I'm giving a talk at the Association for Computing in the Humanities conference, which is being held virtually June 24-26 this year. My talk will be on June 26 in the morning. The talk describes a newer digital collection, Adivasi Writers.
Showing posts with label South Asia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label South Asia. Show all posts
Association for Asian Studies Conference 2026: A Few Highlights and Notes
I was at the AAS conference in Vancouver over the weekend, to be part of a panel on Colonial Archives and Digital Humanities in South Asia.
I also took the opportunity to listen in on some conversations I might normally get to hear at literature conferences.
I was just there for Friday and Saturday, and I was able to attend the following panels:
- Why Do We Care? Smart City, Artificial Intelligence, and Care in Urbanizing Asia
- The Cultural Revolution After Sixty Years: Mao's Strategic Vision or Improvised Disorder?
- Beyond the Visual: Gender, Queerness, and Media Margins in Japanese Popular Culture
- Film, Media, and Gender (interesting paper on Adivasi filmmakers)
- Sitting in the Tension: Caste in the South Asian diaspora (standout session for me, focusing on caste, especially in the Sikh diaspora)
- AI in Action: Best Practices for Research, Publishing, and Teaching in Asian Studies - Sponsored by AAS Editorial Board (surprisingly upbeat and non-apocalyptic!)
And my own panel: - New Approaches to Colonial Archives in South Asian Digital Humanities
I'll do brief summaries of some takeaways from the various sessions below.
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1. The Asian Smart Cities panel was something I went to on a lark, mainly out of curiosity. Here's a bit from the panel description:
The concept of smart city is linked to futuristic scenarios made of images, symbols and concepts that became part of collective imagination and memory: cities should not only be efficient, productive and accessible; they also need to be beautiful, sustainable and socially inclusive.
At present, the smart city designation means things like: real-time traffic monitoring, with cameras and censors; CCTV cameras everywhere, observed either by humans or (increasingly) by AIs; weather and threat warnings (i.e., flood sensors).
By and large, I was not surprised to hear Singapore discussed on the panel as embracing the smart city approach. But I was interested in the presentation on the panel dealing with the Smart City approach in Jakarta. There, it has been only partially successful since there are so many people in the city who are in informal settlements... it's hard to use high-tech cameras and monitors when people are living in shacks and improvised settlements... There was also an interesting paper here on the rise and fall of the cycle rickshaw (Bejak, in Jakarta) as a mode of transportation and as a symbol of the Indonesian working-class "everyman" that continues to be invoked by politicians even as the city modernizes.
(Side comment: I do wonder whether before planners invest billions of dollars making smart cities in the Global South, they should make cities where everyone has access to affordable housing, power grids and sewage systems that work, and roads and public transportation.)
Some of the papers alluded to other dissents from the Smart City model, especially the growing emphasis on using AI instead of human monitoring. AI-powered smart city technology is expensive; it's often strongly promoted by companies selling monitoring systems and other tech companies; and it can lead to a sense of being constantly policed that might be good for preventing street crime, but that's not good for overall social well-being or urban discovery or spontaneity.
Along those lines I came across this Op-Ed by Richard Sennett in the Guardian that spoke to those dissents: "No One Likes a Smart City That's Too Smart":
Uniform architecture need not inevitably produce a dead environment, if there is some flexibility on the ground; in New York, for instance, along parts of Third Avenue monotonous residential towers are subdivided on street level into small, irregular shops and cafes; they give a good sense of neighbourhood. But in Songdo, lacking that principle of diversity within the block, there is nothing to be learned from walking the streets. [...]
A great deal of research during the last decade, in cities as different as Mumbai and Chicago, suggests that once basic services are in place people don't value efficiency above all; they want quality of life. A hand-held GPS device won't, for instance, provide a sense of community. More, the prospect of an orderly city has not been a lure for voluntary migration, neither to European cities in the past nor today to the sprawling cities of South America and Asia. If they have a choice, people want a more open, indeterminate city in which to make their way; this is how they can come to take ownership over their lives.
(This wasn't mentioned on the panel; just something I read and thought was on point.)
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2. The Cultural Revolution panel I attended was really well-attended -- standing room only, with a number of people turned away at the door due to the overflow crowd. The speakers were all very senior academics, some with several books on the history of post-revolution China. Here's a bit from the program copy.
