Talk by Seuty Sabur

Both an Asian Development Bank (ADB) report (2016) and a World Bank report (2014) have spoken of the possibility of Bangladesh becoming an upper-middle-income country by 2021. From 1990 to 2010, the size of the middle classes expanded from 9% to 20%. Yet, despite this newfound interest in the middle class, questions about its composition, the practices, and aspirations of its constituents are hardly ever raised. The political implications of such questions are also never acknowledged, let alone debated. My longitudinal research attempts to make a section of this class tangible. In this essay, I explore the material conditions under which these gendered-class consolidations were possible during successive colonial and postcolonial periods. Through memoirs, genealogies, intergenerational family histories, and archives, I attempt to locate my interlocutors and their class position across space and time. Their intergenerational narratives reveal how their spatial mobilities (birth, marriage, work, and retirement) are entwined with the accumulations of various capitals and how that collided with Dhaka's urban formations as a metropolitan city.

Seuty Sabur is currently an associate professor of anthropology at BRAC University. She obtained her PhD in sociology from the National University of Singapore and her MA in cultural dynamics from Hiroshima University, Japan. Seuty Sabur teaches a range of undergraduate courses, including critical social theory, methodology, gender, class, kinship, and family. For the past few years, her core research interest has been the ‘Metropolitan Middle Class of Bangladesh’. As an activist and academic based in Bangladesh, she has been drawn to multiple recent social movements. She has been writing on the women’s movement, the Shahbag uprising, the gendered construction of the nation, and the culpability of left and liberal forces. Her research has been published in reputed journals such as ‘Fieldsights’ by the Society for Cultural Anthropology, ‘Journal of South Asian Development,’ ‘South Asia Chronicles’ and ‘South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies.’ She has authored numerous op-eds for international and national newspapers and portals. She is currently working on her upcoming book “Marriage and Friendship: Social Networks of the Bangladeshi Affluent ‘Middle Class”.

ICM FALL 2022 NEW BOOKS SERIES

This talk by Professor Travers will focus on his just published book, Empire of Complaints: Indian Petitioning and the Making of the British Empire in India (Cambridge UP, 2022) which reinterprets the transition from Mughal to British rule in eighteenth-century India, showing how precolonial, Persianate ideas of imperial justice shaped the emergence of modern colonialism. It argues that British conquerors built a new colonial state in Bengal by expropriating and transforming earlier Mughal protocols for doing justice to petitioning subjects, and by adapting Persianate routines for documenting local rights. Travers explores how a new system of colonial land and taxation law grew out of judicial processes of petitioning and judicial inquiry, in which Indian petitioners invoked the historical memory of Mughal justice to make claims on the early colonial state. Even as British rulers claimed to have established an enlightened ‘rule of law’ in a land of ‘despotism’, they also reworked Mughal norms and precedents to suit their own purposes, justifying their own imperial decrees by reference to reconstituted forms of Mughal law.

Robert Travers is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Cornell. His academic research has focused mainly on the British empire in India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and tries to understand the political, social and cultural foundations of imperial power. His book, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India (Cambridge UP, 2007) examined the political thought of the first generation of British empire-builders in India.

Another of Travers' ongoing research project focuses on forms of ‘Eurasian cosmopolitanism’ and cultural exchange generated on the moving frontiers of European empires. A recent essay examines the career of a notable Eurasian cosmopolitan, Haji Mustapha d. 1791, who served both the French and British empires in India as a ‘go-between’ and knowledge broker. Recent published essays have also focused on questions of imperial political economy, diplomacy and treaty-making, and imperial law.

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A zoom link is provided for the extenuating circumstances of those who cannot attend in person, but the quality of the image and sound cannot be guaranteed.

