Editorial
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Since the publication of our last Newsletter in the Fall of 2020, the students and researchers of the CEIAS have had to adapt to restrictions imposed by the pandemic in France. As was in the case in most research centers and universities, all seminars, conferences, and meetings were held online. The CEIAS doctoral students were particularly pro-active, impulsing a real scientific dynamic and human synergy amongst themselves despite the tremendous difficulties they have faced. Doctoral students and researchers have been grounded with all fieldwork put on hold for the second year running.
Mid-May, the CEIAS, along with a number of EHESS research centers, left its historic location boulevard Raspail to join the Campus Condorcet (in Aubervilliers) intended as a hub for Social Sciences and Humanities and bringing together eleven institutions of higher education and research. As we are finalizing this Newsletter, we have just moved into our new offices !
This move to the new EHESS building on campus seals a further step towards merger with the CEH (Centre d’études himalayennes—Center for Himalayan Studies) which we announced in the previous newsletter. Indeed, the CEH and the CEIAS will be moving into the new EHESS building together, where we will pursue the final steps towards the elaboration of a new research center which will be officially created in January 2023.
In an ongoing effort to better integrate the CEIAS doctoral students in the collective dynamic of our research center, we are pleased to announce that two of them (Trisha Lalshandani and Jonathan Koshy) have joined the Newsletter team. The CEIAS seminar for the next academic year also reflects this effort as Margareta Trento, postdoctoral fellow at the CEIAS, has joined Vanessa Caru and Zoé Headley in the coordination of this monthly event.
Though nearly all travel abroad went on standstill and all scientific events online, a vast number of projects grew stronger during this difficult time. For instance, as described by Remy Delage, very significant advances were made on the South Asia Research Archive project which aims to bring together and make available numerous archival resources produced by researchers over the years in the CEIAS. Other projects, both individual and collaborative, are covered in this issue.
The CEIAS Directing Team
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Interview with |
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On 21 May 2021 Trisha Lalshandani (TL) “zoomed” with Julien Levesque (JL) to discuss his past, present and future projects.
By Trisha Lalshandani (CEIAS Doctoral student) and Julien Levesque (CEIAS Postdoctoral Research Fellow)
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TL: Perhaps we can begin with the work you've been doing at the CSH (Centre for Social Sciences and Humanities).
JL: I joined the CSH in 2017, and my initial project—my intention—was to explore the question of caste by focusing on Muslims of the highest status group, that is the Sayyids, who claim to descend from the prophet Muhammad. My observation is that there existed some scholarship on the mobilization of marginalized caste groups called the pasmanda, but little on dominant groups among Muslims, from the point of view of the caste question. Moreover, this project also prolongs interrogations I had during my PhD research. So, when I was working on Sindh and the political advantage conferred by the status of claiming prophetic lineage, and to be very specific, the case I have in mind is that of G.M. Sayed, the main architect of the Sindhi nationalist movement and Sajjada Nashin—so the main custodian of the Sufi shrine. And he rejected the practices that treat Sayyids as saintly, but benefited from an authority and a network which he pretty amply used in his political career. And so among the questions that I had in mind was what kind of political advantage you get from being a Sayyid. So, this work on Sayyid led to a panel and the special issue in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society in 2020. And also, in the course of this work at the CSH, my interest shifted to the broader question of representation and leadership among Indian Muslims. This question originated in my intention—I hope to get a sense of the numerical over-representation of Sayyids in positions of power, in electoral mandates and in organizations that claim to represent Muslims. I wanted to check whether the allegation made by pasmanda groups was actually true—whether the dominant caste groups among the Muslim, or the Ashraf, actually do occupy most of the positions of power. For this, with my colleague Laurence Gautier, with whom I also co-edited the Sayyid special issue, we started compiling a biographical database of Muslim leadership in India. And what is novel with this database is that we include the caste group and the religious orientation.
TL: Talking about the journey that you've had arriving at your current research on the Sayyids, are there any specific milestones that you can identify that led you to dig deeper, delve further, that contested the hypotheses that you began your research with? Are there any points like that that you would like to talk about?
JL: I could talk to you about my personal trajectory... Intellectually speaking, it was I think coming to do fieldwork in India after working on Pakistan and the Sindhi nationalist movement. For a number of years, I worked mostly in Pakistan. And since 2017, I've been working mostly in India, although I’ve been to Pakistan several times.
To answer this question, let me share some more information on the database I mentioned earlier. Because we started compiling this information about 3 years ago. Anyway, we’re actually starting to produce some interesting analyses. I did two presentations in the meantime. What is really interesting is that it was really a new kind of method for me, trying to take a more quantitative approach led to really great discussions and explorations on categories and the diversity within Muslims in India, socially and religiously. And it led us to think about not only about categories for categories’ sake, but also to define our population, what we meant by Muslim leadership. There is no ranking or “Who's Who” of Muslim leaders in India. So, what we did—we brought together a certain population and the question of the criteria, and who can be deemed to be part of Muslim leadership, is something that we’ve been thinking a lot about and that we keep thinking about. And just to briefly mention what we have reached now: we're increasingly stuck or want to stick with this idea that in the Indian secular system, the State, by recognizing various minorities and by granting them rights, creates a space for certain people to make representative claims and in this case to make a representative claim in the name of Indian Muslims. So, our database basically describes certain groups that claim to represent Muslims and that get a certain degree of recognition by the State.
TL: So what are the geographical locations that you are looking at to create your database?
JL: For this database we are basically looking at the national level; the idea was to limit the arbitrariness of who is included and who is excluded. To go through positions of power occupied in certain organizations. So the question then is which organizations to include and which not include. We decided to include organizations that are either—that basically have interactions with the State in terms of community management and in speaking in the name of Muslims. So we had about 16 organizations. Some of them are religious, some educational, others are more political and some governmental organizations.
TL: So there are political organizations involved?
JL: Yeah, we included Muslim political parties that have MPs, so that’s three parties. So these are AIMIM from Hyderabad, the IUML in Kerala, the AIUDF (All India United Democratic Front) in Assam. All these three parties are identified as Muslim parties. They seek to bring the voice of Muslims in the elected political realm and all of them have MPs, unlike other small Muslim parties that we did not include, like Peace Party, Welfare Party. So we have a population of around 172 people in the database and on this population, we then conduct statistical treatment called MCA (multi-correspondence analysis) and that allows us to bring out, based on certain variables, certain similarities and differences between people.
TL: You’ve mentioned political organizations and you've been writing about the political situation in India, what do you have to say about the electoral quagmire that the Muslim parties and the Muslim voters find themselves in… what do you think about the power imbalances among the Sayyids? If you have any comments regarding any of that...