Yiching Wu will argue that in May of 1966, Mao’s intention was to initiate a targeted purge within education institutions, but the campaign soon escalated into a generalized attack on “capitalist roaders” inside the party. Andrew Walder will examine how the unintended consequences of Mao’s moves shaped the course of factional conflicts, particularly in the context of failed truce negotiations among rival rebel groups. Patricia Thornton will focus on the dynamics of the mass movement and the question of representation, raising critical questions about Mao’s ability to direct or contain the grassroots movement he had unleashed. Daniel Leese will assess the quality and structure of information that reached Mao, drawing on the party’s internal reporting systems to interrogate the limits of central knowledge and decision-making during the Cultural Revolution. Felix Wemheuer will chair the discussion.
Essentially, what I took away from the discussion was the sense that the opening of the Cultural Revolution was a lot less organized than one might think. Mao himself initiated some of the new policies, but the extremity of what followed was not really his intent, nor were the actions of party officials in towns and villages outside of Beijing fully under his control. The panelists discussed a number of key events in 1966-1967 in pretty granular detail (see the Wikipedia page for the Cultural Revolution, and scroll down to 1966: Outbreak)
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3. The "Beyond the Visual: Gender, Queerness, and Media Margins" panel I attended had some really interesting papers thinking about sound and voice in Japanese popular culture.
The paper I found most interesting was Haruki Segicuchi's paper a 1988 Japanese film called Summer Vacation 1999, about a homoerotic relationship between teen boys where the actors were actually all cis-gendered women!
I also really enjoyed Minori Ishida's paper on "Gender Deviance in the Bodies of Anime Characters." The panelist mentioned anime series I mostly hadn't seen, like Fena: Pirate Princess and The Land of the Lustrous. There's some really interesting stuff going on here with representations of gender identity (including non-binary and gender non-conforming characters) in both art design and in voicing in these series. While traditional anime featured a highly stylized and binarized approach to gender (soft / feminine women and girls; tough/masculine boys & men), some newer series are exploring queer and nonbinary aesthetics both in visual character design and voicing.
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4. The Film, Media, and Gender panel I attended was a bit of a hodge-podge. I especially enjoyed the two papers dealing with South Asian film studies.
Rebecca Peters of Florida State University gave a paper on Kiran Rao's film Laapata Ladies, focused on how the film uses costume design and clothing to mount a critique of conservative gender norms and expectations. It's part of a dissertation she's writing on women film directors in Bollywood, which sounds like it will be pretty impactful.
Arpit Gaind of UCLA gave a rich talk summarizing his research based on his field experience in Jharkhand working with Adivasi filmmakers.
Here's a bit from his abstract:
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and film analysis, this study demonstrates how Indigenous collectives such as Akhra Ranchi have pioneered what Raheja (2007) theorizes as "visual sovereignty"—the space wherein Indigenous filmmakers critique and reconfigure dominant media conventions while operating within their constraints. By repurposing technologies from analog VHS to digital drones, Adivasi filmmakers parallel global Indigenous movements in asserting what Barry Barclay conceptualized as "Fourth Cinema"—media controlled by Indigenous communities rather than cultural colonizers.
Links for further exploration:
Akhra Ranchi main page
Scholarly chapter on Adivasi Dance in Jharkhand that alludes to Akhra Ranchi
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5. As I suggested above, the panel "Sitting in the Tension: Caste in the South Asian Diaspora" was a highlight for me.
Speakers were Sharanjit Kaur Sandhra (University of Fraser Valley), Neha Gupta (UBC), Sasha Sabherwal (Northeastern University), Anita Lal (Poetic Justice Foundation), and Manmit Singh (grad student at UBC).
I was especially interested in the stories told about a recent exhibit that has appeared at various universities in British Columbia called Overcaste, which has been controversial in the Sikh community. (See coverage in the Vancouver Sun).
Anita Lal is a Dalit (Chamaar) Sikh whose family has been in British Columbia for four generations. Her great-grandfather Maya Ram Mahmi was the first Dalit migrant to arrive in Canada. The community was small, but over time they established their own institutions; today, there are several Ravidasia Gurdwaras that have been founded by Dalit Sikhs.
The Overcaste exhibit has a nice digital version that can be accessed here.
More relevant links: Punjabi Sikh and Dalit (article at SAADA)
Account of the Exhibit at Community Wire, with a quote from Anita Lal that contains a mention of Maya Ram Mahmi:
“In 1906, my great-grandfather Maya Ram Mahmi became the first recorded Dalit immigrant to Canada, seeking a brighter future and escape from the social and economic oppressions he faced in India. Yet, he and his descendants, including myself, have faced ongoing caste discrimination, an issue that persists over a century later. Through the OVERCASTE exhibit, we aim to highlight the often-ignored problem of caste bias in Canada. This initiative seeks to amplify the Dalit Canadian narrative, which has been historically sidelined and ignored,” says Anita Lal, Co-Curator of the exhibit and Co-Founder of the Poetic Justice Foundation.
