My dissertation, The New Voyager: Theory and Practice of South Asian Literary Modernisms, investigates how literary modernisms in Bengali, Hindi, and Indian English functioned as much as a turning away and remixing of earlier literary traditions as a journey of engagement between the individual writer and his or her response to and attempts to re-create the modern world. This thesis explores how theories and practices of literary modernism developed in Bengali, Hindi, and Indian English in the early to mid-20th century, and explores the representations and debates surrounding literary modernisms in journals such as Kallol, Kavita, and Krittibas in Bengali, the Nayi Kavita journal and the Tar Saptak group in Hindi, and the Writers Workshop group in English. Theories of modernism and translation as proposed by South Asian literary critics such as Dipti Tripathi, Acharya Nand Dulare Bajpai, Buddhadeva Bose, and Bhola Nath Tiwari are contrasted to the manifestos of modernism found in journals such as Krittibas and against Agyeya's defense of experimentalism (prayogvad) from the Tar Saptak anthology. The dissertation then goes on to discuss how literary modernisms in South Asia occupied a vital space between local and global traditions, formal and canonical concerns, and between social engagement and individual expression. In doing so, this thesis notes how the study of modernist practices and theory in Bengali, Hindi, and English provides insight into the pluralistic, multi-dimensional, and ever-evolving cultural sphere of modern South Asia beyond the suppositions of postcolonial binaries and monolingual paradigms.

This dissertation charts how the legal regulation of Islam in colonial India fostered a conception of religion that focused on dividing it from secular economy and politics. Colonial law segregated religious law from other branches of law through intersecting binaries that pitted religion against reason and family against the economy. These binaries continue to shape both popular and scholarly approaches to South Asian religion. Unsettling these common assumptions, the dissertation reveals the close relationship between contemporary conceptions of religion and the imperatives of imperial governance. By segregating religious from secular law, the British developed a bifurcated strategy of governance that balanced contradictory commitments to preserving Indian traditions with introducing modernizing reforms. Scholars have traditionally located the origins of the colonial approach to administering Indian religious laws in the early decades of Company rule. The dissertation argues instead that the conceptual framework of religious personal laws emerged between the second and third quarter of the nineteenth century. Changing concepts of sovereignty, an evangelical commitment to spreading Christian civilization, and the integration of colonial production into global markets led colonial officials to look for ways to consolidate the authority of the colonial state. Due to the history of Mughal rule, colonial officials viewed Islamic law as posing a particular threat to colonial suzerainty, placing Islam at the center of these debates. Limiting religious laws to the sphere of domestic relations and ritual performance allowed the colonial state to maintain the rhetoric of respecting Indian religions while consolidating new bodies of criminal, commercial, and procedural law. The boundaries colonial law drew around religion, however, proved unstable. By bringing different definitions of religion into dialogue, legal adjudication in courts unsettled the boundaries between religious and secular authority that colonial legislation and legal texts attempted to solidify. The dissertation looks at legal debates occurring in different levels of the judicial system and in the wider court of public opinion, turning to newspaper coverage of trials and literature on Islamic law. The dissertation uses this broadened archive of legal contest to explore alternative understandings of the relationship between religion, politics, and economy. / History

The new Government of India did not introduce legislation for `native' lunacy in colonial India as a measure of social control after the uprisings of 1857-8; discussions about Indian insanes had already occurred in 1856, following asylum and pauper reform in Victorian England. With the 1858 Lunacy Acts, native lunatic asylums occupied an unsteady position between judicial and medical branches of this government. British officers were too constrained by their inexperience of asylums and of India to be effective superintendents and impose a coherent psychiatry within. They relied on their subordinate staff who were recruited from the communities that surrounded each asylum. Alongside staff and patients, the asylums were populated by tea sellers, local visitors, janitors, cooks and holy men, all of whom presented alternate and complementary ideas about the treatment and care of Indian insanes. By 1912, these asylums had been transformed into archetypal colonial institutions, strict with psychiatric doctrine and filled with Western-trained Indian doctors who entertained no alternate belief systems in these colonial spaces. How did these fluid and heterogeneous spaces become the archetypes of colonial power? / History of Science

