to address this flaw, the
article takes a theoretical step further. Building on the work of Amartya Sen, it introduces the
concept of “capabilitisation” as a more suitable substitute to describe the mechanisms as per
which female slum-dwellers’ succeed (of fail) to achieve their taaqat.

Bio: Hugo Ribadeau Dumas is a PhD scholar affiliated to the Centre of Indian and South Asian
Studies, Paris (CEIAS-CNRS). He is currently based at the Centre des Sciences Humaines (CSH), in
 New Delhi. His research work forces on urbanisation and gender in India. He has worked in the past
for PRIA, the Aga Khan Foundation, the Agence Française de Développement (AFD), Altai
Consulting and KPMG, across India, Bangladesh and Afghanistan.


• Adivasi women’s rights to land: Traditional patterns & new emancipatory discourses
Chiara Correndo (Università degli Studi di Torino)

The paper analyses women’s proprietary patterns among some Adivasi communities in Jharkhand
(India) in order to underline how Adivasi women navigate between customary and statutory law
and forums in order to advance their claim over lands. Indigenous rights to land and customary
land tenure are controversial fields of debate in India, as they have been progressively watered
down and eroded by means of significant legal reforms and massive expropriation of land for
public purposes. This situation has contributed to an exacerbation of the relationship between
Adivasi communities (along with their customary leaders) and state institutions. Nonetheless,
from the fieldwork that I conducted in 2017 it emerged there is a need to analyse the situation of
women as regards property rights and land tenure separately as they entail a significant departure
from the official Adivasi rhetoric about land. Starting from a gendered analysis of women’s
conditions which borrows modules and category from indigenous intersectional feminism, it could
be argued that not only women are more severely affected from displacement policies, but their
customary rights to land are far more insecure than men’s. In fact, they are subject to diverse
forms of oppression which make it impossible to lump Adivasi women’s claims and activism with
the broader category of Adivasi struggles for land. The purpose of this research is therefore to
underline that women often resort to state institutions and state norms in order to advance their
claims, therefore activating processes of interplay and hybridization between customary and state
legal sphere.

Bio: Chiara Correndo is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Adjunct Professor at the University of
Turin, Department of Law, where she teaches Hindu Law and Law and Society in Asia. She is a
former Research Scholar at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, Centre for the Study of Law and
Governance (New Delhi) and Van Calker Fellow at the Institut Suisse de Droit Comparé (Lausanne).
During her PhD, she was also Visiting Research Student at the Queen Mary University of London,
Department of Law. Her main research examines the interplay between legal orders in the Indian
space: she has worked extensively on Hindu personal law and gender issues, as well as the
Panchayati Raj system and its impact on local power structures. She has published widely in peer-
reviewed journals (to mention some, Diritto Pubblico Comparato ed Europeo, Daimon and
Südasien Chronik- South Asia Chronicle).


• Social disadvantage, economic inequality, & life expectancy in nine Indian states
Sangita Vyas (University of Texas at Austin), Payal Hathi (University of California, Berkeley), & Aashish
Gupta (University of Pennsylvania)

An extensive literature studies the contributions of discrimination and social exclusion to health
disparities. This study investigates life expectancy differences along lines of caste, religion,
indigenous identity, and class in India, home to some of the largest populations of marginalized
social groups. Using large, high-quality surveys that measured mortality, social group, and
economic status, we estimate and decompose life expectancy differences between higher-caste
Hindus and three of India's most disadvantaged social groups: Adivasis, Dalits, and Muslims. For
Adivasis and Dalits, we are the first to document large within-state mortality disadvantages across
the life course that are not fully explained by differences in economic status. We also document
large gaps by wealth alone. These life expectancy gaps are comparable to the Black-White gap in
the US in absolute magnitude. These findings extend the literature on fundamental causes of
global health disparities. Methodologically, we contribute to the estimation of mortality rates and
demographic decomposition using survey data from low- and middle-income contexts.

Bio: Ashish is a demographer with interests in health, environment, and social inequality. He is also
a PhD Candidate in Demography and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.

