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The Manipal Centre for Humanities meets the Centre for South Asian Studies

LECTURE #1

Ageing and Later Life Caregiving Arrangements in Urban India

By Jagriti Gangopadhyay

This lecture will be examining how ageing experiences, intergenerational relationships, and eldercare are shaped in a globalized India. Although, the law emphasizes on the role of the family to provide later life care, nonetheless, increasingly eldercare is becoming market (private companies providing a host of caregiving services to the older adults of urban India) oriented. Additionally, post the pandemic, virtual care has emerged as a strong option for later life care. Against this backdrop, this lecture will highlight how family care, virtual care and market-based care determines ageing experiences in urban India.

Jagriti Gangopadhyay is currently an Assistant Professor at the Manipal Centre for Humanities. She did her PhD from the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar. Recently she was awarded the Shastri Publication Grant by the Shastri Indo Canadian Institute for her monograph titled Culture, Context and Aging of Older Indians: Narratives from India and Beyond, published by Springer. This year she co-edited a book titled Eldercare Issues in China and India, published by Routledge: UK. Her work analyzes the intersections between health, cultural practices, laws, and policies among older adults.

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The Manipal Centre for Humanities is one of two Centres of Excellence under the Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE)–MAHE itself was one of the six original Institutes of Eminence recognized by the Government of India in 2018. Over the last decade, the Manipal Centre of Humanities has helped pioneer in India a strong multi-disciplinary, research-driven, and India-relevant approach to undergraduate and graduate education. Its faculty are internationally recognized in three key disciplines–literature, sociology and history–and many of its students and alumni are at the forefront of South Asia research in India, Europe and North America.

This is the first of a series of encounters, planned for the coming years, in which research and teaching institutions in South Asia represented by their faculty will be invited the Centre for South Asian Studies to present their work, discuss shared interests, and meet and exchange as collectives dealing with the same global challenges. A series of talks by colleagues from the Manipal Centre of Humanities will lead up to a panel discussion in which the MCH and the CSAS communities will be given the opportunity to begin an open-ended conversation.

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*no registration required*

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Horror films often depict ghosts wreaking havoc on the living. Scholars of horror have understood the genre’s specters as returns of the repressed that can, like nightmares, be decoded from the fantastical façade of the films. Ghost stories are unscrambled in this analytic process, symbolic representations read back down to the unremembered traumas that they “came from”: the psychic, cultural, and national histories reflected in the broken mirror of horror. This has been a highly influential—and redemptive—-reading strategy by which the most disdained of popular film genres has become the most written about over the last few decades. Yet, after all that reading and writing, others have argued, something is still left on the table: the sensuousness of the horror film. The fullness of bodies, objects, and spaces, of shadows, sounds and colors, helps achieve the immediate visceral impact after which the genre is named. It gives presence to the phantom worlds of horror, and affective force to our viewing of them. But where does this presence come from? In this talk, I offer one answer. I propose that horror encrypts and unleashes the material history of filmmaking in spectral forms. This history is typically described as “behind the scenes,” but the materialities of celluloid editing, location filming, props, and makeup effects (in)form the genre’s representations, becoming perceptible in stylistic and affective “excess.” Focusing on a cycle of horror films made in India between the late 1970s and early 1990s, this talk will explore the spectral materialities of Bombay horror as clues to the forgotten conditions in which horror films were once made, and as traces that still shape sensory encounters with the films.

Kartik Nair is an Assistant Professor of Film Studies in the Department of Film and Media Arts at Temple University in Philadelphia. He is currently completing his first book, Seeing Things, which focuses on low-budget horror films made in 1980s Bombay. Examining the films for spectral traces of material histories of film production, regulation, and circulation, Seeing Things explores the aesthetic and historiographic implications of spectral materialities. Kartik’s writing has appeared in Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (formerly Cinema Journal), Film Quarterly, Discourse, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and The New Inquiry. He is a core editor of BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies and oversees the journal’s book reviews.

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Abstract:

There’s a little known story of nearly 3000 Chinese Indians who were incarcerated in a prison camp in Deoli, Rajasthan in 1962 following a border war between India and China. Families, parts of families and single men were taken across India to the west to be imprisoned for up to five years in some cases. What was their experience in the Camp like? And where are they now?

“The Deoliwallahs” explores the identity of incarcerated people. The stories of the survivors are beautiful and heart-breaking: a 13-year old girl who became the head of the family, three friends who forged their bonds amid despair and the vivid memories of the Camp that haunted a mother in her nightmares. Their story is more relevant now than ever as regional wars over territory rages on and injustice against civilians is a stark reality.

