This dissertation comprises an investigation into the conditions and contemporary implications of an historical event, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) insurrection of 1971. At the broadest level, it revisits the insurrection and its aftermaths to reframe the contemporary question of emergency in Sri Lanka. This dissertation poses emergency, a defining feature of Sri Lanka's postcolonial experience, as a problem native to the emergence of democracy in Sri Lanka. It resituates emergency rule and the concept of necessity which subtends it on the terrain of the secularizing political rationality, which has constituted the emancipatory raison d'etre of the postcolonial state. The visibility of this rationality has been obscured by liberal constitutionalism's ideological narrative of Sri Lankan constitutional history, and I recover and explore the anticolonial, nationalist contexts of its formation, first in the demand for a constitutional bill of rights, then in the movement toward constitutional autochthony, and finally in the creation of the sovereign republic in 1972. I show how this political rationality incorporates certain secular-political assumptions, fundamental to the colonial inauguration of democracy in Sri Lanka. One such assumption is that democracy is a matter of naturally occurring majorities and minorities, and that the political rights of minorities are best addressed through the concession of constitutional protections or safeguards, rather than any more generative solution at the level of political representation. I suggest this finding should cause us to radically revise the normative ethical-political coordinates which implicitly orient a greater part of the social scientific study of Sri Lanka. That conventional question has revolved around the transgression of secular norms by the force of ethnicity and nationalism, and hence much work has taken up the challenge of deconstructing and explaining the cultural force of Sinhala nationalist ideology. My dissertation asks that we set aside this problematic and instead foreground the question of the secular inheritances of the state as the target of our critical strategies.

This dissertation focuses on a seventeenth-century (so-called) Malwa manuscript that illustrates the story of Krishna, and the copy manuscripts that were produced after it. It explores how the story is transformed in its incarnations as the vernacular text inscribed on the manuscript, the cycle of illustrations depicting that text, and then the copies made from what appear to be the initial illustrations. The claim is that narrative variations which find their way into these different embodiments should almost never be considered "mistakes," even when an act of misunderstanding seems to be clearly implied. Rather they are moments when the artist's or author's engagement with contemporary sectarian concerns, literary trends, artistic strategies and popular culture is manifest. The first three chapters of the dissertation are devoted to an analysis of text, illustration and copy illustration respectively, while the fourth presents the broader context in which such Krishna manuscripts were circulating.The underlying objective is to re-evaluate the conventional narrative of North Indian illustrated manuscripts. This is cast as the teleology of court styles where political history is used to decide important and influential ateliers. Visually compelling and historically important illustrated manuscripts such as the ones I study, but whose patronizing court is undecided, are largely ignored. This dissertation showcases an alternative, interdisciplinary approach that undertakes thorough visual and textual analyses alongside an examination of the broader socio-religious trends that impacted artistic production. It advocates that every illustrated manuscript should be studied individually, rather than as just a member of a predetermined stylistic group.

In its Constitution, postcolonial India acknowledges the caste-based practice of "untouchability" as a social and historical wrong, and seeks to redress the effects of this wrong through compensatory discrimination. Dalits are recognized by the state as having suffered the effects of untouchability, and thus as eligible for statutory protections and remedial measures, on the condition that they profess no religion "different from the Hindu religion" (a condition later expanded to include Sikhism and Buddhism as well). The present work charts the career of the idea underlying this condition of recognition - the idea that the "untouchable," insofar as she has not converted to Islam, Christianity, or another "world religion," must be Hindu - and its consequences, from the late nineteenth century to the present. Historically and ethnographically grounded in the community life of the sanitation labor castes - those Dalits castes that perform the vast majority of South Asia's sanitation work - in the north Indian city of Lucknow, the study tracks the idea from its ruptive colonial beginnings to its propagation by Hindu nationalists, induction into mainstream nationalism and installation in the edifice of postcolonial law. This is also an account of the everyday effects of postcolonial India's regime of recognition in the present: what it confers, what it transforms, what hides in its shadows.

