Talk by Renny Thomas (Sociology & Social Anthropology, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Bhopal)

My book, Science and Religion in India: Beyond Disenchantment (2021), explored ethnographically, the various ways in which Indian scientists lived their religious and scientific lives. In this lecture, I attempt to examine conversations and debates from the early days of space science in India by examining how different Indian stakeholders responded to the new developments in understanding the cosmos and how they imagined space and space science. The ISRO, or the Indian Space Research Organization is one of the largest and generously funded techno-scientific projects in post-colonial India with many successes, ups and downs. The intention of this lecture is not to discuss the case of ISRO. Instead, the lecture examines the early days of ‘space science’; the small history of a big scientific project in modern India. Based on archival sources, I look at how the cosmos and space were discussed in the parliamentary debates and the curiosity it generated among various actors in the early 1960s. The lecture analyzes the nature of those debates to see how space science was imagined religiously and how categories from religion were employed to describe the nature of space, cosmos, and space science.

Renny Thomas is currently the Taki Visiting Global Professor at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University (NYU-Gallatin), New York (2024-2025) and an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India. He has been a Charles Wallace Fellow in Social Anthropology at Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK (2017-2018), and a Visiting Fellow at the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Cultural History at Friedrich-Schiller University-Jena, Germany (2022-2023). He is the author of Science and Religion in India: Beyond Disenchantment (Routledge, 2021), and co-editor of Mapping Scientific Method: Disciplinary Narrations (Routledge, 2022), Religion and Technology: Power, the Sacred, and the Digital (forthcoming), and Decolonial Keywords: South Asian Thoughts and Attitudes (forthcoming).

Talk by Amanda Lanzillo, (Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago)

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, laborers across northern India found themselves negotiating rapid industrial change, emerging technologies, and class hierarchies. In response to these changes, Indian Muslim artisans asserted the relationships between their religion and their labor, using the increasingly accessible popular press to redefine and reclaim Islamic traditions “from below.” In this talk, Amanda Lanzillo shares stories from her recently published book, Pious Labor, that reveal how Muslim artisan workers in India claimed the centrality of their own embodied and textual knowledge to the colonial industrial economy. The talk focuses especially on the trades of tailoring, print work, and stonemasonry. It draws on Urdu-language technical manuals, community histories, and poetry that circulated among workers in these fields. Through these texts, the talk explores how Muslim laborers contested their marginalization within colonial-era hierarchies of technical and religious knowledge through claims on Islamic pasts and practices.

Amanda Lanzillo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. She is a historian of labor, technology, and religion, and is the author of Pious Labor: Islam, Artisanship, and Technology in Colonial India (University of California Press, 2024). Amanda is also a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, researching a second book project about Afghan migration and labor in British India and the Indian Ocean world. She has published in peer reviewed journals including Modern Asian Studies, South Asia, the Journal of Social History, and the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, among others. Amanda also frequently writes about South Asian social history for the popular media, including in a series on artisan and laboring histories in The Wire co-authored with Arun Kumar.

Talk by Rajbir Judge, (History, California State University, Long Beach)

How do traditions and peoples grapple with loss, particularly when it is of such magnitude that it defies the possibility of recovery or restoration? Rajbir Singh Judge offers new ways to understand loss and the limits of history by considering Maharaja Duleep Singh and his struggle during the 1880s to reestablish Sikh rule, the lost Khalsa Raj, in Punjab. Sikh sovereignty in what is today northern India and northeastern Pakistan came to an end in the middle of the nineteenth century, when the British annexed the Sikh kingdom and, eventually, exiled its child maharaja, Duleep Singh, to England. In the 1880s, Singh embarked on an abortive attempt to restore the lost Sikh kingdom. Judge explores not only Singh’s efforts but also the Sikh people’s responses—the dreams, fantasies, and hopes that became attached to the Khalsa Raj. He shows how a community engaged in military, political, and psychological loss through theological debate, literary production, bodily discipline, and ethical practice in order to contest colonial politics. This book argues that Sikhs in the final decades of the nineteenth century were not simply looking to recuperate the past but to remake it—and to dwell within loss instead of transcending it—and in so doing opened new possibilities. Bringing together Sikh tradition, psychoanalysis, and postcolonial thought, Prophetic Maharaja provides bracing insights into concepts of sovereignty and the writing of history.

Rajbir Singh Judge is an Assistant Professor of History at California State University, Long Beach, and, during this academic year, a Member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His first book, Prophetic Maharaja: Loss, Sovereignty, and the Sikh Tradition in Colonial South Asia was published by Columbia University Press in September 2024. His previous publications have appeared in numerous journals including Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, Modern Asian Studies, Theory & Event, positions: asia critique, Cultural Critique, History & Theory, and the Journal of the History of Sexuality, among others.