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6. I was surprised by the generally optimistic tone of the next panel I attended, "AI in Action: Best Practices for Research, Publishing, and Teaching in Asian Studies." Two of the speakers here, Joseph Alter and Elise Huerta, were journal editors.
Alter described how the submission rate for the Journal of Asian Studies has increased by 150% in the past five years. The reason is not so much AI-assisted writing as AI-assisted translation, as many potential contributors who are not native speakers of English are writing up their research in their own languages and then using Gen-AI translation to render their work in smooth, idiomatic English.
The editor was not especially bothered by this, and I can see why -- it has the potential to democratize scholarship in Asian Studies. (However, it does mean that reviewers have to be found to handle all those new submissions, and policies have to be developed to handle the use of AI...)
The editors also mentioned the growing problem of peer reviewers being tempted to use generative AI to create overviews or summaries of submitted articles, or even to write assigned reviews.
Along those lines, in the Q&A I asked the following question:
[Me] This question is first for the editors on the panel but others might also have things to say about it. I’m a little surprised that the overall tone of this panel is a lot less apocalyptic than I would have expected. In literature and writing, the mood is a lot darker – I taught first-year writing recently, and it was really tough to get through to students about the importance of the process we’re asking them to engage in. Some students are having trouble resisting the temptation to cheat with AI, while others wish it would just go away.
Perceived audience and reward matter a lot. People tend to work hard when they know there’s a reward for their effort. People tend to write more thoughtfully and carefully when they know there is a reader who will care what they say. I'm worried about academics also being tempted to cheat using gen-AI for peer-review.
We should mention that peer-review is by and large unpaid labor. It’s also work that doesn’t really have the same level of professional reward as our primary research. Most likely our reviews will be read by an editor who knows our name but will go back to the author who doesn’t know who we are. And while we can claim the review on our CVs it doesn’t count for much in university professional activities reports, so our department chairs and Deans don’t really pay much attention either. So our audience of human readers is tiny; it seems hard to imagine people will not start to cheat when they write anonymous peer-reviews.
So it's a structural problem. Can there be structural solutions?
Perhaps open-peer review? So if we do a review of an essay, it is and can be known by others...?
In their responses, the editors of the two journals and others on the panel were not terribly concerned with this problem. Their sense is that peer-reviewing is voluntary writing, so people who don't want to do the work will turn down the request to review. And they feel that most if not all of what they currently get in terms of peer-review evaluations are written by humans even if the readership is largely anonymized. And they feel that people are by and large sticking to the honor system & often writing really compelling, constructive reviews that help other scholars and that help the field overall.
Overall, a lot less apocalyptic than one would expect!
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7. Finally, my own panel.
Margaret Schotte and Christina Welsch have collaborated on an impressive DH project called Sailing With the French, which aims to "visualize and analyze more than 1300 voyages of the French East India Company during the 18th century, uncovering patterns and stories from archival records of the era." They're finding some really fascinating stuff about the demographic backgrounds of the sailors who sailed for the French Indies Company in the 18th century. Alongside Frenchmen, there were also Lascars and enslaved people, some of them from Africa, who were on these ships.
I would also recommend people interested in these topics check out Christina Welsch's book, The Company's Sword: The East India Company and the Politics of Militarism, 1644–1858.
For my part, I posted the text of my own talk and slides here.
Dhanashree Thorat's talk on telegraph and internet infrastructures overlapped with her 2019 article in South Asian Review, which you can see here.
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After my panel I chatted with Nicole Ranganath of UC-Davis. She mentioned the Pioneering Punjabis Digital Archive (1300 items) and the Punjabi and Sikh Diaspora Archive. The latter has some impressive material related specifically to early Punjabi women settlers in California (see Women's Gallery).
South Asian Americans: Time To Toughen Up
There’s a great research- and reporting-driven opinion essay by Lydia Polgreen in the New York Times about how Indian Americans have found themselves flat-footed after the surge in anti-South Asian rhetoric and policy from the right. There are two prongs of this – one is the expansion of policies designed to reduce immigration, and the other being a more insidious cultural turn towards xenophobia and open, unapologetic racism.
