India and the West - From the Second World War to the 1970s
Organizer: Rajiv Khanna, Department of History, San Jose State University

This panel will analyze India’s relations with the Western powers from the vital years prior to the subcontinent’s independence in 1947 until the ‘big bang’ of 1974. Three themes – global conflict in the 1940s, the international Cold War, and decolonization – provide the backdrop for these papers, which examine superpower propaganda in the region during the Second World War, Western aid and domestic economic considerations underpinning India’s nuclear policy, and the political and international ramifications of the former British colony’s military invasion of Goa. The papers will address crucial issues of nation building, competing development models, mentalities of leaders, security and deterrence, and attempts by new states to define themselves in the global struggle. These studies, based on multiarchival research spanning three continents, make important contributions to South Asian, American, British, Cold War, and international history. By reviewing the West’s interest and influence in the subcontinent before and after independence, this panel also highlights continuities and discontinuities in India’s dealings with the Anglo-American powers. Finally, the panelists hope to demonstrate how propaganda, economics, anticolonialism, and foreign policy all coalesced to shape modern Indian polity during the tense, tumultuous, and formative years between the Atlantic Charter and Pokhran, Churchill and Indira Gandhi.

“Noise and Flutter”: The Strategy and Operations of American Propaganda in India during the Second World War
Eric Pullin, Carthage College

This paper, drawing on research gathered at national archives and libraries in the United States, the United Kingdom, and India, discusses the strategy and operations of American propaganda in India during the Second World War. The paper also evaluates the reactions of Indian nationalists and British imperialists to U.S. information activities. The Americans saw the purpose of their propaganda as stimulating India’s will to war and as developing good relations with the South Asian state. World War II forced the United States to develop a global approach to its propaganda. In addition to offering a vision of post-war Asia to compete with Japan, the United States found itself caught between giving voice to India’s independence and promoting Britain’s war effort. Indeed, the international nature of the war drew sharp attention to the connection between American deeds and words. Meanwhile, though antagonistic towards one another, the British Government and Indian Nationalists largely regarded American propaganda as disingenuous. In fact, both argued that the purpose of American propaganda was to prepare the way for American imperialism in India after the war. Even as the British and Indians resented American information activities, they nevertheless realized the importance of winning US public opinion; each thus tried to manipulate American propaganda for its own purposes. During the war, Indian nationalists viewed American propaganda with ambivalence, regarding information activities as simultaneously clumsy and sophisticated. Upon independence, memories of American propaganda symbolized foreign intrusion into India’s affairs and significantly contributed to fostering India’s posture of nonalignment.

A Fine Balancing Act: Western Aid, the Indian Economy, and the Bomb, 1962-1974
Jaideep Prabhu, Vanderbilt University

Historians still debate India’s motivations for making the atomic bomb, mostly deciding that it was a matter of prestige, while a few mutters are heard citing security. A large part of this claim is based on the decade-long delay between China’s test and India’s own: if security were truly a concern, why, the prestige faction asks, did it take ten years for India to test its own device when they could have probably done so within four years? I believe, however, that this argument overlooks the basic fact of Indian economics and whether India could afford the bomb during this period.
My paper looks at the Indian economy from the Chinese invasion in 1962 until India’s maiden nuclear test in Pokhran in 1974. I study Western aid to India and the West’s penchant for non-proliferation during the period, questioning if one agendum was undermining the other. The White House had, since 1949, believed that a strong India was vital as a bulwark against Red China. On the one hand, it would be in the West’s interests if India emerged as a model and prosperous postcolonial nation, serving as an example of Western wisdom and beneficence to the rest of the Third World. On the other, an Indian nuclear bomb might give the Communists pause in their attempt to proselytize their brand of communism in South and Southeast Asia. My paper analyses the Indian economy and factors in Western aid in an attempt to understand India’s real nuclear options.