Raja Krishnacandra Ray (1710-1782) was a relatively high-ranking aristocrat in eastern India who emerged as a local culture hero during the nineteenth century. He became renowned as Bengal's preeminent patron of Sanskrit and as an ardent champion of goddess worship who established the region's famous puja festivals, patronized major innovations in vernacular literature, and revived archaic Vedic sacrifices while pursuing an archconservative agenda as leader of Hindu society in the area. He is even alleged in certain circles to have orchestrated a conspiracy that birthed British colonialism in South Asia, and humorous tales starring his court jester are ubiquitous wherever Bengali is spoken. This dissertation explores the process of myth-making as it coalesced around Krishncandra in the early modern period, emphasizing the roles played by classical ideals of Hindu kingship and print culture as well as both colonial and nationalist historiography.

“Ordering Subjects” argues that the merchants of Marwar led efforts to demarcate a new, exclusive community of elites, one that they conceptualized of as self-consciously ‘Hindu’ and forged through the application of state power. This early modern Hindu community defined itself in opposition not to the figure of the Muslim but to that of the ‘Untouchable,’ a category that included but was not limited to the Muslim. The early modern Hindu identity was thus deeply imagined in caste terms. This elite community organized around Krishna devotion, especially the Vallabh Sampraday, and demarcated itself through cultural markers such as the practice of vegetarianism, teetotalism, and austerity. Merchants, often joined by brāhmaṇs, waged their battles for the demarcation of this new community by petitioning the crown and by successfully deploying the control that they had gained in prior centuries over the state apparatus as bureaucrats. State power, consisting of its judicial, fiscal, recordkeeping, and surveillance mechanisms, played a central role in the implementation of laws and regulations, including spatial, economic, social, and ritual segregation, enforced vegetarianism, and the moral policing of elite subjects’ lives. Most of these petitions and state responses were legitimized with reference to ethics, marking a departure from the until-then prevalent emphasis on custom as the basis for legislating society. “Ordering Subjects” suggests that this marked a shift towards a more universal law and that the turn to ethical principles made possible the disregard for the force of custom that these departures marked. Further, the dissertation demonstrates that these processes enabled the ascendance of a mercantile ethos as the preeminent cultural code of the region, displacing that of the warrior and modifying that of the brāhmaṇ. Lastly, it shows the extent to which the state in eighteenth century Marwar had penetrated society and was capable of intervening in it using surveillance and judicial methods. The dissertation challenges the current scholarly framing of the debate over the existence of religious identities in pre-colonial South Asia, suggesting that it casts modern, binary (‘Hindu-Muslim’) conceptions of religion, as distinct from politics, upon pre-modern history. Instead, “Ordering Subjects” points to the role of caste, as a field of politics, in determining the contours and imagination of early modern Hindu identity. It offers a political and social history of Krishna devotion, extending scholarship on this field beyond the focus on its literary, theological, and cultural aspects that currently dominate the field. In tracing the local effects of the global processes of economic circulation and integration that characterized early modernity upon social and political life of a landlocked kingdom, the dissertation offers a perspective upon the history of early modern South Asia as it unfolded away from, but in connection with, the ports and court cities of the region.

This dissertation sheds new light on the Purātan Janamsākhī, the earliest available account on the founder and most important figure of the Sikh tradition – Gurū Nānak (d. 1539 CE). Scholarship on Gurū Nānak has largely dismissed the significance of this text and has overlooked the fact that, after its composition in 1588 CE, the Purātan Janamsākhī remained the most widely circulated account of Gurū Nānak’s life for two centuries. This thesis engages with the manuscripts and studies of the text to provide a life-history of the Purātan Janamsākhī, and, in arguing for a reclamation of this account, takes on a close reading of the Purātan Janamsākhī to identify how, within decades of his death, followers of Gurū Nānak remembered his life and message. This thesis situates the Purātan Janamsākhī within its historical context and compares it with some of its closest North Indian contemporaries, including other janamsākhīs composed on the life of Gurū Nānak and hagiographical writings written about religious figures from different North Indian communities. Our comparative approach allows us to identify some basic commonalities in hagiographical writing and glean aspects that distinguish the Purātan Janamsākhī from its counterparts, including Gurū Nānak’s unique interest in political critique and building a new community. This thesis, therefore, contributes significantly to our understandings of identity and community formation, to studies on hagiographical writing, and to our foundational understandings of Sikh history.

