Anand Vivek Taneja is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Anthropology at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of the award-winning Jinnealogy: Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi and the forthcoming The Gabriel of Madness: Islamic Poetry and Ethics in an Age of Hindu Nationalism.

Lecture Abstract:

Maulana Abul Kalam Azad (1888-1958), a major Islamic scholar and the first Education Minister of independent India, articulated a vision of Muslim belonging in a multi-confessional India which continues to be relevant for Indian Muslims today, a vision which is being revived along with Azad’s memory at a time when Muslim belonging in India is yet again being questioned. Crucial to Azad’s vision was a revaluation of the term “minority”. In Azad’s understanding, India’s Muslims were not a disadvantaged demographic category but held a position of social and moral leadership. While largely articulated in colonial (and yet un-Partitioned) India, Azad’s understanding of minority beyond demography, as a morally agentive category rather than one which is the recipient of the majority’s noblesse oblige, is one which has enormous resonance and relevance in post-colonial India, given the ways in which its Constitution and its first-past-the post electoral system have evolved to make it possible for demographic minorities and disadvantaged groups to make developmental demands of the state and to attain power through strategic electoral alliances. In this talk, I will first revisit a moment of the revival of Azad’s memory in Jamia Nagar, Delhi’s pre-eminent Muslim majority area and Muslim intellectual center. Then I will turn to Azad’s writings in his last book published in pre-partition India, Ghubar-e Khatir. Finally, I will think with current Muslim understandings of democratic politics, and the idea of ethical worthiness or auqat, which is understood as being central to electoral success, rather than just raw demographic numbers.

Offered in conjunction with the Department of Anthrolpology Colloquium Series.

Exile Memory and the Last Refuge of the Human Spirit: A study of Ritwik Ghatak and Theo Angelopoulos

Speaker: Dr. Rezaul Islam, Professor of Comparative Literature and Culture at Jahangirnagar University, Bangladesh

Venue: Language Resource Center (Stimson Hall G25), Cornell University

Date & Time: January 15th, 10 AM - 12 PM

Description: This talk examines the interconnected themes of exile, memory, and spiritual endurance in the films of Ritwik Ghatak and Theo Angelopoulos. Both auteurs, emerging from distinct geopolitical and cultural contexts—post-Partition Bengal and post–Civil War Greece—construct cinematic worlds where displacement becomes a metaphysical condition. Through fragmented narratives, elegiac imagery, and recurring motifs of return, their works transform historical trauma into a meditation on the last refuge of the human spirit: its capacity for remembrance and resilience. The speaker argues that for both Ghatak and Angelopoulos, cinema itself becomes a site of exile and redemption, where the boundaries between history, myth, and personal longing dissolve.

The talk will be followed by a discussion session and a musical performance.

Discussants:

Sezan Mahmud, filmmaker, & Professor, Medical Sciences, Quinnipiac University.

Salma Bani: Bangla Academy Award-winning novelist.

T M Ahmed Kaysher, Co-founder, Saudha Society of Poetry and Indian Music.

Ahmed Shamim, Academic Programs Coordinator, Language Resource Center, Cornell University.

Musical Performance:

Vidushi Chandra Chakraborty, an expert in Indian Classical Music.

This event will be held in person in G25 Stimson and will also be streamed live over Zoom. Join us at the LRC or on Zoom.

The event is free and open to the public.

This conference explores the interrelationships among political literary, and religious culture in early second-millennium South India and Sri Lanka. Scholars of premodern South Asia and Indian Ocean political culture now recognize that transregional processes fundamentally shaped political environments in this region. The substantial migration of scholars, military operators, ritual specialists, and pilgrim-patrons led to substantial transfers of knowledge. During this period, textual forms, material culture, languages, and technical sciences were on the move. Speakers will highlight the potential of working across languages and between key political-cultural centers to identify core characteristics of premodern political culture in peninsular India and Sri Lanka from approximately 900-1500. The culture of politics in this region underwent substantial changes during this period, bookended by the Indian Ocean imperial vision of the Cōḷas to the advent of the Portuguese Indian Ocean colonial empire.

