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.

Talk by Prashant Kidambi (History, University of Leicester )

Cantonments were a ubiquitous symbol of the military origins and underpinnings of British rule in South Asia. This talk, based on new research, seeks to rethink existing approaches to the study of cantonments. It critiques perspectives that view cantonments as sealed-off sites of untrammelled colonial power, abstracted from the historical processes shaping the wider society. My analytical framework brings politics back into the study of these putatively ‘military’ zones and restores agency to those who have hitherto been construed primarily as the malleable objects of colonial disciplinary power. In the process, I underscore the significance of cantonments in the making of urban South Asia.

Prashant Kidambi is Professor of Urban History at the University of Leicester. Professor Kidambi’s research explores how modern South Asia was shaped by empire and nation. He has written extensively on Indian cities, public culture, politics, and sports. He is the award-winning author of Cricket Country: An Indian Odyssey in the Age of Empire—the first work of sports history to be shortlisted for the prestigious Wolfson History Prize—and the editor of Bombay Before Mumbai, a path-breaking collection of essays on India’s ‘maximum city’. He is currently working on a new biography of the controversial Indian nationalist leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856-1920).

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Master Javanese gamelan musician Wakidi Dwidjomartono joins the Cornell Gamelan Ensemble and students taking Gamelan in Indonesian History and Cultures for a program of traditional Javanese gendhing.

Talk by Shozab Raza (Anthropology, University of Toronto)

In recent years, we have seen renewed efforts to “decolonize.” From the toppling of statues to the revision of disciplinary canons, much of this effort has focused on overturning colonial residues in our cultural and epistemological landscapes. This talk offers a radically different vision of decolonization — one driven not by bureaucrats, professors or social media activists, but by subaltern actors, a vision that was at once global and local, dedicated equally to dismantling the less visible structures of political economy as it was to fighting epistemic battles. I focus on how landless peasants in Pakistan — participating in a global communist movement stretching from Oakland to Saigon, from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean — reinvented revolutionary theory in their struggles against imperialist political economies. Joining a Mao-inspired party in the 1970s, these peasants not only occupied colonially-established estates (jagirs), but also acquired a meta-recognition that “theory” — now an emic category — was essential to global revolution. Some peasants retheorized Eurocentric Marxisms through the lens of Sufi Islam, while others developed theories of communist becoming inspired by Baloch tribal norms. I conceptualize these subaltern experiments in theory-making as trench theory, with the trench metaphor flagging a mode of subterranean theorizing grounded in political combat. Ultimately, this talk shows how subaltern actors drew on ideas spanning intellectual traditions, borders, and oceans to generate trench concepts aimed at heralding nothing short of a worldly, even other-worldly, liberation.

Shozab Raza is an Assistant Professor of Social Justice Education, with a cross-appointment in Anthropology, at the University of Toronto, and a 2024-25 Fung Global Fellow at Princeton University. He was previously an Agrarian Studies Fellow at Yale University and completed his graduate training at the University of Toronto and the University of Oxford. As a historical anthropologist, his research and teaching focuses on revolutionary political imaginaries and political economy as these unfold across Asia, the Indian Ocean, and beyond. He is finalizing his book manuscript, Theory from the Trenches, which explores how colonial residues and capitalist transformations inspire not only political but also theoretical insurgencies from below. Shozab’s research has been published in several journals, including Cultural Anthropology and Comparative Studies in Society and History, while his public writing has appeared in venues like The Guardian, Boston Review, and Red Pepper. He is also a founding editor of Jamhoor, a movement-oriented Leftist magazine focused on South Asia and its diasporas.