Talk by Dr. Lalitha Gopalan

Cinemas Dark and Slow in Digital India provides a sustained engagement with contemporary Indian feature films from outside the mainstream, including Aaranaya Kaandam, I.D., Kaul, Chauthi Koot, Cosmic Sex, and Gaali Beeja, to undercut the dominance of Bollywood-focused film studies. Gopalan assembles films from Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Kolkata, and Trivandrum, in addition to independent productions in Bombay cinema, as a way of privileging understudied works that deserve critical attention. The book uses close readings of films and a deep investigation of film style to draw attention to the advent of digital technologies while remaining fully cognizant of ‘the digital’ as a cryptic formulation for considering the sea change in the global circulation of film and finance. This dual focus on both the techno-material conditions of Indian cinema and the film narrative offers a fulsome picture of changing narratives and shifting genres and styles. The book presentation will include a sequence of clips from a few select films considered in the book.

Lalitha Gopalan is an associate professor in the Department of Radio-Television-Film and affiliate faculty in the Department of Asian Studies and South Asia Institute. Her research and teaching interests are in the areas of Film Theory, Feminist Film Theory, Contemporary World Cinemas, Indian Cinemas, Genre Films, and Experimental Film and Video. Essays and books written by her include Cinemas Dark and Slow in Digital India (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021; Orient Blackswan 2021), Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema (London: BFI Publishing, 2002), and Bombay (London: BFI Modern Classics, 2005); and the edited volume The Cinema of India (London: Wallflower Press, 2010). Her current book project explores various experimental film and video practices across different locations globally. She has published essays in journals including Screen, Journal of Moving Image, Film Quarterly, New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film, and many landmark anthologies. She has been a recipient of several grants including a Senior Fellowship from the Polish Institute of Advanced Study in Warsaw (PIAST); Provost’s Author’s Fellowship from the University of Texas at Austin; Tagore Fellowship from the Ministry of Culture, Government of India; Senior Long-Term Fellowship, American Institute of Indian Studies; and Fulbright Hays-Nehru Fellowship. Long interested in curatorial practices her recent co-curated projects with Anuj Vaidya include Cruel Cinema: New Directions in Tamil Cinema (2011-12) and Other Species, Other Times: New Video Art from India’ (2015-16). Lalitha Gopalan currently serves on the editorial board of Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies. She has served on several film festival juries and is currently on the advisory board of the 3rd Film Festival, San Francisco.

Many contemporary theorists and practitioners of disobedience have questioned whether civility and nonviolence ought to be requisite components of legitimate dissent. While sharing their skepticism of overly narrow, prescriptive formulations of a moral or legal right to disobedience, Professor Karuna Mantena considers broader practices of civility and explores their purpose and function in terms of the political logic of nonviolent protest. She does so by way of a historical and conceptual analysis of why and how Gandhi introduced civility into the theory and practice of nonviolent disobedience. The emphasis on civility in disobedience marks a significant departure from Thoreau’s understanding, in which the term “civil” designated the object of resistance (namely, civil government or the state) and not its character.

Gandhi began to insist on civility in nonviolent protest as a remedy to the violence that accompanied his first attempts at mass satyagraha in India (1919-1922). He diagnosed this violence as stemming in part from the unmasterable character of political action. Civility as a form of self-discipline was devised to manage and mitigate action’s inherent hazards. The speaker will highlight two novel aspects of this formulation: the ways in which civility was to be formalized, performed, and dramatized in satyagraha and how such practices served to make protest more persuasive.

Please join us for this virtual conversation. Register here.

About the Speaker

Karuna Mantena is a Professor of Political Science at Columbia University and co-director of the International Conference for the Study of Political Thought (CSPT). She is the author of Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (2010), which analyzed the transformation of nineteenth-century British imperial ideology.

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Presented by the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. Co-sponsored by the Department of History and the Gender and Security Sector Lab.

