Talk by Karen Donoghue (Journalism and Mass Communication at North Eastern Hill University)

In an era marked by migration, identity and community dynamics are constantly remade, throwing into sharp relief questions of belonging that must be addressed through a post-nationalist lens. My own scholarly focus was sharpened by a personal catalyst, directing my attention to the period of uprising in the state of Mizoram against the Indian government, called Rambuai-“troubled or disturbed land", that spanned approximately two decades, from 1966 to 1986. A body of works known as Rambuai literature serves as a cultural anchor, tying Mizo memory to this traumatic conflict.

This talk extends Rambuai literature beyond its conventional borders into the overlooked, narrow streets of Happy Valley, Shillong, in the neighbouring state of Meghalaya, where a diasporic Mizo community settled. Through their stories, I explore how identity and homeland are rebuilt in the quiet, domestic spaces of displacement. I discuss how unique perspectives emerge when narratives are analyzed through Mizo/ indigenous philosophical frameworks. Specifically, I examine how lunglen, which I loosely translate as “the inability to imagine oneself without the other,” becomes the embodied virtue underpinning the Mizo diaspora’s unique migration and rebuilding experience. I show how this community-centric approach, using oral history and photography, uncovers novel ways to look at migration experiences and the ideas of home and belonging. I will conclude by reflecting on my own positionality as a diasporic researcher and how it directly informs my current project on the Mizo diaspora in the United States.

Karen Lalrindiki Donoghue teaches in the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication at North Eastern Hill University, Shillong, India. She holds a PhD from the same university, which critically examines media representation of Northeast India in mainstream Indian media. Her research interests include media representation, media and culture, and oral history. She is currently a member of the executive committee of the Oral History Association of India. Her previous work includes co-leading "Stories from the Valley," an oral history project that documented the experiences of the Mizo diaspora in Shillong, culminating in a published book. She is part of the "Rambuai Archives" initiative, which seeks to record first-hand testimonies from a period of conflict in Mizoram and create a sustainable digital repository for these memories. Driven by the urgency to preserve vanishing histories, her scholarship extends to her current project on the Mizo diaspora in the United States, which investigates themes of transnational identity and community. Beyond her academic work, she is a published poet, with her work featured in the anthology "We Come From Mist: Writings from Meghalaya."

Book talk by Shani Rohit De (History, Yale University) and Ornit Shani (Asian Studies, University of Haifa)

In this paradigm-shifting history, Rohit De and Ornit Shani re-examine the making of the Indian constitution from the perspective of the country's people. In a departure from dominant approaches that foreground the framing of the text within the Constituent Assembly, they instead demonstrate how it was shaped by diverse publics across India and beyond. They reveal multiple, parallel constitution-making processes underway across the subcontinent, highlighting how individuals and groups transformed constitutionalism into a medium of struggle and a tool for transformation. The book presents a rich tapestry of these interactions, describing how many of the 500 princely states adopted constitutional documents establishing forms of representative government; discussing the contributions received by the Constituent Assembly from associations of women, Dalits, upper and lower castes, and religious groups of every faith and denomination; outlining the contributions from provincial legislatures, the judiciary and the civil service, and finally reviewing the important demands made by some tribal communities. De and Shani argue that the deep sense of ownership the public assumed over the constitution became pivotal to the formation, legitimacy, and endurance of India's democracy against arduous challenges and many odds. In highlighting the Indian case as a model for thinking through constitution-making in plural societies, this is a vital contribution to constitutional and democratic history.

Rohit De is an Associate Professor of History at Yale University and a historian of South Asia and the British common law world. He is the author of A People's Constitution: The Everyday Law in the Indian Republic (2018).

