Asian Studies Centre

Pervez Hoodbhoy seminar given as part of the Modern South Asian Seminar series in October 2023 What had been a relatively small gap in 1947 between Pakistan and India is turning into an ever widening chasm. Given the common origins of these two countries what essential differences led to the present situation? Or were the trajectories predetermined? After discussing historical similarities and differences, I will explore whether Pakistan can now choose a different future for itself. Pervez Hoodbhoy taught physics at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad (1973–2021) as well as other Pakistani universities for nearly five decades. He was visiting professor at MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Maryland, and a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Washington. His book “Islam and Science – Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle for Rationality” was translated into 8 languages.

Ajay Skaria - University of Minnesota, speaks at the Oxford South Asian Intellectual History Seminar on 1 May 2023. The figures of the neighbor and friend are ubiquitous in Gandhi’s writings. While he himself assumes he is only reaffirming old figures, something truly radical happens in his writings (as in those of his sharpest critic, Ambedkar). Both write at a time when a modern commandment, so to speak, exemplified in the categorical imperative, is displacing the Biblical and other analogous commandments. It is in order to criticize this new commandment that both affirm instead old commandments around neighbor and friend. But in their very questioning, they also borrow from the new commandment a key element—the injunction to equality. By doing so, they inaugurate a new politics—a politics that could be described as democratic neighborliness or political friendship. This talk will trace the conceptual prehistory of this new politics. Ajay Skaria is Professor in the Department of History and Institute for Global Studies at the University of Minnesota. Since the 2000s, his research interests have included twentieth century Indian intellectual history, modern caste politics, and postcolonial theory. In addition to articles in these fields, he is the author of Hybrid Histories: Forests, Frontiers and Wildness in Western India (1999) and Unconditional Equality: Gandhi’s Religion of Resistance (2016). He was a member of the Subaltern Studies editorial collective, and coedited Subaltern Studies Vol XII: Muslims, Dalits and the Fabrications of History (2005).

Miftah Ismail Pakistan’s former Minister of Finance gives a lecture Many Pakistani colonial institutions such has the bureaucracy, the judiciary and especially the army have evolved into self-perpetuating elite institutions that resist change and seek to maintain the status quo. And over the years they have co-opted politicians, religious leaders, the landed gentry and also large industrial conglomerates and together they have neither pursued inclusive economic growth nor a liberal, tolerant society. Resultantly Pakistan is falling behind all its peer nations in South Asia in income and human development. The economic and political crises today, the worst in Pakistan’s history, offer an opportunity to build a new ruling coalition that will sue for growth, inclusivity and human development. The alternative is a secular decline towards a failed state. Miftah Ismail is Pakistan’s former Minister of Finance. He holds a PhD in Public Finance and Political Economy from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

Zaib un Nisa Aziz (University of South Florida, Tampa) speaks at the Oxford South Asian Intellectual History Seminar on 13 March 2023. For queries, please contact seminar convenor at saih@history.ox.ac.uk At the turn of the twentieth century, the global imperial order was in peril. In cities across the world, revolutionary factions emerged where nationalists deliberated radical, even violent paths to a post- imperial world. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin belonged to and wrote of this world – a world primarily defined by the crisis of the imperial order and the looming question of the future of national communities. As Lenin along with his compatriots seized power in Moscow in October 1917, he announced the dawn of a new era where the empires of the world would eventually fall in the throes of the impending world revolution. My talk, based on my first book project, shows how that his call resonated with all sorts of imperial decriers who saw, in his victory, the possibility of a new world. From Rio Grande to River Ganges, anti-colonialists turned to Moscow to help realize their own political visions. Encouraged by the triumph of Lenin and his party, anti-colonialists tied the end of imperialism to the revolutionary end of global socioeconomic hierarchies. This historical narrative responds to recent scholarly provocations to study decolonization in connected rather than discrete terms and to employ the methodological tools of global history to write new historical accounts, which attend to the ends of empire as a global phenomenon. One of my key intellectual objectives is to think of Asian, African, and Caribbean anti-colonialists not only as itinerant revolutionaries and campaigners but as intellectuals, thinkers, and writers. I demonstrate the many ways in which anti-colonialists interpreted, built on, modified, and otherwise responded to Lenin’s critique of imperialism. For many, anti-imperialism now not only meant opposition to foreign rule but also a wholesale rejection of the prevalent global economic order. Hence, inequality and development became an inextricable part of visions of a postcolonial global order. Moreover, this presentation highlights how the inter-war period marks a decisive shift in the intellectual history of decolonization. Zaib un Nisa Aziz is a historian of global and imperial history, with a focus on the British Empire and Modern South Asia. She is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of South Florida, Tampa. In her past and present research, she seeks to push the geographic, temporal and thematic boundaries of the historical study of the end of empire and its aftermath, and is particularly interested in histories of decolonisation, labour and internationalism. Her current book project, tentatively titled ‘Nations Ascendant: The Global Struggle Against Empire and The Making of our World’, traces the origins and politics of an international community of colonial activists, thinkers and campaigners, and shows how they came to share ideas about universal decolonisation and the end of empires.