Crisis of Decolonization: Goa and Anglo-Indian Relations, 1960-1962
Rajiv Khanna, San Jose State University

Third Presentation Abstract: Using unpublished documents from the United Kingdom and India I explore how the crisis of decolonization in Goa soured the postcolonial relationship between the greatest former imperial power and its former nonaligned colony. This paper is part of a larger investigation of British and Indian relations between 1956 and 1962 in the context of the global Cold War. A Portuguese colony on India’s west coast, Goa remained a historical anomaly in an independent and sovereign country. Due to considerable pressure from the “militant” African nationalists and vociferous demands at home, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru ordered troops to “liberate” Goa in December 1961.
I will investigate the complex reasons that compelled Nehru, former Gandhi disciple and architect of India’s bold and peaceful nonalignment policy, to order a military invasion of Goa. By placing Indian foreign policy in the context of the global struggle for anti-colonialism and by drawing connections with similar movements in the African continent, this paper also makes significant contributions to international and comparative history. India’s action also impacted its relations with the global powers, particularly Great Britain, where condemnation was all but unanimous. London, which viewed New Delhi’s Goa misadventure through the prism of the Cold War, remained concerned about its waning influence with its most important Asian ally. Finally, the United Nations also became the battleground for policy differences between the two countries.

[Dis]continuity in Musical Practices of South Asia
Chair: Shalini Ayyagari, UC Berkeley, Dept. of Music, Ethnomusicology

This panel, ranging from the geographical directions of north, south, east, and west of South Asia, grapples with issues of continuity in musical practices. Ayyagari, in her reconceptualization of music among the Mangniyar of western Rajasthan, examines continuity in terms of borderlands and music theorization. In looking at a Dhrupad music tradition from Bettiah in northwestern Bihar, Ranganathan interrogates the nature of historical construction and the complexities of defining continuity for a tradition that is dispersed geographically and propagates through multiple schools. Finally, over the span of 600 years, Muthukumar explores continuity between two early musical texts and present-day musical practice in north and south India.

Respatializing Theory: Unsettling Common notions of music conceptualization among the Mangniyar musician community of Rajasthan
Shalini Ayyagari, UC Berkeley, Dept. of Music, Ethnomusicology

Scholars and musicians alike have described the music of the Mangniyar hereditary musician community of western Rajasthan almost entirely in terms of Hindustani raga theory. Past scholars have gone so far as to call Mangniyar music an “embryo of a classical music tradition”. As a community that has straddled the India-Pakistan border in the desert region of western Rajasthan, India and eastern Sindh, Pakistan, their musical life inhabits a borderland not only in political space, but also in the realm of cultural space. In this paper, I posit that the music of the Mangniyar, while utilizing elements of Hindustani raga, also draws upon the conceptualization of the Sindhi surs, or musical themes compiled by the Sindhi Sufi poet, Shah Abdul Latif. Utilizing translations of this text as well as interviews and musical recordings of the Mangniyar, I intend to unbalance common notions of national boundaries as defining lines for cultural practices. I explore a different theorization of Mangniyar music, taking into consideration musical theory from both Hindustani raga as well as the Sindhi surs.

Histories of the Bettiah Dhrupad tradition: A critique
Sumitra Ranganathan, UC Berkeley, Dept. of Music, Ethnomusicology

This paper focuses on the nature of historical construction for North Indian classical musical practices that do not organize easily around genealogy, or geography. I examine this issue in music historiography using the Bettiah Dhrupad tradition as an example.

The writing of history plays a significant role in building an intellectual tradition around a musical practice, and contributes to its persistence as a cultural artifact. For a genre such as Dhrupad, intellectual tradition has played a strong role in establishing authority and making practices into “tradition”. It is therefore necessary to examine the process by which histories emerge.

I look at musical practices gathered within the rubric of the Bettiah tradition, and discuss three approaches to the telling of its history. I highlight the challenges in the definition of tradition when dealing with diverse musical histories and interrogate the applicability of the conventional notion of gharana, organized as it is around genealogy, geography and unified musical style, to assert continuity under these circumstances.

Alatti, Alapti and Alapana: Continuity in Indian music
V.N. Muthukumar, UC Berkeley, Dept. of South and Southeast Asian Studies

The classical music of India underwent several changes during the last six hundred years, including paradigmatic shifts such as the emergence of a fixed tonic, the evolution of two distinct musical systems (the North and the South) and further changes within the performance traditions of both these systems. In the light of these changes, it is natural to ask what continuity means in Indian music. In this talk, I address this question by examining the concept of raga elaboration described in two musicological texts, Arivanar’s Panca Marapu (Tamil, 11th CE) and Sarangadeva’s Sangita Ratnakara (Sanskrit, 13th CE). Analyzing the descriptions in these two musicological traditions and comparing them with current practice, I seek to establish continuity in certain basic notions of Indian music.

