Approaching South Asia: Challenges, Connections and Creativity by Jonathan Galton and Adrija Dey
One-Day PhD Conference, Friday 29th June 2018, SOAS South Asia Institute, University of London
How do we approach South Asia in the 21st Century? For academics, the region presents a unique set of challenges arising from its socio-cultural diversity, its complex political landscape and entrenched economic disparities. Moreover, the region is arguably as divided as it has ever been and there is an increasing emphasis on challenging the constricted academic notion of South Asia as a coherent entity that is often framed in highly Indocentric terms.
These were the questions that brought together thirteen PhD student presenters and eight academic staff chairs and panellists at this year’s edition of the SSAI PhD conference Approaching South Asia: Challenges, Connections and Creativity. Together, participants drawn from eight academic institutions brought perspectives shaped by research on four countries: Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan and India.
On paper, disciplines represented included literary criticism, film studies, anthropology, political science and religious studies. In reality, however, the material presented demonstrated the porous nature of both disciplinary and territorial boundaries. For example, a presentation on a South Indian religious practice was shaped as much by ethnographic fieldwork as it was by textual analysis, while a discussion on the representation of Karachi as a “non-place” in Hanif Kureishi’s Something to Tell You was as much about the UK as it was about Pakistan. Indeed, some threads emerged only during the discussions following each panel, such as the importance of social and linguistic capital in contexts as diverse as the Bangladeshi NGO elite, local government in Sindh and the quest for representation among dominant castes in Maharashtra.
Four panels of student presentations, chaired by SOAS and guest academics, were followed by a plenary Round Table discussion. Chaired by SSAI Director Professor Edward Simpson and featuring two SOAS academics (Dr Amina Yaqin and Dr Feyzi Ismail) and two guest academics (Profess Ronki Ram from Panjab University, and Professor S. Parasuraman, former director of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences), this session was explicitly geared towards “Challenging South Asia”. Following an opening salvo from each of the four speakers, questions were open to the floor and included a debate about caste in contemporary South Asia and a lively discussion on the decolonisation agenda.
An intense day of thought-provoking presentations and discussion was concluded with a captivating performance of music and dance. Drawn from folk traditions of border regions such as Punjab and Bengal, these performances were perhaps the most eloquent argument in favour of a broad conceptualisation of South Asia that leaves room for a nuanced appreciation of sub-regional variety.
