South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies

07/02/2025

This essay looks at the popular self-described mythologist, Devdutt Pattanaik, and his Mahabharata retelling, Jaya (2010), to analyse the production and dissemination of Hindu mythology in contemporary India as a guidebook. Drawing on cultural histories of book production in post-Independence India, the rise of the Hindu Right, and studies of neoliberalism and the post-millennial workspace, this essay argues that Pattanaik recontextualises the Mahabharata narrative using both rationalistic and pseudo-rationalistic knowledge systems to foreground the multiplicity of the Mahabharata narrative tradition while simultaneously reinscribing centre-margin hierarchies upon that multiplicity and legitimising the logic of Hindu history in his vision of a national Indian culture. Pattanaik thus retells the Mahabharata to provide lessons in self-control and self-regulation by reframing the narrative and rearticulating its moral lessons within the discourse of responsibilised productivity to (re)produce neoliberal workers.

This essay looks at the popular self-described mythologist, Devdutt Pattanaik, and his Mahabharata retelling, Jaya (2010), to analyse the production and dissemination of Hindu mythology in contempo...

07/02/2025

A new linguistic hierarchy emerged in nineteenth century colonial Bengal with the implementation of a centralised education system in the English language by the British and the codification of a new vernacular, sadhu-bhasha (standard Bangla). This new linguistic hierarchy paved the way for the social othering and linguistic marginalisation of several social groups, including Bengali-speaking Muslims. This study investigates the position of Bengali-speaking Muslims in this changed socio-linguistic landscape and explores the factors that contributed to its creation. The research highlights that Bengali Muslims navigated linguistic hegemonies shaped by the implementation of English, the promotion of standard Bangla and the pressure of Urdu, the language for asserting pan-Indian Islamic identity. This study explores the constant linguistic negotiations Bengali Muslims undertook in shaping their language of education. It traces how language became a source of social exclusion for them on the path to gaining formal education both inside and outside their community.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00856401.2024.2432231 #:~:text=The%20new%20linguistic%20hierarchy%2C%20a,identity%20construction%20of%20Bengali%20Muslims.

07/02/2025

The site of Rozabal in Srinagar, Kashmir, locally called the burial place of a nabīʼ (prophet), is famously known as the Tomb of Jesus. This paper analyses portrayals of the site in two well-known Persian texts from Kashmir, Azam Dedmari’s mid eighteenth century Wāqiʻāt-i Kashmir (Events of Kashmir) and Hassan Khuihami’s late nineteenth century Asrār-ul Aḵẖyār (Secrets of the Pious). It demonstrates how the bringing together of the oral and textual narratives into a genre of historical chronicles by the two authors played a critical role in mapping the site of Rozabal onto the larger canvas of what Nile Green has termed as a ‘sacred geography’ of the region. It argues that the making of Rozabal as an Islamic shrine presents a perfect case of the Persian texts creating sacred geographies at the intersection of myth, memory and history. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad’s claims about Jesus’s burial in the shrine and the subsequent undying debates between his proponents and opponents revolved around reinterpretations of Wāqiʻāt and Asrār’s textual descriptions of the site, demonstrating the renewed lives of these texts in modern contexts.

The site of Rozabal in Srinagar, Kashmir, locally called the burial place of a nabīʼ (prophet), is famously known as the Tomb of Jesus. This paper analyses portrayals of the site in two well-known ...

03/02/2025

This paper attempts to analyse Dr. B.R. Ambedkar’s writings on Indian Christianity with the aim to outline their methodological significance and limitations. We argue that the significance of his work stems from the fact that he placed the ‘untouchable’ Christian—and their individual and collective predicaments—at the heart of his analysis. Dalit Christian movements have duly acknowledged and expounded this aspect of his work. Nevertheless, his normative-ideal approach to religion, informed by the conventions of imperial knowledge production and the politics of nationalism, pose peculiar problems to the sociologist of Indian Christianity. The paper argues for an emphatic reconsideration of Ambedkar’s use of religion as an ontological given and an epistemic destiny in the context of Indian Christianity.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00856401.2025.2425563?src= #:~:text=Ambedkar%20argued%20that%20the%20Christian,to%20Gandhi's%20hostility%20towards%20them.