Ornit Shani is an Associate Professor in the history of India’s democracy and South Asia politics at the University of Haifa and is the Henry Hart Rice Visiting Professor at Yale University in Spring 2025. She is the author of How India Became Democratic: Citizenship and the Making of the Universal Franchise (2018)

Talk by Ateya Khorakiwala (Architecture, Columbia University)

What architectural technologies were deployed in response to colonial famine? A history of food is, at its most radical, a history of the production of poverty as a systematic condition and an institutional discourse. This paper seeks to locate famine and starvation, not as a colonial event of economic neglect, but rather a central methodology of extracting labor knowledge from the bodies of colonial subjects. Focusing on the two famines that took place in quick succession in colonial Punjab in 1896 and 1899, this paper looks at two types of documents: the Punjab Famine Code and the Famine Commission Reports. Both documents outline how famine camps and relief works were deployed to manage populations affected by food scarcity. The famine camp and the relief work are two architectural embodiments of famine epistemology. Both typologies claimed to be humanitarian interventions towards famine relief but were instead, this paper argues, methods of extracting knowledge from the bodies of rural laborers. Knowledge such as: how little grain did a person need to survive? What minimum quantity of grain enabled a person to still labor? How bad did starvations conditions need to be before a landowner worked alongside a peasant? In this way, the Revenue Department used architectural technologies to produce a racialized, gendered, and caste-based epistemology of famine. This paper aims to argue that architectural thought on minimum space and famine thought on minimum sustenance share an infernal history that manifests in relief works where technologies of policing rural poor were perfected.

Ateya Khorakiwala is a historian of modernity in its colonial and postcolonial guises in South Asia. the aesthetics and materiality of its postcolonial infrastructure and ecological and political landscapes. Her current book project Famine Landscapes, is an infrastructural and architectural history set in India’s postcolonial countryside. The book shows how infrastructures of the developmental decades can be traced back to colonial famine policies, physiocratic theories of land management, and utilitarian theories of governance, even as these architectural interventions emerge in a contested field of cold war techno-scientific thinking. She is also researching the labor politics and environmental histories of architectural materials like concrete, bamboo, and plastic. Khorakiwala has received grants and fellowships from the MacDowell Foundation, the Volkswagen Foundation, and the American Institute of India Studies. Her essays and articles have appeared in e-flux Architecture, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (CSSAAME), Grey Room, and the Journal of Architectural Education (JAE). She coedited Architecture in Development: Systems and the Emergence of the Global South (Routledge, 2022). Khorakiwala received her Ph.D. from Harvard University, her MS in Architecture Studies from MIT, and was trained as an architect at KRVIA in Mumbai, India.

In this chapter, I am examining the Pashtun nationalist claims in the context of the Afghanistan government’s historical resistance to officially recognizing the Durand Line. What has been the reaction of Afghanistan’s successive governments to the Durand Line? Can this resistance be characterized as a national reaction irrespective of the people’s ethnicity, language and religion?

Or would it be more accurate to describe it as a political project by the ethnocentric Pashtun ruling elites to unify Pashtuns and to maintain their monopoly on power?

This topic is important because the official position of the Afghan government on Durand Line has had both external and internal consequences, fostering geopolitical conflict with its eastern neighbor, Pakistan, as well as alienating its non-Pashtun citizens. If the problem persists, the current instability in Afghanistan will continue with its people paying the price.

Speaker
Sharif Hozoori has a PhD in International Relations from the Center for International Politics, Organization, and Disarmament at the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi.

Currently, Sharif is a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Government. His research focuses on Afghanistan politics and foreign policy, comparative politics, Central Asian and Middle Eastern affairs.

Sharif has authored several journal articles and book chapters in both national and international publications. His recent book, The Political Elites and Foreign Policy at Mullah Omar’s Emirate and Karzai’s Republic (in Persian), was published in 2024 but subsequently banned by the Taliban authorities. His most recent article, “Taliban 1.0 and 2.0 in Afghanistan: Same Policies, Persistent Vision,” appeared in the Journal of Strategic Studies in June 2025.

Sharif is presently working on two additional book chapters and one journal article. The current talk is based on his under-review book chapter contribution to Oxford University Press’s Oxford Handbook of South Asian Borders.