2020
Documentary marathon: Anand Patwardhan’s Vivek (Reason)
No plans this Sunday evening? Why not cuddle up on your coach with Anand Patwardhan’s disturbing documentary Vivek (Reason)?
Time: Nov. 8, 2020 5:00 PM–9:30 PM
The battle between faith and reason is universal and ongoing. In India, the world’s largest democracy, the ideology that murdered Mahatma Gandhi has been in power since 2014. The secular democracy that once aspired to the values of enlightenment and non-violence is being dismantled. As accusations fly of “eating cow meat” or “treason of Mother India,” minorities and those who fight for the poor bear the brunt of rising Hindu majoritarianism and a complicit corporate media. The film fearlessly examines the far right at huge rallies but also introduces us to rationalists who, despite appearing on hit lists, lead a growing resistance.
The screening will be followed by a 30-minute interview with Anand Patwardhan filmed at the European premiere of Vivek in Amsterdam.
About Anand Patwardhan
Having made political documentaries for over four decades, Patwardhan pursues diverse issues that are at the crux of social and political life in India. Many of his films were at one time or another banned by state television channels in India and became the subject of litigation by Patwardhan who successfully challenged the censorship rulings in court.
2019
WhatsApp, the digital living room and lived democracy in India
In this Morgenstierne seminar, Philippa Williams from the Queen Mary University of London will discuss the role of the popular digital chat application in transforming everyday politics in urban India.
Time and place: Sep. 4, 2019 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Undervisnings Rom 4, Georg Sverdrups hus
Digital technology is typically presented either as the utopia, the answer to deepening democracy, or increasingly blamed for new dystopian realities. In this paper we examine how social media platforms are transforming spaces of everyday lived democracy in India, drawing on ethnographic research carried out in the lead up to the 2019 Indian national elections.
Drawing on digital ethnographic research from two north Indian cities, this paper considers the role of the ‘WhatsApp group’ as digital infrastructure to think through how WhatsApp has become embedded in India’s social and political fabric since it launched in mid-2010. There are now more WhatsApp users in India than in any other democracy and the platform has become a key tool for political parties to both organise and communicate with voters.
For political actors and ordinary citizens alike, the digital chat application has engendered new practices and meanings and transformed digital-analogue politics in urban India. We interrogate the wider implications of this digital transformation with respect to the reconfiguration of private/public spheres and patterns of inclusion and exclusion in political life.
Philippa Williams is a Senior Lecturer in Geography at Queen Mary University of London, UK. She has over 14 years of research experience in India (Varanasi, New Delhi and Mumbai) on everyday politics of the state, Hindu-Muslim relations, violence/non-violence and the politics of digital development.
The Culture of Cartoons in India
In this Morgenstierne seminar, anthropologist and historian Ritu Khanduri will address question of free speech, laughter, and political caricatures in contemporary India.
Time and place: Mar. 20, 2019 4:15 PM–6:00 PM, Seminar room 12, PAM
The Charlie Hebdo attack and Jyllands Posten's publication of cartoons depicting Prophet Mohammed spurred global attention and debates on free speech and modern liberal democratic rights. But how does the demand for free speech play out in everyday multicultural contexts and in modern democracies? Turning to India's cartooning culture, its past and present, offers a unique vantage point for unraveling the contradictions within liberal demands for free speech and the right to laugh.
Ritu Gairola Khanduri is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas, Arlington. She is the author of Caricaturing culture in India: Cartoons and history in the modern world (Cambridge University Press, 2014).
Double lecture: Prints and death in Hindu India
In this double lecture, Richard Davis and Amy Allocco present their ongoing research on devotional prints and rituals of death in Hindu India.
Time and place: Feb. 14, 2019 2:15 PM–3:45 PM, PAM 360
Richard Davis: The Beginnings of Mass-Produced Devotional Prints in India
A key feature of twentieth- and twenty-first century Hindu devotionalism has been the central role played by mass-produced religious prints, known as God-posters or calendar-prints. The proliferation of these prints has made a profound impact on Hindu visuality and on religious practices over the past one and a half centuries. But where did this form of popular imagery originate? Best known is the major role played by Ravi Varma and the press he founded in 1894 near Bombay. Yet he was not the first: in Maharashtra and especially in Calcutta, there were earlier practitioners and presses. Compared with those of Ravi Varma, these prints are far less well-known.
Working with two print collectors, Richard Davis has been studying the earliest prints produced in Calcutta in the second half of the nineteenth century. These early prints demonstrate unusual experimentation with various artistic media and printing technologies. They reflect a distinctive Bengali regional iconography, quite distinct from the more intentionally pan-Indian imagery promulgated by Ravi Varma and the twentieth century print industry. These prints also raise important questions about reception and ritual deployment of two-dimensional prints, available for the first time to Hindu consumers on a broad basis.
Richard Davis is Professor of Religious Studies at Bard College, NY.
Amy Allocco: Dealing with the Dead in Tamil Ritual: Desire, Dialogue, and Deception
Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Tamil Nadu, South India, this presentation examines the ongoing ritual relationships that many non-Brahmin Hindus maintain with their dead relatives. Specifically, it analyzes a category of ritual undertakings to honor a family’s pūvāṭaikkāri, a term which literally means “she who wears flowers” and refers to a class of women who died as auspicious wives with living husbands and thus were eligible to be adorned with flowers.