03/02/2025

This article engages with questions about smell, specifically ‘fish stench’, to understand social hierarchy amongst Muslims in Kerala. It argues that the discourse on fish ‘stench’ as framed by inland Muslims contributes to the construction and maintenance of hierarchy between themselves and coastal Muslims. The paper investigate smell on three levels: (1) in relation to Islamic understandings of cleanliness and hygiene; (2) through the distinction between ‘Gulf smell’ and ‘fish stench’; and (3) in contradistinction to sight. It argues that the ‘marginal’ sense of smell is key to the marginality of coastal Muslims vis-à-vis inland Muslims, who develop a perspective in which they are associated with the ‘higher’ sense of sight. This hierarchisation of the senses becomes the ground for a variety of what Johannes Fabian calls the ‘denial of coevalness’, aligning economically mobile inland Muslims with the future and coastal Muslims with the past.

This article engages with questions about smell, specifically ‘fish stench’, to understand social hierarchy amongst Muslims in Kerala. I argue that the discourse on fish ‘stench’ as framed by inlan...

03/02/2025

This paper tells the story of 24 years of Pakistan’s expanding wireless soundscape from 1947 to 1971, which is critical in reassessing ideas about nation and identity. Even though the wireless’ reach across the airspace of Pakistan’s linguistically and culturally diverse ‘wings’ was one of the strongest available infrastructures for envisioning an ‘imagined community’, radio was used to both forge and resist linguistic and cultural homogeneity. The paper investigates a few broadcasting practices and policies post-1947 by bringing together previously unexplored aural, oral and textual resources from the two leading radiophonic pulse points, the Dacca and Karachi stations, to intervene in how linguistic choices on air, as well as debates about sonic symbols of nationhood and belonging, were played out in the creation of a national soundscape.

This paper tells the story of 24 years of Pakistan’s expanding wireless soundscape from 1947 to 1971, which is critical in reassessing ideas about nation and identity. Even though the wireless’ rea...

30/01/2025

The question of why the Pakistani state was so ardent in its support of Urdu despite popular protest across the country, specifically in East Bengal, has been answered in a multitude of ways. Was the issue of language a hegemonic issue for the Pakistani ruling elite, or an example of the political subjugation of Bengalis in Pakistan? Or was the insistence on Urdu as an official language connected with ‘fears of a Bengali-Hindu conspiracy to undermine the new state by retaining linguistic and cultural connections with India’? This article argues that the Pakistani state’s responses and policies were not part of a grander strategy or an attempt to subjugate the Bengali population, but a confused and undirected Pakistani state trying to implement its vision of the nation, while simultaneously increasing its state-building capacity.

The question of why the Pakistani state was so ardent in its support of Urdu despite popular protest across the country, specifically in East Bengal, has been answered in a multitude of ways. Was t...

30/01/2025

Bangladeshi writer Shawkat Ali’s trilogy Dhakkhinayoner Din (The Days of Summer Solstice) insightfully captures the East Pakistan-West Pakistan entanglement from 1965 to 1969. The trilogy depicts the urban Pakistani entrepreneurs benefitting from the nation’s development discourse, as well as the activities of political radicals in rural East Pakistan. The educated middle-class woman, Rakhi, straddles the world of business and political radicalism. This article is a comparative reading of the trilogy’s fictionalisation of the Ayub Khan regime’s development agenda in postcolonial Pakistan and the confused adventurism of radical political movements. It also examines Rakhi’s liberation—inspired by the ideologue Shezan—in the backdrop of growing Bengali separatism in East Pakistan.

