Other Horizons: Geographicities in South Asia

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel Proposal Application

Abstract

While South Asian historiography has long been attentive to marginal subjects and subjectivities, it has remained curiously bound to organized systems of power in its conceptions of spatial categories. The result is a historiography which often replicates imperial or statist geographical logics, making it difficult to capture regional histories that do not fall into what Indrani Chatterjee has described as the “colonial impasse of territorialism and tribalism.” This panel will explore conceptual and representational tools for the exploration of other “geographicities,” what Chatterjee describes as horizontal cross-regional culture zones forged by material everyday community transactions; by interlingual cultural traditions especially shared across ‘minor’ languages; and by local knowlege and cosmologies that are shared across lines of formal community belonging and are built through an accumulation of common embodied and antiprogrammatic experience. Occupying the realm of the informalized, fluctuating in space over time and radically contingent with regard to the specific content of cultural improvisation that unites them, such geographicities are often archivally invisible in a traditional sense, but are intuitive to many who continue to move along their afterimages in the present. Counter to models of South Asian cultural history that center concentrations of power in their narratives, our exploration of these decentralized spaces of memory and resilience will think through vocabularies for spatiality that move beyond notions of center and margin. Moreover, by focusing on different cultural zones, the panel hopes to promote a methodological conversation of general relevance to South Asian historiography.

Area of Study

• South Asia

Session Organizer

• Ananya Chakravarti, Georgetown University

Individual Presentations

• The Ghosts of the Past: Beyond Goan Exceptionalism in the Konkan - Ananya Chakravarti, Georgetown University

• Networks and Anti-Societies: Some Ideas about Representing Fragments of ‘Dardic’ History in the Afghan-Pakistan Mountains - James Caron, SOAS, University of London

• The Space of the Vernacular: Local beyond Languages, Religions, and Frontiers - Pushkar Sohoni, University of Pennsylvania