Talk by Jason Cons (Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin)

Delta Futures explores the competing visions of the future that are crowding into the Bengal Delta’s imperiled present and vying for control of its ecologically vulnerable terrain. In Bangladesh’s southwest, development programs that imagine the delta as a security threat unfold on the same ground as initiatives that frame the delta as a conservation zone and as projects that see its rivers and ports as engines for industrial growth. This talk, and the book upon which it is based, explores how these competing futures are being brought to life: how they are experienced, understood, and contested by those who live and work in the delta, and the entanglements they engender—between dredgers and embankments, tigers and tiger prawns, fishermen and forest bandits. These future visions produce the delta as a “climate frontier,” a zone where opportunity, expropriation, and risk in the present are increasingly framed in relation to disparate visions of the delta’s climate-affected future.

Jason Cons is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Delta Futures (University of California Press, 2025) and Sensitive Space (University of Washington Press, 2016). He is the co-editor of Frontier Assemblages (Wiley) and is a member of the Limn editorial collective and an outgoing editor of South Asia: The Journal of South Asian Studies.

This presentation is supported by a grant from the Central New York Humanities Corridor

Talk by Sara Kazmi (English, University of Pennsylvania)

This talk will focus on left, feminist, and anticaste literatures produced by radical intellectuals from Punjab, a border region split between India and Pakistan. I show how Punjabi writers deployed regional oral poetic and performative forms to critique caste, patriarchy, authoritarianism, and dominant religion in postcolonial South Asia. Focusing on Marxist playwrights Najm Hosain Syed and Gursharan Singh, the talk will analyze how they interpreted and referenced key genres embedded in poetic cultures that predate the national divide, like the Var of Dulla Bhatti, a historical ballad that celebrates 16th-century rebellions against the Mughal throne. In doing so, these authors responded to the rising significance of the peasant as a political actor in 1960s Punjab in both India and Pakistan, intervening in global debates around revolutionary transformation and decolonization. Moreover, they constituted a border-crossing literary practice that traversed, and indeed, actively challenged the colonially drawn boundary between the two nation-states.

Sara Kazmi is an Assistant Professor of English with affiliations in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, and Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies. She is a scholar and translator whose work takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of anticolonial, left, and oppositional literary production in the global south. Sara focuses on the Panjab region, and more broadly, on South Asia and South Asian diasporas, combining methods in literary studies, performance, and history to examine how marginal and vernacular writing engages planetary debates around decolonization, Marxism, and revolutionary transformation. Sara is also part of the Revolutionary Papers collective, which is a transnational research collaboration exploring 20th-century periodicals of left, anti-imperial, and anticolonial critical production. In addition to her work as a scholar, she is a performer and student of Indian classical music. She blends ragas with folk tunes in renditions of protest music from South Asia, some of which are archived at mein.beqaid (I, Uncaged). Prior to joining the University of Pennsylvania, Sara Kazmi was a Postdoctoral Fellow at LUMS University in Lahore, Pakistan. She received a PhD in Criticism and Culture at the Department of English, University of Cambridge, an MA in South Asian History at SOAS, London, and a B.A. (Hons) in Humanities from LUMS University.

Discussion with Sarah Thompson (Government, Cornell University), Sadia Mahmood (South Asia Program, Cornell University) and author Natasha Raheja (Anthropology and Performing & Media Arts, Cornell University)

Selective Welcome: Pakistani Hindus in India (Forthcoming, University of Chicago Press) explores the flexibility of minority-majority politics in the context of citizenship claims in South Asia. The book offers an ethnographic account of the migration of minoritized Pakistani Hindus to India, where they ostensibly become part of a religious majority. I argue that majority-minority politics in South Asia exceed state borders, in ways that are not nation-bound. Theorizing the ways that national majorities construct themselves as global minorities, and conversely, the ways that minorities imagine justice as majorities, I contend that liberal democracy's minority form does majoritarian work. As more and more national majorities consolidate authoritarian rule through imagining themselves as minorities under threat, this work makes an important contribution to scholarly conversations about political theory, migration, and borders across the humanities and social sciences.

Members of the Cornell community may read a draft of the book's introduction before the presentation (Cornell netID required to view).

Natasha Raheja is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Performing & Media Arts at Cornell University. She received her PhD in Anthropology from NYU and her BS in Biology and MA in Asian Languages and Literature with a focus on Urdu from UT Austin. Her projects explore questions of migration, belonging, and majority-minority politics in South Asia. Dr. Raheja is the director of Cast in India, an observational portrait of the Bengali metal workers who manufacture New York City manhole covers, and A Gregarious Species, an experimental, found-footage film featuring cross-border locust swarms in the Thar Desert region. She is also completing a book tentatively entitled Selective Welcome: Pakistani Hindus in India.