Vikram Visana (University of Leicester) speaks at the Oxford South Asian Intellectual History Seminar on 7 March 2023. Uncivil Liberalism studies how ideas of liberty from the colonized South claimed universality in the North. Recovering the political thought of Dadabhai Naoroji, India’s pre-eminent liberal, this book focusses on the Grand Old Man’s pre-occupation with social interdependence and civil peace in an age of growing cultural diversity and economic inequality. It shows how Naoroji used political economy to critique British liberalism’s incapacity for civil peace by linking periods of communal rioting in colonial Bombay with the Parsi minority’s economic decline. Innovating an Indian liberalism characterized by labour rights, economic republicanism and social interdependence, Naoroji seeded ‘Western’ thinkers with his ideas as well as influencing numerous ideologies in colonial and post-colonial India. In doing so, the book reframes so-called Indian ‘nationalists’ as global thinkers. Dr Vikram Visana is Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of Leicester. He was awarded his PhD in the history of Indian Political Thought under the supervision of Chris Bayly at the University of Cambridge in 2016. He has taught at the University of Cambridge, University of Edinburgh, and the University of Huddersfield, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Global History, Freie Universität Berlin. Dr. Visana’s research focuses on Indian political thought from the nineteenth century to the present. His book, Uncivil Liberalism: Labour, Capital and Commercial Society in Dadabhai Naoroji’s Political Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2022), is an original and radical reinterpretation of the political thought of Dadabhai Naoroji, and studies how ideas of liberty from the colonised South claimed universality in the North. Dr. Visana has also published on Indian iterations of liberalism, republicanism, sovereignty, peoplehood, populism, and political economy. Ongoing research has articles in preparation for leading political theory journals and edited volumes. These new publications consider contemporary Indian political theory from the mid-20th century to the present with a particular focus on authority, multicultural justice, and majoritarianism in Indian conservative political philosophy and Hindutva. Please note that there were some minor technical errors in the PowerPoint Presentation, with some text omissions due to issues with screen-sharing, where some text boxes would not load. For queries, please contact seminar convenor at saih@history.ox.ac.uk

Sarah Ansari (Royal Holloway, University of London) speaks at the Oxford South Asian Intellectual History Seminar on 31 Oct 2022 South Asia’s transition from colonialism to independence in 1947 was undoubtedly one of the most momentous events of the twentieth century. Not surprisingly perhaps, its early postcolonial years have come to exercise a great pull for a range of scholars, who explore this key period, on the one hand, to ask questions about colonial-era legacies or continuities, and, on the other, to identify developments that help to explain what is happening there in the twenty-first century. This paper accordingly explores how - during those early postcolonial years - ideas about, and forms of, citizenship were created or forged by contingent processes of interaction between the ‘state’ – its representatives and institutions at different levels – and ‘society’ – its citizens in-the-making. Very often, as this paper will highlight, it was the day-to-day realities of the time that directly shaped the broader context in which Pakistanis and Indians engaged with what it seemed to mean, in practice, to be a citizen in post-1947 South Asia. Sarah Ansari is a historian of modern and contemporary South Asia, based at Royal Holloway, University of London. Much of her research has focused on issues linked with religion, identity, migration, citizenship, gender, and the province of Sindh, both before and since 1947. Her latest monograph—co-written with William Gould and entitled Boundaries of Belonging (Cambridge University Press, 2019)—explores the intersections between localities, citizenship and rights as these played out in India (UP) and Pakistan (Sindh) during the decade following Independence. Sarah is also currently President of the Royal Asiatic Society, the first woman to hold this role in the institution's 200-year existence.