Speaker Bio:

Joy Ma grew up in India and has lived in Kolkata and New Delhi. She attended Lady Shri Ram College and graduate school at the New School. She recently published the book The Deoliwallahs: The True Story of the 1962 Chinese-Indian Incarceration. Joy was one of a handful of children born in the Deoli internment camp in Rajasthan. Her connection to the community in the US and Canada taps into the rich narratives of the group. She is co-producer of "Voices of Deoli", a film in post-production.

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Pathbreakers: New Postdoctoral Research on South Asia at U of T

This talk will discuss Dr. Rachelle Saruya’s research on Myanmar Buddhist nuns’ formal and informal education. Dr. Saruya focuses on fourteen Buddhist nuns at one nunnery in Sagaing, Myanmar, their experiences with education and monastic training, and their spaces of choice or convenience that help mediate these practices. By allowing the spatial aspects of one nunnery to organize her investigation, Dr. Saruya is able to move through each building, encountering nuns at different life stages and with various aspirations, creating a much more complex picture than if she had used what might be called an “ideal” renunciant with a linear and straightforward educational path. More specifically, this approach enables her to touch on themes of secular vs. monastic education, child nuns vs. older ones, disability and minority status, reformed nunneries vs. old institutions, and lineages, among other matters. While examining this nunnery, Dr. Saruya also explores the connections this nunnery has to two seminary type nunneries and monasteries in the area that help in the nun-making process.

Rachelle Saruya is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Historical Studies at UTM where she is teaching two courses and embarking on a new research project centered on child-wishing rituals in contemporary Myanmar. She is originally from the San Francisco Bay Area.

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NOTE: The event will now be conducted virtually on Zoom due to weather conditions. Please register to receive the Zoom link.

Pathbreakers: New Postdoctoral Research on South Asia at U of T

The saint, prophet, liberated guru, or enlightened being occupies a powerful place not only in their respective religious spheres, but in the social lives of the cultures that create and maintain them. Yet how are these social categories “created” and through what means are their parameters delimited over the last century and a half as technologies of mass comminication have transformed the epistemology of discourse?

To approach these questions, this paper focuses on the “living arahants” of early twentieth-century Burma, examining how the narratives surrounding this supposedly enlightened class are negotiated and contested in the public sphere through the mediums of photography and print. By exploring the figure of the Mingun Jetavana Sayadaw (1868-1955), a Burmese scholar-monk and pioneer of insight, or vipassanā meditation, it is argued that the application of these categories is not just a religious act, but profoundly political—determining who wields the power of definition itself.   

BIO:

Tony Scott is a PhD Candidate at the Department for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto, working under Professor Christoph Emmrich. His research focuses on the relationship between Pali commentary, insight (vipassanā) meditation, and Buddhist statecraft in twentieth-century Burma/Myanmar. Tony’s dissertation centres on the Milindapañha-aṭṭhakathā (Commentary on the Questions of King Milinda) of the Mingun Jetavan Sayadaw (1868-1954), a rare example of a modern Buddhist commentary (aṭṭhakathā) that caused controversy amongst the highest levels of the Burmese monastic community (saṅgha) and first independence government.

As a 2018-2019 Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation Dissertation Fellow in Buddhist Studies, Tony spent the year working in Myanmar, Tokyo and Hong Kong, and as a 2019-2020 Bukkyō Dendō Kyokai Foreign Scholar Fellow, he will finish his dissertation at the University of Tokyo under Professors Norihisa Baba and Ryosuke Kuramoto.

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Abstract:

The emergence of the digital financial services ecosystem in India has widened the digital divide leading to the financial exclusion of marginalized populations and negatively impacting economic development. This research addresses the United Nation’s sustainable development goal of poverty reduction with the advances in information technology. Illiteracy, lack of digital literacy, and distrust of digital payment systems are widely prevalent among the marginalized in the Global South. This research seeks to understand the causes and consequences of the financial exclusion of impoverished users and find solutions to foster financial inclusion from community organizations, fintech and political institutions. The research aims to comprehend the power dynamics determined by political institutions and conglomerates for private gain vs. the public interest for digital financial platforms in India. It illuminates the gaps that lead to information asymmetries arising from economic and information policies. This research tracks digital policies to facilitate the adoption of mobile applications for monetary transactions and the experience of marginalized micro-entrepreneurs with digital financial services. Research questions include: How has the emergence of the digital financial service ecosystem in India impacted social practices around money and economic development for the marginalized? What is the role of political institutions in arranging the public and private power dynamics for digital financial platforms?