The Trump administration, led by Trump himself but also J.D. Vance and Stephen Miller, has been dead-set on reducing both legal and illegal immigration from all non-European countries. The administration can apparently act on this single-handedly – virtually eliminating asylum options, adding onerous fees and paperwork to H-1B visa processes, and making it more difficult and less appealing for Indian students to come study in the U.S. (Indian student enrollment at U.S. universities was down 44% this year.) The good news is that at least some of that may be at least partially reversible the next time there’s a Democrat in the White House. Then again, it is certainly possible that future Democrats, having seen how unpopular Joe Biden’s approach to immigration was, may be reluctant to look “soft” on immigration and keep at least some of the Trump policies in place. (The ICE raids, we can hope, will stop once Trump is out of office.) Without comprehensive immigration reform, it is not clear there is a way to fix everything that’s been broken in the immigration system.
That leaves the racism; this is something we can fight, but first we have to understand it. Some right-wing Indian Americans have been surprised to discover the rapid acceleration of racialized hostility on social media. After encountering an overwhelming array of hostility to his benign Diwali post on social media (choice example: “Go back home and worship your sand demons”), Vivek Ramaswamy asked his peers on the right to “cut the identity politics.” Even Dinesh D’Souza, a commentator who built a long career on anti-Black race-baiting, has finally decided to be a little bit offended (“In a career spanning 40 years, I have never encountered this type of rhetoric. The Right never used to talk like this. So who on our side has legitimized this type of vile degradation?”) To these folks, I would absolutely say, you made your bed, now lie in it.
Others, like the retired doctor in Texas in Polgreen's story whose community built a 90 foot Hanuman statue at their local Mandir only to discover evangelical Christians in their town protesting at the temple gates, need to wake up to the new realities of American life. Below I have a couple of strategies for how South Asian Americans might toughen up a bit.
Some of what I have to say is hinted at in Polgreen’s piece itself. I would recommend reading through to the second half, where she has some helpful quotes from Suketu Mehta about the delusions some Indian Americans have harbored about how others really feel about them:
But Mehta also wondered whether Indian Americans had become a bit smug about their spectacular success in America over the past six decades, trusting that their wealth and status would shield them from the kind of bigotry that once barred them from entry and citizenship. Indian Americans, he said, tell themselves: “We are the richest, best educated people. We don’t commit crimes. We go to good schools. We came here legally. We’re not like the Mexicans.”
Mehta finds this exceptionalism both understandable and dangerous. The Indians who come to the United States are not just the most ambitious and educated. They also are mostly the beneficiaries of the durable hierarchies of caste, class and religion that stratify Indian life.
Following Mehta’s insightful comments above, it seems to me that the goal for South Asian Americans has to be to build generation-spanning institutions and spend both cultural capital as well as real capital on investments that benefit American society as a whole.
Nobody is impressed by “model minority” rhetoric, and some communities are actively hurt by it. A surprising number of South Asian Americans, especially of the older generation, blithely cite success statistics and low crime rates as if those all happened in a vacuum. And as if other communities haven’t been on the receiving end of generational institutional racism, cyclical poverty, and over-incarceration.
Nor is there much going to be much benefit in complaining about racism that mysteriously just appeared. Newsflash: it was always there; it’s just more visible now that there are politicians at the top who are willing to exploit it and mobilize it. The kinds of demonization that have been directed against Black folks and Latinos can also be directed against privileged brown immigrants. Indeed, it should not surprise us that this would happen.
So what can we do?
1. South Asian Americans could work together with other minoritized communities to fight anti-Black and anti-Latino racism, all forms of xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and anti-Muslim rhetoric wherever any of these may crop up. We need to learn to see those fights as our fights. (Note: this is why "South Asian American" – including immigrants from Muslim-majority South Asian countries as well as Nepal and Sri Lanka – is a better framework for organizing than “Indian American.”)
2. South Asian Americans could use our economic clout to build lobbying groups and PACs to advance South Asian community interests. If a politician running for the U.S. Senate starts posting about Hindu deities as “demons” on social media (as happened with the Hanuman statue in Texas), a strategic offer of a political donation if they can tone it down could do wonders. Otherwise, make a donation to their primary opponent and announce why we’re doing that to the media. Indian Americans have been happy to spend their money building massive, showy temples. In politics, they’ve been somewhat inclined to stay on the sidelines. It’s time for that to change.