JL: Yes, absolutely so. The database answered my initial question on the over-representation of Sayyids and what we see is a strange stability of this population in our database over time—because it's a diachronic database since 1947. And we see an over-representation of men from dominant Ashraf groups including Sayyids over time. Now of course it opens up new questions for me, especially the one related to Muslim politics, and then I tried to link this with the caste question and, basically, it's a question of non-diversity within Muslims and, basically, if you want to bring all Muslims into one political platform, to have a unitary voice among Muslims in India, a unitary political voice, how do you deal with internal diversity? Sectarian differences, of course—Sunni/Shia, but also within Sunnis, within Shia, the North/South divide which is quite significant. And then, how do you deal with the caste question? Especially when you have strong contestation of the leadership from the dominant groups coming from below. And what I have in mind when I say this is AIMIM in particular, because AIMIM has been emerging in the past few years possibly as the all-India political platform for all Muslims. AIMIM is trying to construct itself as such, and originally, it's a party that originated in Hyderabad, that for the longest time could send only one MP to Parliament although it has very strong local support, but in terms of national reach it was very limited until recently. We have seen in the last few years that it has gained some MLAs in Maharashtra and it also got a second MP in Aurangabad in 2019 and just recently in the last Bihar election in October, AIMIM managed to gain 5 seats in the Bihar assembly. Of course, if you look at the last Bengal elections, AIMIM not did not manage to get in, but that's a different story. They did try—they had at least 7 candidates—but there were different conditions and I think it was also a question, you could say, of a cultural circle. They were Urdu-speaking and Bengal has different political and sociological dynamics. To add a few words on this, I have been looking at elections and that brought me to look into the role of caste-based organizations among Muslims and my work progressed on these questions because one of the main problems you have when you talk about caste amongst Muslims is that people will say: Well, there are no castes in Islam and you don't have them in the Quran or the Hadith—the foundational texts have no explicit mention or have no justification for caste the way you could invoke the Manusmriti for example. So, you have no equivalent for Muslims, so in fact Islam generally is understood as enjoining equality among believers. But of course, there are several objections to this. First, of course, there have been practices of inequality since the beginning of Islam. The other thing is that there is now plenty of evidence that in South Asia a lot of religious scholars have not only practiced caste-based discrimination, but also justified it. There are sects that basically use the Muslim or Islamic religious tradition to justify practices of inequality based on status groups with endogamous practices, and so on. One of the interesting ways to circumvent the problem of when people start telling you there is no caste amongst the Muslims is to look at organizations. Organizations have a factual existence. Often, they are registered with this state but not always. You can trace them; you have this group of people coming together on the basis of a certain status identity, which is not caste but their biradari. And then they start making political claims about representing them and gaining access to certain positions or certain circles. And there is a long tradition of this since the late 19th century. There is a long tradition of caste associations in India and Muslim caste associations have not received attention in India. The question of what is specific about it has not really been explored. These are some of the things that I am in the process of trying to make sense of. So some of my fieldwork in Himachal and Bihar has been to conduct interviews with caste association leaders about their association. Do they see themselves as political and if so what are their relations with political parties and the electoral process?
TL: The Sayyids may be the elite among the Muslims, since there is the question of caste and everything that follows from it. Do you think something like education affects how these social and political groups are organized, or how these political organizations reach out to their vote bank? The question of education also entails class, which in India is intertwined with the question of caste. It is difficult to separate the two, or in any case it complicates the question of caste. Since you mentioned that there is a cultural hierarchy between Muslims from different regions in India, could you tell us what are the other factors such as education or class or some of the others which play a role in these political organizations and their vote banks?
JL: It’s a very good question. I think I would have to think a bit to give you a clear answer when it comes to vote banks in particular, but the correlation between class, caste, education can be observed among Muslims. One of the questions we can raise is how come in the positions of power in Muslim organizations, not only political parties but also the others, how come we do not see at the top-level people who come from marginalized castes, from the pasmanda group, occupying these positions. But we have one third of the people who are Sayyids, two thirds who are Ashraf, if not more. So, that’s kind of the question that, I think—well, it’s not for me to answer it really. I think a lot of the Muslim leadership, when you start talking about caste, will say why do you want to divide it because in the context of being a minority in India the pressure to be politically united and to speak in one voice—it's very strong, and one of the strong arguments, one of the arguments they put forward whenever someone raises the question of caste is to say it's not a problem, we have to be united because we're a minority. But then if you really want to commit to that idea of unity then how come you're not able to bring about greater equality within your own community or to give certain positions to certain people. And we're speaking about caste. But if we want to speak about inequality, of course gender should come first because that is even more blatant. And on that very point something that is interesting is, when you look at the case of AIMIM is how they initially were very reluctant to support a bill in the Andhra Assembly and eventually the Telangana Assembly in favor of caste-based reservations for OBC, for marginalized castes among Muslims, and for the longest time, they defended the idea that there should be quotas, reservations for Muslims as a whole and that you couldn’t add socioeconomic criteria. In the Telangana Assembly they did vote in favor of a bill that excluded certain upper castes among Muslims from reservations but they did that reluctantly, the whole process lasting over 20 years from the 90s to I think 2014, but that gives you an example of the positioning of Muslim political parties with that question of internal caste-based division. But they did eventually vote in favor of that law by saying, if that is what is needed to get those reservations then we'll vote for it.
TL: On the question of reservations and minorities, have there been questions of how does the notion of nationalism or secularism—how does that—or does that ever come up in this discourse, in this field of Muslim political organization and the area that you're working with? If the Sayyids categorize themselves as a minority, how do they envision themselves vis-à-vis the Indian nation-state? Especially given that there is this very acute anti-Muslim—you know, that is, this very serious and acute rhetoric that is constantly going on right now. So have you had any such conversations with any of the people you've interacted with?
JL: One interesting example I can give you of that tension: there is one organization called Ansari Mahapanchayat. It was launched in Bihar about 2 years ago and clearly when they launched it, they had the upcoming Bihari election in mind. So there's a long tradition in Bihar and in UP of the Ansari community, of the mobilization of the Ansari community. So there's an organization called the Momin conference, which was launched in 1911 in Calcutta and which has existed and which was basically a pro-Congress organization before partition, then merged with the Congress. Then, since then—so it was merged at the time of partition with Congress, but then it was revised in the 70s, and so on. And we see across the North Indian landscape, there are lots of, some small some, some slightly bigger organizations—Ansari organizations. So this was a Bihar-based organization and initially they claimed to represent the Ansaris and they used different numbers to say that they were under-represented in Bihar politics and they said “We’re ready to talk to anyone, any political party... we are apolitical, we don’t do politics... we only work for the welfare of the community.” But very quickly, the CAA process happened, and then they had to take a stand. So in December, 2019 this same group that until a few days ago was basically saying we're ready to talk to anyone as long as they give us hissedari, representation—but then they had to take an anti-BJP stand when the CAA was passed and there was a Bihar-bandh against it in mid-December 2019, and so this organization had to reveal that it was political… This reveals to some extent the relationship between these social groups and their stand vis-a-vis secularism...
