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 as 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 starvation 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 the rural poor were perfected.

Ateya Khorakiwala is a historian of modernity in its colonial and postcolonial guises in South Asia and of 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.

Host

Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, part of the Einaudi Center for International Studies

Talk by Llerena Guiu Searle (Anthropology, University of Rochester)

In order to build a more just world order, philosopher Olúfémi Táíwo argues that we must contend with the fact that our current social order builds on relations of colonialism that did not end with colonial independence in the 1940s-1960s. Slavery, colonialism, and racial capitalism have created what he calls the “Global Racial Empire” which accumulates advantages and disadvantages, harms and capabilities unevenly (2022). How might we understand “design” as a set of practices that operates within such a world system? Drawing on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork with furniture and interior designers in India, this talk examines the ways in which designers navigate capitalist markets that continue to be haunted by colonialism. On the one hand, creative experts shaping elite Indian homes describe design as an anti-colonial project, poised to free India from tastes, fashions, and products from abroad. On the other, designers navigate hierarchies of values set by global markets, including demand for exotic, uniquely “Indian” products. Furniture and interior production also relies on production methods still defined through neocolonial discourses of “crafts difference” (McGowan 2009) and on caste and class dynamics that legitimize labor exploitation. By investigating how these unseen forces – histories, values, and ideologies – structure design practice in India, this paper contributes to our understanding of the politics of the creative industries and their imbrication in “Global Racial Empire.”

Llerena Guiu Searle is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and of Visual & Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester, where she also co-edits the Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture Series. She is the author of Landscapes of Accumulation: Real Estate and the Neoliberal Imagination in Contemporary India (University of Chicago Press, 2016). Her research examines capitalism and the production of the built environment in urban India.

Talk by Sadia Mahmood, South Asia Program, Cornell University

Mainstream historiography on South Asia has largely overlooked the afterlives of the colonial Enemy Property regime in postcolonial India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Drawing on archival records from Pakistan and India, as well as oral accounts from the Thar borderlands of Sindh, this talk traces how “enemy property” was produced, contested, and redistributed in early postcolonial South Asia. I situate Pakistan’s practices of seizing and reallocating enemy-owned assets within a longer international legal genealogy that emerged during World Wars I and II, when the confiscation of enemy property became a routine instrument of wartime governance. Transplanted into British India, this legal and administrative apparatus continued to shape Pakistan’s bureaucratic imagination during the 1965 and 1971 Indo-Pak wars. I argue that the category of enemy property migrated from a European imperial wartime technology to a postcolonial mode of governing minorities in South Asia, often blurring the distinction between wartime enemies and religious communities deemed politically suspect. In the Thar borderlands, the ruins of officially classified “enemy properties” function not only as material remnants but also as markers of social and emotional vulnerability through which local populations continue to navigate their dispossession.

Sadia Mahmood is an Assistant Professor at Quaid-e-Azam University, Pakistan, and a Visiting Scholar at the South Asia Program, Cornell University. Her work examines the making of postcolonial religious minorities, the histories of caste-oppressed communities, and state-making in Pakistan. Her research centers on the desert borderlands of Tharparkar, where memories of the 1971 Indo-Pak war continue to shape collective memory and everyday life. She works with Pakistan’s diverse Hindu and Sikh communities in Sindh and Punjab provinces. Her articles have appeared in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies (2024), where she published “The Long Migration: Revisiting the Postcolonial Minority/Refugee Crisis and Governance in East Pakistan,” and in The Indian Economic & Social History Review (2023), where she published “Untouchability, Caste, and the Electorate: Revisiting Legacies of the Poona Pact in Pakistan.” She also has forthcoming contributions, including “Historical Lines in the Dunes: Tharparkar,” in the Handbook of Sindhi Studies (Routledge).