Bangladeshi writer Shawkat Ali’s trilogy Dhakkhinayoner Din (The Days of Summer Solstice) insightfully captures the East Pakistan-West Pakistan entanglement from 1965 to 1969. The trilogy depicts t...

30/01/2025

Local histories in Pakistan often face challenges due to their entanglement with ideological narratives of Muslim nationalism and colonial historiography. They are overshadowed by a cognitive dissonance that stems from the tension between grand historical ideologies and the lived realities of diverse local cultures.

This article looks at factors that marginalize local histories, including state-led efforts to cultivate national consciousness through the use of historically detached, apolitical vignettes of local culture, and the failure of professional historians to engage with local and traditional knowledge.

The article criticizes these approaches and advocates for methodologies, such as environmental history, that embrace complexity and diversity, bridging these gaps in understanding. By shifting the focus to environmental and spatial factors, it challenges dominant narratives and reveals the nuanced, diverse histories of smaller communities. Using the Rachna Doab—a region between the Ravi and Chenab rivers—as a case study, this article explores how environmental history can unveil overlooked aspects of society, economy, and culture in Pakistan.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00856401.2024.2393527

23/09/2024

South Asian cities share a contested late colonial history. Calcutta (Kolkata) occupies a distinctive place in their emergence as modernising urban centres. Instead of viewing changes in Calcutta’s markets merely as the products of colonial and racial hierarchies—or as the product of modernisation—mental maps of people moving through these spaces inform a deeper understanding. Attempts by the Calcutta municipality to ‘modernise’ markets using European assumptions about how urban markets work, failed to recognise the autonomous nature of indigenous ‘mental maps’. The paper analyses these tensions through a street-level observational typology. An experiential legibility of urban spaces thus exposes an otherwise obscured haptic and psychological tension, as cities modernised, between a Westernised urban sensibility and an expanding autonomous space.

South Asian cities share a contested late colonial history. Calcutta (Kolkata) occupies a distinctive place in their emergence as modernising urban centres. Instead of viewing changes in Calcutta’s...

23/09/2024

In 1882, Krishnabhabini Das travelled to England and wrote a travelogue, Englandey Bangamahila (A Bengali Lady in England) in Bengali. A year later in 1883, Pandita Ramabai also travelled to England and wrote a letter in Marathi describing her travel experiences, which was later published as Englandcha Pravas (Travel to England). This article reads the two travel accounts together and in relation to one another aiming to compare and juxtapose their differing and at times overlapping navigations and negotiations with the West in an attempt to understand the early expression of gendered subjectivities via narratives of travel at a time when both travel and writing by women were discouraged, if not proscribed. With a focus on two related aspects—(1) the textual construction of the ‘self’ and (2) the trope of the reverse female gaze on the West—the paper argues that these travel writings produce as they record the making of distinct modern female subjectivities at the end of the nineteenth century.

In 1882, Krishnabhabini Das travelled to England and wrote a travelogue, Englandey Bangamahila (A Bengali Lady in England) in Bengali. A year later in 1883, Pandita Ramabai also travelled to Englan...

23/09/2024

In examining the religious implications of printing, there is a scholarly consensus that Protestant Christianity, rather than Catholicism, played a central role in popularising print technology by disseminating religious materials in vernacular languages. This article builds upon this widely accepted hypothesis and seeks to explore the religious aspects of print modernity in Kerala, a southern state in India. The focus of this study is on the Catholic Church’s engagement with printing and the development of Catholic print capitalism in Kerala, with a special emphasis on the nineteenth century until the 1870s. This paper investigates how the Catholic Church interacted with and mediated with the printing press as an agent of modernity, particularly in response to the flourishing Protestant missionary engagements in the region.

In examining the religious implications of printing, there is a scholarly consensus that Protestant Christianity, rather than Catholicism, played a central role in popularising print technology by ...

