On February 2, 1901, the Krishna Press in Bhagalpur published 1000 copies of Bābū Bṛj Bihārī Lāl Maṇḍal’s Mithilā Nāṭak. This was an ambitious undertaking for a small-town press since Maṇḍal was still to gain renown as a playwright and poet.

As Ambedkarite Buddhists have increasingly migrate outside India in the past thirty years, they interact with other Buddhist traditions and socio-political contexts that prompt new considerations of Buddhism and marginality. Ambedkar’s rationalist vision of Buddhism focused on social transformation, explicitly responding to caste-based discrimination in modern India. Ambedkarite Buddhists carry on this legacy while exploring further what Buddhism means to them.

The political lives, identities, and influence of the Indian diaspora have been much discussed in recent years. This paper will contextualise current political trends within a longer historical trajectory, and explore the genealogies of contemporary mobilisations, tensions, and transnational networks.

The talk analyses civil rights activism in Indian politics. It traces the path taken by voluntary and independent citizen groups to secure civil rights. In that backdrop the talk proposes some analytical insights to show how such activism was recieved, re-worked, and deployed to create a particular ethical practice of civil rights activism in a postcolonial context.

In the past decades, India and other emerging developing economies have been playing a growing role in global development, mostly through what is known as South-South Cooperation (SSC). This presentation explores some of the ways accountability has been understood, disputed and negotiated within India in the context of country's growing development cooperation role. Looking at accountability politics in the context of India's SSC can reveal ongoing disputes over India's international identity as both a 'Southern/developing country' as well as a 'rising power'.

Book Launch - Seeking Supremacy: The Pursuit of Judicial Power in Pakistan

Ersama block in coastal Odisha, India, was devastated in the supercyclone of October 1999, an event that marked a turning point in the disaster mitigation and management approach for the state. Through research spanning over a decade, I observed how post-supercyclone Ersama has undergone significant transformation in the way its lands are imagined and used, through the introduction of a new form of shrimp aquaculture as the principal livelihood. At the heart of this imagination is a powerful notion of the landscape rendered as 'empty' and 'unproductive' by the supercyclone.

The talk will scrutinise theories on the emergence of a vernacular literary tradition in the “Hindi Belt” (Madhyadeśa) and examine the earliest extant works coming from the region. While both Hindi and Urdu have produced literary histories that extend for a millennium or more, most early claims are untenable in the light of later philological research. The talk will examine the role of Jain stories and of a primarily Jain literary idiom rooted in Apabhramsha and originating in Gujarat in setting examples for later works.