Panel 7: Digital Worlds: Limits & Possibilities

• Digital labour inequality in the age of Industry 4.0: A Neo-colonial perspective from Bangladesh
Nazam Laila (SOAS University of London)

Industrial Revolution Four, often known as Industry 4.0, is accelerating the growth of the age of
information and technology at a great speed. The driving forces behind this revolution are big data,
complex devices and faster internet connectivity. In an economically globalised world, this
connectivity has created a seemingly borderless digital labour market which connects the Global
North with the Global South now more than ever. Existing literature shows that, the dominant
narrative on gig economy is pre-dominantly coming from the global tech firms and it often neglects
the digital inequalities that are faced by the local digital labourers. This inequality is neo-colonial in
nature to a great extent as coloniality of power emerges through information and algorithmic
control. Therefore, to ensure the best uses of gig economy and digital labour in a glocal context,
better economic development and ICT strategies need to be developed that would examine how
these transnational jobs truly affect the livelihoods of the digital labourers due to their race,
gender and class. By using the fairness model of digital work provided by the Fairwork Foundation
 and the Oxford Internet Institute and a theoretical lens of postcolonial political economy, this
paper analyses the cases of platform economy in Bangladesh. Thus, this paper aims to determine
the position of Bangladesh in the global discourse regarding digital economy during industry 4.0.

Bio: I am currently pursuing my PhD at SOAS University of London as a Commonwealth Doctoral
Scholar on the socio-political aspects of technology. I am also affiliated with BRAC University,
Bangladesh, where I am serving as a senior lecturer in the School of General Education. I am
teaching the course World Civilisations and Cultures there. Previously, I worked as a senior fellow
and instructor at the Asian University for Women in Bangladesh. I had my last MSc in Gender
Development, Globalisation from the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK. Before
that, I finished my MA and BA in multidisciplinary English literature, history and biotechnology
from BRAC University. I am interested in interdisciplinary research.

• Facial recognition technology & voter turnout
Feyaad Allie (Stanford University)

A perennial challenge for the state is making its citizens legible. Traditionally states gathered
information on their citizens through methods like cadastral maps and permanent last names. Over
the past several decades, with major advancements in technology, state efforts to collect
information on citizens and their activities have taken on a new form. One of these new
technologies is facial recognition technology (FRT) which states use to assist in policing citizens,
monitoring public goods, and even running elections. This paper asks how FRT in polling stations
affects voter turnout. Existing research on technology in elections offer ambiguous predictions for
the direction and magnitude of the effect. I leverage a state-run randomized pilot of FRT in local
elections in Telangana, India to show that polling stations with FRT have lower turnout compared
to those without. I explore three distinct mechanisms through which facial recognition technology
can decrease voter turnout. I provide suggestive evidence that voter concerns about the
government’s ability to identify them with technology explains the effect. The negative effect on
voter turnout is stronger for polling stations with more Muslims, a marginalized group especially
concerned about surveillance after FRT use at Citizenship Amendment Act and National Registry of
Citizens protests. The results indicate that technology at the polls may have negative consequences
for the cornerstone of democracy: voting.

Bio: Feyaad Allie is Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at Stanford University. He is also a 2017
National Science Foundation graduate research fellow and Stanford Enhancing Diversity in
Graduate Education doctoral fellow. Feyaad’s dissertation project studies Muslim political behavior
and representation in India. He also works on projects related to political violence, migration, and
the intersection of technology and politics. At Stanford, Feyaad is affiliated with the Immigration
 Policy Lab and the Abbasi Program for Islamic Studies. Prior to graduate school, he worked on an
international development project in Nairobi, Kenya. Feyaad received his B.A. in Government from
Dartmouth College where he was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow.

• A suitable sexuality: The public-digital secret of dating apps in Mumbai
Kavita Dattani (Queen Mary, University of London)

Since the launch of Tinder in India in 2013 digital dating apps have been on the rise, quickly
becoming some of the highest grossing apps in the country and seeing a particularly large take-up
by young people between the ages of 18-30. This paper, based on ethnographic research and
interviews, explores the ways in which digital dating apps have come to acquire an important
space of sexual exploration for many young, middle-class women and gender minorities in
Mumbai. While there has been a significant regulation of sexuality in India and Mumbai by families,
societies and the state, dating apps have been able to emerge amongst this. Dating apps and their
facilitated intimate practices could be read as a threat to the nationalistic ideal of heteronormative
Hindu family life, yet they remain to function and grow as an important tool of sexual exploration
for the young women and gender minorities that I spoke with. Using and relying on a digital
assemblage of mechanisms and affordances, these young people actively keep their digital dating
lives out of the gaze of the individuals and institutions that have long regulated and surveilled their
sexual-urban lives. Building on Taussig’s idea of the ‘public secret’, I argue that this has resulted in
the emergence of a uniquely public-digital secret amongst this group, known and kept by the
digital-native users of the apps. With active strategies of digitally-facilitated secret-keeping, they
renegotiate spaces of sexual exploration. This secret is upheld by mass media campaigns of dating
app companies, which depict digital dating apps as sexually kosher and endogamous tools, through
aesthetic and narrative representations of what I call a ‘suitable sexuality’ – a representation that
negotiates a longstanding tension in Indian advertising, the balance between modernity and
Indianness.