23/09/2024

Common across India’s Smart Cities Mission (SCM) projects are ‘smart’ components added to existing surveillance infrastructure, termed surveillant assemblages here. Surveillant assemblages resonate powerfully in Northeast cities where surveillance has been woven into the urban fabric for decades. Using Imphal, Manipur, this paper explores the following proposition: despite decades of crushing surveillance, enhanced surveillant assemblages under the SCM resonate as promises for a more ‘developed’ city. Analysing different surveillant assemblages draws attention to harmonies and tensions between ideas about the future of the city and the SCM. It explores surveillant assemblages from the perspective of three groups. First, for civilian authorities, enhanced surveillance promises law and order and to speed up the city, making it more ‘developed’. Second, for the military and paramilitary, enhanced surveillance brings more of the city under their gaze while simultaneously eroding the power of counter-insurgent infrastructure based on slowing the city down. Third, enhanced surveillance appeals to citizens to track foreign bodies through horizontal relations—variously, non-local, non-citizen (including refugees) and ethnic ‘others’—in articulating rights to the city based on exclusion.

Common across India’s Smart Cities Mission (SCM) projects are ‘smart’ components added to existing surveillance infrastructure, termed surveillant assemblages here. Surveillant assemblages resonate...

23/09/2024

This paper argues for the significance of s*x work as a figurative and affective reference point in the production of ideas of romance, risk and respectability in public culture through a reading of contemporary Hindi cinema. Reading the films Jab We Met (2007) and Pink (2016), this paper asks what the s*x worker does in the films’ narratives when she herself is absented from it but brought up suggestively. It proposes suggestion as a figurative technique deployed in the films to mediate a tension about knowing and identifying s*x work as well as to produce an ideology of romance, personhood and injury, critical to assemblages of femininity in these films. This paper argues that such a reading of films that privileges the figuration of s*x work through what may otherwise be seen as a minor invocation, presents the opportunity to critically examine naturalised ideas of romance, risk and respectability that find expression in them. It makes the case for the figure of the s*x worker as an important node of affective intensification in the larger sphere of public s*xuality.

This paper argues for the significance of s*x work as a figurative and affective reference point in the production of ideas of romance, risk and respectability in public culture through a reading o...

19/09/2024

Anglophone pulp fiction has been identified by Paula Rabinowitz as an important site for the production of modernity. This paper argues that Urduphone novels written by and for women likewise grappled with contemporary social issues and provided an important forum for the discussion of changing gender dynamics. Women novelists wrote fiction that engaged with intergenerational anxieties about changing power relations within the household. Debates on women’s freedom were inscribed in what were called ‘social’ novels, even while the women-centric reading experience was propelled by the engines of print capitalism. This study traces the trajectory of mid-twentieth-century gender debates by conducting a close reading of Urdu novels by A.R. Khatun and Razia Butt. It also argues that, ultimately, reading for pleasure was an important way for women to participate actively in larger social debates about gender, religion and nationhood itself.

Anglophone pulp fiction has been identified by Paula Rabinowitz as an important site for the production of modernity. I argue that Urduphone novels written by and for women likewise grappled with c...

19/09/2024

The study examines Ameena Hussein’s 2009 novel, The Moon in the Water, with the objective of unveiling an alternative form of religious faith and belonging among Sri Lankan Muslim women. This investigation delves into the intricate dynamics at play, wherein religious and cultural negotiations unfold within a multi-ethnic context. The primary focus is on unravelling the temporal and spatial stratification of mourning practices adopted by Muslim women in response to the encroachment of Wahhabi influences in Sri Lanka during the early 1980s. Moreover, the research underscores the practice of idda (the widow’s four months and ten days of required mourning) within the context of marriage and gender experiences. It illuminates how these women manoeuvre across areas of subversion, resistance and cultural norms, finally questioning and redefining the peripheries of their lives.

The study examines Ameena Hussein’s 2009 novel, The Moon in the Water, with the objective of unveiling an alternative form of religious faith and belonging among Sri Lankan Muslim women. This inves...

18/09/2024

Our latest issue with a special section on Anthropological Knowledge in South Asia is now available online! https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/csas20/47/1