3. South Asian Americans need to rally behind politicians who support South Asian communities -- and civil rights and secularism more generally -- and unify against those who don’t. Anyone who talks like Stephen Miller or J.D. Vance should not have a chance of getting our vote. I was not hugely surprised to see that in the 2024 election there was a small but noticeable shift in the Indian American community towards Trump – even at a time when Trump’s opponent was an Indian-American woman! (61% of Indian Americans still voted for Harris in 2024, but one might have expected that number to be higher.) Some of the interest in Trump, admittedly, was due to social media misinformation (see point #4 below), as well as the “economic message.” But some of the softness in support was due to lack of clarity and confusion about what the different parties actually stood for.
4. South Asian Americans probably need to invest in social media influence campaigns to correct falsehoods, misinformation, and out-of-context stories.
In conversations leading up to the 2024 campaign, a surprising number of my friends and acquaintances were citing an old story about Kamala Harris that had been circulating on social media about Kamala Harris’ role as Attorney General in a case in 2011, where a Sikh man with turban and beard sued to be able to hold a job as a prison guard, which requires people to be clean-shaven; Harris supported the state of California’s position on prison guards being clean-shaven to wear gas masks. This is apparently a real story, but it is hardly a reason to say that “Kamala Harris is anti-Sikh.” Again, if we were comparing Harris – a Black and South Asian candidate with a long history of supporting civil rights – to Trump, it should be clear to everyone who is likely more sympathetic to South Asian communities, including Sikh Americans.
Similarly, a number of my family members and friends were duped by the idea – again, popular on WhatsApp – that “Modi and Trump are best buddies, so nothing bad could happen with respect to India or Indians.” They seemed not to realize that Trump meant what he was saying on the campaign trail about radical changes to the immigration system, and what that might entail.
How exactly this might get fixed is not so easy. Some of it could be solved by the platforms themselves. But probably advocacy groups should be thinking about corrective social media influence campaigns to respond to out-of-context stories. These can be tricky to do well, but the incredible success of Zohran Mamdani on social media in the 2025 NYC mayoral campaign might be a model to emulate. Humor, wit, and charismatic messengers could go a long way here.
2025: My Year in Books
1. General Interest Recommendations
Even now -- and after many, many years of teaching books like The God of Small Things -- I've still never seen Roy's early films (Massey Sahib, directed by Pradip Krishen; In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, which Roy wrote; and Electric Moon, which, frankly, I'd never even heard of!)
Massey Sahib (1989) is a kind of loose adaptation of Joyce Cary's Mister Johnson transposed to India; there's a version of it on up on YouTube here.
There's a version of In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (1990) here. (This film, which is based on Roy's experience in a school of architecture in Delhi in the 1970s, seems like the place to start)
I don't see any versions of Electric Moon (1992) online. (Probably ok; in her account of it in the memoir, Roy suggests that this film, a hybrid British-Indian production made with BBC funding, was a bit of a misfire.)
Caoilinn Hughes, The Alternatives. File under: thoughtful climate fiction. A readable but somewhat idiosyncratic novel of ideas; what would it really mean to move to rural Ireland and drop off the grid? What sacrifices would it require, especially in terms of your personal relationships and your family? At the center of this smart novel are four sisters, each with a Ph.D. -- one a philosopher, one a geologist, one a caterer, and the fourth a political scientist. The debates between the sisters form the core of the novel. Some of the philosophy might be a little abstruse for readers (Kant!), though Hughes does find ways to make it accessible enough and relevant to the core ethical dilemmas she wants to explore.
Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore. File under: climate fiction + thriller. A novel set on a remote island outpost near Antarctica (Shearwater Island), with a group of caretakers whose main job is to protect a doomsday seed bank. The novel has the stylized language and lyricism of literary fiction, though in the second half it turns more into a thriller plot. Overall, it made me curious to visit the place itself, though given its remoteness that seems far-fetched. (Let's start by getting ourselves to Australia or New Zealand first...)
Percival Everett, James. I'm guessing most people in my circle have read this brilliant rewriting of Huckleberry Finn from Jim/James' point of view -- it was on everybody's top ten lists last year. I finally read it this year; it's very good. I especially liked the investment in James' interest in writing his own story: "With my pencil, I wrote myself into being. Wrote myself to here." Also: "I can tell you that I am a man who is cognizant of his world, a man who has a family, who loves a family, who has been torn from his family, a man who can read and write, a man who will not let his story be self-related, but self-written." This theme of the novel reminded me of other 'postcolonial' texts that write back to the Anglo-American Canon -- and that thematize the act of writing as a central part of coming to own one's subjectivity (see: J.M. Coetzee's Foe). I've never taught Uncle Tom's Cabin, but if I were to do that in the future, I would do it alongside James.
