Talk by Amrita Kurian (Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania)

This paper uses a historical and ethnographic approach to analyze how the ideal of the “progressive farmer” percolates into the literature and processes that help establish the latest standards in Indian Flue-Cured Virginia (FCV) or cigarette tobacco markets. A legacy of colonial and postcolonial agricultural improvement projects, tobacco companies use the term as an accolade, indicating their preference for collaborating with some farmers over others - usually affluent farmers with the resources necessary to invest in improving farming practices. In a cash crop economy dominated by a few large buyers, these preferences also strongly influence the direction of state regulation and infrastructure projects. The paper argues that “progressive farming” practices geared toward producing standardized commodities reinforce the rural hegemony of affluent farmers while masking the infrastructural changes that have, over the years, shifted the financial burden of producing a quality crop from producers onto farmers. On the other hand, farmers, particularly affluent farmers, negotiate evolving metrics used to evaluate farming practices to variously align with the state and corporations and further their own goals of accumulating wealth and prestige.

Amrita Kurian is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania. She has a Ph.D. in Sociocultural Anthropology from UC San Diego and an M.Phil in Sociology from the Delhi School of Economics. Her ethnographic research is based in the Flue-Cured Virginia (FCV) tobacco sector in rural Andhra Pradesh, India, where she studies experts’ scientific and affective mediation of markets and agrarian relations of production. Her articles titled “Flowers of Deception,” “Expert Disenchantment,” and “Progressive Farmers” are at various stages of review in Cultural Anthropology, Science, Technology, and Human Values, and Geoforum. Her essay “Accusations of Corruption: A Cautionary Tale from Indian Tobacco Auctions” was published in India in Transition and Scroll.in.

Talk by Adeem Suhail (Anthropology, Franklin & Marshall College)

This talk is based on ethnographic explorations of the broken worlds the denizens of contemporary Karachi, Pakistan, inhabit. It examines the period between two catastrophic floods in 2020 and 2022. By observing the efforts of the Wasted to piece together new realities amidst the ruins, the study seeks to understand the everyday processes and practices involved in conjuring through faith a commons as an infrastructure for troubled times. In Karachi, the ruptures caused by a convergence of crises have disrupted the city's function as a labor-driven engine of value creation. With the demise of postcolonial modernity, the city has entered a different temporality, characterized by multiple broken worlds experienced by its inhabitants. Engaging in cosmological speculation, conspiracy theories, and mythopoesis, individuals grapple with uncertainties and possibilities rooted in post-colonial and decolonial practices that produce ambivalent outcomes. Crises here manifest in jagged details that cut. Highlighting the vitality and creativity of the marginalized in contrast to the oppressive practices of the ruling classes who have dubbed these multitudes as being already-sacrificed (nazar hona) and thus Wasted (zaya hona), the talk proposes the idea of a new politics of the Sacrificed and the Wasted.

Adeem Suhail is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Franklin and Marshall College. His research addresses issues in the anthropology of violence, social theory, and urban studies. His current project, Machines of Violent Desire, interrogates how non-state violence and transnational kinship networks contribute to order-making in urban South Asia, especially in the context of ecological and political fracture. He is concurrently working on another co-authored book project with David L. Nugent, titled Sacropolitics, which addresses how human communities confront emergent ecological and political crises across the globe through a politics of repair and rejuvenation. His recent publications include Urban Rearrangements: A Movement in Five Suites (IJURR, 2023) and Unarchiving Baloch History: ‘Small’ account of Baloch women that make waves in the Indian Ocean (2023).

Talk by Divya Cherian (History, Princeton University)

What did it mean to be Hindu in pre-colonial India? Through a discussion of everyday life and local politics in the kingdom of Marwar in the eighteenth century, this presentation will show that an alliance between existing landed elites and a newly ascendant mercantile class remade the category “Hindu.” A key element of this new articulation of an early modern Hindu identity was vegetarianism and an embrace of non-violence. Based on extensive research into the administrative records of the region, this presentation will show how political mobilizations of the ethical ideal of non-harm fashioned not just a new Hindu identity but also a more starkly defined “Untouchable.” These findings challenge the projection of dyadic conceptions of Hindu and Muslim onto the pre-colonial past and demonstrates the centrality of caste to the early-modern Hindu self and its imagination of inadmissible others.

Divya Cherian is a historian of early modern South Asia. She is an assistant professor at the Department of History at Princeton. Her book, Merchants of Virtue: Hindus, Muslims, and Untouchables in Eighteenth-Century South Asia (University of California Press, 2023), offers a fine-grained study of pre-colonial reconfigurations of the Hindu Self and its inadmissible Others pursued through local politics, state law, and bodily practice. Cherian is now working on her next book project, which is a history of "magic," sex, and political life in pre- and early colonial India.

Talk by Kalyani Ramnath (History, University of Georgia)

For more than century before World War II, traders, merchants, financiers, and laborers steadily moved between places on the Indian Ocean, trading goods, supplying credit, and seeking work. This all changed with the war and as India, Burma, Ceylon, and Malaya wrested independence from the British empire. Set against the tumult of the postwar period,Boats in a Storm centers on the legal struggles of migrants to retain their traditional rhythms and patterns of life, illustrating how they experienced citizenship and decolonization. Even as nascent citizenship regimes and divergent political trajectories of decolonization papered over migrations between South and Southeast Asia, migrants continued to recount cross-border histories in encounters with the law. These accounts, often obscured by national and international political developments, unsettle the notion that static national identities and loyalties had emerged, fully formed and unblemished by migrant pasts, in the aftermath of empires.

Drawing on archival materials from India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, London, and Singapore, Kalyani Ramnath narrates how former migrants battled legal requirements to revive prewar circulations of credit, capital, and labor, in a postwar context of rising ethno-nationalisms that accused migrants of stealing jobs and hoarding land. Ultimately, Ramnath shows how decolonization was marked not only by shipwrecked empires and nation-states assembled and ordered from the debris of imperial collapse, but also by these forgotten stories of wartime displacements, their unintended consequences, and long afterlives.

Kalyani Ramnath is assistant professor of history at University of Georgia. She received her Ph.D. from Princeton University and was a Prize Fellow in Economics, History, and Politics at Harvard University.

The annual International Fair showcases Cornell's global opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students. Explore the fair and find out about international majors and minors, language study, study abroad, funding opportunities, global internships, Cornell Global Hubs, and more.

The International Fair is sponsored by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies and Office of Global Learning (both part of Global Cornell), with Cornell's Language Resource Center.

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