Panel Session 2
10:45 AM - 12:15 PM -- Friday, February 15

Author Meets Critics Panel: Sheldon Pollock

Session 3
1:30 - 3:00 PM -- Friday, February 15

Information and Communications Technologies for Development (ICT4D)
Chair: Isha Ray, University of California, Berkeley

At the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), 174 countries adopted the Tunis Commitment to bridge the digital divide and to promote ICTs as instruments of sustainable development. ICTs are now being used to assist in social development and poverty alleviation in several developing countries, through ‘ICT for development’ (ICT4D) projects. The hope is that these technologies can be used to support health, e-governance, and agricultural applications for rural populations and simultaneously create new business opportunities. Many case studies have highlighted the potential of ICT4D in the education, small business and health sectors. This panel will critically examine the social impacts of ICT4D, focusing both on social critique as well as on opportunities to extend the promise of these technologies.

"My child will be respected": Aspiration and Computers in Rural Primary Schools
Joyojeet Pal

Computer centers in rural Indian public schools raise questions about the value of expensive modern technology in an otherwise starkly poor environment. Arguments for or against spending on computers in low-income schools have appeared in policy circles, academia, teacher conferences, and philanthropy, with passionate rhetoric from all sides. A glaring shortcoming of the debate has been the absent voice of parents or children themselves. Here, I present research over two years of interviews with parents discussing aspirations, children's interest in schools, and the symbolic value of technology in rural Karnataka villages where the state government has recently donated computers.

The Fortune at the Top of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty through Profits
Aishwarya Ratan (Microsoft)

This paper explores the flipside of the argument presented by C.K. Prahalad in his book "The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits." The central argument presented here is that it is not just the linkage of the rich as producers with the poor as consumers that will alleviate poverty, but in fact the reverse linkage of the poor as producers with the rich as consumers, which can substantially raise incomes for the poor. In a number of industries, there is a large opportunity for poor producers to gain from the aggregation of their production, further specialisation, selective processing/value-addition, branding, and strategic marketing to 'Top-of-the-Pyramid' customers. The organisational structure that will afford high returns to poor producers from pursuing such a growth strategy, is that of the Federated Producer Cooperative Society, where poor producers collectively play the role of primary producers-owners-shareholders of the establishment. This route is exactly what might systematically grow the income of poor families over time and indeed "end poverty through profits." Evidence for this argument is presented using three short case studies from India. Recommendations for the potential role of technology and business management expertise are presented in conclusion.

Constructing Class Boundaries: Gender and Shared Computing
Renee Kuriyan, UCB and Kathi Kitner, Intel

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have been referred to as the ‘the great equalizer’ between men and women. Our research in India and Chile explores how gender and class identities intersect with ICTs in the context of shared computing environments with telecenters. Our study indicates that although these shared use projects are implemented in the name of targeting poor women, an ‘emerging middle class’ of women, such as stay at home mothers and young unmarried women are one of the dominant user groups in these telecenters. Women are constructing identities, trying to cross perceived class boundaries, and maintaining middle class positions through the use of ICTs and their symbolic value. This symbolic value becomes tied to linear notions and aspirations of progress, advancement, and upward mobility.

Going beyond ‘reducing information asymmetries’: How do information kiosk projects actually shape change?
Janaki Srinivasan

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) based projects attract significant support from both state and non-state actors across the world to further development goals. Literature on the use of ICTs for development sees efficiency gains and reduced economic inequality as important consequences of ICT deployment. It argues that that in the context of the developing world, ICTs can play an important role in reducing acute information asymmetries and, further, that by providing information for economic decisions, ICTs can lead to effective markets, economic gain and ultimately to economic development. This paper examines the above claim in the light of a study of an ICT based project called Sustainable Access in Rural India (SARI), in the Madurai district of rural Tamil Nadu. The paper argues that change for such projects is shaped less by the provision of information or the ‘reduction of information asymmetries’ than by the processes through which these projects are implemented.