Luna Sabastian (Northeastern University- London) speaks at the Oxford South Asian Intellectual History Seminar on 7 Nov 2022. Luna Sabastian is Assistant Professor in History at Northeastern University - London. Prior to assuming this position, she held a postdoc at Cambridge University, from where she also received her PhD in 2020. Her work focuses on modern Indian political thought. She is writing a book titled ‘Indian Fascism?’. Among its highlights is an exploration of Savarkar's Hindutva, gendered violence, and race. Much of the talk will be taken from this chapter. The book further explores a meaningful connection between Indian thought and Nazi ideas of "caste"; the idea and geography of the Hindu Crown; and seismic shifts in the political thought of Hindutva after Savarkar. One of her ongoing side projects focuses on British Indian legal history.

Freedom Between Order and Chaos: Reading a Political Satire From India Jyotirmaya Sharma (University of Hyderabad) speaks at the Oxford South Asian Intellectual History Seminar on 16 May 2022. For queries, please contact seminar convenors at saih@history Hasyarnava or The Ocean of Mirth, a medieval Sanskrit political satire, delineates two compelling themes that require serious consideration. First, the Indic traditions underline the centrality of order in a polity. This preoccupation is underlined by the supremacy of the Rajadharma-dandaniti framework. A great deal of violence and cruelty inheres within this framework. Second, if the order is the site for violence and force, it follows that a glimpse of freedom, unshackled from the conventional implications of the purusharthas can only be had in upholding the desirability of disorder.

In 2019, the Indian government unilaterally revoked the autonomy of the disputed region of Kashmir amidst one of the harshest and longest military blockades and communications blackouts in history of the region In 2019, the Indian government unilaterally revoked the autonomy of the disputed region of Kashmir amidst one of the harshest and longest military blockades and communications blackouts in history of the region. While the move was primarily justified as a national security imperative that would also bring economic prosperity to Kashmir, one of the tertiary arguments that was put forth in support of the move was a celebration of the revocation of autonomy as a victory for LGBTQ+ rights. How did a right-wing Hindu nationalist government, which had - less than a decade ago - vociferously opposed LGBTQ+ rights, suddenly adopt such progressive rhetoric? Was there any truth to the government's claims or was it yet another form of "pinkwashing" intended for an international audience? And what does the adoption of LGBTQ+ rights language by the Indian government in Kashmir mean for the broader future of LGBTQ+ rights in India? Anish Gawande is a writer and a translator. He is the Director of the Dara Shikoh Fellowship in India and the Curator of Pink List India, the country's first archive of politicians supporting LGBTQIA+ rights. Anish Gawande is currently a Rhodes Scholar finishing his MPP degree in Intellectual History at Oxford.

Talk by Cemil Aydin from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Cemil Aydin (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) speaks at the Oxford South Asian Intellectual History Seminar on 6 June 2022. For queries, please contact seminar convenors at saih@history.ox.ac.uk.