TL: It's not possible to be apolitical if you're Muslim (or any religious/caste group) in India and especially if you're a Muslim organization. It just doesn't work, I think.
JL: Well, you can try, but…
TL: Are you going to be covering any of the elections next year in India? Do you plan to do that?
JL: I'd like to be in UP for the UP election. In Amroha in particular. I’ve been doing some fieldwork in Amroha, so I’d like to go back there; but I’m not sure. I mean I'm not sure where I'll be next year, I'm not sure whether I'll be in India or in France.
TL: My next question has to do with your earlier work, where you talk about Sindh, and that's how your engagement with Islam began.
So there is this Sufistic principle of Sindh. A lot of literature produced in India at least talks about or emphasizes the Sufistic element of the Sindhi community, but it's ironic because you don't see that particularly any more or perhaps it is visible only in very tiny pockets.
It does not manifest itself in the popular domain. Do you have any observations to share about that? I understand that this is something that you did years ago, but if you have anything that you would like to share that would be great…
JL: Well, I still go to Sindh and I still work on Sindh. In fact, much of my work on Sindh has not yet been published, or is in the process of being published. My PhD dissertation should come out as a book in the coming year, and then I have papers in the pipeline with journals so I'm really hoping to see that come out soon now. When you said engagement with Islam—so if you just want, just for the sake of anecdote, I first came to India in 2006. I was an exchange student at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi for a year. That's how my encounter with Indian Islam began. Then I spent some time with an NGO in Kishanganj in Bihar in 2007. I travelled to Sindh for the first time in 2007, because I had a friend at Jamia who was a Pakistani Sindhi and so that’s how it all started. When I started my PhD in 2010, it was a few years later, and I already had a certain notion of Sindh because I had travelled there and had this good friend, so that's how I started—with the question of interrogating the link between Sufism and nationalism in Sindh. That was initially at the very center of my PhD project. I was defining Sufism as a mystical approach to Islam. As I progressed, this turned out to be only one aspect of my dissertation, which is this paper you might have read, “Sindhis are Sufi by Nature,” so my dissertation more broadly traced historically the construction of nationalist movements in Sindh, and the construction of an idea of them defined by a certain set of identity markers, Sufism being only one among them. The question of why it is contentious to claim that Sindhis are Sufi by nature... The claim is problematic because it makes a double essentialization. It essentializes Sindhis as all being Sufi irrespective of their religion or cultural diversity—and we know that there is still today a lot of religious and cultural diversity in Sindh. Even if you only take into account native Sindhi speakers, there are some differences and that was even more true before partition. And the second essentialization that it makes is that it essentializes Sufism as being only one certain conceptualization of mysticism. It reduces Sufism to one type of Sufism, whereas there's a very long history, with a lot of different rituals and approaches that sometimes are very conflictual as well. And so regarding the second aspect of essentializing Sufism, I think basically in my work in my PhD, in that paper, I wanted to expose, you could say, the constructed nature of the statement on the so-called Sufi nature of Sindhis, which is something I encountered a lot in my interviews with Sindhi nationalists, something that is part of the Sindhi nationalist rhetoric, and of course your question was why it is contentious, and the intention of G.M. Sayed was that by seeing Sindh as a land of Sufi—it was a way of countering the official Pakistani nationalism that tended to push for a certain reformist kind of Islam. But also G.M. Sayed had his own reformist dimension in the sense that he also rejected a lot of the rituals of Sufi Islam, and in fact he had a very strange or rather a very abstract understanding of Sufism as mysticism, as a very esoteric spiritual quest. It has nothing to do with rituals, including Islamic rituals, which is why his book, published in 1967, Jiyan Ditho aa Moon, attracted lot of wrath from religious clerics in Pakistan. So what I wanted to say about this was that claiming that Sindhi are Sufi by nature is a kind of a performative in the sense that it claims to make it happen. The maker of the claim hopes that stating what she wants to happen will make it happen and so we could also call it kind of representative claim (so here I'm using the term of Michael Saward), and then in the sense that it's a claim about the so-called true nature of Sindhi but it serves a political purpose. It's a political claim in that sense, and what is also interesting is that we can see the consequences of this claim in the official cultural policy pursued by the government. From the 40s to the 70s the Sindh government funded scholarly enterprises to create a new kind of discipline of the study of Sindh—to establish the study of Sindh, a discipline called Sindhology. So you had 1970, when the Institute of Sindhology was established in Sindh, but of course, it's based on pre-existing organizations. And then in India now, there's also an Indian Institute of Sindhology in Adipur. And so Sindhology implies folklore collections, and the writing of the Sindhi historical narrative, and then, from the 70s, you really have an endorsement of this vision with the Pakistan People’s Party coming to power in Sindh, and pushing for this vision of Sindh. So it had by then a large scholarly literature it could rely upon and the PPP in the 70s also expanded this idea of the authentic Sindhi culture and history associated with Sindhology and it replicated some of the cultural institutions that were created in Sindh. For instance they established the Lok Virsa, the popular heritage organization in 74 under Bhutto and that was based on the Sindhi institution that had existed for 25 years called the Sindhi Adabi Board. And more recently we’ve seen the provincial government in Sindh—that is its cultural policy, political response to the Promotion of Sindhology, and for instance it has recently established a university of Sufism in Bhit Shah, where the tomb of Shah Latif is located. So I hope that gives you an idea about, you know, these interactions... the question of defining Sindhi identity and the question of the Sufi religiosity.
TL: Absolutely! So you've covered quite a lot of terrain starting from Sindhi nationalism, Sufi religious practice, and then talking about the Sayyids and the political situation in India. Which direction do you think your research is about to take in the future? Do you have some plans?
JL: I have plans of course. Well I'd like—they're things that I'd like to explore on both sides of the border, so the question of Sayyid and Sayyid organizations is something that I've been working on now for a few years. I've done some fieldwork in Sindh and in North India. I would like to do some fieldwork in Kerala about this, as well, to be kind of comparative. And then more, I would say globally, from the database that I have created with my colleagues. We’re just starting to get some results so I think it's a great basis for understanding the question of representations of Muslims in India and part of the Indian secular system and that is something I want to keep working on and by expanding the database, in order to keep exploring the question of the internal division of Muslims and kind of maybe a new form of Muslim politics has been coming up over the past 20 years. So, these are the things I would like to keep working on in the future.