Modernist Studies Association 2024: A few notes
I was recently at the Modernist Studies Association Conference in Chicago. I've been going to the conference on and off for many years (going back to the early 2000s?). Lately, I've been going there to present on materials relevant to my digital projects. If interested, slides from my presentation are here.
I'm not going to try and give a comprehensive account of what I saw and did at MSA, but below are a few highlights. Overall, the vibe was good -- despite the wild week in US politics, everyone seemed eager to talk about their research. Indeed, in a few cases (especially with some of the material related to queer and trans writers), it seemed like there was a more intense relevance in light of the growing anti-trans tendency in public discourse.
Saturday Keynote: Nella Larsen's Passing
It was fun to have the Saturday keynote be a screening of the 2021 Netflix adaptation of Passing, followed by a panel discussing it. The film was great (I hadn't seen it!), and the panel discussion following, with Rafael Walker, Pardis Dabashi, and Cyraina Johnson-Roullier, was lively and enlightening. My main takeaway from the panelists was that the film is a pretty faithful adaptation of the novel, but it's more optimistic about love and less pessimistic about the affect of racism on personal relationships than Larsen's book.
Queer and Trans Writing
Panel attended: Transing modernism/queering modernism
Jaime Harker, University of Mississippi
Chris Coffman, University of Alaska, Fairbanks
Aaron Stone, University of Virginia
Mat Fournier, Ithaca College Marquis Bey, Northwestern University
Marquis Bey, Northwestern University
This was a standout panel. Papers on Bryher, Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Djuna Barnes' Nightwood, and more
The idea of thinking about Bryher as a trans figure seems especially worthwhile. Also, the paper on Orlando mentioned some recent adaptations of the novel, including a film called Orlando: My Political Biography as well as a 2019 opera adaptation by Olga Neuwirth.
There were also a couple of papers that were theoretical / auto-theory interventions on the concept of dysphoria, and the concept of gender itself (memorable phrase: "from gender dysphoria to gender euphoria").
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At another panel I attended, I saw another paper dealing with trans issues -- Michael Mayne of Denison University. He had rewritten parts of his paper at the last minute to reflect the results of the election. (In recent years, 664 anti-trans bills have been proposed by state legislatures. In the recent election, 41% of the ads for Trump were anti-Trans ads.
The Well of Loneliness is increasingly being read as a trans novel (including by scholars like Jack Halberstam and Leslie Feinberg). Mayne's emphasis was on the idea of transness as abjection in Hall's novel. He also mentioned Julia Serano's idea of "Effemimania" (a term I hadn't heard before), and Susan Stryker's idea of the prospect of trans writers reclaiming the "monster."
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At another panel, Pamela Caughie gave a presentation on "Bloombsury's Gender Politics," where she alluded to the painter Dora Carrington, who was not quite trans, though she did engage in some transgressive gender play, and who was certainly queer and polyamorous (key line: "How I hate being a girl! Tied with female encumbrances and hanging flesh").
Caughie also mentioned many other writers who were new to me, including Rosamund Lehmann (Dusty Answer, 1927), and Denton Welch (Maiden Voyage, 1943).
Early Postcolonials
For many years, the MSA has been a welcoming place for people doing work on what we might think of as "early postcolonial" literature (1950-1980, roughly). This is the era of people like Naipaul and Lamming, Khushwant Singh, Mulk Raj Anand, C.L.R. James, etc.
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On the panel where I presented, Ben Fried gave a paper on the relationship between V.S. Naipaul and his publisher, Andre Deutsch. Deutsch was a Jewish immigrant who fled from German-occupied Europe. Deutsch and Diana Athill worked together to form a new publishing house (Allan Wingate), which published Naipaul and many other postcolonial writers. Throughout his early career, Naipaul struggled with the tension of being a highly culturally grounded writer at a time when publishers were looking for "universal" appeal.
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On another panel, I saw a paper by Rochona Mojumdar of the University of Chicago. She was interested in the dialogue between Mrinal Sen's early 1970s "Calcutta Trilogy" and radical Latin America in the "Third Cinema" movement -- specifically, Fernando Solanas' revolutionary classic, La Hora de Los Hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces), and Sen's Padatik (1973). There's an interesting moment of borrowing or appropriation in Sen's film -- where he takes the exact footage of police beating protestors that also appears in Solanas' film.
