The Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life presents

"Secularism in Contemporary India"

A discussion with Christophe Jaffrelot (Alliance Visiting Professor; Sciences Po); Thomas Blom Hansen (Anthropology, University of Amsterdam), and Rajeev Bhargava (Political Science, University of Delhi and Director, Center for the Study of Developing Societies).

Co-sponsored by the Alliance Program; the Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures; and the Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration and Religion.

Time: 10:30am – 12:30pm
Location: Room 1512, International Affairs Building, 420 West 118th Street

"Forests and the Environmental History of India"
A talk by Kalyanakrishnan (Shivi) Sivaramakrishnan (Yale)

This talk will explore how the definition and management of boundaries between wildness and civility in Indian society and the relation of ideas of nature to different aspects of social life -- labor, aesthetics, politics, commerce, or agriculture – are interconnected historical processes that inform environmental history. Using the vantage point of forest history, the domain of environmental history in which the most robust body of scholarly debate exists in India, the talk will examine this rich literature to ask questions that newer and emerging environmental histories of India, especially as they deal with questions of water, air, industry, and climate change, may find generative for their own development.

Kalyanakrishnan (Shivi) Sivaramakrishnan is Professor of Anthropology, Yale University; Professor of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Yale; Co-Director, Program in Agrarian Studies; and Chair, South Asian Studies Council, McMillan Center for International and Area Studies. He completed an MA in History at Jamia Millia Islamia University; an MES in Environmental Studies at the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Yale; and a PhD in Anthropology at Yale. He is the author of Modern Forests: Statemaking and Environmental Change in Colonial Eastern India. Next year will see the publication of two edited volumes, The State in India after Liberalization: Interdisciplinary Perspectives; and the two-volume Environmental History of India: A Reader.

Time: 4:00pm – 5:30pm
Location: Knox Hall, Room 208, 606 West 122nd Street, between Broadway and Claremont Avenue

A talk by Farzana Shaikh (Royal Institute of International Affairs)

"Identity, Ethnicity and Democracy: The case of Pakistan"

Co-Sponsored by the Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures

More than sixty years after its creation in 1947, Pakistan remains plagued by fierce ethnic divisions and the absence of stable democratic institutions. Explanations for their persistence vary widely with attention focused overwhelmingly on the conditions of unequal access to state power that favor some ethnic groups over others and on repeated interventions by the military, which have eroded the foundations of popular democracy. The speaker will argue that the uncertain terms of Pakistan's national identity and the state's vexed relationship with ‘Islam' have been at least as important in deepening ethnic discord and negating plural definitions of ‘the Pakistani'. This uncertainty and the chronic lack of consensus over ‘Islam', the speaker will suggest, have been no less responsible for fuelling exclusionary political discourses. They, in turn, have affected constitutional development by encouraging the country's governing elites to seek a monopoly over the expression of Islam in an attempt to generate power that lies for the most part beyond the reach of mass democratic politics.

Farzana Shaikh is an Associate Fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) in London. She was a Scholar in Residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 2006-07, and has lectured on Pakistan and Islam in South Asia at universities throughout the United Kingdom, Europe, and the United States. She is the author of Making Sense of Pakistan (2009) and Community and Consensus in Islam: Muslim Representation in Colonial India, 1860-1947 (1989).

Time: 6:00pm – 7:30pm
Location: Knox Hall, Room 208, 606 West 122nd Street, between Broadway and Claremont Avenue

A talk by Ramnarayan Rawat (South Asian Studies, University of Pennsylvania)

"A new history of untouchability: the making of a Dalit movement in North India"

ABSTRACT
Every Dalit caste in India is defined solely in reference to a supposedly impure occupation that provides the basis for their untouchability -- this dominant assumption has shaped the study of Dalit society and history in South Asian academia. The persistence of the stereotype that Chamars are leather workers, spanning both colonial and postcolonial contexts, demonstrates the constitutive relationship between imagined occupation and the representation of Dalit identities. In the case of Chamars, who constitute fourteen percent of the total population of the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, it is leather-work. A key objective of my book is to demonstrate the intellectual genealogy of the association between untouchability and occupation which has been crucial to framing existing understandings of the origins and practice of untouchability in India. Second, this assumption has also played an influential role in conditioning the research questions that have been asked in the study of Dalit society and history. Dr. Rawat's book, "A New History of Untouchability: Colonialism, Nationalism, History, and the Making of Dalit identity in North India," questions this dominant assumption by arguing that the shared framework of colonialism versus nationalism in South Asian historiography has prevented us from taking seriously Dalits as historical actors with their own agendas.

Time: 4:00pm - 5:30pm
Location: Room 1, Faculty House, 64 Morningside Drive (between 116th – 118th Streets)
Directions to the meeting at Faculty House: http://facultyhouse.columbia.edu/content/contact-us#Directions

The talk will be followed by a no-host dinner (about $22) at Faculty House. If you wish to attend the Seminar Dinner following Dr. Rawat's talk, please RSVP as soon as possi

''To persuade them into speech and action': Political Tamil and the Tamil Political, Madras 1905-1919'
A talk by Bernard Bate (Yale)

All the elements of 20th century politics in Tamilnadu cohere in 1918-1919: human and natural rights, women's rights, the labor movement, linguistic nationalism, and even the politics of caste reservation. Much has been written of how this politics was mediated by newspapers, handbills, and chapbooks, as the dominant narrative of such events privileges the circulation of print and print culture of vernacular language. This talk explores the relatively less well known story of the role and impact of vernacular oratory on the development of the mass political in Tamilnadu from the Swadeshi movement (1905-1908) to the formation of labour unions (1917-1919) and the explicit attempt to persuade non-elites into speech, action, and ultimately politics. I will argue that Tamil oratory was an infrastructural element in the production of the political, at least the political as we understand it in 20th century Tamilnadu where oratory became the defining activity of political practice. When elites made the conscious move to begin addressing the common man, when Everyman was called to join into the political, a new agency was formed along with a new definition of what politics would look like. Ultimately, the talk will consider what such new agency and definitions entail for an understanding of what constitutes the political generally and the Tamil political in particular.

Bernard Bate is an Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology at Yale University. He received his MA and PhD in Anthropology at Chicago. His most recent book, Tamil Oratory and the Dravidian Aesthetic: Democratic Practice in South India was published in 2009 by Columbia University Press.

Time: 4:00pm – 6:00pm
Location: Knox Hall, Room 208, 606 West 122nd Street, between Broadway and Claremont Avenue