TL: Well I look forward to reading all of that! Finally, since it is the pandemic, we have to end with the pandemic question. I myself have found that my work has just been moving so slowly because of everything that's going on. Archives are inaccessible and so is the field! So do you think—has your work been affected because of the pandemic? Have you had to change the nature of your research—fieldwork, of course, is not possible at any time, right now. So what's happening pandemic-wise?
JL: Yeah, of course, it's been affected. I think everybody's work has been. I was lucky enough not to have any family members who were directly affected. But in terms of work, of course, it's been a problem—but then, I found it helped me to focus, in a way, so I was able to make progress on writing, and in fact I was lucky enough to be—as a foreigner and as a foreign researcher—to be in India already at CSH when things, you know after the first wave, when things calmed down. I was able to do fieldwork, in UP, in Bihar in the f all. And also, as recently as February, I was able to travel. So that was very nice to have the chance to do that as compared to many other researchers, foreign researchers who work on India who haven't been able to. But then of course I do also rely on some phone calls like anybody else.
TL: Yes, we can just hope that it gets better and we’ll all just be able to do our work!
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Focus On |
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1 - South Asia Digital Research
Archive Project
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By Rémy Delage
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During the preparation of the 2019-2023 scientific project, the upcoming board of directors set as one of their goals the creation of a digital repository for the CEIAS, based on the archives of current and former researchers. Established in 1955 by the anthropologist Louis Dumont, the CEIAS (Centre d’études de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud—Center for South Asian Studies, UMR 8564, EHESS/CNRS), was initially intended to renew studies on India by combining the various disciplines of the social sciences and humanities, while engaging in a dialogue with classical Indology. This major characteristic of the CEIAS, linking fieldwork and texts, has been a constant ever since, while taking in an ever-broader array of disciplines—anthropology, demography, geography, history, ancient and modern literatures, linguistics, philosophy, political science, religious science, and sociology—and regions of the South Asian cultural area (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives). Committed to an ongoing engagement with multidisciplinary approaches since the 1980s and 1990s, the laboratory is also a multilingual research community whose members are fluent in a variety of Indian languages, both ancient and modern (Sanskrit, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Tamil, Nepali, etc.), as well as Arabic and Persian, and of course English, the lingua franca of research on the sub-continent.
Over the past 70 years, several generations of researchers have therefore amassed a large body of archival material—research data used or produced over the course of their work. Some of these archives were stored either at the CEIAS documentation center (Maison de l’Asie, EFEO) or at its own offices at 54 boulevard Raspail. Some researchers entrusted archival collections to other libraries, such as the BULAC (Bibliothèque universitaire des langues et civilisations—University Library of Languages and Civilizations), the CEH (Centre d’études himalayennes—Center for Himalayan Studies, in the Marc Gaborieau collection, for instance), or the Eric-de-Dampierre Library (Laboratoire d’ethnologie et sociologie comparative—Comparative Anthropology and Sociology Laboratory, University of Nanterre). Realizing that this wealth of material is invaluable for future generations of researchers working on South Asia, the current CEIAS board of directors has made it a priority to collect and make accessible to the public most of these archives by diversifying the digital tools and media for its scientific dissemination.
In addition to the personal archives of researchers,1 several funded and collaborative projects, coordinated by CEIAS members, specifically focus on the preservation and digitization of local sources in ancient and/or vernacular languages. Several members of the Center have collected corpora of digital images, Tamil and Sanskrit inscriptions, agrarian archives of the Tamil country, old photographs and slides, medieval and modern sources of the history of Bhojpuri literature, sound and video recordings (including interviews), project archives, field notebooks, official and vernacular maps, administrative and scientific archives, etc. One of these collections has been valorized through a dedicated website (Musiques indiennes en terres creoles—Indian Musics in Creole Countries), created and managed with the assistance of Nadia Guerguadj (communications officer and webmaster of the Center between 2010 and 2021). It seemed important to us to reinforce this archival dynamic and to firmly establish it in the digital humanities landscape by valorizing the numerous vernacular language collections and corpora that have been compiled over the years by the members of the Center.
From January to March 2020, the CEIAS recruited Thomas Morel (archivist) with the main objective of drawing up an inventory of existing and potential researchers’ archives. During this period, he was also able to conduct a series of about ten interviews with former researchers, the main thread of which was the history of the Center, its main milestones and important moments. The analysis of this material, coupled with that of the numerous archives collected, both institutional (scientific reports and projects, courses, correspondence) and ethnographic (field data), the oldest of which date back to the end of the 1950s, could, for example, make it possible to compile a true history of an institutional structure where knowledge and research on India and South Asia has been produced for over half a century. The personal archives we have collected could also be used to trace out an individual researcher’s career path.
Put on hold due to the pandemic, which disrupted our work habits throughout the year 2020, this project was resumed in January 2021 with the recruitment of Marvin Lawson-Body (PhD student in literature). In coordination with the EHESS Digital Research Unit (Pôle Numérique Recherche)—notably represented by Joachim Dornbusch and Maxence Gévaudan—as well as the CEIAS board of directors, he began an intensive process of digitization and indexing (metadata enrichment) of the archives to make it possible to store them and make them accessible to the public in the research data repository Didomena 2 , which is housed by the EHESS. During the first semester of 2021, tens of thousands of images have been produced and organized into numerous thematic collections and sub-collections. Among the most notable, we can cite for instance :
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Scientific and administrative archives of the CEIAS: seminar notes from the 1970s, CEIAS reports and projects since 1967, newsletters, course structures, etc.
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Maps, charts and imagery of South Asia: digital map collection from the CEIAS library, maps and charts of Pakistan, Nepal, aerial photographs of Sri Lanka, vernacular cartographies, etc.
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Indira Gandhi’s official visit to the CEIAS:
1971 at the FMSH, 54 Blvd. Raspail
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Various interviews:
with researchers, intellectuals, and actors in the field
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Peddling booklets: multilingual collection (5 languages), unpublished iconographical and textual corpus
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The Gurungs of Nepal: field notebooks and photos, working files, maps, correspondence with Louis Dumont (dissertation director), 1950s
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Sri Lanka: lectures, aerial photos, village photographs, censuses not available in libraries, recordings of lectures in the 1980s
- Mission Interdisciplinaire Française du Sindh (MIFS—French Interdisciplinary Mission of Sindh): maps, vernacular literatures, slides, GIS and field data, etc. covering the 2008-2013 project period
- Studies in Tamil Studio Archives and Society (STARS) – Tamil Studio portraiture (1880-1980): project 2015-2019
- Digital Archive of Tamil Agrarian History (1650-1950 – DATAH): project 2010-2016, agrarian archives of the Tamil country, digitized from paper, palm leaves, copper plates
- The Domestication of “Hindu” asceticism and the Religious making of South and Southeast Asia (DHARMA):
photos of temples, Tamil and Sanskrit inscriptions
- Etc.
