This special section of Contemporary South Asia is dedicated to the papers presented at the 2019 Annual Conference of the British Association for South Asian Studies (BASAS). The 2019 Conference was hosted by Durham University, with the kind support of the Oriental Museum, University College, Collingwood College, Research and Innovation Services, and our Vice-Chancellor, Professor Stuart Corbridge. Signatory authors to this introduction formed the main organising committee of the conference, and have been listed alphabetically. We thank Raihana Ferdous for her tireless contribution to conference organisation, including collecting and sorting panel and paper submissions, travel prize submissions, and managing email communications with delegates. We also thank our student volunteers, Anita Datta, Ramesh Shrestha, Rahnuma Siddiqua (Durham University) and Nasreen Akhter (Sussex University), and professional support staff in the Department of Anthropology, Judith Manghan, Gillian Longthorne, Rebecca Strong, and Event Durham, for their invaluable support with the day-to-day logistics of the conference.
Writing this introductory note a year later, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic that has transformed so much of what we might have previously taken for granted about the world around us, it would be tempting to refer to the 2019 conference as a calm before the storm. Certainly, Durham’s green and pleasant surrounds added to a sense of scholarly detachment from the wider events of the world back then, as old friends and new acquaintances enjoyed time together exploring the small medieval city. Yet even in April 2019, storm clouds were gathering – with developments across South Asian and northern European countries emerging as portents of what was to come. We experienced these not only in terms of how the UK’s increasingly hostile visa regime had prevented some colleagues from South Asia attending (a problem that is becoming increasingly common for Southern academics). Many of the panels and papers of the conference too reflected on what seemed then to be the worsening political, social, and environmental conditions unfolding across many parts of the sub-continent itself.
As a moment to reflect on the previous decade, and to anticipate what the 2020s might hold in store, the 2019 conference was not, perhaps, one of immediate optimism. Before most of us had even heard of coronaviruses, ‘R’ rates, and social distancing, we were tracking the emergence and effects of infections and vectors across different registers. Among them included a seemingly contagious fascination with ‘strong man’ political leaders across multiple countries, as well as the growing devastation wrought by humans on environments that was driving new forms of social suffering. Alpa Shah’s keynote address, immediately followed by a protest action in solidarity in with Indian resistance movements experiencing government suppression, spoke directly to these challenges – while also sounding an important note of hope. Offering a personal reflection on the question, ‘why I write?’ Shah began with a survey of the destruction caused to the critical, political, and creative literary genres of academia by the insidious audit cultures of Europe and North America, and the new nationalisms and surveillance of South Asia. Her solution, as simple as it was alluring, was to reimagine the audience we might write for – to move away from the self-referentialism of narrow disciplinary conversation and to take our place at the table of public debate.
Shah’s conclusion left us with confidence that careful, collaborative, and accessible research can make a change in these difficult times. If Covid-19 encourages new ways of thinking, working, and indeed writing in our profession, then the conversations we started in Durham in 2019 may provide an early example of efforts towards that end. The three papers included in this special section provide a snapshot of how we might undertake this venture in South Asian studies. As a set, they highlight well-established themes of social and political injustice in the South Asian social science literature – agrarian crisis, tribal and class inequalities, and communal violence – which, as we head into the 2020s, are likely to gain greater urgency as people and governments adjust to new realities of a post-pandemic world. The three authors write from anthropological and ethnographic perspectives, showing us how close attention to the local, the contextual, the contingent, and the often confusing, can reward us with insights that derive strength less from rigid theories and ‘last word’ conclusions but the opportunity for ongoing, open-ended dialogue and debate.
Thus, Tim van de Meerendonk’s paper, ‘Claiming Crisis: Narratives of Tension and Insurance in Rural India,’ offers a timely reminder to take seriously local imaginaries and articulations of crisis and its affective manifestations as people try to account for and accommodate overwhelming experiences in their lives. Drawing from a study of agricultural precarity in central Maharashtra, van de Meerendonk shows how an overemphasis on structural accounts of agricultural failure misses ‘the experiences, agency and positionalities of those imagined to be living through its consequences.’ His ethnography draws our attention to the ways farmers’ understandings of crisis receive expression through an Anglicised term, ‘tension,’ which expresses ‘feelings akin to stress and worry.’ By mobilising this term, farmers can render the seemingly ungraspable graspable, and ‘claim crisis.’