Within this category Allocco focuses on two main types of ritual performances: the annual offerings made at a water source during which the dead woman is worshiped, dressed, and fed before being asked to safeguard the family in the coming year, and the occasional invitation (aḻaittal) ceremonies that call the departed back into the world and convince them to take up residence in the family’s home shrine as a protective deity (vīṭu teyvam). These more elaborate rites rely on the skills of ritual musicians (pampaikkārar), who summon the dead and encourage them to speak through their living kin in what are often dramatic and tense exchanges characterized by grief, recrimination, and regret.
In closing Allocco identify specific ritual and social possibilities that are created for those who engage in these ongoing transactions with the dead and argue that these possibilities ultimately hinge on the pūvāṭaikkāri’s willingness and ability to speak. Indeed, in these invitation rites dialogue is fundamental to human-divine engagement, for the dead must descend on a human host and answer questions, dispense advice, and agree to consult with the family when called upon in the future in order for the ceremony to be deemed successful.
Amy Allocco is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Elon University, NC.
2018
Votes, Publics and Political Action in Contemporary India
In this double Morgenstierne seminar Nicolas Martin and Lisa Björkman analyze defining aspects of Indian democracy
Time and place: May 31, 2018 2:15 PM–5:00 PM, PAM seminarrom 1
The 'Free Vote' in India
Scholars have noted that while the Indian state may frequently deny or violate its’ citizens fundamental rights, the one right that it has upheld is people’s right to the free and secret vote. Moreover scholars frequently claim that ordinary voters—Dalits in particular—have broken the chains that once shackled them to their upper caste political overlords. But is the vote in India always free and secret, and is it truly the case that the erosion of caste-based power structures means that everyone can now vote freely?
Evidence gathered during the Punjab Block Samiti elections of 2013 suggests not. In this presentation, Nicolas Martin will illustrate some of the mechanisms through which Indian voters can still be monitored and coerced despite the formally secret vote.
Nicolas Martin is Professor of Modern Indian / South Asian Studies, University of Zürich.
'Publics' and 'Customers': Mass Assembly as Political Speech in Mumbai
This talk explores a somewhat curious use of the word 'public' in the political life of Mumbai, where the word is used to describe cash-compensated crowds assembling for political gatherings - protest marches, road blocks, campaign rallies. Popular and scholarly discourse tends to dismiss paid crowds as inauthentic, even fraudulent forms of political assembly – reducible to instrumentalist and transactionalist logics.
In this presentation, Lisa Björkman explores a different form of political relationality that may be at work by attending to the way the word 'public' circulates in a very different context in Mumbai, where it is used to describe audiences of lavani dance when the dance is performed in the context of a theatrical stage show. When performed in any other context or venue – in a Sangeet Bari theatre for instance – the audience is described not as a public but rather as customers.
The paper unpacks the meaning of public in relation to its opposite – customer – in the context of lavani audiences in order to make sense of theatrical dimensions of cash-mediated mass political assembly in Mumbai. Understanding public as the opposite of customer insists that we take theatrical forms of mass assembly quite seriously as a form of political utterance and representation.
Lisa Björkman is Assistant Professor, Department of Urban & Public Affairs, University of Louisville.
Informal Indian Workers: Between a Neoliberal Civil Society and a Capitalist State
Morgenstierne seminar lecture: Jonathan Pattenden, University of East Anglia
Time and place: May 14, 2018 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, PA Munchs Hus, seminar room 9, Blindern
Neoliberalism tends to move workers’ collective action from ‘workplace’ to ‘living space’. Drawing on fieldwork among informal precarious labourers working in Karnataka’s agricultural and construction sectors, this paper analyses constraints on labour’s power in sites of production and reproduction.
The state’s role is pivotal - its widespread failure to regulate production sites facilitates ‘super-exploitation’ and channels class struggle towards its own institutions, with contradictory implications. Programmes such as the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme and Construction Workers Welfare Boards provide some material gains and political space while underwriting social stability and the expanded reproduction of Indian capital in a competitive global marketplace.
Meanwhile, in rural sites of reproduction neoliberal microfinance-oriented civil society organisations divide and depoliticise, and may divert workers from their own self-organisation – a key part of the hegemonic practices of a neoliberal capitalist state. If workers’ collective action is to loop back from ‘living space’ to ‘workplace’, then the constraints in both need to be analysed along with the spatial and temporal patterns of organisation likely among informal precarious labourers fragmented within and across sites of production and reproduction.
Cultivating democracy: 15 years of election ethnography from eastern India
Mukulika Banerjee, London School of Economics
Time and place: May 3, 2018 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, TBA
Mukulika Banerjee is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology and Director of the India Studies Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is currently completing a book manuscript based on 15 years of ethnographic data of rural voters and their multivalent engagement with elections and voting activities in West Bengal, India. It is part of her wider interest in the cultural meanings of democracy in South Asia, especially India, and in political anthropology more generally.