The Politics of Emergent Socialities in South Asia
Chair: Mara Green, Anthropology, UC Berkeley

This panel brings together four papers on emergent socialities in South Asia, examining the political and pragmatic stances of marginalized groups in India and Nepal. In exploring the relationships of specific communities to the self, the state, civil society, and transborder movements, these papers individually and collectively seek to open up analytical demarcations of the social and the political. Vandana Chaudhry investigates how disabled peoples’ self-help groups in rural Andhra Pradhesh negotiate neoliberal norms. She draws our attention to the multifaceted interconnections between subjects, state policies, and the needs of everyday life. Michele Friedner looks closely at an everyday need for mobility in urban Bangalore; in thinking about why deaf people regularly drive without the licenses forbidden them by law, she troubles notions of resistance, politics, and practicality. Gautam Bhan locates queer discourse in India fully in the realm of politics. He traces an historical shift that has decentered questions of minority identity and rights, opening up demands for inclusion in other social movements while also challenging social norms. Mara Green explores how Nepali deaf activism, in the context of political instability in Nepal and North-South deaf configurations, orients itself to multiple actors and organizations, arguing for a reworking of notions of hierarchy and democracy. Together the papers provide snapshots of how individuals and communities emerge out of contestation (or lack thereof), seek to address systematic inequalities through various strategies, and ask us to take seriously the theoretical and social boundaries they challenge.

Politics of Self-help: Disability and the Neoliberal Indian State
Vandana Chaudhry, Social Work, University of Illinois at Chicago

State of Andhra Pradesh (AP) is widely hailed as a forerunner of neoliberalization in India. In line with neoliberal governmentality, AP, with funding from the World Bank, has adapted self-government techniques, such as community driven development, decentralization, and grass-root empowerment to limit the scope of the state. This paper focuses on one such development project in rural AP, that organizes large-scale grassroot self-help groups (of women, Dalits and disabled people among others). Based on my fieldwork, I will tease out the politics of “self-help,” with special reference to disability as an analytic. I explore how this politics unfolds and is depoliticized, appropriated, and even reclaimed, by all actors concerned—the state, civil society and disabled people. Here I draw on Barnett’s (2005) work in characterizing SHGs as “bottoms-up governmentality,” mechanisms through which subjects act both upon themselves and on the state. SHGs are unable to alter the structural inequalities resulting from neoliberalism, however, disabled people use their very materiality, the politics of daily needs and pragmatics, to invoke the state. Most of their discourses revolve around accessing government entitlements—disability certificates, pensions, scholarships, subsidized food and housing—that fall within the developmental purview of the state. Making soft claims on the state, they utilize the politics of self-help to act upon the conduct of the state. If we characterize this phenomenon as “individualized collective action” (Barnett 2005), we also need to carefully observe the political gains it can accrue for the disabled community, and how it can produce acting subjects.

The Conflict that Wasn’t: Deafness and Difference in the City
Michele Friedner, Medical Anthropology, UC Berkeley

This paper looks at a particular community of deaf adults living in New Delhi. This community is made up of Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh deaf women and their families who have come together based on a shared experience of deafness. While it seems that a focus on this shared experience allows for an everyday life that is devoid of conflict and tension, difference does occasionally come to the fore and when it does, members of the community engage in tactics of meaning making and identity hierarchization that avoid conflict. I explore the techniques that these deaf women and their families engage in to create a unified deaf community and ask questions about how a focus on “the everyday” and “the local” allows us, as anthropologists, to track both sameness and difference. By focusing on how relationships are forged, delineated, and contested and how space and place are produced by these women and their families, I explore the everyday lived realities of this community. What practices do these women and their families engage in to foster sameness and elide difference? What does this story tell us about processes of community making, politics, and belonging? What does it mean to say “I am deaf you are deaf we are the same” in this particular community?

Intersections and Movements: The Rise of Queer Politics in India
Gautam Bhan, City Planning, UC Berkeley

For many years now, activists in India have documented and protested violations against gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered communities. In recent years, however, the language of this protest has changed from focusing on violations to a discourse of rights and political assertion. Within this shift has been the emergence of a queer politics. In this paper, I trace this shift, asking the following questions: What is a queer politics in the Indian context? How is it different from speaking of LGBT rights, and from the historical and contemporary uses of "queer" in the West? I will argue that the use of "queer" is a political/ideological choice, as well as a strategic one. The concept "queer" seeks to do three things: (a) shift the political question away from speaking of identity or minority-based issues to larger understandings of gender and sexuality in society; (b) locate sexuality as a politics intrinsically and inevitably connected with the politics of class, gender, caste, religion and so on, thereby both acknowledging other movements and also demanding inclusion within them; and (c) move away from protesting isolated incidents of violence to challenging social norms and value systems that deem such violence legitimate in the first place and allow it to continue. After tracing the shift I describe above, I will explore some of the implications this emergent political language has for both queer and non-queer social movements and spaces in contemporary India.