This dissertation is a multi-sited ethnographic study of the cultural formations of moral and political community among Tamils displaced and dispersed by three decades of war and political violence in Sri Lanka. Drawing on twenty months of field research among Tamils living in Toronto, Canada and Tamil Nadu, India, I inquire into the histories, discourses, and practices of diasporic activism at the end of war between the Government of Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Tamils abroad were mobilized to protest the war, culminating in months of spectacular mass demonstrations in metropolitan cities around the world. Participant-observation among activists and their families in diaspora neighborhoods and refugee camps, and their public events and actions, as well as semi-structured interviews, media analysis and archival work, reveal how “diaspora” has become a capacious site of political becoming for the identification and mobilization of Tamils within, across, and beyond-nation states and their borders. Part One of this study considers how migration and militancy have historically transformed Tamil society, giving rise to a diasporic politics with competing ethical obligations for Tamils living outside Sri Lanka. Chapters One and Two describe and analyze how distinct trajectories of migration and settlement led to diverse forms of social and political action among diaspora Tamils during Sri Lanka’s 2002 ceasefire and peace process. Chapter Three turns to the history and historiography of Sri Lanka to contrast narratives about the emergence of Tamil politics, nationalism and militancy with diaspora narratives developed through life history interviews with activists. Taken together, these chapters provide a layered social and historical context for the ethnography of Tamil diaspora life and activism. Part Two of the dissertation ethnographically explores how and why Tamils in Canada and India protested the recent war, soliciting their states, national and transnational publics, and each other to “take immediate action” on behalf of suffering civilians. Chapter Four examines diaspora community formation and activism in Toronto, a city with the largest population of Sri Lankan Tamils outside Asia, in the wake of Canada’s ban on the LTTE. Chapter Five turns to refugee camps in Tamil Nadu, India, to discuss how camp life shaped refugee politics and activism, while Chapter Six follows the narratives of two migrants waiting and preparing to migrate from India to the West. Chapter Seven examines how Tamil activists in Toronto and Tamil Nadu publicly invoked, represented, and performed suffering to mobilize action against the war. The dissertation concludes with a discussion of the modes of Tamil migration, asylum-seeking, and diaspora activism that emerged in response to the war’s end and its aftermaths. In their actions of protest and dissent, I argue that Tamils from Sri Lanka create new modes of belonging and citizenship out of transnational lives forged from wartime migration and resettlement in multicultural and pluralist states. A political subject of “Tamil diaspora” has thus emerged, and continues to shape Sri Lanka’s post-war futures. This ethnography contributes to scholarly debates on violence, subjectivity and agency; the nation-state and citizenship; and the politics of human rights and humanitarianism at the intersections of diaspora, refugee and South Asian studies.

My dissertation explores the formative stages of European interest in, engagement with and consumption of Indian pictorial art over a period of one hundred and fifty years, from the mid-16th century up to the early 18th century. During this period, European cabinets of curiosities witnessed the arrival of increasing numbers of a previously unknown class of collectible: Indian paintings on paper. Interest in these paintings was spurred by a growing curiosity about the East, combined with a general re-orientation of the European system of knowledge towards a more “scientific” methodology of inquiry, which encouraged a revision of the stereotypes that had informed medieval European conceptions of India through engagement with original sources. The relevance of this phenomenon to the history of early modern exchanges between India and Europe can hardly be overstated. Yet, modern scholarship has tended to ignore it, focusing instead on the Indian fascination with and reception of European artistic forms and techniques. This dissertation seeks to develop a more exhaustive picture of the early modern artistic encounter between India and the West, one in which European consumption of Indian paintings is dutifully represented and India plays an active role in the emerging system of knowledge. The starting and central point of my investigation consists of the vast and diversified collection of Indian paintings gathered by a Venetian traveler to India, Niccolò Manucci (1638-ca. 1720), as a visual accompaniment to his travel account, the so-called Storia do Mogor. This collection, which has remained largely ignored, makes a crucial case-study for approaching issues relative to the nature of European interest in Indian paintings in early modernity, the contexts and modalities through which this interest was articulated, as well as its relevance to processes of knowledge making and identity construction that were prompted by European encounters with alterities. The first part of my study provides an in-depth analysis of Manucci’s collection performed through a careful examination of the paintings it comprises along with contemporary textual sources, including the original manuscripts of the Storia do Mogor. My analysis exposes the interrelatedness of Manucci’s collecting enterprise with his authorial project, as well as assessing its broader scope and intended aims. The second part of the dissertation situates this collecting enterprise within its broader historical context by examining other European collections of Indian paintings dating from the 16th and 17th centuries and characterized by comparable subject matter: portraits of historical and living personages associated with Indo-Muslim dynasties, depictions of native Indian peoples and socio-religious customs, and representations of deities of the Hindu pantheon. Besides delving into the specifics of these collections, I explore their dialogic relation to one another and to descriptive practices and interpretative discourses that gained shape in European travel writing and print culture. In doing so, I highlight their participation in broader cultural trends and their contribution to evolving European approaches towards the Orient. This corpus of largely neglected works offers precious insights into the complex dynamics of cross-cultural encounter, as well as exposing the pivotal role played by early modernity in shaping later trends in Indo-European artistic interactions. Offering a direct antecedent to “Company painting,” a 19th-century Indian pictorial genre for European consumption, these works call for a revision of traditional understandings of the latter as an artistic development prompted by the rise of British colonial interests and agendas, and invite a broader reassessment of a unique historical era – the early modern one – that is key to understanding the roots of institutionalized Orientalism.