Itay Noy’s paper, ‘Public Sector Employment, Class Mobility, and Differentiation in a Tribal Coal Mining Village in India,’ focuses on the effects of changing economic opportunities on intra-community relations within Adivasi coal-mining villages in Jharkhand. His ethnography shows how government policies offering compensatory public sector employment to Adivasi workers transformed livelihoods and social relations among Adivasi neighbours, some of whom had secured permanent salaried jobs in the colliery, with others remaining on insecure, daily-waged labour. Noy shows how these arrangements manifest as status differences that in turn challenged assumptions, held by outside observers and some Adivasi themselves, that egalitarian ideologies defined Adivasi society. Noy’s conclusion offers a challenging contribution to the literature on India’s tribal communities, as well as debates over the implications of anthropological knowledge for Adivasi politics, which both position ‘tribal egalitarianism’ in contradistinction to the caste inequalities of wider Indian society.
Sandya Fuchs’ paper, ‘“Give me the Space to Live”: Trauma, Casted Lands, and the Search for Restitution among the Meghwal Survivors of the Dangawas Massacre,’ draws from a ‘social life’ study of the 1989 Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes Prevention of Atrocities Act, a piece of legislation designed to prevent caste violence and facilitate justice for its victims. Fuchs’ ethnography tells a story of how the survivors of anti-Meghval violence in Rajasthan sought to recover and remake life only partially through appeals to the Act and its enforcement by the state. Instead, they focused on channels of restitution available within the village – in particular, claims to land as safe spaces to live and move within the community free from the threat of violence. As with Meerendock’s and Noy’s contributions, Fuchs’ interlocutor’s framing, ‘the law is out there but we have to live here,’ compels us think beyond official, normative, and structured accounts, to engage with the lived experiences and strategies of people confronted with unprecedented change and uncertainty in their lives.
Taken together, the articles included in this special section remind us of why international scholarly meetings are so important for the generation and sharing of new ideas. To the question of ‘why I write?’ we might also add, ‘why we meet?’ – at least one answer to which is surely to remind us how our scholarship, so often in the social sciences and humanities pursued as a solo venture, is of course nothing if not sociable. The papers collected here show us what we have missed following the unfortunate but unavoidable cancellation of the 2020 conference due to the Covid-19 pandemic. However, we look forward with renewed energy to the 2021 conference, hosted by Edinburgh University, which for the first time will be fully online. We have no doubt the spirit of the BASAS annual conference, long anchored in the social, political, and environmental reflection, engagement, and critique that we celebrated in Durham – and, just as importantly, hospitality, generosity, and friendship – will continue to flourish over the next decade.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Ben Campbell
Ben Campbell joined the Durham Anthropology department in 2006. He works on issues of sustainability especially in communities of the Nepal Himalayas. His book Living Between Juniper and Palm: Nature, Culture and Power in the Himalayas (OUP Delhi) was published in 2013. Ben turned to research energy transitions in this time of climate change concerns affecting development agendas, working through the Durham Energy Institute, to extend social science understandings of energy transitions. Between 2017 and 2018 he was PI to the project ‘Energy on the Move’ (ESRC/DFID), on informal settlers’ energy practices comparing case studies in Nepal, Bangladesh, Nigeria, and South Sudan.
Raihana Ferdous
Raihana Ferdous is an energy geographer. Her research is concerned with the development of sustainable energy technology and in their shaping of human and more than human worlds. She has an extensive background in Human Geography and Social Anthropology, and has worked with various inter- and multi-disciplinary research groups in the field of energy and development. Methodologically, Raihana values long-term ethnographic engagement and co-production of knowledge engaging with creative methods such as visual, storytelling, and following networks and materials. She produced Off the Grid: Notes from a Forgotten Island, a film which has won several prestigious awards.
Nayanika Mookherjee
Nayanika Mookherjee is a Professor of Political Anthropology at Durham University. Her research concerns an ethnographic exploration of public memories of violent pasts and aesthetic practices of reparative futures. She explores this through engagement with gendered violence in conflicts (The Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories and the Bangladesh War of 1971 [2015 Duke University Press; 2016 Zubaan], graphic novel, animation film, 2019 Praxis award recipient), memorialisation and transnational adoption. She has published extensively on violence, ethics and aesthetics. Currently, she is finalising her manuscript Arts of Irreconciliation and continuing her British Academy funded research on conflict and transnational adoption.
Tom Widger
Tom Widger is a social anthropologist at Durham University. His research interests encompass self-harm and suicide, charity and philanthropy, environmental pollution and climate change, and global traditions of toxicology. He has conducted fieldwork in South, South East, and Central Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America. His first book was Suicide in Sri Lanka: The Anthropology of an Epidemic (Routledge, 2015; Manohar, 2018). He is working on two new monographs – the first developing a concept of toxicologism to explore relationships between poison and political sovereignties in South Asia and Europe; the second a critique of humanitarian intervention in Sri Lanka.