FALL 2025

Monday, September 22, 2025

Klarman KG42

ICM NEW BOOKS SERIES

Moorings: Voyages of Capital Across the Indian Ocean

NIDHI MAHAJAN (Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Cruz)

The Institute for Comparative Modernities is thrilled to welcome Cornell alum Nidhi Mahajan '15 to campus for a talk about her recently published book Moorings: Voyages of Capital Across the Indian Ocean.

Moorings follows sailors from the Gulf of Kachchh in India as they voyage across the Indian Ocean on mechanized wooden sailing vessels known as vahans, or dhows. These voyages produce capital through moorings tht are spatial, moral, material, and conceptual. With a view from the dhow, the book examines the social worlds of Muslim seafarers who been rendered invisible even as they maneuver multiple regulatory regimes and the exigencies of life, navigatiing colonialism, neoliberalism, the rise of Hindutva, insurgency, climate change, and border regimes across the ocean. Based on historical and ethnographic research aboard ships, at ports, and in religious shrines and homes, Moorings shows how capitalism derives value from historically sedimented practices grounded in caste, gender, and transregional community-based forms of regulation.

BIO

Nidhi Mahajan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz. She was recently the inaugural Fatema Mernissi Postdoctoral Fellow in Social and Cultural Studies at The Africa Institute, Sharjah, UAE, where she continued research on a new project that examines multiple contestations over belonging and notions of sovereignty in contemporary coastal Kenya. Mahajan is also a practicing artist and has developed multi-media exhibitions for the Fort Jesus Museum in Mombasa, Khoj International Artists’ Association in New Delhi and the 2019 Sharjah Architecture Triennial.

Talk by David Engerman (History, Yale University)

Apostles of Development offers a history of international development through the lives and work of six South Asian economists who all studied together in Cambridge in the 1950s. They were an illiustrious group, with long careers and many succeses: winning a Nobel Prize (Amartya Sen), spending a decade as Prime Minister of India (Manmohan Singh), inventing the Human Development Index (Mahbub ul Haq), becoming a leading economist of international trade (Jagdish Bhagwati), agitating for independent Bangladesh (Rehman Sobhan), and helping create the modern Sri Lankan economy (Lal Jayawardena).

David C. Engerman, Leitner International Interdisciplinary Professor of History and Global Affairs, teaches international history at Yale University. Between receiving his Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley in 1998 and joining Yale in 2018, he was on the faculty at Brandeis University. In 2016, he served as elected president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. He is the author of four books – Modernization from the Other Shore; American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development (Harvard, 2003), Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts (Oxford, 2009), The Price of Aid: The Economic Cold War in India (Harvard, 2018), and most recently Apostles of Development: Six Economists and the World They Made (Penguin/Random House-India, Oxford, 2025); he is also the editor or coeditor of multiple collections, including a volume of the new Cambridge History of America and the World.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Aditya Bhattacharjee, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow from Asian Studies at Cornell University.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the The Kahin Center, 640 Stewart Ave. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

About the Talk

My presentation shares ethnographic vignettes from an ongoing investigation of the religious lives of Thai-American restaurateurs in different locations across New York state. More specifically, I center this population’s interactions with the rising popularity and worship of Hindu gods in their predominantly Buddhist homeland. Drawing on interviews with Thai-American restaurant owners and observations of the artwork that decorates their businesses, I explore how new trends in popular Thai religion have influenced the beliefs and business practices of residents in the Empire State’s primary Thai enclaves.

By taking note of the frequency with which paintings and icons of Hindu figures like Ganesha, Brahma, and Lakshmi are grouped with Southeast Asian and Chinese deities like Nang Kwak, Thao Wetsuwan, Guan Yin Pu Sa, and charismatic Buddhist monks on the Thai restaurant altar setting, my talk uses a material analysis of such design-work to raise three related questions: (1) Are Thai-Americans performing Thai-ness by incorporating Indian deities within their religious repertoires?; (2) What kind of experience does the Thai-American restaurateur wish to convey to clients by creating a dining aesthetic inflected by Hindu iconography?; and (3) How might we re-think notions of cultural appropriation in contemporary times by engaging with case studies, like those considered in this talk, that are curated by Asian Americans following patterns of emerging religious syncretism in their homelands?

South Asia Librarian Kelsey Utne will introduce graduate students to resources available through the Cornell University Library for doing research on South Asia.