Her most recent book Why India Votes? (Routledge 2014), the outcome of a major ESRC Grant, breaks several new grounds both conceptually and methodologically: it examines the reasons why despite varying odds, India’s voter graph continues to rise, making India the largest electoral democracy in the world. Voters across 13 states were asked the same set of questions, and their responses compared and woven into a socio-politico-anthropological narrative on the sacredness of participative political behaviour in a country marred by extreme income inequality, skewed access to resources, and dystopic infrastructural developments, intensified by an asymmetrical rural-urban divide.
Paper Activism: Environmental Struggles in Western India
Kenneth Bo Nielsen, Associate Professor, IKOS.
Time and place: Mar. 15, 2018 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, PAM seminarrom 8
The Indian state, writes Nayanika Mathur, is a paper tiger: An inveterate writer that is obsessed with producing, circulating, storing and decoding paper. Paper, in this rendering, is thus central to the composition, maintenance and assemblage of the Indian state.
While recent anthropological work has productively used the study of documents to highlight the constitutive work they perform across multiple domains within and beyond the state, in this talk I want to look at how paper has also become a central medium through which social activists engage the state and contest state action in the context of struggles over nature.
From petitions and memoranda to fact finding mission reports, household surveys, and grassroots environmental impact assessments, the production and circulation of paper is, I argue, crucial to what activists do when they mobilise to protect the environment. In the presentation I use the case of a highly controversial airport project in the Western Indian state of Goa to analyse the contours and implications of this kind of paper activism.
Political Modernity in the Postcolony: Some Reflections From India's Bhil Heartland
In this seminar, Alf Gunvald Nilsen analyzes the roles historically played by law, civil society, and citizenship in the social movements of Bhil Adivasis in western India
Time and place: Feb. 15, 2018 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Sophus Bugges hus, Blindern, seminarrom 2 (130)
One of the foundational mythologies of sociological Eurocentrism pivots on the proposition that political modernity originated in the West. On this reading, the democratic nation-state, and institutions such as citizenship and civil society are purely Western achievements that only made their way southwards long after they had been consolidated in the north Atlantic realm of the world-system.
The fundamentally problematic nature of this proposition has been evidenced in a compelling body of scholarship that has unearthed the multiple origins of modern statehood, sovereignty, and technologies of governance, as well as in the rich historical work on the Haitian revolution as a founding moment in the transnational historical trajectory of democracy. But how do we conceptualize political modernity in the contemporary postcolony?
This talk engages this question through an analysis of the roles played by law, civil society, and citizenship in the social movements of Bhil Adivasis in western India. Engaging critically with Partha Chatterjee's recent work, I suggest that the meanings and practices that we associate with universalizing democratic vocabularies have always been shaped and reshaped – and, crucially, expanded in more progressive and encompassing directions – by the mobilizations of subaltern groups in the postcolony.
Alf Gunvald Nilsen is Associate Professor at the Department of Global Development and Planning, University of Agder, Norway.
A Sanskrit and Vedic School for Girls in Varanasi
Tradition, Innovation, and Resistance. The Morgenstierne Lecture by Ute Hüsken.
Time and place: Jan. 15, 2018 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Seminarrom 9 PAM
The girls' school Pāṇinikanyāmahāvidyālaya in Varanasi (established 1970) is a resident school for girls' (aged 8 to 22 years) which hosts up to 100 girls from all over India. In this school in-depth practical and theoretical knowledge in Sanskrit and Vedic rituals is imparted to the girls, complemented by training in martial arts, music, and computer sciences.
The presentation discusses the reception of this school and its activities in the influential Brahmin circles in Varanasi, contextualizes this with view of discussions of female religious agency (adhikāra) in Ancient India, and the views of the girls themselves on these matters.
Ute Hüsken is professor of Sanskrit and Head of the Indology Department at the University of Heidelberg.
2017
Enterprise Hindutva: Five Prototypes in Urban India
Morgenstierne Lecture by Sahana Udupa
Time and place: Dec. 1, 2017 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, PA Munchs hus seminarrom 3
The expansion of social media in India has marked a distinct debate culture among the middle classes, shaping a new milieu of ideological affiliations. Amidst a diversity of online voices, social networking sites are active with an alert and assertive group of Hindu nationalist sympathizers whom I call the “ideological warriors of New India”. This talk delineates the new media cultures surrounding this ideological group, and the varied motivations that cluster around the enthusiasm to announce the arrival of the confident “right-wingers”. The talk suggests that this could be best understood as “enterprise Hindutva” which is distinct from a cadre based and organizationally controlled ideological project. The talk will sketch five prototypes of enterprise Hindutva in urban India, and how digital media is crucial for connecting the dispersed agents and providing the conditions for religious nationalism to fluoresce in a net fed urban India.
Prof Dr Sahana Udupa is professor of media anthropology at LMU Munich, where she leads the five year ERC starting grant project on digital media politics: For digital dignity.
The Indus River Basin as Sovereign Space: Nature and the Partition of India
The Morgenstierne Lecture by David Gilmartin
Time and place: Nov. 30, 2017 4:15 PM–6:00 PM, P.A.Munchs hus seminarrom 11
The Indus Basin of contemporary India and Pakistan witnessed the development under British colonial rule of the largest, integrated irrigation system in the world. The development of this system not only transformed production in the region, but also came to play an important role in the ideological justifications for British rule. The bifurcation of the river basin at the time of partition in 1947 thus signaled a crisis both in water management and in the linking of the sovereign claims of both India and Pakistan to control over nature. This talk will examine the history of the basin's development and the consequences that ensued from partition.