Bio: Kavita is a PhD candidate in Human Geography at Queen Mary, University of London. Her
research interests lie at the intersection of gender, sexuality and digital technologies in the South
Asian context. She is interested in understanding how digital technologies facilitate relations of
power in increasingly deceptive ways, and the potentials of these very technologies for new kinds
of progressive politics. Kavita’s PhD project looks at how the proliferation of digital dating apps in
Mumbai is shaping the city in new ways for young, middle-class women and gender minorities. She
also works on the gig economy in Indian cities, and on the links between biometric and financial
technologies in India, notably the Aadhaar scheme.


• Jean Baudrillard in Tamil Nadu & electoral politics in the post-truth era: Memes, simulacrum, &
the 2021 Assembly Elections
Guhan Priyadharshan P (Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur)

James Morris established an affinity between Jean Baudrillard's conception of simulacrum and the
post-truth creation of fake news to imply that fake news wasn't a product of modern technological
advancements such as social media, but was a continuum with forms of media of the twentieth
century. I propose to situate memes— political memes especially in the context of 2021 Tamil
Nadu state assembly elections in India— as simulacrum to enquire its relation to the post-truth
establishment; this will imply the application of the conception of simulacrum in the contemporary
context to understand political implications of truth in the social media of Tamil Nadu. I seek to
answer questions concerning the role played by memes in disseminating truth or false information
in post-truth political discourse and the theorisation of memes as simulacrum. The methodology is
to read memes in the context of simulacrum to establish connections with the discourse of post-
truth which will also disclose the role played by memes in the establishment of political ideas
among the masses. As I will limit the paper to the memes circulated during 2019 Tamil Nadu
assembly elections, questions concerning the role of truth in the contemporary political scene will
also be situated.

Bio: Guhan Priyadharshan P is a research fellow at Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur who is
currently working in a broad interdisciplinary area that concerns the intersection of tissues of
continental philosophy and critical theory. He has contributed to an Indian short story anthology
titled Shards of Ink in 2017, and has contributed a research paper titled “Decolonisation and
Homonationalism: Subversion of Colonial Law and Ethnic Nationalism in Selvadurai’s Funny Boy” in
the book titled Gender, Sexuality and Literature in 2020.















SPEAKER & DISCUSSANTS’ BIOs


• Prof. Rani D. Mullen is an Associate Professor of Government at William & Mary. She is also a
Senior Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi, where she directs a research
program on Indian development cooperation. She was a Senior Fulbright Fellow at India’s only
Afghanistan Studies Centre at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi in 2013–14, and a Visiting Scholar at
the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University as well as a Liechtenstein
Scholar on Afghanistan in 2008-09. Prior to teaching at the College of William & Mary, Professor
Mullen worked as the Asia Project Manager at the Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination at
Princeton University, was a consultant at the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and the
United States Agency for International Development. She also worked for a German think tank, as
well as a member of the German Parliament.
Professor Mullen’s research and teaching focus is on South Asian Politics, particularly state-building
and democracy in and foreign policies of India and Afghanistan. Her book, Decentralization, Local
Governance, and Social Wellbeing in India, was published in 2011 by Routledge. She has published
articles in Asian Survey and Foreign Affairs and book chapters in several Oxford University Press
and Routledge publications on state-building in Afghanistan, India’s democratic institutions, and
Indian foreign and aid policies. She is also a founding member and co-chair of the South Asia in
World Politics section of International Studies Association.

• Dr. Manali Kumar is an International Postdoctoral Fellow with the Institute of Political Science at
the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, and Editor-in-Chief of 9DASHLINE. She has a Ph.D. in
Political Science (International Relations) from the National University of Singapore. She was also a
Swiss Excellence Research Scholar in 2018-19. Her current research explores whether and how
India's national identities and interests have changed with its emergence as rising power. She also
studies the value of prudence in statecraft, especially as a normative and prescriptive approach for
decision-making under uncertainty and in crises.

