A discussion with Partha Chatterjee and Ira Katznelson

Anxieties of Democracy: Tocquevillean Reflections on India and the United States

Co-sponsored by the Departments of History and Anthropology, and the Heyman Center for the Humanities

Partha Chatterjee and Ira Katznelson will discuss their recently published edited volume, Anxieties of Democracy: Tocquevillean Reflections on India and the United States (2012), which includes essays by the editors and by Rajeev Bhargava (Centre for the Study of Developing Societies), Daniel Carpenter (Harvard), Niraja Gopal Jayal (Jawaharlal Nehru University), Sudipta Kaviraj (Columbia), Margaret Levi (Washington, Seattle), Rogers M. Smith (Pennsylvania), and Ashutosh Varshney (Brown).

Partha Chatterjee is a Professor in the Departments of Anthropology and Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia. A founding member of the Subaltern Studies group, he was Professor of Political Science and Director of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences from 1979 - 2007. Chatterjee was awarded the annual Fukuoka Prize for outstanding achievement in Asian Studies in 2009. His most recent monographs include Lineages of Political Society: Studies in Postcolonial Democracy (2011) and The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power (2012).

Ira Katznelson is Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History at Columbia. In September 2012, Katznelson will take up a post as Director of the Social Science Research Council. He has taught at the University of Chicago, chairing its department of political science from 1979 to 1982; and at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, where he was dean from 1983 to 1989. Katznelson was President of the American Political Science Association for 2005-06. His many publications include When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (2006) and The Politics of Power: A Critical Introduction to American Government (2005) with Mark Kesselman and Alan Draper.

Time: 4:00pm - 5:30pm
Location: Knox Hall, Room 509, 606 West 122nd Street, between Broadway and Claremont Avenue

Carl Ernst
(University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)

"Anglo-Persian Taxonomies of Indian Religions."

Introduction by Allison Busch, Associate Professor, Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies

Co-sponsored by the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life

Abstract: Before the establishment of British colonial categories for classifying the religions of India, a vast archive existed in Persian texts that described Indian religious groups. After a brief sketch of religious concepts embedded in Mughal administrative compendia (Abu al-Fazl, Rai Chaturman), this paper presents two examples of Anglo-Persian texts, commissioned by British officials and composed by Hindu secretaries (munshis) in Persian around 1800, with accompanying illustrations, as accounts of the most prominent religious groups in Benares; both texts were key sources for H. H. Wilson's pioneering Sketch of the Religious Sects of the Hindus (1828-32). Comparison of these writings reveals a wide range of differing taxonomies of religions and shifting strategies of translation, and it opens a window onto the complex mediating role of Persianate Hindus on the threshold of the colonial era.

Carl W. Ernst is the Kenan Distinguished Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was Chair of the department (1995-2000) and is currently Co-Director of the Carolina Center for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Civilizations. He earned his PhD at Harvard University and has been awarded Fulbright, NEH, and Guggenheim fellowships. Ernst was elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has been a visiting lecturer at EHESS (Paris), the University of Seville, and the University of Malaya. His most recent publications include How to Read the Qur'an: A New Guide, with Select Translations (2011); Rethinking Islamic Studies: From Orientalism to Cosmopolitanism (co-edited with Richard Martin, 2010); and Following Muhammad: Rethinking Islam in the Contemporary World (2003).

Time: 4:00pm - 5:30pm
Location: Knox Hall, Room 208, 606 West 122nd Street, between Broadway and Claremont Avenue

Antoinette Burton
(University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)

"Species War: Some Naturalists' Views of the First Afghan Campaign, 1839-42."

Antoinette Burton is a Professor of History and Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies in the Department of History, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She earned her PhD at the University of Chicago and has been awarded Fulbright, NEH, and Guggenheim fellowships. Burton's research interests include Modern Britain and empire; colonial India; women, gender and feminism; postcolonial studies; and world history. Her most recent monographs are A Primer for Teaching World History: Ten Design Principles (2012); Brown over Black: Race and the Politics of Postcolonial Citation (2012); and Empire in Question: Reading, Writing, and Teaching British Imperialism (2011).

Time: 4:00pm - 5:30pm
Location: Knox Hall, Room 208, 606 West 122nd Street, between Broadway and Claremont Avenue

Maarten Bavinck
(University of Amsterdam)

"Caste law and the regulation of ocean fisheries in Tamil Nadu, India - a legal pluralism perspective"

Co-Sponsored by the Department of Anthropology

Maarten Bavinck is Director, Centre for Maritime Research (MARE), and Associate Professor in the Department of Human Geography, Planning and International Development Studies. at the University of Amsterdam. His research interests include fisheries governance, coastal zone development, livelihood/well-being studies, legal pluralism, and South Asia. He is presently working as Director of a project entitled Re-incorporating the excluded: providing space for small-scale fishers in the sustainable development of fisheries of South Africa and South Asia (2010-2015). His publications include Social justice and fisheries governance: the view from India (with D. Johnson, 2010); Fish for Life: interactive governance for fisheries (edited with J. Kooiman, S. Jentoft and R. Pullin, 2005); and Marine resource management: Conflict and regulation in the fisheries of the Coromandel Coast (2001); and Small fry: The economy of petty fishermen in northern Sri Lanka (1984).