David Gilmartin is Distinguished Professor of History at North Carolina State University.
Religious spaces: Shared and contested
In this double lecture, Devleena Ghosh and Vera Lazzaretti introduce two out-of-the-ordinary religious spaces in India, each providing a unique window into the country’s religious complexity.
Time and place: Nov. 1, 2017 2:15 PM–5:00 PM, Seminar room 10, PA Munchs Hus, Blindern
Devleena Ghosh
The Waking God: Desire, Concealment and Syncretic Practices at a Bangalore Church
In the context of escalating religious tensions in India, sites that still openly welcome practitioners of different belief systems face a range of complex issues. At the Holy Infant Jesus Church in Bangalore, there is a shrine set aside for people of non-Christian religions, both Hindu and Muslim, who view this deity as a jagrata or ‘awake’ god who grants boons and wishes. Despite the hardening of boundaries, this site exhibits the persisting appeal of ritual engagement across religious boundaries. The outcome is not always open connections or dialogue but concealment of syncretic practices from others in the supplicants’ communities. What do we make of the peculiar combination of continued appeal and concealment in contemporary India?
Devleena Ghosh is Associate Professor at the Social and Political Sciences Program at the University of Technology, Sydney. She has worked extensively on colonialism and Indian ocean exchange, and is regional editor of the Asian Studies Review.
Vera Lazzaretti
The burden of security: Spatial regulation of religious offense and the geographies of enforcement
What can studies of contested religious sites tell us about how state-imposed security works in practice? This talk presents the background for a new research project on the Kashi Vishwanath temple/Gyan Vapi mosque complex in Banaras (Varanasi), a site that is multiply shared and contested. During and after the Ayodhya campaign, it was targeted by Hindu ‘rightist’ groups as one of the next places to be ‘freed’ from Muslim presence. The project will reconstruct the history of the area and bring out how securitization shapes the lives, religious experiences and relationships of its multiple actors in terms of liveability, mutual respect and the every day practice of social order.
Vera Lazzaretti is a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo. Vera recently joined us from the University of Milano, where she worked on sacred places and spatialized practices of Hinduism.
Borderline nationalism: Blurring Indo-Pak Lines through Indian Border Security Force VCDs
Morgenstierne lecture with Ronie Parciack.
Time and place: Aug. 28, 2017 4:15 PM–6:00 PM, Sem.room 14, P.A. Munchs hus at Blindern
Seven decades have elapsed since the traumatic partition in 1947. Since then the relationship between India and Pakistan has been studded with wars, nuclear arms race, border clashes and terror attacks. Indian news media routinely accuse Pakistan of supporting the perpetrators, thus projecting the neighbouring country as a fierce enemy and a constant threat.
This talk addresses a somewhat surprising set of representations of Indo-Pak relations formulated on the Indian side.The representations appear in video compact discs (VCDs) designed to be played on personal computers. They are never broadcast online, on television or in cinema theatres. To what extent do these VCDs suggest the existence of vernacular socio-religious ideolgies that challenge the hegemonic narrative of Indo-Pak animosity? Drawing on visual ethnography, textual analysis and participant observation, this talk documents a liminal ideology that even appears to be present in the Border Security Force.
Ronie Parciack is a faculty member at the Department of East Asian Studies at Tel Aviv University. Her research interests include vernacular political theology, popular culture as and Indo-Islamic visual culture.
Songs of sameness and syncretism
What could be greater proof of the syncretic history of the Indian subcontinent than the eulogization of Lord Krishna by one of the greatest Sufi mystics of all times? Welcome to a talk by Madhumita Ray, which also will include demonstration and soundbites.
Time and place: May 23, 2017 4:15 PM–6:00 PM, Seminar room 360, P.A.Munchs hus at Blindern
The thirteenth-century Sufi poet and composer Amir Khusrau has made priceless contributions to Hindustani classical music. One of his lesser known contributions is his poetic praise of Lord Krishna, one of the most beloved deities in the Hindu pantheon.
Many of Khusrau's poems were commissioned by the Sufi saint Nizamuddin Auliya. At the night of the auspicious Jamnashtmi festival, Nizamuddin Aulia happened to dream about Lord Krishna. In the dream he was greeted by Lord Krishna, and by the end of it, he promised Krishna that he would get his most talented disciple - Amir Khusrau - to compose an ode to him in the vernacular language.
One of the odes that Khusrau was to compose, envisions the Sufi saint playing Krishna's bansuri flute while the deity himself dances. In another song the poet imagines himself playing Holi (the colour festival) with Lord Krishna in the lanes of Vrindavan.
At a time when the religious pluralism of the subcontinent is under threat, it is vital to remember Khusrau. To what extent is performning his songs about to become a political act?
About the presenter
Madhumita Ray is a Hindustani classical singer who has trained with a number of India's legendary classical maestros. She also masters the semi-classical thumri genre and occasionally experiments with other art forms (including jazz, baul and qawwali). She has performed at numerous prestigious venues in India and abroad.
Spaces of Religion in Mumbai: Spaces of religion in Mumbai: Interdisciplinary perspectives
Morgenstierne Seminar with István Keul, University of Bergen.