Hierarchy and the Horizontal: How Nepali Deaf Activism Troubles Deep Democracy
Mara Green, Sociocultural & Linguistic Anthropology, UC Berkeley

In this paper I examine Nepali deaf activism in relation to transnational deaf networks and the state. To account for these relationships, I will argue, we must complicate Appadurai’s often-cited model of “deep democracy” (2001). Nepal’s National Federation for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (NFDH) perfectly fits Appadurai’s definition of grassroots movements as “claiming voice and space” and “reconstitut[ing] citizenship in cities” (25). But in characterizing such movements, Appadurai draws sharp distinctions between “horizontal” and hierarchical organizational structures and networks (39), and between groups that “have opted for armed, militarized solutions” and groups that have not (24). Careful examination of Nepali deaf activism undermines these dichotomies. In serving deaf people’s social, political, and economic needs, the NFDH unites 20 regional chapters, and is a member of the World Federation of the Deaf (WFD), which in turn works with the UN. The relationships cultivated in the physical-social spaces provided by WFD enable NFDH’s leadership to exchange ideas with other deaf activists, secure funding for projects throughout Nepal, and engage in “deaf democracy” across and within borders. In addition, NFDH has met with representatives of the Maoist Party, which led a 10-year armed insurgency. Yet in light of Nepal’s ever-shifting political situation and the peace accords between the Seven Party Alliance and the Maoists, the very demarcation between militarized and other appears untenable. I conclude therefore, that normative notions of “democracy” adequately address neither political contingencies in the context of an unstable and unresponsive state, nor the structural inequalities of deafness.

Discussant: Fouzieyha Towghi, Lecturer, Gender & Women’s Studies, UC Berkeley

Panel Session 4
3:15 - 4:45 PM -- Friday, February 15

Performing the Universal as Local: Imperial Histories, Performance Pedagogies, and the Global Passages of the Bengali Theater
Chair: Sudipto Chatterjee, University of California, Berkeley and Loughbrough University, UK

The study and practice of performance in the Western academy has long been focused predictably on Western objects and knowledges as not only Western-centric, but universal forms mimicked by many cultures “eager” to learn and reproduce. The links between the dissemination of “modern drama” and “realism” through the networks of the British Empire’s reach and the appropriation of non-Western theatre practices out of their context have rigorously been addressed in the margins of many disciplines but these critiques have failed to have a major impact on the fundamental tenets of many disciplines as to how global and non-Western knowledges should be represented without ultimate recourse to the “Western” as the origin of the conditions for innovation, or as a mere additive to a generalist syllabus. Rather than striving to prove the universality of the local, what would happen if local performance histories were revealed rather to demonstrate the localness of the universal?

In the context of Indian performance, an attention to the locality of the development of the “modern theater” in India would not only defeat stereotypes of national cultural homogeneity but reveal the varied impact of British rule on changes in artistic and intellectual trends as well as provide a space to think of British India not as a site where modernity was simply imported, but rather a crucible in which its invention could be thought of as reactionary rather than already achieved.

We will examine modern and contemporary Bengali theatre as a regional practice whose evolution has continued to be interlocked with the history of colonial rule, nationalism and the pressures of globalization and industrial change. What qualifies a work as “universal” and how might this privilege be undone by locating a different center (or centers) of knowledge production and artistic invention? How might this provide a model not only centralize non-Western performance practices within “modern” performance histories, but combat the broad generalizations made about "Indian" performance practices inside and outside the Western academy?

“Something ‘strange and beautiful': Agunmukho, Surja Pora Chai and Globalized Regionalisms on the Kolkata Stage”
Charlotte McIvor, University of California, Berkeley

In summer 2007, the Bengali family and the trials and tribulations of globalization and Westernization were center stage in Kolkata in two new Bengali language plays. Bratya Basu’s adaptation of Agunmukho (Fire Face), based on the original German play Feuergesicht by Marius von Mayenburg, was running for several weeks at the Max Mueller Bhavan under the direction of Suman Mukhopadhyay, while director Debesh Chattopadhyay’s new play Surja Pora Chai (Sun-burnt Ashes) premiered in theaters throughout the city. Hit Bollywood songs served as the counter-text in these productions as two fractured families faced up to the excess of their own desires and traumas in an increasingly confused world. The true meaning of progress and freedom are up for discussion, and the future is uncertain. Foreign or commodified influences are not only consumed, however, but appropriated, often violently. The disastrous choices of the individual characters and the constraint of their particular communities are foregrounded rather than diluted, putting Kolkata and Bengali center stage rather than relegated to metaphor.