One year ago, on August 15, 2021, the Taliban entered the Arg (Presidential palace) in Kabul, completing their astonishingly rapid takeover of Afghanistan. At the end of that same month, US forces completed withdrawal from Afghanistan – marking an end to the longest war in American history. One year later, our speakers reflect on Afghanistan’s recent history, life under the Taliban regime, and what we might expect in the near future as the Taliban engages with the international community. We welcome attendees to join us for a fireside conversation about this critical geopolitical topic.

Speakers

Zinab Zhra Attai, Reppy Institute Director’s Fellow, Ph.D. student in Comparative Politics, Cornell University

Sharif Hozoori, Visiting Scholar, South Asia Program & IIE-SRF Fellow

Maryam Amini, Global Development, Cornell CALS

Moderator

Sabrina Karim, Hardis Family Assistant Professor for Teaching Excellence, Associate Director, Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies

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Presented by the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. Co-sponsored by the South Asia Program and the Gender and Security Sector Lab.

A conversation with Nishant Batsha and Durba Ghosh (History, Cornell University).

On a small Pacific island, a brother and sister tune in to a breaking news radio bulletin. It is 1985, and an Indian grocer has just been attacked by nativists aligned with the recent military coup. Now, fear and shock are rippling through the island’s deeply-rooted Indian community as racial tensions rise to the brink. Bhumi hears this news from her locked-down dorm room in the capital city. She is the ambitious, intellectual standout of the family—the one destined for success. But when her friendship with the daughter of a prominent government official becomes a liability, she must flee her unstable home for California. Jaipal feels like the unnoticed, unremarkable sibling, always left to fend for himself. He is stuck working in the family store, avoiding their father’s wrath, with nothing but his hidden desires to distract him. Desperate for money and connection, he seizes a sudden opportunity to take his life into his own hands for the first time. But his decision leaves him at the mercy of an increasingly volatile country. Spanning from the lush terrain of the South Pacific to the golden hills of San Francisco, Mother Ocean Father Nation is an entrancing debut about how one family, at the mercy of a nation broken by legacies of power and oppression, forges a path to find a home once again.

Nishant Batsha is a writer of fiction and histories. He is the author of the 2022 novel Mother Ocean Father Nation (Ecco/HarperCollins). He is currently at work on A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart (Ecco/HarperCollins, February 2025), a novel set between California and New York at the dawn of World War I. He holds a PhD in history from Columbia University, as well as a master's from the University of Oxford (on a Doctorow Fellowship and ESU-SF Scholarship) and an undergraduate degree from Columbia. His academic research focused on Indian indentured labor in Trinidad and Fiji. Nishant's writing has been supported by the Headlands Center for the Arts and the Prelinger Library, as well as fellowships such as the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans.

Books will be available for sale, and signing, after the conversation.

Talk by Kalyani Devaki Menon

In today’s India where we see the ascendance of Hindu supremacy, the increasing hegemony of upper-caste Hindu norms, escalating violence against religious minorities, and rising authoritarianism, the place for Muslims is shrinking. However, while these forces marginalize Muslims and threaten their place in contemporary India, they are not totalizing. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with diverse groups of Muslims in Old Delhi, I examine how religion provides one arena for Muslims to intervene in the political and counter the revanchist politics of the Hindu Right in India. The religious practices of Old Delhi’s Muslims imbue localities with particular cultural inflections and can be seen as modes of making place. Focusing on tensions that emerged between different groups of Muslim women over mourning rituals in Old Delhi, I explore how they not only index diverse constructions of ideal religious subjectivity, but also illustrate how Old Delhi’s diverse Muslim communities negotiate difference and construct belonging in contemporary India. In so doing, I analyze how rituals of death are also very much about life, providing an arena for Old Delhi’s Muslims to variously make place for themselves in India today.

Kalyani Devaki Menon is a Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at DePaul University. Her research focuses on religious politics in contemporary India. Her first book, Everyday Nationalism: Women of the Hindu Right in India, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2010. Her new book, Making Place for Muslims in Contemporary India, was published by Cornell University Press in 2022.