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I also attended this panel:
R28. Mediating Empire: Comparative Colonialisms, Comparative Media Studies
Chair: Jessica Berman, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Daniel Morse, University of Nevada, Reno
Stephen Pasqualina, University of Detroit-Mercy
Abhipsa Chakraborty, SUNY Buffalo
Nasia Anam, University of Nevada, Reno
This was another standout panel, with papers on radio adaptations of Raja Rao's Kanthapura, CLR James' broadcasts on the BBC, and more. Recent scholarship on the BBC's radio broadcasts has really expanded our understanding of how postcolonial literature emerged as a new formation during and after World War II.
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On Sunday morning, I was in a Digital Humanities Seminar, on "Modernism in/and as Data." It was a fun and productive discussion.
Pandita Ramabai's Book on America (1889)
In my travel writers class, we're looking at Pandita Ramabai's book on America, which has been recently translated by Meera Kosambi as Pandita Ramabai's American Encounter (2003). The original book was written in Marathi in 1889, and published as United Stateschi Lokasthiti ani Pravasavritta, which translates to The Peoples of the United States. It's an intriguing book -- part of the small group of "Easterner goes West" books published in the 19th century, which coexist uneasily alongside dozens of conventional Orientalist travel narratives describing the mystic, masalafied "East." What Ramabai has to say about America is interesting partly for the oblique criticisms of colonialism and racism one finds at various points, and partly because of her staunch, unapologetic feminism. Meera Kosambi has a thorough introduction to the book and to Pandita Ramabai, which is the source of most of the information in the post below. First off, the basic biography: Pandita Ramabai was born to a Brahmin family in Maharashtra in 1859. In a personal memoir she writes that her father (known as Dongre) went out on a limb and taught her Sanskrit, and also taught her to read and recite from the Puranas -- considered completely off-limits to women at the time. But both of her parents died in 1876 in the terrible Madras famine of 1876-1878, and Ramabai and her brother wandered around India until they ended up in Calcutta in 1878. They impressed Sanskrit experts at Calcutta University, who granted Ramabai the name "Pandita," in honor of her learning. Unfortunately, her brother died soon afterwards, and Ramabai married one of his friends, a lawyer from the Shudra caste named Bipin Behari (also known as Das Medhavi). The couple was ostracized for the cross-caste marriage, and tragically, Medhavi died of cholera just a couple of years later (in 1880), leaving Ramabai to raise their daughter Manorama on her own.
It isn't surprising that she fell in with Christian missionaries, who helped Ramabai go to England in 1883 to study medicine. Unfortunately, she was refused admission after reaching England on account of defective hearing. It was at this point that she converted to Christianity (Anglicanism), which made her controversial in the Indian press at that time. It still may be controversial for some readers, though I think it's important to remember that Ramabai, as a Brahmin woman, had been battling religious orthodoxy her whole life: first, as a woman who knew Sanskrit and could read and critique the classical texts, then as a person who married across caste only to be completely ostracized -- and finally as a young widow who was also orphaned and without siblings!
According to Kosambi, it isn't clear that Ramabai was comfortable within the Anglican fold (Ramabai would dabble with other denominations), nor is it clear that she enjoyed being in England, where she lived between 1883 and 1886. In fact, she didn't publish very much about her specific experiences there, though we do have access to her letters.
In 1886, Pandita Ramabai went to the U.S., to give a lecture at a Women's Medical College in Philadelphia. Here she had a personal connection to another Marathi woman, Anandibai Joshee, who holds the distinction being the first Indian woman to earn a medical degree in the west -- only a few years after medical schools began to open their doors to women. (This was also well before women got the right to vote.) She planned to go for a month, but ended up staying for three years.
In 1887, Ramabai published a book in English, The High-Caste Hindu Woman, dedicated to Anandibai Joshi (who died of TB in 1887), and with a preface by Rachel Bodley, Dean of the Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania, where Anandibai Joshi had studied. The book critiques customs like child marriage, seclusion (purdah), and the treatment of child widows, arguing that education and economic independence are essential for women's liberation. The text is primarily directed at western feminists and educated Indian readers, and Ramabai used sales of the book to raise money for the American Ramabai Association.
Otherwise, did very well in the U.S. Pandita Ramabai. She did numerous lectures at various cities around the northeast and midwest, as well as further out west (she made it as far as Denver, and writes about her impressions of the Rocky Mountains). Her larger mission at this time was to raise money for a school she wanted to start back in India -- and here she was remarkably successful. It's no surprise to find, then, that Ramabai writes effusively about the country in her book, though she does criticize the country's problems with race, its persecution of Native Americans, and the resistance to women's emancipation.