Time and place: May 11, 2017 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, PAM seminar room 9
For the past two years, an interdisciplinary research group formed by scholars from the study of religions, sociology, social anthropology, political science and South Asian studies has been working on various aspects related to the socio-cultural dynamics of religion in one of the largest and culturally most diverse cities in the world, Mumbai. Addressing their specific topics, the participating scholars took a spatial approach, avoiding thus the homogenization of religious communities as clear-cut entities. The focus and main interest was on the dynamics of composite spaces (real and imaginary), and on socio-religious constellations and interactions in various metropolitan settings.
The lecture introduces selected themes from the project, such as the crossing of demarcation lines at religious sites that attract large numbers of visitors with different religious backgrounds; the negotiation of inter-religious marriages by ethno-religious communities, civil-society groups, political parties and religious organizations; the extents to which religious festivals as major urban events can become arenas for cross-religious engagement and participation, but also for the communalization of ethno-religious identities. The subproject that will be presented more extensively is the study of multi-religious neighborhoods and the ways in which religious factors contribute to the forging of structures and relations in the residents' day-to-day life.
István Keul is professor in the Study of religions at the Department of Archaeology, History, Cultural Studies and Religion, University of Bergen.
Political Tolerance in India, Pakistan and Uganda
Morgenstierne seminar with Sten Widmalm
Time and place: Feb. 16, 2017 4:15 PM–6:00 PM, Blindern, PA Munchs hus seminarrom 9
What makes people agree to the extension of political rights to those they clearly dislike? Sten Widmalm presents the main findings from his book Political Tolerance in the Global South: Images from India, Pakistan and Uganda (Routledge 2016).
The presentation offers an account of the factors that shape the foundations of a society and its capacity to be democratic, but where the need for the protection of human rights is great and where the state is either weak or even constitutes a counter-force against the rights of individuals and groups.
Sten Widmalm is Professor in Political Science at the Department of Government, Uppsala University Sweden.
Prof. Caleb Simmons: “Rascally Infidels:” Politico-religious transgression in international correspondences of Ṭipū Sultān
Time and place: Feb. 1, 2017 4:15 PM–6:00 PM, P.A. Munchs hus: Seminarrom 6
In this talk, I will discuss “religious transgression” in the political theology of Ṭipū Sultān, a Muslim ruler in South India during the early modern period (r. 1783-1799). Particularly, I will examine his construction of religious fidelity and infidelity as it relates to a variety of political and military allies and enemies. For Ṭipū Sultān, the status of other political entities as “believers” or as “infidels” was not constituted through communal identity (i.e. religious tradition) but in their willingness to ally themselves with him and his kingdom.
Using the rhetoric of fidelity and infidelity in a series of correspondences to French and Ottoman representatives, I will argue that Ṭipū Sultān and his court saw kingship as an office of divine election that was affirmed through martial success and his sovereignty as a fulfillment of divine injunction. By choosing to ally with him and his kingdom, other political bodies could prove their divine election also. Those that did not where labeled as infidels.
By considering this unique form of politico-religious transgression, we can see the flexibility and fuzzy boundaries of religious belonging and not-belonging in early modern South Indian political theology.
Prof. Caleb Simmons (Ph.D. University of Florida, 2014), Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies and Classics at the University of Arizona (USA), is currently KHK Fellow at the Centrum für Religionswissenschaftliche Studien at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. His research focus is on the South Indian kingdom of Mysore and their devotion to the goddess Cāmuṇḍēśvari.
Documentary: Thrust into Heaven
How are blasphemy controversies in Pakistan linked to forced conversion? This is the question addressed by Jürgen Schaflechner's new documentary film "Thrust into heaven" (2016). The filmmaker will introduce his own film and respond to questions from the audience after the screening.
Time and place: Dec. 12, 2016 5:00 PM–6:30 PM, Undervisningsrom 2, Georg Sverdrups Hus
Cases of “forced conversion” of Hindu girls in Pakistan often have a similar trajectory: a young woman disappears from her house, or place of work, for some days and resurfaces again as a married and newly converted Muslim.
Changing one’s religion from Islam to any other faith would mean a denial of the Prophet Mohammad. This is thus apostasy in Pakistan, which is an illegal act under the blasphemy laws (§295 Pakistan Penal Code).
Once a conversion occurs and has been publicized, the combination of legal issues and the dominant street power of extremist religious groups makes it impossible for the newly converted girl to go back to her former life. Thus the acceptance of Islam in Pakistan is unidirectional. Unfortunately, these conversions are often utilized to conceal criminal acts including kidnapping, human trafficking, and rape. These cases also carry implications of “patriarchal opportunism” (Toor 2011), whereby religious sentiments are manipulated as a means of controlling female sexuality and denying women’s autonomy in choosing a spouse.
Following the work of Sanjesh, Ravi, and Rita, three volunteers at the Pakistan Seva Trust (a Hindu NGO in the Islamic Republic), the film reveals the complexities behind forced conversions in today’s Pakistan and seeks to disentangle them from a simply religious move.
Jürgen Schaflechner is a social anthropologist (PhD University of Heidelberg) who has conducted extensive research on Hindus and Hindu pilgrimage in Pakistan.