Alicia Decker (Penn State) as part of the Conference - Expulsion: Uganda’s Asians and the Remaking of Nationality Between October 2 and December 31, 1982, nearly 80,000 Banyarwanda – most of whom were citizens of Uganda – were violently expelled from their homes by state operatives in Mbarara and Bushenyi Districts. Approximately half fled to neighboring Rwanda, while the rest crowded into existing refugee settlements in the southwest or found themselves stranded on the Ugandan side of the border at Merema Hill. Unlike the Asian expulsion of 1972, the Banyarwanda were not given ninety days to prepare. Instead, they were attacked in their homes and forced to flee without a moment’s notice. Most of the displaced lost everything they owned – their homes, their valuables, and their cattle. International observers also reported multiple instances of rape and suicide. I do not wish to suggest that the Asian expulsion was any less violent or traumatic. On the contrary, I argue that it provided a dangerous template that was later used by those in power to justify and carry out the next brutal eviction. Indeed, as this presentation reveals, expulsion functioned as a militarized form of statecraft that bolstered, and then later undermined, the integrity of the postcolonial state. Alicia C. Decker is an associate professor and department head of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the Pennsylvania State University, with courtesy appointments in the African Studies Program and the Department of History. She also co-directs the African Feminist Initiative with Gabeba Baderoon and Maha Marouan. She is the author of In Idi Amin’s Shadow: Women, Gender, and Militarism in Uganda (Ohio UP, 2014), and co-author with Andrea L. Arrington-Sirois of Africanizing Democracies: 1980-Present (Oxford UP, 2015). She is the co-editor of “African Feminisms: Cartographies for the 21st Century,” a special issue of Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism (2018) and “African Feminist Subjectivities,” a special issue of Feminist Formations(forthcoming 2024). With Giacomo Macola, she co-edits a book series on War and Militarism in African History (Ohio University Press) and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of African Military History. Her scholarly articles have appeared in the International Journal of African Historical Studies, Women’s History Review, Journal of Eastern African Studies, History Teacher, Afriche e Orienti, Feminist Studies, Journal of African Military History, and Meridians, as well as various edited book collections. Decker is currenting working on a new book that explores the gendered legacies of militarism in Uganda after the collapse of Amin’s military state.

Anneeth Kaur Hundle (UC Irvine) as part of the Conference - Expulsion: Uganda’s Asians and the Remaking of Nationality In this short talk, I offer a synopsis of my forthcoming book and its core interventions. Namely, I recenter contemporary Uganda within scholarly discussion on the 1972 Asian expulsion. I assess the exceptional ways in which the 1972 Asian expulsion is understood within global knowledge formations, arguing that expulsion is a “critical event” with lingering effects and affects in territorial Uganda and its diasporas, which I situate as the “insecurities of expulsion." Despite the historic expulsion of Ugandan Asians, South Asian-ness continues to define the very constitution of the Ugandan nation and the normative construction of (racially nativist) Ugandan national identity. Ugandan postcolonial governments have shifted from policies and practices of Asian racial expulsion to maintaining racial exclusion while incorporating Ugandan Asian returnees and South Asian subjects as racial non-citizens and economic subjects. I utilize the post-liberal democratic analytic of “non-citizenship” to explore gradations in substantive privileges, rights and entitlements and exclusions across Ugandan Asian returnee and new South Asian migrant communities across old and new imperial and sub-imperial formations, orienting us to the study of Afro-Asian entanglements and the broader decolonization of political community in both national and transregional scope. Ultimately, I am proposing an “anthropology of Afro-Asian entanglements”-an arena of study that is concerned with the ways in which indigenous Africans and South Asians are bound together in relations of interdependency, hierarchy, intimacy and estrangement both within territorial Uganda and its transregional geographies across the Indian Ocean and North Atlantic. Anneeth Kaur Hundle is assistant professor of anthropology and Dhan Kaur Sahota Presidential Chair of Sikh Studies in the Department of Anthropology at University of California, Irvine (UCI). Prior to UCI, she was Visiting Professor at the Center for African Studies at UC Berkeley, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UC Merced, and Research Associate at the Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR) at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. She is completing a book manuscript entitled, Insecurities of Expulsion: Race, Violence, Citizenship and Afro-Asian Relationalities in Transregional Uganda and beginning work on two new projects on Sikh feminisms and the intersections of Sikh Studies and university studies. She is also involved in new research clusters on Global Africa/Global Blackness, Interrogating South Asia/diasporas and Decolonizing Universities in Global Perspective with her colleagues at UCI.