* * *
On to the book itself. Ramabai starts with a reference to the history of early exploration, and a dig at religious superstition:
Centuries ago, when people lacked adequate knowledge of the earth, they indulged in all sorts of speculations in this regard. The ancestors of the Hindu and other communities believed the earth to be flat; as a result, they imagined the universe to be multi-storied, like the large multi-storied city houses, with the earth occupying the middle story. According to the Hindu Puranas, the universe is a fourteen-storied mansion, of which six stories or "worlds" are situated above the earth, and seven below; the lowest of these stories has been named the Nethermost Woeld. Now that all these ideas have been disproved by new discoveries, everyone has understood that the universe is not like a fourteen-storied mansion, and that the earth is not flat. (62)
So much for the scientific value of the Puranas!
Ramabai also doesn't fail to remind her readers that Columbus, in his exploration, was in fact looking for India, and she is unrelenting of her criticism of the exploitative nature of the Spanish and Portuguese doings in the new world in the early years. She accuses Columbus of practicing "deceit," and denigrates his eagerness to enslave the natives, take them back to Europe, and forcibly convert them to Christianity (Catholicism): "How sad that a great man's conduct should be tarnished by such an extraordinarily demonic deed!"
Some of her remarks about this chapter of American history strike me as coded or indirect criticisms of British colonialism:
If these same Europeans had discarded their firearms and weapons, such as bows and arrows, quartz knives, and bone-tipped lances, they would have proven themselves to be truly brave. But sad to say, those who called themselves pious and went forth to enlighten the ignorant, to rescue people from hell and lead them to heaven, ended up by utterly annihilating the poor innocent Indians through deceit, trickery, cruelty, and false speech. (71)
Clearly the British colonization of India and the American conquest of the Native Americans are two quite separate things, but there might well be some parallels in the references to "deceit, trickery, cruelty, and false speech" -- though that is only an inference. (Pandita Ramabai is rarely directly critical of the British in her writings.)
* * *
Occasionally, Pandita Ramabai also makes some circumspect comments on the problem of writing a travel narrative, and seems to be alluding to the extremely problematic narratives Europeans themselves had produced when traveling to India. She knows better than to simply reverse the dynamic, claim to be the monarch of all she surveys:
It is impossible for a person to see all the sides of an object while sketching it; the same applies to the description of the social conditions in a country. A single person is not able to see all aspects of a society; therefore one person's opinion of it cannot be assumed to be infallible.
Some English and American people have traveled in India and written descriptions of our customs and manners and social conditions. A perusal of these clearly shows that a foreigner sees the people of the country he visits in a very different light from how the inhabitants see themselves. Therefore, I have refrained from presenting any firm and final conclusion that such-and-such is the nature of American society and that it has only these many types. Instead, I intend to describe how they appeared to me. This is the objective of this chapter and of the book as a whole.
Fascinating and precocious; it took the discipline of Anthropology another 80 years to reach this level of epistemological humility.
* * *
And finally, I should mention that most of the second half of Pandita Ramabai's book on America is dedicated to the specific question of the status of women in the country. On the one hand, she is impressed by the remarkable progress that was being made with regards to women's education; this was the era during which the great women's colleges were opening, and it was also the era of the first women graduates from law and medical schools. On the other hand, Ramabai is surprised by the amount of resistance these progressive measures encounter, and feels pressed to actively rebut the charge that having women in positions of responsibility, or actively participating in the work-place, would somehow be detrimental to morals. In that the book is aimed at Indian readers, it's hard not to think that she's thinking of the Indian objections to these reforms as well.
Her most striking comment along these lines still in some sense rings true today:
How true is the claim of many Western scholars that a civilization should be judged by the conditions of its women! Women are inherently physically weaker than men, and possess innate powers of endurance; men therefore find it very easy to wrest their natural rights and reduce them to a state that suits the men. But, from a moral point of view, physical might is not real strength, nor is it a sign of nobility of character to deprive the weak of their rights. . . . [A]s men gain wisdom and progress further, they begin to disregard women's lack of strength to honor their good qualities, and elevate them to a high state. Their low opinion of women and of other such matters undergoes a change and gives way to respect. Thus, one can accurately assess a country's progress from the condition of its women. (169)
This statement is perhaps not without a couple of problematic elements, but as a progressive take on the relationship between feminism and history it is still very much something to contend with.
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