In this talk, I will offer some reflections on what it has meant for me as a professional academic trained in the putative secular discipline of history to write over the past couple decades about a series of modern goddesses of modern India who have succeeded in capturing my imagination, in disturbing the terms of my engagement with official documentary archives, in troubling the text-saturated categories of my analysis, and in redirecting my work along new paths permeated by the power of the image.

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.

Bringing political thought to bear upon one of the world’s most pressing geopolitical problems, this paper explores Kashmiri engagements with nature and how these served late colonial attempts to concurrently champion two nations: ethno-linguistic and almost homogenous Kashmir, and heterogenous but organic India. Disconnected from human endeavour and, therefore, astonishingly unreliant on other ideas to define Kashmir’s distinctiveness, the idea of natural purity had something in common with the earlier New World nationalisms of colonial white settlers who sought to remake conquered lands.

This talk will be about making sense of people's history and their understanding of what "our history" means. I will argue that history as shared by a group, community or society in a place arises as a lived experience of the everyday social. Thus, the ontology of their histories are related to the ontology of their everyday social. As Guru and I argue in our book 'Experience, Caste and the Everyday Social', the everyday social in societies, particularly in Asia and Africa, can only be understood through a deep engagement with sensory experiences.

If we think about emotions today, we tend to imagine them as interior to a subject with well-defined boundaries, deciding which emotions to let in and which expressions to let out. The history of emotions in South Asia has contributed to destabilize this notion. Until the 19th century at least, subjects saw feelings as floating between porous subjects.

This talk focuses on the idea of spolia, which has a long and illustrious genealogy in political discourse, beginning with the display of objects seized and monuments destroyed or assimilated into new structures as emblematic of military conquest, but in a more expansive sense, as a practice fundamental to the establishment of new regimes―not only a visceral exercise of power, but also as symbolic appropriation of the strength of one’s enemies and predecessors.

To join the mailing list to receive more information and Zoom links for the series, please email zobia.haq@mansfield.ox.ac.uk.

To join the mailing list to receive more information and Zoom links for the series, please email zobia.haq@mansfield.ox.ac.uk.