Two Morgenstierne Lectures: Angelika Malinar and Paul Rollier
Time and place: Nov. 2, 2016 12:15 PM–4:00 PM, Georg Morgenstiernes hus seminarrom 205
Angelika Malinar: Reframing a traditional instititution Hindu monasteries (matha) in Modernizing India
Since the beginning of the Common Era monastic institutions dedicated to the study and practice of different religious-philosophical knowledge traditions played an important role in the cultural-political landscape of India. While Buddhist and Jaina monasticism has been widely studied, the importance of monasteries in the history of Hinduism has received less attention.
The lecture firdeals with the history and multiple functions of Hindu maṭhas serving religious, educational as well as political-economic purposes. It then focusses on the changing perceptions of this traditional institution in the colonial period. Colonial administrators sought reduce the multi-functionality of the monasteries by defining them as purely religious institutions subject to charitable law. Their traditional educational function was to be taken over by schools and colleges based on the British system. This process was accompanied by a criticism of maṭhas as places of exploitation and indoctrination. Yet, they remained important institutions of social and religious life in modern Hinduism.
In the postcolonial period they, on the one hand, continued to be subject to various forms of state administration, and, on the other hand, partially resumed their role as important centres of education. The contemporary situation will be discussed with respect to the role of Hindu monasteries in Orissa / Odisha.
Paul Rollier: Walking for Maryam's grace Christian piety in the Pakistani Punjab
Every year, thousands of Pakistanis walk over great distances to reach the village of Maryamabad and celebrate the nativity of the Virgin Mary. This paper offers an ethnographic account of the three-day walk from Lahore to Maryamabad, and the subsequent mela held around the shrine of Mary. Following a group of male Lahori youth, I document the growing popularity of this gruelling yet playful ritual established by Belgian Capuchins in the 1940s. Most pilgrims are working-class Punjabi Christians, descendants of untouchable caste converted to Christianity. But the language of ritual practices deployed in this setting is interchangeable with that of Muslim shrines, allowing for a wide participation of non-Christians.
Often described as excessively Islamized, or as a superficial recasting of Hinduism, the performance of local Christian piety upsets the received nomenclature of Pakistan's religious communities as discrete entities. In particular, I show how the pilgrimage enables participants to display an assertive Christian identity, but in so doing compels themselves to contend with accusations of Hindu idolatry and with their status as vulnerable 'untouchables'. While the nature of this ritual trivializes religious affiliation by accommodating non-Christian participation, it reinscribes local Christians' past Hindu identity within the world of caste.
Hindu priestesses (Strī Purohitā) in Pune
A Talk by Ute Hüsken
Time and place: Sep. 7, 2016 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, P.A.Munch's Hus Seminarrom 7
According to many Brahminic texts in Sanskrit, Vedic learning, initiation into priesthood, and the performance of rituals "for others" (parārtha) is the exclusive right of male members of Brahmin castes. Members of non-Brahmin castes, but also women are traditionally excluded from the right to even listen to the Veda, lest learn specialized religious / ritual theory and practice. However, we witness a radical change in contemporary India: In spite of initially strong opposition from orthodox Brahmin circles, today more and more women receive training in Sanskrit knowledge and ritual practice.
Since the late 1970s, a very active center of female priestly education is in the Indian state of Maharashtra, and here especially the large city Pune. At present, this still seems to be a largely upper middle class and urban phenomenon, driven in part by the dissatisfaction with the services offered by the traditional male priests. Some training institutions that educate women as Hindu religious specialists, however, see their role mainly in promoting social reform, campaigning against "superstition" and "blind belief". Important part of their mission is the scientific explanation of the purpose of the ritual services they offer to their clients.
These groups do not focus on the religious and ritual empowerment of women alone, but to a similar degree on the empowerment of non-Brahmin castes. Yet there are many more groups and individuals, with a broad range of motivations, from a wide variety of social and religious backgrounds, who are engaged in similar activities, although for very different reasons and with different agendas.
All these activities, as different as they may be, are expressions of a shift in the religious and ritual agency of women in Indian Hindu traditions, which however inadvertently goes along with the women's emphasis of their connection to, and continuation of the orthodox Sanskrit textual tradition.
2016
When Pottan became Shiva: The celebration of blasphemy in Teyyam and its appropriation by Brahminical Hinduism
Talk by Arnab Banerji (Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles)
Time and place: May 23, 2016 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, P.A.Munchs Hus Seminarrom 11
Teyyam, the ritual dance theatre from Northern Kerala, celebrates blasphemy and transgression. The dancers, festival organizers and sponsors belong to the various sub strata of the Brahminical Shudra caste category. Dancers, known as Kolakkarans enter into a trance to invoke deities who stand in direct contradiction to Brahminical Hinduism. Deities like Pottan and Vishnumurti are believed to be caste members who were killed by upper caste affiliates because they questioned and threatened caste categories and boundaries. And yet in an interesting instance of religious, social, and cultural superimposition the teyyam deities have been systematically coopted by Brahminical Hinduism. In the process narratives describing caste atrocities and demanding social reform have been replaced with paeans honoring Brahminical gods.
In this paper, I will present an overview of teyyam, its history, and some examples of Brahminical cooption from the teyyam repertoire. In doing so I want to address and add to the contemporary conversation around the erasure of subaltern history and suppression of Dalit voices in Brahminical discourse. I will also briefly address the Communist Party’s use of teyyam as a tool for election propaganda and the merits and demerits of this political appropriation.