Kolkata’s recent performance history is characterized by the practice of Group Theatre with non-professional groups mounting collective works, often in the form of new plays. Even the imported works, such as the popular Shakespeare and Brecht, frequently make themselves answerable to the questions of this particular audience through language, staging and costume rather than being presented simply as “great works.” Continuing in this tradition, Agunmukho was adapted, rather than translated, and Surja Pora Chai, although loosely influenced by a Western play, arose out of Chattopadhyay’s experiences as a high school science teacher and his questions for the next generation in Bengal. By examining their exposure of the universal as local, I will address how they undo its arguments and uncover not only networks of influence but the routes necessary for preserving local communities, even as they deal with the onslaught of the global.

“One Language, Two Nations, Two-and-a-Half Brechts: Adapting Brecht in/for Two Bengals”
Sudipto Chatterjee, University of California, Berkeley and Loughbrough University (UK)

Bertolt Brecht’s plays have been consistently popular in the Bengali language, spoken both in Indian West Bengal and Bangladesh. The theatre in the 1970s, on both sides of the border, was marked by a number of adapted Brecht productions that were immensely successful. This paper looks at the fate of two plays: The Good Person of Szechwan or Herr Puntila & his Man Servant Matti. While the former was adapted successfully in West Bengal by Ajitesh Banerjee, it was done by Aly Zaker in Bangladesh and performed to great aplomb. Puntila was adapted by Shekhar Chatterjee in Calcutta, while Asaduzzaman Noor adapted it for the Dhaka stage. What is most peculiar about these productions is that, although they were both staged in Bengali, they were created for exclusively insular audiences with no more than (perhaps) a factual awareness of the same titles also being adapted on the other side of the border. This was not a choice, but rather an unavoidable consequence of the divided status of the landmass of Bengal as West Bengal and Bangladesh. By the time Brecht started being staged with consistency in the Bengali language, the two Bengals had existed to each other’s mutual exclusivity as different nations for almost three decades. This paper shall explore how the Brecht adaptations are marked by “differences” caused by communal separation and post-partition history, impact of the Bangladesh Liberation War, the Leftist movements in West Bengal, etc.

“The Case of Modern Bengali Theater: The Power of Modern Theater and/or the Theater of Modern Power”
Ayan K. Gangopadhyay, West Chester University

If in any historiographical imagination, the issue seems to present itself as that of a series of transformations leading inevitably to the formation and gradual consolidation of what we know today as the political state, then the case of Modern Bengali Theater, as I will try to argue in my paper, its inception in the latter half of the 19th century under the British colonial rule and subsequent developments – its troubled relationships with nationalism through its emergence as a bundle of several theater groups largely centered around the city of Calcutta during the so-called post-colonial era via the inflections it received from the Indian Peoples’ Theater Association (IPTA) – that have finally arrived in the era of a transnational globalization, is no exception. It is plain and simple a ‘local’ history tied very much to the genealogy and development of the ‘modern’ in a colonial setting that nonetheless bears the traces of the ‘global’.

Taking my clues from Utpal Dutt’s (1929 – 1993) play, Tiner Talwar (The Tin Sword, published and premiered in 1971) that recreates the initial moments within the history of modern Bengali theater in its 19th century context, this paper will try to argue that the real trouble is to hold that very question of modernity as the object of enquiry. To begin to ask about the nature of the modern is not to fall prey to the telos of the political state, and thereby be able to avoid the inevitability of it.

5:00 PM - Reception in the Great Hall

6:30 PM - Keynote Lecture by Sugata Bose
Sugata Bose is the Gardiner Professor of Oceanic History and Affairs at Harvard University.

Saturday

Panel Session 1
9:00 - 10:30 AM - Saturday, February 16

The Genre in Perspective
Chair: Ari Singh Anand, Department of Anthropology, University of Arizona

In this panel we explore the notion of the genre and its utility in thinking about various aspects of knowledge-production in South Asia. We observe the genre not as a fixed form but as both the creation and the continuing existence of diverse expectations in literary, social, and historical contexts. The genre functions as the sometimes necessary and oftentimes imaginary resolution to specific socio-historical problems. Our aim in this panel is to draw upon the genre as a set of conventions employed to give shape to responses to emerging social contingencies, in order to explore aspects of various cultural processes and products--from colonial urban architecture to the colonial glossary, to the postcolonial autobiography--and consequently to demonstrate the value of this notion by thinking about the social in its terms.