This ethnography takes place at four of northern India’s most renowned, all-girls’ private boarding schools, established in reference to the British Public Schooling model mainly during the tail ends of colonialism by Indian queens and British memsahibs on the sub-continent. It is a story told from the points of view of founders, administrators, and teachers, but primarily from that of students, based on fieldwork conducted from July 2013 through June 2014. Schools heralded as historic venues of purported upper-caste girls’ emancipation, this study interrogates the legacies of this colonial-nationalist moment by examining how these institutions and their female students engage in newer processes and discourses of class formation and gendered empowerment through schooling. For one, it considers the dichotomous (re)constructions of gendered and classed personhoods enacted through exclusionary modernities, particularly in terms of who gains access to these schools, both physically and through symbolic forms of belonging. It then examines the reclamation of these constructs within (inter)national development discourses of girls’ empowerment and the role of neoliberal privatization in reconstituting elite schooling experiences with gender as its globalizing force. Here, seemingly paradoxical relationships between such concepts as discipline and freedom, duties and rights, collective responsibility and individual competition are explored, arguing that the pressures of academic success, tensions over the future, and role of high stakes examinations and privatized tutoring are contributing to student experiences of performative or fatiguing kinds of empowerment. Through such frames, extreme binary constructions of empowerment are complicated, demonstrating how female Public School students exist more within middling spaces of “betweenness,” of practiced mediation. Empowerment in this sense is not an achievable status, nor unidirectional process, but a set of learned tools or skills deployed in recurring moments of contradiction or in difficult deliberations, whereby students variously buy in, (re)create, opt-out of, or reject proposed models of “successful” or “legitimate,” female personhood. Overall, this ethnography problematizes assumed relationships between empowerment and privilege, questions the alignments between school and the (upper-)middle class home, and suggests that as the reproductive capabilities of elite schooling are challenged in the face of newer venues of capital, these all-girls’ Public Schools and their students are finding unique ways to remain or become the elite of consideration.

There are more than 3.4 million South Asians in the United States. Among this subgroup, Bangladeshis in New York have a high prevalence of Type 2 diabetes ranging from 15 to 24% compared to the general population. This study examined the effect of acculturation through length of stay in the United States and understanding of the English language, and the role of gender on self-efficacy (SE) and diabetes self-management among 336 New York Bangladeshi immigrants between the ages of 21 and 75 who had been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes with A1C -‰¥ 6.5%, as verified by their medical record for inclusion criteria in the original DREAM study. Health belief model was used as a theoretical framework. The key findings showed a significant relationship between gender and SE levels (p ¤ .0001). Bangladeshi women were 79% less likely to have high SE levels compared to their male counterparts (OR= .212; 95%CI: .099 -.453). Additionally, those who had low education attainment were 68% less likely to develop high SE levels (OR = .323, 95%; CI: .105 -.998). The findings demonstrate the need to understand the influence of social and contextual factors on SE and underscore the importance of integrating a systems approach and ontological lens in the implementation of gender-specific innovative strategies. Such an understanding might help destigmatize diabetes, improve medication adherence, and enhance SE and coping skills for Bangladeshi women across the life span. The findings of this study might provide knowledge to public health practitioners that would help create gender-specific diabetes education and lifestyle management for equity-centered capacity building to alleviate the disproportionate burden of diabetes in Bangladeshi minority women in the United States, ultimately improving health outcomes and reducing healthcare expenditures.