Other archives are in the process of being digitized and indexed, in fields as varied as the administration of French domination in India (especially its legal aspects), an original collection of printed materials dating from the end of the 19th century, and even an entire body of literature from the Indian communist party. We are also exploring other avenues for the development of this digital archive specific to the CEIAS through the development of other major collections we have identified.
Our goal is now to make these collections available to the public starting in the fall/winter of 2021, in parallel with the opening of a valorization site that will be continually updated with posts or data papers describing these collections or corpora in detail. This valorization site will also constitute a platform through which various researchers will be invited to publish posts concerning the archival sites and pedagogical information sheets centered on the use of research sources in relation to South Asian societies.
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Notes
1 For example, between 2012 et 2019, Nadia Guerguadj digitized quite a few, slides, maps, booklets, etc. (approximately 2,500 images).
2 “It is a collaborative platform that allows EHESS research units to organize, share and preserve the data used or produced in the course of their work. The data kept there is described according to the standards of scientific and technical information. Depending on the needs of each user, it can be kept in restricted access or released in open access.”
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2 - Doctoral program at the EHESS:
Field Investigation, Textual Corpuses, Interdisciplinarity
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By Rémy Delage
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Since September 2020, a new doctoral program at the EHESS entitled “Terrains, textes, interdisciplinarité” (2TI) (Field investigation, textual corpuses, interdisciplinarity) has been offered. It was aimed at students who have completed one of two multidisciplinary master’s programs at the EHESS: Etudes asiatiques (Asian Studies) and Sciences des religions et sociétés (Social and Religious Sciences). However, the program is open to candidates working on a wide variety of subjects and methods of investigation, neither exclusively on Asian studies nor on religious issues. It welcomes doctoral research projects that study a wide range of situations and questions, both current and past. Whether examining systems of thought, belief and representation, political institutions, social organizations, the spatial configurations of activities or other topics, projects are expected to draw on several traditions and disciplinary debates by applying them and confronting them with sources acquired either through field investigation, archival work, or the critical reappraisal of textual corpuses.
The pedagogical team is composed of faculty who are specialists in various cultures and periods and who work in several disciplinary fields. This team will ensure a coherent supervision, in particular to accompany the thorny phases of the thesis between data collection, processing and analysis, and the final phases of writing, publication and restitution of the results of the research. The 2TI doctoral program allows the preparation of PhD theses in the following disciplines and specialties: Social anthropology and ethnology, Visual studies, Political studies, Urban studies, Geography, History and civilizations, Literary studies, Social sciences and gender, Socio-economy of development, Sociology.
Admissions for the 2021-2022 2TI Doctoral program are open from April 16 to October 18, 2021. Applications can be submitted online on the EHESS application platform (eCandidate), accessible on the EHESS website.
The new EHESS 2TI Doctoral program will also award one Doctoral Contract this year through competition (with the possibility for finalist(s) to be selected for another contract by the Doctoral School Jury, which will meet in a second phase). Those who wish to apply this year must submit their application by September 3, 2021. The applications will then be passed on to and evaluated by the members of the 2TI doctoral program’s pedagogical team. The decision to award a Doctoral Contract is equivalent to admission to the doctoral program. The laureates will be contacted by the Doctoral School’s administration to proceed with their registration. Once these formalities have been completed, they will be contacted by the Office of Contractual Personnel for the establishment of the doctoral contract.
All information can be found here:
EHESS website
Master’s program (Asian Studies) website
Admission procedures for the 2TI Doctoral program 2021-2022
Contacts:
Coordinators: Emma Aubin-Boltanski and Guillaume Carré
Secretariat: Ninga Ahmed Affandi
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3 - Multiple Cravings.
A Fieldwork Project in Chandigarh
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By Caterina Guenzi
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In May 2021, after experiencing several months of lockdown and early curfew, people in France were eagerly waiting for restaurants, museums and cinema halls to reopen. Just before the “liberation day,” scheduled on May 19th, excitement and impatience could be sensed in the streets. On the appointed day, many people felt they could breathe again, soothing their craving for cafés and cultural life. An anthropologist deprived of fieldwork for long has a somewhat similar feeling of eagerness and impatience when eventually planning to go into the field. Over the past decade, I have been unable to carry out extensive ethnographic research for professional and family reasons. In spring 2020, my plan was to spend the 2020-2021 academic year in India but my project was delayed by the pandemic. Although the situation is currently still very critical in India, I have strong hope that by this fall it will be possible to carry out a project in the field. The EHESS and the CSH (Delhi) will support my staying in Chandigarh during the 2021-2022 academic year. I’m just craving for it.
My research project in Chandigarh stems out from my two previous main fields of investigation. The first one was on astrology and astrologers in Banaras (see Guenzi 2013 and 2021) and the second one, still ongoing, is a study of an early modern North-Indian Sanskrit treatise that combines astrological and karmic notions, the Karmavipākasaṃhitā (KVS), the “Collection on the maturation of [past life] deeds” (1726 is the terminus ante quem to date its composition). After completing the translation of this treatise into English, I am now writing a book on it. As an anthropologist, my interest in this treatise arose because of its pragmatic approach and its close connection to Brahmanical professional practices. In Sanskrit literature and academic research, karma (karman) is mainly approached as a “theory” or “doctrine” explaining human destiny, while in the KVS—a popular treatise that was reprinted several times over the past centuries and is still available in different editions today—karmic ideas are used as a tool to treat people’s problems and to provide a livelihood to Brahman practitioners. The KVS explains how to conduct therapeutic consultations (praśna) with clients suffering from infertility and other diseases. It contains 108 past-life narratives based on the clients’ astral configuration at birth and proposes personalized remedial measures. Many reproductive problems, such as miscarriage, amenorrhea, impotency, secondary infertility, and still death, are mentioned in the treatise. They are all seen as the results of bad deeds conducted in the last human life. However, all therapeutic efforts are aimed at achieving one and only one reproductive goal: the birth of a healthy and long-lived son. Women that are “daughters generating” (kanyakājananī) must undergo treatment and the birth of daughters is to be stopped through very expensive ritual remedies. The KVS targets wealthy couples craving for sons in North India.