• Dr. Louise Tillin is currently Director, King’s India Institute and Reader in Politics. She is also the
programme director of the MSc Global Affairs. Louise’s research interests span federalism,
democracy and territorial politics in India, and the history and politics of social policy design and
implementation. Louise is a regular commentator on Indian politics in UK, Indian and international
media. She is an editor of the journal Regional and Federal Studies, and an editorial board member
of Pacific Affairs.

• Prof. Christophe Jaffrelot is the Avantha Chair and Professor of Indian Politics and Sociology at the
King's India Institute. He is also the Research Lead for the Global Institutes, King’s College London.
He teaches South Asian politics and history at Sciences Po, Paris and is an Overseas Fellow at the
 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He was Director of Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches
Internationales (CERI) at Sciences Po between 2000 and 2008. He is also a Non Resident Scholar at
the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington D.C. and is a regular commentator
on Indian and Pakistani politics in France, UK, north America and in India where he writes a
fortnightly column in The Indian Express.

• Dr. Kriti Kapila is a social anthropologist whose research focuses on the work of law in
contemporary India, including in the anthropology of law, genetics and genomics. She is the
Academic Director for the International School for Government and has extensive experience in
running cutting-edge professional development and executive education programmes. Kriti is
currently co-director the Chevening Financial Services Leadership Programme. Kriti's research is
concerned with the regimes of evidence around the cultural difference in India in three distinct but
interrelated contexts. This research examines the politics of recognition in India with a particular
focus on the overlaps and disjuncture between official, popular and academic understandings of
the category ‘tribe’ in contemporary India. It further compares two large-scale mapping exercises
that have the culture-concept at their heart, currently underway in India

• Dr. Anastasia Piliavsky is a social anthropologist, who works on India’s democracy and the role of
vernacular values, especially the hierarchical, in India’s social and political life. She is currently
Principal Investigator of a European Council-funded project on 'India's politics in its vernaculars', a
major mapping of India's conceptual political vocabulary in 17 languages.
After studying anthropology at Boston University and Oxford, Anastasia taught at Bristol and
Cambridge before coming to King’s in 2018. She has written on crime, policing and corruption in
India, on secrecy and the public sphere, on ‘criminal tribes,’ patronage and democracy, hierarchy
and egalitarianism, and on social theory and the history of anthropology at large. She was
previously co-Investigator of a European Research Council & Economic and Social Research
Council-funded project on South Asia's democratic cultures.

• Dr. Sunil Kumar is a Lecturer in Economics at the India Institute. Before joining King’s, Sunil
received his PhD in economics from the University of East Anglia, MA in economics from the Delhi
School of Economics, and BA in Mathematics from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University.
Before embarking on his PhD, he worked for the Social Initiatives Group of ICICI Bank, an erstwhile
major funder of non-profit activities in India. From 2011 to 2014, he jointly developed and taught a
short course on impact evaluation at the University of East Anglia's School of International
Development, and has taught a short version of this for the UK Department of Business Innovation
and Skills.

• Dr. Thorsten Wojczewski is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow specialising in Indian foreign and
security policy, international relations theory, populism, world order and critical security studies.
Before joining King’s in 2016, Thorsten was a Research Fellow at the German Institute of Global
and Area Studies in Hamburg. In addition, he was a Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford and
the Institute for Defence Studies & Analyses (IDSA) in New Delhi. He studied political science and
public law at the University of Hamburg and the University of Reading, and completed his PhD in
International Relations at the University of Kiel, Germany.

• Dr. Srilata Sircar is Lecturer in India and Global Affairs at the King's India Institute. She is module
leader for the Introduction to Global Affairs and Contemporary India modules. Trained as an urban
geographer, Srilata received her doctoral degree from Lund University, Sweden in 2017. With a
prior background in History and Development Studies, her research interests include urban
political ecology of South Asia, the politics of caste in infrastructure-building, and the political
economy of subaltern urbanization. Srilata is a contributing writer for Feminism in India. She is also
interested in documentary film-making and podcast production. Her current research focuses on
the knowledge politics and caste dimensions of urban infrastructure building in South Asia.






















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