Conference participants include:

Manasicha Akepiyapornchai, Asian Studies, University of Texas at Austin

Daud Ali, South Asia Studies, University of Pennsylvania

Stephen Berkwitz, Religious Studies, Missouri State University

Anne Blackburn, Asian Studies, Cornell University

Whitney Cox, South Asian Languages & Civilizations, University of Chicago

Elaine Fisher, Religious Studies, Stanford University

Alistair Gornall, History & Religion, Singapore University of Technology and Design

Larry McCrea, Asian Studies, Cornell University

Bruno Shirley, Buddhist Studies, Heidelberg University

Come to the LRC to practice your language skills and meet new people. Conversation Hours provide an opportunity to use the target language in an informal, low-pressure atmosphere. Have fun practicing a language you are learning! Gain confidence through experience! Just using your new language skills helps you learn more than you might think. Conversation Hours are open to any learner, including the public.

Modern surveillance technology has transformed the epistemic conditions of armed conflict. Drones, satellites, and persistent ISR systems now enable military commanders to identify individual civilians and predict, with statistical precision, the casualties their strikes will cause. Yet international humanitarian law continues to operate on frameworks designed for an era when such knowledge was unavailable - permitting foreseeable civilian deaths as lawful "collateral damage" provided they are not "excessive" relative to military advantage gained.

The Principle of Foreseeable Harm to Innocents (FHI) addresses this gap through one core proposition: if you can see them, and you can spare them, you must spare them. FHI does not create new law but clarifies what existing obligations under Additional Protocol I already require when properly interpreted for contemporary capabilities. It introduces an "avoidability gate" into targeting analysis: before asking whether civilian deaths are proportionate, commanders must first ask whether they are avoidable through feasible alternatives—different timing, different weapons, different approaches.

This lecture presents FHI as a further-protective interpretation of existing international humanitarian law, particularly Articles 51 and 57 of Additional Protocol I. Drawing on cases including the 2016 drone strike that killed Mohammad Azam - a Pakistani taxi driver identifiable as a civilian, whose death was foreseeable with certainty, and avoidable through alternative means—it demonstrates how current law permits outcomes that contradict its own protective purposes. FHI reorders the legal analysis to match the moral intuition that knowledge of preventable harm generates obligation to prevent it.

Speaker

Neil Cameron read law with computing at Sussex University, where he studied international humanitarian law under Professor Colonel Gerald Draper. Called to the Bar in 1978, he practised briefly before moving into legal technology consultancy - a field in which he has worked for over thirty-five years, latterly as an adviser to major law firms on technology strategy. He conducted a review of IT systems for the European Court of Human Rights and currently serves as Lead Analyst at Legal IT Insider.

His interest in humanitarian law never waned. Reading Daniel Ellsberg's Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner during the COVID lockdown prompted him to write The Inherent Flexibility of the Human Moral Compass, a two-part analysis tracing the erosion of civilian protection norms from the League of Nations' 1938 resolution through to contemporary drone strikes. The Principle of Foreseeable Harm to Innocents grew from that work. He has since engaged with scholars at Cornell Law School and Oxford's Ethics and Laws of Armed Conflict research group, and has an academic article under preparation. Originally from the UK, Neil currently lives in Ithaca, New York.

Host

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

Achieve fluency in a language of South Asia with the help of a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) summer fellowship. You’ll gain valuable knowledge about cultures and countries in which your language is commonly used, while developing skills in a language critical to the needs of the United States. Graduate and undergraduate students are eligible.

Eligible South Asian languages available for in-person or virtual intensive language study include Bengali, Dari, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Nepali, Oriya, Pashto, Persian, Punjabi, Sinhala, Tamil, Telugu, Tibetan & Urdu.

The deadline to apply is February 18, 2026.

Can't attend? Contact sap@einaudi.cornell.edu for more information.