This dissertation examines three contemporaneous religious philosophers active in early modern South Asia: Muhibb Allah Ilahabadi (d. 1648), Madhusudana Sarasvati (d. 1620-1647), and the Safavid philosopher, Mir Findiriski (d. 1640/1). These figures, two Muslim and one Hindu, were each prominent representatives of religious thought as it occurred in one of the three pan-imperial languages of the Mughal Empire: Arabic, Sanskrit, and Persian. In this study, I re-trace the trans-regional scholarly networks in which each of the figures participated, and then examine the various ways in which their respective networks overlapped. The Chishti Sufi Muhibb Allah, drawing from the Islamic intellectual tradition of wahdat al-wujud, engaged in "international" networks of Arabic debate on questions of ontology and metaphysics. Madhusudana Sarasvati, meanwhile, writing in the Hindu Advaita-Vedanta tradition, was busy adjudicating competing interpretations of the well-known Sanskrit text, the Yoga-Vasistha. Mir Findiriski also took considerable interest in a shorter version of this same Yoga-Vasistha, composing his own commentary upon a Persian translation of the treatise that had been undertaken at the Mughal imperial court. In this Persian translation of the Yoga-Vasistha alongside Findiriski's commentary, I argue, we encounter a creative synthesis of the intellectual contributions occurring within Muhibb Allah's Arabic milieu, on the one hand, and the competing exegeses of the Yoga-Vasistha circulating in Madhusudana's Sanskrit intellectual circles, on the other. The result is a novel Persian treatise that represents an emerging "sub-discipline" of Persian Indian religious thought, still in the process of formulating its basic disciplinary vocabulary as drawn from these broader Muslim and Hindu traditions.

This dissertation situates debates over food procurement, provision, and hunger as the key economic and social contestations structuring the late colonial and postcolonial Indian state. It juxtaposes the visions of national statesmen against those advanced by party organizers, scientists, housewives, journalists, and international development workers and diplomats. Examining their promises and plans - and the global contexts in which they were made - this project demonstrates how India's "food question" mediated fundamental arguments over citizenship, governance, and the proper relationship between individuals, groups, and the state. / History

This research study locates the functioning of Seven South Asian domestic violence organizations within the secular liberal framework of U.S. I describe the various services provided, and attempt to explore the disconnect that often occurs between these services and the unique needs and contexts of the South Asian immigrant domestic violence victims when they seek help in the U.S. I do this by defining the secular- liberal framework, and a discussion on the “individuated self” by drawing from Brown (2006). Through un-structured telephone interviews and participant observation this descriptive study of services, provided by these organizations, reflects the innovative approaches that address the needs of the South Asian immigrant communities. However, I argue, these services don’t fall under the secular–liberal framework, since they are “irrational” and “non-liberal” in nature. Ultimately, I state that the liberal framework is inherently exclusionary and fails to capture the nuances and complexities of gender and culture in domestic violence resolution in the U.S. In conclusion, and for future research, I suggest exploring alternate ways of dealing with domestic violence through increased community engagement and deriving the various meanings and negotiations that are made within those communities. / text

This report summarizes the process of developing, writing, directing, and finishing Fatakra, a short narrative film. The film was produced as my graduate thesis film in the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin in partial fulfillment of my Master of Fine Arts in Film Production. Additionally, this report contextualizes the making of FATAKRA within my development as an artist and filmmaker. Finally, the report looks forward as I complete what is commonly referred to as a “calling-card” film and leave an academic setting to pursue a filmmaking career. / text

The interlocked social struggles waged by overlapping and diverse Britons of color for racial and social equality and everyday survival is the dynamic corollary of the contradictions engendered by the ruling relations of racial differentiation and racism in Britain. Grassroots struggles against routine racist violence and state violence, conceptualized as politically interlinked, are the critical sites that contribute to the recursive racial domination experienced by Britons of color in contemporary Britain, and forms the key ethnographic research focus of this study. Prior studies have already critiqued the dominant state framework of viewing racist violence as random, de-racialized and nonpolitical events – as individual incidents, neighborhood disputes, inter-personal conflict, and robberies gone wrong. These studies have alternately identified the social dehumanizing functions of racist violence, the possessive local white territorialism that they materially support and their relationship with macro-level socio-economic crises and changing racial exclusion ideologies of the liberal democratic nation. What I add to these studies is the argument that the racial subordination and ruling relations inherent in the social processes of racist violence and, by formal extension, state violence are not only derivative of broader ideological forces or local social relations but are in fact constitutive of white racial state formation in Britain’s postcolonial era. I argue that the processes of racist violence and state violence are productive of the domination and hierarchy that is secured for whites, through unevenly empowered and routinized contestations within the re-configurations of white racial state formation and an emergent neoliberal-multicultural national security state. It is within this framework of analysis that the politics of black mobilization by Britons of color and their allies, in the context of contemporary multiculturalism’s contradictions, and against the many-sided form of racial subordination is made legible -- not as an anachronism -- but as socially meaningful, interlocked and politically urgent. / text

No description available.

The main research question of this project asks: what role does Indian classical dance play in the identity formation of second generation Canadian women of South Asian origin as they negotiate their identities as Canadians living in a multicultural country? The research question is analyzed through the theoretical frameworks of both citizenship theory, identity theory, and Bourdieu’s notions of ‘habitus’, ‘field’, and cultural capital. Semi-structured interviews are conducted with dancers of 2 main dance styles (“Kathak” and “Bharatnatyam”) and of various ages over 18. Interviews are also conducted with a dance teacher/creative director and a dance company coordinator. Findings indicate that Indian classical dance influences identity formation in 3 main ways: in the way that the participants embody the dance forms of Kathak and/or Bharatnatyam, in the way they form their identities as individuals, and in the way they form their identities as multicultural Canadians.