This paper contrasts two Afghan Pashto critical-literary responses to one of modern war's main characteristics: ontological devastation as a tactic. Large-scale violence over 40 years of occupations in Afghanistan not only destroyed material worlds, but in the process broke the chains of signification embedded in those worlds, creating landscapes in which meaning and reality themselves broke down. Afghan literary authors, however, have long had available tools that link meaning, affect, and ontology, which they use to combat this tactic.

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. 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.

Abhishek Kaicker is an Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley and an editor of the Journal of South Asian Intellectual History. He has a PhD from Columbia University, an MA from the University of British Columbia, and a BA from Macalester College.

Dr Humeira Iqtidar is Reader in Politics at King's College London. Her research interests bring together postcolonial theory, critical theory and comparative political theory with a focus on modern South Asian Islamic thought. Thematically, her research has been concerned with the place of religion in contemporary political imagination, the politics of knowledge, and the legacies of colonialism. She is the author of Secularising Islamists?

Akeel Bilgrami got a B.A in English Literature from Elphinstone College, Bombay University and went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar where he read Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. He has a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Chicago. He is the Sidney Morgenbesser Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, where he is also a Professor on the Committee on Global Thought. He has been the Director of the Heyman Centre for the Humanities as well as the South Asian Institute at Columbia.

Professor J. Daniel Elam is Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. He is the author of World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth: Anticolonial Aesthetics, Postcolonial Politics (Fordham University Press, 2020), and Impossible and Necessary (Orient BlackSwan, 2021), and two co-edited volumes on revolutionary anticolonial writing, Reading Revolutionaries (with Kama Maclean, 2014) and Writing Revolution (with Kama Maclean and Chris Moffat, 2017).

This talk is based on my current book project that contemplates the postcolonial trajectories of development and democracy. My focus is a river bridge in Bangladesh which is one of the largest and priciest infrastructural projects so far. In 2011, the World Bank suspected possible corruption and decided to withdraw crucial funding. A Canadian court later dismissed the case in absence of acceptable evidence, labeling it as hearsay and rumor.

Dr. Nazmul S. Sultan is George Kingsley Roth Research Fellow in Politics and International Studies at Christ’s College, University of Cambridge. Dr. Sultan is a political theorist with particular interests in the history of political thought, empire and anticolonial thought, popular sovereignty, and modern conceptions of the global. His current book project explores the question of popular sovereignty in modern Indian political thought and offers a new interpretation of the anticolonial democratic project.

Dr Mishka Sinha is a Research Associate at St. John’s College, Oxford, and co-director of the project on St. John’s and the Colonial Past with Professor William Whyte. She is a cultural and intellectual historian of the modern period. Her research interests focus on the history of orientalism and the transcultural history of knowledge in the context of colonialism and empire, in particular, the transfer of knowledge from Asia to Europe.