As a result of a post-partition Nehruvian project, obviously Chandigarh is not among the many North Indian cities and villages mentioned in the KVS. Nor it is a renowned Brahmanical center of learning such as Banaras. Nevertheless, son preference is more visible in the Corbusian city than everywhere else in India. The population of this Union Territory has one the worst skewed sex ratios in the country (818 women for 1000 men, according to the 2011 Census; child sex ratio 880/1000). The wealthy and educated population of the city also has one of the lowest fertility rates in India (1,5 birth/woman in 2013).
It is thus a very interesting place to observe middle- and upper-class reproductive choices, values and strategies. While most studies on reproductive health in India focus on bio-medical practitioners and services, midwifery and assisted reproductive technologies (ART), in my study I will adopt a much broader definition of “assisted reproduction.” I’ll thus consider different kinds of practitioners who, are consulted, alongside gynecologists and midwives, to provide assistance in the reproductive process, such as gurus, priests, astrologers, vastu specialists, karmic healers, tantric specialists, and so on. I’m interested in the diversity of idioms and tools that are used not only to favorize “successful” reproduction, but also to explain and treat “defective” or “failed” procreation (miscarriage, the birth of a daughter, malformations at birth, stillbirth, and so on). Perceived as less invasive, less harmful and not less effective than biomedical treatment, the remedies provided by these “spiritual” practitioners are appreciated by couples, and especially by women (for a statistical survey comparing “allopathic” and “other kinds” of infertility treatment sought by Indian women at a national level, see here). However, this does not mean that the innocuousness and effectiveness of these treatments is recognized by all and that no tensions arise when different kinds of practitioners are simultaneously consulted and provide contradictory advice. Medical practitioners warn about the adverse effects that the consumption of “sex-selective drugs” provided by faith healers in the region may produce (for the increased risk of stillbirth and congenital malformations see here). According to a brief survey that I conducted among gynecologists working at PGIMER (the main public hospital) and in a private fertility clinic in Chandigarh, the influence of “gurus” and “babas” may dangerously prevent “successful” reproduction, as in the case of a woman who interrupted a promising IVF because her astrologer said that the fetus had not been conceived at the appropriate moment, or another who asked to have C-section on an auspicious day, which turned out to be fatal for her. In the pluralistic landscape of reproductive health, I’m thus particularly interested in the way both families and practitioners deal with conflicting authoritative statements, interpretations and practices. Sometimes cravings may be deadly. Let's hope that my craving for fieldwork is generative and fertile.
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4 - Informal Ceias Doctoral Seminar
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By Cansu Gurkaya
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This year, we, the PhD candidates of CEIAS, created a unique platform that brought together all the doctoral students of CEIAS to share their research with each other and receive constructive feedback. Through this platform, bimonthly informal seminars have been held online where, in addition to sharing our own research, group discussions around readings on specific topics have also taken place. The topics discussed have ranged from theoretical frameworks around citizenship, to public/private boundaries, via secularism and so on. In doing so, we have gained insight into how the works of researchers (from South Asia and beyond) can be discussed collectively to contrast various aspects relating to our own research interests and respective
fieldwork areas. For instance, we collectively explored the differences of caste as an administrative category by comparing empirical findings from different South Asian countries, and held discussions on the myriad ways in which the State relates to religion or religiously defined communities in different historical and geographical contexts. The closed-door format of the seminar, restricted to doctoral students alone, has allowed for a frank exchange around a variety of issues—be they conceptual and methodological difficulties, challenges in bringing to bear Western theoretical perspectives on South Asian contexts, challenges encountered in designing a research question that both underlines and extends the common understandings of a problem, challenges faced in the field, etc.
Since mid-February, we have successfully held eight sessions so far, and we still have more to go until the end of this academic year as the response has been very encouraging till now, and as it emphasized the importance of having a platform for the free and open exchange of ideas and concerns related to the academic life of a doctoral student. We would therefore like to continue organizing such sessions in the informal format for the next academic year as well. However, we would limit the sessions of the informal seminar to once a month, and would like to take up another meaningful initiative, by opening the existing platform to a wider public, including researchers and fellows from other institutes, hosted by us. In order to do so, we would initiate a monthly formal EHESS seminar, in addition to the informal seminar already started. Like the informal seminar series, this too will be held in English. For this new seminar series, our aim will be to explore conceptual and methodological issues with a wider audience. We also propose that these seminars need not be restricted in format to presentations and discussions alone, but could take the shape of workshops as well. We could include workshops on new methodologies, and at the same time hold discussions on the implications of making use of empirical data that refers to a specific context from South Asia while, at the same time, synthesizing multiple research perspectives from different disciplines, historical periods, and geopolitical environments.
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5 - Urban in the Making. A research collective focused on urban spaces
in South Asia
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By Loraine Kennedy and Christine Ithurbide
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The first of two workshops dedicated to India's Smart City Mission, Sept. 25, 2018
The first of two workshops dedicated to India's Smart City Mission, Sept. 25, 2018
In South Asia, urbanizing spaces are privileged sites for observing social transformations of various kinds. Rapid urbanization has brought sharply into focus issues of social and spatial (in)justice, including access to housing, basic services and public spaces, or what is also called “right to the city.” The emergence of the metropolis as an engine for economic growth has exacerbated the competition for land, resulting in evictions through land grabbing or forceful acquisition by the state, and has led to the proliferation of large-scale urban projects (multimodal transport systems, road infrastructure, commercial and residential complexes) that disrupt the social and spatial fabric of the city. At the same time, cities remain places of social, cultural and political innovation. Urban-based political dynamics give rise to experiments in local democracy and urban governance, while cultural dynamics (architecture and heritage, cultural industries, evolution of consumer norms and lifestyles) shape the everyday urban experience and contour the unfolding landscapes of the future city.
Urban research at the CEIAS is grouped under an overarching Research Area V (Axe V) called: Urban in the Making. Discourses, Practices and Representations. It is a forum where urban scholars can come together to share their on-going research, host seminars for invited speakers, organize events and initiate joint research through the organization of working groups on emerging topics in urban scholarship. Participants of the Research Area are engaged in teaching and research training in urban-related topics, either through regular seminars at the EHESS or through occasional talks in other classes.
In the last few years, the research collective, which includes external members, has organized a number of scientific events. In January 2020, it co-sponsored with Geographie-Cités a half-day meeting featuring EHESS Visiting Professor, Bhuvana Raman (http://ceias.ehess.fr/index.php?5156), speaking on land transformation in Indian cities with a focus on developers and brokers and Bérénice Bon, IRD researcher, CESSMA, presenting recent joint research on “frontier urbanism,” through the case of Faridabad.
