This talk charts out an oceanic microhistory, grounded in the voyages of a dhow from the port of Kuwait, captained by the nakhoda ‘Abdulmajeed Al-Failakawi. It anchors itself in Al-Failakawi’s logbook, and looks out from the deck of the dhow onto a world of texts, letters, accounts, and other writings by nakhodas. The texts they wrote give us a sense of how nakhodas braided together past and present as they moved around the Indian Ocean; the routes they traversed bore the sediments of a long history of trade and empire. By writing from the deck of the dhow, we can gather histories that have been scattered along the coasts of Arabia, South Asia, and East Africa; we gain a sharper sense of how actors understood this world of circulation and inscribed it into their voyages.

**Co-sponsored with the South Asia Program

This talk inserts the Omani sultans and their royal household into the Arabian Sea world to shift the focus away from the histories of imperial hegemony and capitalist expansion that dominate its historiography. It analyzes princely careers as they evolved drawing from multiple contexts that were accessed by the excessive mobility of the protagonists, both overseas and over land. It views the Western Indian Ocean as a wide canvas for Omani careering in which the Sultans remained entangled in imperial networks and translated Western obsessions -- likely slavery and radical Islam -- making them locally legible.

This paper is an attempt to understand how, what counts as “violence,” and what does not, emerges in a given society. Groups in post-1990s Sri Lanka, particularly those led by monks, engage in and authorize a “new” monastic discourse in which they demand state sovereign power. These groups and their political actions – hunger strikes, protests, and hostility towards minority communities, especially Muslims – are able to disable the state order. However, these acts are rarely considered “violent” by the majority of Sinhalese Buddhists. In this paper, Dharmasinghe analyzes how the actions of some monks come to be interpreted or glossed as not-violence in the Sinhala Buddhist majoritarian tradition in Sri Lanka. It is her contention that the Sinhala Buddhist tradition serves as a legitimizing frame for the monks' authority as a force in Sri Lanka. Dharmasinghe's ethnographic materials are gathered from Sri Lanka, but she argues that this work’s relevance goes beyond places where the Theravada Buddhist tradition triumphs.

Geethika Dharmasinghe, is a PhD candidate in the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University. With the support of the Wenner-Gren Foundation, Dharmasinghe finished her field work in Sri Lanka in 2019. The larger question that hovers over her dissertation concerns the relationship of “Buddhists” to “violence.” It examines the conditions of possibilities for the emergence of Buddhist violence located outside of state control yet indebted to post-colonial avowedly secular electoral procedures, claiming premodern precedent for activities supported by a neo-liberal economic order. .

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, fellowships, internships, study abroad, exchanges, service learning, and more.

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Since 1947, the valley of Kashmir has become synonymous with a territorial dispute. Such is the emphasis on “territorial integrity” in the mediatized discourse on Kashmir, both in the South Asian subcontinent and the west, that the territorializing of the region is hidden under the self-evident notions of nationalism and statecraft. The political narratives on the contestations of sovereignty in the region assume a nexus between territory, state, and sovereignty at the cost of literary imaginaries. These literary imaginaries offer a space for historical thought to begin re-telling and remaking the topography of Kashmir as an instance of multiple histories, temporalities and human geographies. As some of the Kashmiri writers are celebrated in the canon of global English literature, identified by their representativeness of regional territory, their writing reveals an enquiry into how territorialism happens. By focusing on the key Kashmiri writers of the present, I will argue against the forgetting of issues of migration, an alternative subaltern postcolonial history and the solidification of sub-national orientation. These three axes of my argument intersect at the current reality of the political fragments of Kashmir, drawn across subcontinental nationalisms, which require a new imaginary to even begin describing the immense loss of lives, aspirations, languages and cultures of contact that is the Kashmiri condition since the last century.

Asiya Zahoor hails from Baramulla, Kashmir. She studied Caribbean literature, Kashmiri Literature and Psycholinguistics, at the Universities of Kashmir, Jamia Millia Islmia (New Delhi) and Oxford University (UK). Her research explores the issues of migration, representation, identity and cognitive processes involving language learning. Asiya has translated short stories from Kashmiri to English. Her film, The Stitch, has won the Critics’ Award for the Best Short Film at the South Asian Film Festival and Best Short Film at Third Eye Film Festival, Mumbai. It has been an official selection at several international film festivals, including Roshd International festival in Tehran and Sharam Al Sheikh Festival, Egypt. Asiya has curated a website www.bolbosh.net that aims to document the literatures and languages of Kashmir. Her latest book, Serpents under my Veil (2019) is a collection of critically acclaimed poems. Currently, Asiya is a Sanford Taylor Fellow in the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University.

Actors across latitudes and cultures amaze their audiences by displaying at will the physical ‘symptoms’ of emotions such blushing, shivering, and weeping. Sanskrit sources offer almost two millennia of sophisticated reflections on the emotional life of actors, the hidden engine lying behind their almost eerie capacity to emote by exhibiting emotions that they might not even be feeling. In the most commonly known South Asian theory, it is the spectator who is the locus of rasa, the aesthetic experience of blissful savoring that even foreshadows the mystical experience of oneness with the absolute. However, an identical experience in the playwright and its indispensable transmission through the medium of the performer —be it an active or a passive recipient— are also vital aspects of the artistic process. The starting point of my presentation will be the seminal dramaturgical treatise by Bharata, the Nāṭyaśāstra, but the major protagonist will be Abhinavagupta (10th-11th c., Kaśmīr), a tantric master and philosopher who fashioned an innovative synthesis of earlier aesthetic theories. According to his vision, fictional detachment, emotional involvement and dynamic agency are integrated in the figure of the performer and in his liminal and all-encompassing nature of recipient, transmitter, and creator of the elixir of aesthetic experience. Such a mastery over one’s own emotional, mental and bodily sphere —the thespian experience— makes the actor a perfect metaphor and paradigm for the playful freedom of lordship, be it that of Śiva himself, the actor supreme, or of the nobleman, the supreme aesthetic connoisseur.

Daniele Cuneo is ‘maître de conférences' (lecturer) in Sanskrit and Indian Civilization at the Université Sorbonne nouvelle, Paris. After obtaining his PhD at the University of Rome "La Sapienza" under the direction of Raffaele Torella, he worked and taught in the three prestigious universities of Vienna, Cambridge and Leiden. His main areas of research are Sanskrit aesthetics, Philosophy of Language, Tamil Culture, and South Asian Manuscript Studies. Across multiples texts and traditions, it is the cultural imbrication of language and emotions that represents the core of Daniele Cuneo’s historical and philosophical investigation. His publications include several articles on Indian aesthetics and philosophy such as ‘Detonating or Defusing Desire. From Utpaladeva’s Ecstatic Aesthetics to Abhinavagupta’s Ecumenical Art Theory’, Italian translations of the Mānavadharmaśāstra, the seminal work on Sanskrit jurisprudence, and of the Muttoḷḷāyiram, a celebrated collection of Tamil poems from the mid-first millennium, and numerous contributions to the digital catalogue of the Sanskrit manuscript collections at the Cambridge University Library. His current projects focus on the edition, translation, interpretation and study of several Sanskrit texts from late medieval Kashmir (Mukula’s Abhidhāvṛttamātṛkā of Mukula, the unpublished commentary by Sahadeva on Vāmana’s work, and Mammaṭa’s Śabdavyāpāravicāra).