Time: 4:00pm - 5:30pm
Location: Knox Hall, Room 208, 606 West 122nd Street, between Broadway and Claremont Avenue

Upmanu Lall and Vijay Modi (Columbia University)

Title to be announced

Upmanu Lall is the Alan and Carol Silberstein Professor of Earth and Environmental Engineering at the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science at Columbia University. He served as Earth and Environmental Engineering Department chair from 2003 to 2006. He co-founded, and currently directs, the Columbia University Water Institute, a division within the Earth Institute. He received his B.S. in 1977 from the Indian Institute of Technology and both his M.S. (1980) and Ph.D. (1981) in civil engineering from the University of Texas. Current projects at the Water Center include a three-year, $6 million grant from the PepsiCo Foundation which performs research in India, Brazil, China and Mali through as well as in regions of the United States including the Everglades, the Delaware Water Basin and the Colorado River; and a grant from the Pulitzer Foundation has supported research on water development in Northern Ethiopia. His current research interests include global water security; hydro-climate modeling; time series analysis and forecasting; Bayes networks for process modeling and decision making; risk and reliability; and water resource management using climate information.

Vijay Modi is a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science at Columbia University. Vijay Modi received a B. Tech. in mechanical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, earned his Ph.D. at Cornell in 1984, and performed postdoctoral research at MIT from 1984-1986. His expertise is in the field of energy sources and conversion, heat/mass transfer, and fluid mechanics. His areas of research interest are related to energy infrastructure, CO2 sequestration, fuel cells, distributed sensing/control of flow, and heat transfer.

A faculty member of the Earth Institute since 2006, Modi lead the UN Millennium Project effort on the role of energy and energy services in reaching the Millennium Development Goals. At the Institute, he is focused on three projects: leading the infrastructure team for the Millennium Villages Project (10 countries, 14 sites across sub-Saharan Africa), developing planning and decision-support tools for infrastructure, and looking at the food-energy-water nexus in Indian agriculture. Modi works on projects in water with fellow Earth Institute faculty member Upmanu Lall, urban infrastructure (through the IGERT program led by fellow Earth Institute faculty member Patricia Culligan), and optics of concentrated solar and software systems for m-health with lab colleague Matt Berg.

Time: 4:00pm - 5:30pm
Location: Knox Hall, Room 208, 606 West 122nd Street, between Broadway and Claremont Avenue

Saloni Mathur (UCLA)

Title to be announced

Saloni Mathur is Associate Professor, Department of Art History, UCLA. She received her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from the New School for Social Research. Her areas of interest include the visual cultures of modern South Asia and the South Asian diaspora, colonial studies and postcolonial criticism, the history of anthropological ideas, museum studies in a global frame, and modern/contemporary South Asian art. She is author of India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display (2007), editor of The Migrant's Time: Art, Dispersal, and Difference (2011), and co-editor (with Kavita Singh) of the forthcoming No Touching, Spitting, Praying: Modalities of the Museum in South Asia. Mathur has received grants and awards from the Yale Center for British Art, the Getty Grant Program, the Clark Art Institute, the University of California Humanities Research Institute, and the Social Science Research Council of Canada. She previously taught at Vassar College and the University of Michigan, before joining UCLA's faculty in 2001.

Time: 4:00pm - 5:30pm
Location: Knox Hall, Room 208, 606 West 122nd Street, between Broadway and Claremont Avenue

Barnard College and The Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies present a film screening in honor of Barbara Stoler Miller

Jai Bhim Comrade (2011, 198 minutes)
Followed by a discussion with director Anand Patwardhan

Co-sponsored by the South Asia Institute and the Film Department, School of the Arts

Introduction by Rachel Fell McDermott, Professor and Chair of the Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures Department

Fourteen years in the making, Anand Patwardhan's documentary tells a story of Dalit and communal politics in Maharashtra, and the ongoing struggles of Dalits for justice and equality. When a statue of B. R. Ambedkar in Mumbai's Ramabai colony was desecrated in 1997, angry crowds gathered, and the police opened fire, killing ten unarmed persons, all of them from the Dalit community. Vilas Ghogre, an activist, poet and singer, who witnessed the events, later hung himself in despair. Jhai Bhim Comrade traces the decade-long story of the protest through the poetry and music of Ghogre and others. Jhai Bhim Comrade was named Best Film at both the Mumbai International Film Festival and Film South Asia, Katmandu, Nepal, and received the Firebird Award at the Hong Kong International Film Festival.

Anand Patwardhan earned a B.A. in English Literature from Bombay University, a B.A. in Sociology from Brandeis University, and a Master's degree in Communications from McGill University. He has been making award-winning political documentaries for nearly three decades, pursuing diverse and controversial issues that illuminate social and political life in India. Many of his films were at one time or another banned by state television channels in India and became the subject of litigation by Patwardhan who successfully challenged the censorship rulings in court. His film War and Peace/Jang aur Aman (2002) received a Best Documentary award from the National Film Awards of India in 2004, as well as top prizes at film festivals in Karachi, Kerala, Mumbai, Sydney, Tokyo, and Zanzibar.

Seating is limited and will be on a first-come, first seated basis.

Time: to be announced
Location: to be announced