Visual Art in South Asia, Photography, Clay: A double lecture
- Revisiting Camera Indica: Popular Photography in the 21st Century
Christopher Pinney (UCL) - Down and Dirty in Western India: How Clay Reshapes Cosmos and Polity
Susan Bean (American Institute of Indian Studies)
Time and place: May 19, 2016 10:15 AM–1:00 PM, PAM seminarrom 7
Double Lecture on Blasphemy in India and Pakistan
- Syed Akbar Hyder (Uni. of Texas Austin): ”Blasphemy laws” and Urdu aesthetics in the Pakistan
- Heinz Warner Wessler (Uni. Uppsala): Dalit discourses on religion and secularism: From Dr. Ambedkar to the revival of the Ajivikas
Time and place: May 13, 2016 1:15 PM–4:00 PM, P.A.Munchs Hus, 1st floor, seminarrom 15
Blasphemy in flux: Reassessing Urdu's notorious words
Guest lecture with Syed Akbar Hyder.
Time and place: May 9, 2016 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, P.A. Munchs hus, seminarrom 11
Mirza Ghalib's ghazals are among the poetic expressions in Urdu that have attracted criticism as hovering on the blasphemous.
This talk will highlight the ways in which the idea of "blasphemy" has been fashioned in the Urdu literary sphere during the last two hundred years. In the process, it will ask fundamental questions about poetic licence, censorship, nationalism and globalization.
Syed Akbar Hyder is Associate Professor of Asian Studies and Islamic Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on aesthetics in the Muslim world, Perso-Urdu devotional literature and Sufism.
Invoking Sufi Symbolism in a contemporary non-Muslim Devotional culture
Guest Lecture by Afsar Mohammed, University of Austin, Texas
Time and place: Mar. 15, 2016 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, P.A. Munchs hus seminarrom 3
How do we understand a Sufi poem in a contemporary Muslim political discourse? What aspects of Sufi poetics are now reimagined and appropriated to address various concerns of popular Islam, Islamophobia and fundamentalism?
This talk explores how a new dialogue emerges into poetic narratives of various social groups and sub-castes, as the histories of local Sufi saints are now transformed into identity markers for these social groups.
This talk shows how poetic narratives function as a primary source to delineate the contemporary cultural practice of Muslim discourse now widely in circulation among various Muslim activist groups specifically among the Telugu-speaking Muslims and South Asia in general.
2015
Rumor of Democracy: Media, Religion and the 2014 Elections
A talk by Prof. Irfan Ahmad, Australian Catholic University, Melbourne
Time and place: Mar. 17, 2016 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, P.A. Munchs Hus Seminarrom 9
Much of the literature often views rumor as a plebeian, oral communication of resistance. In contrast, this article argues that rumor is also a weapon of power elite. Disavowing a rupture between modern and pre-modern world, it posits that what was rumor to pre-modern society, TV and new media are to contemporary nation-states. The premise of rumor as a plebeian resistance flounders for mainstream media at the service of power elite works like rumor machines. Using an anthropologically informed critical discourse analysis concerned with production of contents and drawing on qualitative data from the coverage of 2014 Indian elections by television channels and social media, it demonstrates how rumor was central to the electoral mobilization as media spread Hindutva as development to resemble rumor-mongering. The emerging interface amongst media, elections and neoliberal economy in polities like India, the article argues, signifies the onset of designer democracy of which rumor is a key component. By foregrounding the issues of “truth”, “half-truth” and “un-truth”, it heuristically differentiates, while noting slippage and promiscuity, amongst rumor, gossip, propaganda and related terms to justify rumor’s centrality to the analysis. In Conclusion, the article dwells on the effects of rumors and three distinct factors that helped Hindutva win in 2014. It ends with observations on implications from the Indian case for a comparative understanding of the place of rumor in democracies in general.
Ibsen in Hindi: The challenges of translating Henrik Ibsen's plays to South Asian languages
What are the special challenges facing translators of Henrik Ibsen texts in South Asian contexts? Open lecture by Astri Ghosh.
Time and place: Oct. 22, 2015 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Seminarrom 6, PA Munchs Hus
“You should never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.” From An Enemy of the People (1882).
Ibsen’s characters have an individual way of expressing themselves, through which their level of education and refinement is made manifest. Ibsen used the pronouns du or De very consciously to create intimacy or distance, pronouns that correspond to तू, तुम and आप in Hindi. Yet many former translations of Ibsen to Hindi, Bengali or Urdu do not follow Ibsen’s original use of pronouns because the translator has relied on English translations which only use you. In this talk Astri Ghosh elaborates on this and other ways in which subtle meanings of Ibsen’s plays can become lost in translation.
Astri Ghosh is a literary translator based in Goa, India. She is currently translating prose plays of Ibsen into Hindi, four of which were published in September 2015. In the Ibsen in Translation project, translators from across the world collaborate in translating twelve plays to Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Egyptian, Arabic, Hindi and Persian. The process of collaboration gives a new dimension to understanding the texts.
The battlefields of love: Public space and moral policing in urban India
What makes love so controversial in India? Why does the celebration of Valentine's Day trigger so violent reactions toward the idea of choice, pleasure and consumption? Open lecture by Christiane Brosius.