The first of two workshops dedicated to India's Smart City Mission, Sept. 25, 2018
The first of two workshops dedicated to India's Smart City Mission, Sept. 25, 2018
More recently, in March 2020, the group welcomed Xuefei Ren, Associate Professor of Sociology and Global Urban Studies, Michigan State University, for an online talk about her new book, Governing the Urban in China and India (Princeton University Press, 2020). Min Tang (PhD candidate, KU Leuven and Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne) led the discussion and presented her own comparative research in Mumbai and Shanghai.
Other highlights of the group’s activities include two workshops on India’s Smart City Mission: one was showcased as the CEIAS Annual Day in 2018 (http://ceias.ehess.fr/index.php?4682), the other was jointly organized with the Paris Institute for Advanced Study and the FMSH in May 2019 (https://www.paris-iea.fr/en/events/how-sustainable-are-india-s-smart-cities-critically-assessing-the-projects-and-politics-underpinning-the-smart-city-mission-2.
A photo exhibit, “City of Waste,” curated by Rémi de Bercegol, was co-hosted at the EHESS in May 2019 (“Des déchets et des Hommes”), as part of the celebrations of the 80th anniversary of the CNRS.
In 2020, a new working group was formed with a focus on digitalization in relation to urban geographies and governance. The idea was to create a space within the CEIAS to share reflections and deepen the study of digital issues in South Asian cities, building on the earlier deliberations surrounding India’s Smart Cities Mission. The group is a response to increasing interest for these themes among colleagues, associated members and PhD students. The global spread of terms such as “digital urbanism” or “data-driven urban management” has triggered questions about their deployment and the broader stakes in the South Asian context, including about the ways they are appropriated, debated or contested.
In dialogue with the members of Research Area V, the working group proposes to extend ongoing research on urban dynamics questioning the way digitalization processes and tools (data generation, platforms, analytics), in their material, cultural and political dimensions, introduce new arrangements in complex social and spatial urban processes. The strength of the group resides in the cumulative research experience of its members on cities, governance, citizenship in South Asia and the diversity of fieldwork undertaken.
The format for meetings will vary, reading groups will alternate with sessions centered on methodological issues, for instance how to conduct research using digital tools and platforms. The first meetings provided an opportunity to share bibliographies and to present both individual and joint work-in-progress. The most recent session in May 2021 was centered on a discussion of the book Digital Geographies (Sage, 2018), putting key themes (governance, civics, ethics) into perspective with the group’s own research work in South Asia.
A first event is planned in the form of a workshop, “The digitalization of urban governance in India: Techniques, ideas, practices” coordinated by Stéphanie Tawa Lama-Rewal and Khaliq Parkar, to be held in October 2021. It aims to capture and document the ambiguity inherent in the digitalization of urban governance, by assessing its actual, observable impact on local democracy in the Indian context.
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From the Field
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Behind a School Performance by Children with Autism in Bangalore, Karnataka (South India): Exploring a Conflict between Special Educators through the Lenses of Care
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By Marie Manganelli
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As a PhD student since 2016, I carried out doctoral fieldwork between 2017 and 2020 under the supervision of Serena Bindi, CANTHEL (Université de Paris); I recently became an associate student at the CEIAS. My research focuses on the experiences of families and especially mothers of children diagnosed with autism in Bangalore, Karnataka (South India): I attempt to understand the social construction of the biomedical category through an analysis of care for a child with autism.
In this report, I would like to use an episode of conflict as narrated by Arkavati, a mother of twins diagnosed with autism, to illustrate how it can help with understanding the various elements at stake during a play performance of children with autism. Among other facets, such an event represents an opportunity for mothers to find a renewed sense of parental satisfaction and motivation to work with the child at home. Notions of hope, motivation and inspiration are indeed portrayed by counselors and mothers as crucial in the process of care for a child with autism: the “slow” progress of an autistic child as well as strong family and social pressure—they are often blamed for the socially inappropriate behaviors of the child—make many mothers particularly vulnerable to stress and exhaustion. In the meantime, specials schools expect them to implement home-based interventions over the long term for the autistic child.
It was the first time I was attending an event organized by this special school. Families of the eighty students had joined on a hot March afternoon to celebrate the end of the school year. The event was taking place in a conventional school compound in Bangalore, which provided a bigger yard not far from the special school’s buildings.
A few months earlier, in December 2018, I had met the school’s founder-director, Janaki ma’am, at the Global Autism Convention, a major three-day event co-organized by twelve organizations—mostly NGOs and trusts—involved in the field of disability and autism in Bangalore.
Trained as a special educator in the US, Janaki ma’am had come back to India with the intention of helping the few children that were diagnosed with autism in the beginning of the 1990s. Little by little, the informal sessions attracted more and more students and had to be moved to a bigger building: the special school was born.
With time, leadership and procedures, the school grew bigger thanks to funding by the Government, corporations, and individual donors, which allowed it to expand its role as a charity and offer special grants to the underprivileged families who wanted to enroll their children.
Now, it appears to be one of the most well-established institutions specializing in the care and the education of children with autism in Bangalore. It welcomes children under sixteen and provides training to some of the mothers.
Like many of the public celebrations intended for families, this year’s Annual Day was showcasing a performance by the special educators—the “teachers”—and the children: a play had been written and produced by a senior art-therapist, Sumitra ma’am, a lady in her fifties who practiced art-based therapies at another special school I was working with.
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| Before the show: welcoming the families
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The play was inspired by Bollywood movies from the 1970s and involved children with autism as well as children from the “social skills groups,” who were mostly the neurotypical siblings of the school’s students. When arriving at the event, Sumitra ma’am had enthusiastically proposed that I sit next to her, in front of the stage. Even though I had intended to mingle amongst the families who were sitting in the back of the audience, I wasn’t quite in the position to refuse this invitation. However, it proved to be a pretty good idea for various reasons, one of them being that she was kind enough to translate and explain parts of the plot when needed, as it was narrated and acted in Kannada, the local language of Bangalore.
But most importantly, after the performance she introduced me to various families and professionals, whilst everyone had crowded over a buffet of various South Indian dishes.
A white plastic plate in my hand, I had followed her and her golden-maroon sari all around the yard, sometimes losing her and then finding her again, navigating between the darkness of the night and the extravagance of the streetlights that were ensuring the vividness of the celebration. The festival of saris, contrasted by the sad casualness of men’s clothes, had made me a bit dizzy. That night, I got to introduce myself to and gathered the contacts of about fifteen actors, mostly mothers of children diagnosed with autism. Amongst them, several had become special educators at the school.
This is the night when I first met some key players in our story: Arkavati, her husband, her twenty-one-year-old daughter and her fifteen-year-old twins. Ten days later, I visited their home, situated fifteen minutes away from the special school’s main center by autorickshaw, for an interview that lasted about three hours.