"Cosmopolitanism in Hobson-Jobson"
Ari Singh Anand, Department of Anthropology, University of Arizona

This presentation explores the colonial resolution of the contradiction between benign intent and colonial violence in India under the Raj. It does so through an analysis of Hobson-Jobson, the well-known nineteenth-century British colonial glossary of Anglo-Indian argot, drawing on an understanding of the genre as well as a Peircean approach that emphasizes indexicality as a key means of signification. In performing a close reading of Hobson-Jobson, the presentation attempts to demonstrate both the need for more sober and critical readings of the text, as well as the value of a particular understanding of the genre, as well as the Peircean notion of indexicality, in analyzing discourses with an eye to relations of power that constitute socio-historical contexts. Finally, I suggest that what is problematic about Hobson-Jobson despite all its linguistic richness is not the just the history from which it arose but its active participation in facilitating and constituting both that history and its agents.

"The Arrears of Familiarity: The Architectural transformation of Colonial Bulandshahr"
Venugopal Maddipati, University of Minnesota

This paper seeks to historicize the rhetoric that has come to surround present-day city and town-improvement drives in India in post-colonial times, by bringing to the fore their very colonial roots. Immediately after the insurrection of 1857, a dichotomy emerged between the idea of the transformation of Indian towns and cities and the ideal of the improvement of Indian towns and cities in the language of British colonial officials. On the one hand was the approach taken by Lord Napier who was in the favor of rapid transformation in the fabric of towns like Lucknow and Delhi. On the other hand was the approach taken by the District Collector of Bulandshahr, Frederick Salmon Growse, who advocated the gradual improvement of Indian towns and cities. While Napier, in true Hausmannian fashion, campaigned for the immediate imposition of a distant metropolitan modernity upon the towns and cities of India, Growse appealed for an agonizingly slow, historicist approach that claimed to be in step with the horizon of expectations of local people. Their approaches then, constitute modes of adhering to the expectations produced by two very different genres that sit together rather uncomfortably in the overweening rubrics of "colonial change." This paper attempts to explore the historical and utopian expectations that reside within the ideal of a Growsian gradualism, specifically as they materialized in his writings on the town of Bulandshahr.

"Fictions of Nation: Autobiography and Lesbian Identity"
Sridevi Nair, University of Michigan

My paper seeks to understand cultural production in which the lesbian appears as a moment that suggests the "impossibility" of "nation." Reading lesbian writer Suniti Namjoshi's autobiography, I argue that her evocation of the split sensibilities that dominate her life - India and the west, English and Marathi, race and upper-caste Maratha identity - contribute to a deeply unsettling effect of the idea of "India." Her manipulation of genre is central to this, and I read this in light of the autobiography as a form that is rooted in colonial modernity.

Panel Session 2
10:45 AM - 12:15 PM -- Saturday, February 16

(Re)shaping the Indian Middle Class: Gender, Work and the “New” Nation
Chair: Smitha Radhakrishnan, Sociology, Wellesley College

More than a decade after the institution of liberalization policies in India, the face of the middle class in large cities has changed significantly. Previously, middle class status was achieved through a stable government job, usually secured by a male breadwinner supporting a wife and children. Increasingly, however, middle class status in India’s large cities has become associated with high-end service sector jobs, often occupied by women. These shifts are at odds with older models of the middle-class family that constitute the foundation of the national imagination. Even so, subjects constituted in these new socio-economic conditions strive for middle-class status. This panel seeks to explore the ways in which new forms of work shape and are shaped by gendered subjects to achieve this status, even as the meaning of this status changes in the process. New cultures of work, leisure, and consumption created in these contexts draw upon scripts of femininity and masculinity that hearken back to nationalist ideals even as they assert “global” or “American” norms. Drawing from ethnographic and discursive analysis, this panel will detail some of the ways in which discourses of gender and gendered workers come to make up both the everyday relations of work as well as a larger ethos of a "new" Indian middle class. The three papers in the panel address different sites of gendered work—specifically, information technology (IT) offices, call centers, and large music stores—to explore the interconnections between gender, class, work, sexuality, and a shifting notion of “Indianness.”