Shobana Shanker (Stonybrook) as part of the Conference - Expulsion: Uganda’s Asians and the Remaking of Nationality Most accounts of Idi Amin’s expulsion of Asians from Uganda in 1972 assume that African leaders and the Organization of African Unity were largely silent or unmoved to action. This interpretation assumes that Africans understood the Asian expulsion as a political problem—by contrast, I argue that Africans understood the question of Indian settlers as a fundamental problem of the postcolonial condition, connected to the very definition of African selfhood. I explore the significance of the Indian question around the African continent to the formation of intersecting movements of anticolonialism, antiracism, nationalism, Pan-Africanism (which was a critical antidote to nationalism), and Afrocentrism. Contrary to simplistic renderings of African responses to Idi Amin’s anti-Asian racialism, African reckoning with African-Indian entanglements garnered dynamic and long-lasting African cultural responses—even where Indian settlers were few—that produced new African-Indian negotiations on the continent and among African migrants in India. Shobana Shankar is Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies at Stony Brook University, in New York. Her research focuses on cultural encounters and politics in West Africa and Africa-India networks, especially in religion, intellectual history, health, and education. Her most recent book, An Uneasy Embrace: Africa, India and the Spectre of Race (Hurst, 2021), grew out of her meeting with Muslim Indian missionaries in Nigeria, during the course of her research for her first book Who Shall Enter Paradise? Christian Origins in Muslim Northern Nigeria, c.1890-1975 (Ohio University Press). She has also co-edited two collections of essays on religion and globalization. Her recent articles focus on Ghanaian Hinduism, reformism in Nigeria, and Senegal’s Afro-Dravidian movement.

Round table discussion

Ammar Ali Jan (Haqooq-e-Khalq Movement) speaks at the Oxford South Asian Intellectual History Seminar on 17 January 2022. For queries, please contact the seminar convenor at saih@history.ox.ac.uk. This talk will discuss salient features of authoritarian rule in Pakistan. First, the permanent state of emergency that shapes political life in the country fuels arbitrary and whimsical forms of governance. The perpetual violation of the constitution by the ruling classes tells us that rather than viewing the Pakistani state as theocratic, it might be better to suggest that the country's crisis results from the fact that it lacks any political theology or sacred document. Second, the case of missing persons is emblematic of the nature of power in the country as it is the invisible ink through which sovereign power simultaneously reveals and veils itself. Such disavowed forms of violence show that "erasure" remains a central, yet under examined aspect of the exercise of modern power. Finally, the controlled nature of democracy in Pakistan results in a tense dynamic between the form and content of authoritarian rule. For historical reasons, democracy is the necessary form through which authoritarian rule is justified in the country, a contradiction that also opens up important space for oppositional politics. Carefully considering these themes makes it possible to intervene in debates on the global itinerary of democracy and resistance in the time of global authoritarianism. Dr Ammar Ali Jan is an academic and left-wing political activist based in Lahore, Pakistan. Dr Jan has a Doctorate in History from the University of Cambridge, where he worked on the encounter between anti-colonial thought and Marxism in colonial India. His book, Rule by Fear: Eight Theses on Authoritarianism in Pakistan (Folio Books, 2021), explains the political, economic and social roots of authoritarianism in the country, focusing on the structural features propelling the rising militarisation of society. He is a regular contributor to a number of leading publications, including The News International, Al-Jazeera, EPW and The Jacobin. At present, Dr. Jan is a member of the Haqooq-e-Khalq (People’s Rights) Movement, an anti-capitalist organisation that is working among workers, farmers, students and women to build an alternative political project. He is also a Cabinet Member of the Progressive International and does a weekly show on Naya Daur. Dr Jan was recently fired from his teaching post and charged with sedition as part of a crackdown against dissenting voices.

Sudipta Sen (University of California, Davis) speaks at the Oxford South Asian Intellectual History Seminar on 26 April 2021.

Sundar Sarukkai (Centre for Society and Policy, IISc) speaks at the Oxford South Asian Intellectual History Seminar on 10 May 2021. For more information on the event, see here. For queries, please contact the seminar convenor at saih@history.ox.ac.uk. Please note that there were some unavoidable technical difficulties during this talk, which have impacted the quality of the recording.

Sumathi Ramaswamy (Duke University) speaks at the Oxford South Asian Intellectual History Seminar on 31 May 2021.

Durba Ghosh (Cornell University) speaks at the Oxford South Asian Intellectual History Seminar on 7 June 2021.

Saili Palande-Datar gives the fourth and final presentation on the second day of the Maharashtra Studies Conference.