Aditi Bhatia-Kalluri is a fifth-year Ph.D. student at the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto. Her research focuses on how digital policies shape the information practices of marginalized users in the Global South. The research tracks adaptation to mobile phones by auditing everyday user challenges and finding gaps that lead to information asymmetry. Aditi earned a Master of Digital Media from Toronto Metropolitan University and B.A. Hons in New Media Studies from the University of Toronto.

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Policy reports on the “status of women” constitute one of the most abundant archives on the world’s women in the second half of the twentieth century. This talk offers an account of and a reckoning with the promises and limits of the social scientific report through an analysis of archives of early “status of women” reports, focusing on reports produced in South Asia from the 1970s to the 1990s.

Speaker:

Durba Mitra is the Richard B. Wolf Associate Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and Acting Director of the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Harvard University. She is the author of Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought (Princeton University Press, 2020).

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The India-Canada Association Lecture

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This talk presents ongoing research on the Tantric traditions of Kashmir in the 17th and 18th centuries. It is based on a newly prepared critical edition and translation (with Prof. Ben Williams, Naropa University) of Sanskrit hymns composed by the followers of the prolific and influential Kashmirian author, Sābib Kaula. Many of the hymns are about their guru and their lineage, but others reframe earlier Śaiva and Śākta traditions popular in Kashmir. This talk focuses on three hymns: the Bhairavīśaktistotra (modelled on Abhinavagupta’s Bhairavastotra) and Tripurasundarīstotra of Gaṇeśa Bhaṭṭāraka and the Svacchandamaheśvarāṣṭaka of Govinda Kaula. Based on this analysis, it argues for new perspectives on the history and evolution of religious and literary traditions in Kashmir.

Speaker Bio:

Hamsa Stainton is an Associate Professor in the School of Religious Studies at McGill University. His recent research focuses on a popular genre of Sanskrit devotional poetry in north India, the hymn of praise (stotra). Recent publications include Tantrapuṣpāñjali: Tantric Traditions and Philosophy of Kashmir; Studies in Memory of Pandit H.N. Chakravarty (co-edited with Bettina Bäumer) and Poetry as Prayer in the Sanskrit Hymns of Kashmir (Oxford University Press, 2019).

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This event is a keynote presentation as part of the Centre for South Asian Studies Graduate Symposium 2023 and is open to public.

Keynote speaker:

Professor Nayanika Mathur (Professor of Anthropology and South Asian Studies, School of Anthropology & Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford)

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This talk weaves together beastly tales of big cats that make prey of humans in India to ask what they may be telling us about a planet in crisis. There are many theories on why and how a big cat comes to prey on humans, with the ecological collapse emerging as a central explanatory factor. Yet, uncertainty over the precise cause of crookedness persists. This talk explores the many lived complexities that arise from this absence of certain knowledge to offer new insights into both the governance of nonhuman animals and their intimate entanglements with humans. It deploys ethnographic storytelling to explain the Anthropocene in three critical ways: as method, as a way of reframing human-nonhuman relations on the planet, and as a political tool indicating the urgency of academic engagement with the climate crisis.  

Image credit: Nayan Khanolkar

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Abstract:

How did statistics become a public good in modern India? In this presentation, I trace the institutional history of statistics in 20th century India. Nationalist statisticians, on the one hand, advocated using disciplinary statistics to constitute a scientifically conscious, statistical-minded public. On the other, their work demonstrated how only a certain pedagogical training could result in using and understanding statistical reasoning and data. How did this dilemma between statistics as public knowledge and as a domain of expertise shape the kind of postcolonial public that nationalist statisticians envisioned? What notions of community and nationalism came to be envisioned following the dissemination of statistical thinking as a public form of reasoning? Historicizing the rise of statistical reasoning in colonial modernity will enable us to reflect on how statistical data came to be seen as objective and at the same time can be mobilized to exclude and discriminate against communities.

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Sayori Ghoshal completed her PhD at the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies (MESAAS), Columbia University, New York. At present, she is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science & Technology (IHPST), University of Toronto. She is working on her first monograph, “Calculated Identities: How Difference became Minority in Modern India”. Her work on contemporary politics of Hindu nationalism, and the intersection of religious, caste and racial differences have been published as journal articles in the ‘Economic and Political Weekly’ and ‘History Compass’ as well as an essay in an edited volume, ‘Nation, Nationalism and the Public Sphere’. Her current research is funded by the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science & Technology (IHPST) and by the International Network for Research in Science and Belief in Society (INSBS), University of Birmingham.