Time and place: Sep. 10, 2015 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Undervisningsrom 3, Georg Sverdrups Hus
Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Delhi between 2009 and 2012, this talk deals with several practices that track the relay between romantic love, sexuality and cultures of urban modernity in northern India.
Visuality and material culture, place-making and place-restricting tactics, as well as the making of "new" social relations and "new emotions" will be explored in the case of greeting cards made for the celebration of Valentine’s Day, an event that has stirred not only romance, but most of all, violence, rejection and turbulent reactions towards the idea of choice, pleasure and consumption.
The talk will have a dual focus. One will deal with the language of love of the greeting cards, including their production and circulation. The other will deal with the articulation of subtle or overt positions of critique, including hate speech and physical violence.
Christiane Brosius is professor of visual and media anthropology at the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies.
Disparate genealogies, pragmatic histories and the universalization of blasphemy
How could a project of secular governance in colonial India, the laws regulating offences against religion, establish the conditions for the emergence of affective religious publics? Open lecture by Asad Ali Ahmed.
Time and place: Sep. 2, 2015 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Undervisningsrom 2, Georg Sverdrups Hus
In September Asad Ali Ahmed visits the University of Oslo as part of the Morgenstierne lecture series at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages.
This talk presents a genealogy of Pakistan’s laws against “blasphemy” in order to track configurations of colonial and post-colonial governance in South Asia. This will be done by examining utilitarian theories of law, language and government, that is, Jeremy Bentham’s jurisprudential theory, that was crucial to the conceptualization and formulation of the Indian Penal Code of 1860.
In so doing the talk will engage with Michel Foucault’s appropriation of Bentham’s Panopticon as the paradigmatic exemplification of disciplinary power crucial to the genealogy of the subject in the West. By contrast one could ask, what does a focus on Bentham’s Pannomion, that is, legal codes, indicate about the relationship between law, language and subjectivity in post-colonial contexts?
It will be suggested that neither Foucault nor Bentham are able to account for the constitutive power of law and language.
About Asad Ali Ahmed
Asad Ali Ahmed, Associate Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology at Harvard Unviersity, is a leading scholar of the history of Pakistan's controversial blasphemy legislation.
The contest of religion
Open seminar Dr. Cornelia Mallebrein about the Lanjia Sora Adivasi from Odisha and their recent conversion to Christianity.
The two lectures are based on field work in the Sora region since 1995.
Part one
Time and place: May 27, 2015 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, P.A. Munchs hus seminarrom 11
The traditional world view and religion of the Lanjia Sora tribe. The small community of the Lanjia Sora is one of the most fascinating tribes in Odisha.
The Kudam (male) and Kudamboi (female), religious experts are the intermediaries between the world of the living and the underworld, the world of the ancestors. In a state of trance their souls leave their bodies and the ancestors use them as a channel of communication to speak to the living in this world.
The contact with the deceased is of vital importance, since the Sora believe that the ancestors are the cause of illnesses and diseases and must be satisfied with offerings. The Sora shamans are married to spiritual partners, the Ildas who live in a separate Ilda world. To communicate with them they need a specific painting in their house, depicting the Ilda house in the other world.
Part two
Time and place: May 28, 2015 2:15 PM–4:10 PM, P.A. Munchs hus, room 11
The sudden break with their old tradition - reasons for conversion and the present situation.
In 1995 only a few Sora had been converted. During the short span of not more than 16 years nearly all young Lanjia Sora have converted to various Christian dominations.
- What are the reasons for this sudden change?
- What does it mean for the traditional Lanjia Sora community and culture?
- How do the elderly Lanjia Sora cope with this sudden change?
Contact
Claus Peter Zoller
Culture Making and Development Discourse in Contemporary India
Jyotirmaya Tripathy will in this guest lecture propose an idea of culture where multiple versions of development compete for space and legitimacy. Open for all.
Time and place: May 21, 2015 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, P.A.Munchs hus, room 11
Culture has always been seen as development’s other or its prehistory. This othering was not just sanctioned by the linear narrative of Western development models, but also by the postcolonial developmental states like India. However, from being an extrinsic factor, or even impediment to development, culture has come a long way as the space where meaningful and authentic development can take place.
Homogenizes local culture
This new-found interest in culture, as in various post-development and postcolonial literature as well as in resistance narratives, often homogenizes local culture and creates an idea of culture which is a container of people’s life-world, or complete wholes without any internal contradiction. What is elided in this understanding is the constructed nature of culture itself and the struggle of its members over developmental meaning.
Multiple versions of development compete
While being sympathetic to this view of culture as the site of development, I would like to interrogate the reductive understanding of culture as timeless and fixed, as well as the simplistic binary of local culture against global development.
Instead I will propose an idea of culture where multiple versions of development compete for space and legitimacy by drawing from two resistance movements against foreign capital, one against the South-Korean steel company POSCO and another against the UK based mining company Vedanta.
About Jyotirmaya Tripathy
Jyotirmaya Tripathy (IIT Madras) is interested in cultural studies (representation, identity formation etc.) and critical development thought. At present he is a visiting fellow at Aarhus University.
Contact
Arild Engelsen Ruud