Friday, March 11th, 2016 Dissent in Contemporary India

Description

Please join scholars of South Asia from UofT, York, Waterloo and Carleton for a discussion on freedom of speech and the public sphere in contemporary India: the JNU crisis and threats to cultural and educational institutions; the targeting of Dalits and the events leading to the suicide of Rohith Vemula; Islamophobia and the situation in Kashmir. The event aims to foster a cross-regional, interdisciplinary, and public conversation on the university’s role as a space for critical thinking and minority voices. All are welcome.

Idrisa Pandit is the Associate Professor and Director of the Studies in Islam, an interdisciplinary program at Renison University College, University of Waterloo. Idrisa is a native of Kashmir and lives in Waterloo. Idrisa is passionate about issues of social justice, interfaith dialogue, and peacebuilding. For combining her scholarship with social activism, Idrisa was named Woman of the Year, Oktober Fest 2015.

Chinnaiah Jangam is a historian specializing in modern South Asia. He finished his Ph. D. from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, UK in 2005 and his thesis focused on the intellectual and political writings of Dalits against caste inequality and oppression in colonial South India. Currently he is working on a monograph based on his Ph. D. thesis entitled “ earnings from the Margins: Dalits and the Making of Modern India.” He is keenly interested in issues of social justice, human rights, self-respect and dignity, democracy and citizenship. Dr. Jangam has been the recipient of Felix Scholarship for doctoral studies in England. He was also awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has been a post-doctoral fellow at New York University.

Malavika Kasturi teaches in the area of modern South Asia in the Department of History. She is also graduate faculty at the the Department for the Study of Religion. She finished her B.A. and M.A at Jawaharlal Nehru University in India and received her PhD at Cambridge University. Her research interests include the histories of gender and kinship, law and legal history, and their interface with religion in modern South Asia. Dr Kasturi’s first monograph, Embattled Identities, Rajput Lineages and the Colonial State in Nineteenth Century Colonial North India (Oxford University Press, 2002) analysed the reconstitution of the family and martial masculinities amongst elite lineages in British India, against the backdrop of colonial ideologies, political culture and material realities. In this context, Dr. Kasturi has also written about how kinship hierarchies in a variety of contexts were restructured in conversation with colonial legal discourses on property, succession and inheritance. Her research project, ‘Crafting Hindu Publics: Ritual, Religiosity and the Public Sphere in Twentieth Century India’ explores the role orthodox Hindus socio-religious reformers have given to sacred space and ‘everyday’ socio-religious ritual practices in constituting and shaping civil society projects in colonial and postcolonial India. Dr Kasturi’s articles have appeared in edited collections and in journals such as Modern Asian Studies, Studies in History and The Indian Journal of Gender Studies.