“'The Body Communicates Constantly': New Middle Class Bodies and Metrosexual Modernity”
Meredith McGuire, Anthropology, University of Chicago

How do bodies become identifiably “new middle class”? This paper begins with an examination of the burgeoning popularity in Indian workplaces of corporate training programs focused on bodily cultivation. Often referred to as “Personality Development and Enhancement” (PDE), these programs were developed for use in American-process call centers, to produce in trainees a set of “techniques of the body” that would convey to their overseas customers an ‘American’ attitude of openness, confidence, and ease (Mauss 1973). These training programs’ growing purchase in domestically-oriented businesses—and even, occasionally, in NGOs that facilitate rights-claims for the marginalized—suggests that the bodily production of world-class service increasingly appears connected to the production of modern subjecthood and citizenly entitlement. A discursive analysis of training materials, corporate publications, and popular discourses on the world-class Indian body suggests that while conspicuous consumption has long been the watchword for describing new middle class constructions, a key aspect of the formation of the new middle class is the conjuring of a new sort of body, one uniquely suited to the fruits of the post-liberalization nation. Arguing that the production of this body entails the production of new gender regimes that trouble the moral authority of the middle class, I close with an examination of the assumptions and anxieties attendant on popular discourses about ‘metrosexuality’ in urban India.

“Where the Women Aren’t: Gendering the Music Store”
Jayson Beaster-Jones, Anthropology, University of Chicago

While conducting ethnographic research in a large chain of urban music stores, the dearth of female employees on the shop floor was immediate apparent. While young women had a significant presence in the back offices working as regional and senior managers, few stores of this chain had more than one or two women of the staff interacting directly with customers. Book, apparel, and departmental stores, on the other hand, had many more women present on the shop floor. Why is female labor in certain retail contexts acceptable, but not in other contexts? How do these differential conceptions of “proper” labor articulate with the production of the new Indian middle-class? Based upon interviews from twenty-six stores in nine cities of this retail chain, this paper critically examines the gendering of music store labor in urban India. Exploring the narratives explaining this lack of female customer service agents in India’s most “cosmopolitan” cities, the paper analyzes a variety of rationalizations from managers and staff, ranging from issues of personal safety to a disdain of “shopkeeping.” The paper suggests that work in music stores is, in part, a normative reproduction of middle-class modesty in the nascent service economy. I provisionally suggest that differential conceptions of “the public” play a role here, as do expectations that the women of the family should interact only with particular sorts of people in the marketplace. Thus, in this context, music store labor has been gendered male, despite the similar numbers of male and female customers.

“Good 'Global Indian' Women: Remaking Respectability”
Smitha Radhakrishnan, Sociology, Wellesley College

The dramatic growth of the service sector in post-liberalization India has signaled a particular kind of social and cultural opening for middle-class women. In particular, professional women working in information technology (IT) have become icons for the benefits of globalization, signaling progress in a national culture long thought to be inevitably oppressive towards women. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork and interviews in Mumbai and Bangalore, this paper examines the discourses through which professional IT women assert their symbolic position as the nation’s culture-bearers to remake notions of “Indianness” in their everyday lives. These women possess the cultural credibility to rework older notions of national culture to accommodate the social, economic and ideological shifts of India’s changing socio-political landscape. Their respectability can be traced to their relationship to legacies of colonial and nationalist constructs of ideal Indian women, as well as the enduring cultural capital of a dominant Indian middle class. From this position, professional software women actively navigate class distinctions and femininity to reinforce their own respectability vis a vis other less respectable femininities, particularly those enacted by call center workers. By melding the work of Bourdieusian feminists with postcolonial theory that highlights the gendered and middle-class underpinnings of nationalist projects, this study of professional software women in India moves towards a theory of respectability with which to understand the changing and abiding aspects of India’s “new” middle-class culture.

	Friday, February 15		Saturday, February 16
	Homeroom	Ida & Robert Sproul Room	Homeroom	Ida & Robert Sproul Room
9:00-10:30 AM	India and the West - From the Second World War to the 1970s	[Dis]continuity in Musical Practices of South Asia	The Genre in Perspective
10:45-12:15 PM	Author Meets Critics Panel: Sheldon Pollock		(Re)shaping the Indian Middle Class: Gender, Work and the "New" Nation
L U N C H
1:30-3:00 PM	Information and Communication Technologies for Development	The Politics of Emergent Socialities in South Asia
3:15-4:45 PM	Performing the Universal as Local: Imperial Histories, Performance Pedagogies, and the Global Passages of the Bengali Theater	The Politics of Emergent Socialities in South Asia
5:00-6:15 PM	Reception in the Great Hall
6:30 PM	Keynote by Sugata Bose