Arkavati, a forty-five-year-old woman, was born in Bangalore as her father had moved from a local village to the city to work. Both she and her husband identified as Vokkliga caste, a land-holding caste of Kannadiga farmers. Arkavati had studied electronics and worked in computer programming, but at the insistence of her own father and later, her husband, she had given up the idea of taking up a job when her daughter was born. The twins, Jailesh and Aadidev, were born six years later, and in a pediatric clinic of Bangalore were respectively diagnosed with moderate and mild autism at the age of two.
A number of factors such as the observations of Arkavati’s mother, the comparison she was able to make with her first child’s development and behavior, and the difficulty she was facing in managing the twins on a daily basis had pushed her to consult her pediatrician quite early. Two years before our conversation, Jailesh had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder on top of autism: he had become very aggressive, often uncontrollable and subject to frequent anger outbursts; his tolerance of objects lying around him had significantly decreased, which was leading him to throw them around. After experimenting with several combinations of allopathic medications, Jailesh had calmed down a bit, but according to his mother, mental and physical disturbances were still triggering him easily.
I would now like to use the story of an episode of conflict Arkavati narrated, to illustrate how it can help with understanding the various elements at stake during a play performance of children with autism.
As both a parent of children acting in the school play, and a special educator at the school—she had undertaken training following Janaki ma’am’s encouragement ten years before—Arkavati stood in an in-between position which had led her to call the school’s counselor a few days before our meeting.
A quarrel had arisen during rehearsals and after the performance between her and the special educator in charge of Jailesh’s act. During their performance, Jailesh and other children had been told to sit on the sides, while the special educator was dancing in the middle of the stage, to the Staying Alive song. Drawing from my own experience of the play, I did remember being astounded by the stark contrast between the special educator’s “showmanship” and the distracted, costume-clad youngsters on the floor. I had experienced a feeling of uneasiness at the vision of these children who seemed to be used as decor, if not as a pretext for the dance of the “abled” young woman. Though I had kept these thoughts and sensations to myself, they later helped me in relating to Arkavati’s narrative.
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| During the performance: students and special educators playing an act
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I would first like to provide some elements of understanding of the conflict, as mobilized by Arkavati. On the one hand, she emphasized the children’s ability to dance, and questioned the way in which the special educator worked with them, since she did not, according to her, integrate the particularities of autism and the difficulties of imitation associated with the condition*:
“Actually all the children they can do one or two steps, they are not CP (cerebral palsy) children. They are not physically disabled children”; “Some children they look and dance, some children you have to tell them verbally, ‘dance, shake your leg,’ something like that. If you tell them, they’ll do. They are not understanding that each child needs different way of instruction,”
From this, she pointed out the first frictions that emerged during the rehearsals:
“I told her, ‘don’t stand in the middle, stand to the right side of the child.’ So (that) she’s not facing the audience and she’ll be helping the child. But she’s not listening! (laughs) For that also, she argued so much: ‘no I’ll not compromise, I’ll not go on the stage.’ So I told her not to go on the stage (laughs).”
Moreover, in this context, ideals of aesthetics should not take precedence over notions of justice and equity between children and their families, for Arkavati:
“They’re not going for any competition, it’s not a competition, it’s an Annual Day”; “In this class of six children, two are able to do, then eighty percent are not doing, still (...). I want that four children to do that. (...) But if you don’t work on the other children (...), it means you’re doing injustice to the other children. They’re also paying fees and coming.”
However, it is parental expectations that seem to be at the heart of Arkavati’s anger:
“What is there in putting a little effort and teaching them? Parents also will become happy. Actually in our class only, one parent came and told, ‘my son didn’t do anything on the stage,’ that means, you can think, any parent will come to see her child only to dance on the stage”; “As a parent, why do I go to the annual day, I don’t want to see some other child... it’s not that I don’t want to see, but when I look at the stage I’ll be looking at my child only, I need that motivation.”
Annual Days and stage performances by autistic children represent an opportunity for parents to find a renewed source of motivation to work with them at home. As if the vision of an active, engaged child on stage could act as a form of reward to the parent and of visible progress of the child, it seems like an essential experience to bring about a sense of parental satisfaction, otherwise so fragile in parents of autistic children.
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| The children and the teachers gathered on the stage at the end of the performance,
while families in the front are taking pictures
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As Sumitra ma’am suggests, stage performances are moments where the abilities of the children are put to the fore; they are supposed to participate in shifting parental visions of disability. In this, we can see that Arkavati’s concerns echo broader contextual dynamics, where the parent—and particularly, the mother—embodies the autistic child’s primary caregiver and often, his or her main daily “teacher.” The episode seems to crystallize some of the tensions between explicit—an aesthetic, diverting performance—and more implicit—a source of motivation—intentions and expectations of actors around the theatrical performance of children. It also makes visible some of the power dynamics that emerge between the special educators around these intentions.
Notions of inspiration, motivation and hope have colored the discourses and actions of many an actor during my fieldwork, and particularly those of special school counselors, who, at times, draw on Hindu mythology to bring about the “right” dosage of these.
The care of a child being subject to the vulnerability of a mother’s shifting motivation, the question of how to enhance the “right” amount of hope in her, halfway between “acceptance” of the child’s condition and faith in his or her capacity to evolve, remains a crucial one for professionals who work with parents of children with autism in Bangalore.
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Notes
*I use the bold font to stress the phrases most relevant to my analysis.
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Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Participatory Local-Level Planning Process in a Municipality of Nepal
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By Vishnu Tandon
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This account illustrates my observations on the effect of the first wave of COVID-19 on my research subject, the local planning process in a municipality of Nepal. It also demonstrates how the pandemic impacted the way of conducting interviews during the field visit. These observations cover the period from February 10, 2021 to March 20, 2021. Although I was aware of the uncertainty of my field visit in the midst of the corona pandemic, just to be able to conduct a field visit brought me a lot of excitement and hope to advance my research. As everywhere in the World, COVID-19 has affected every aspect of life in Nepal. When the pandemic hit Nepal, the focus of the government was to prevent and control its spread. Therefore, Nepal enforced a nationwide lockdown to control the spread of COVID-19 from March 24, 2020 to July 21, 2020.1 The unpredicted situation created by the pandemic affected every sector of the government; similarly, its effect on the local planning process was also visible.
Figure 1 Ward committee members of Ward No. 4
The local planning process is a policy-making process that enables citizens to participate and propose projects that directly affect their lives. I tried to understand the effect of the pandemic in the annual planning process of Buddhabhumi municipality during the 2020-21 fiscal year. For that purpose, I interviewed about 35 respondents in the municipality, including ward chairpersons, ward members, the mayor, deputy mayors and ordinary citizens. All interviewees answered my questions cordially. I wanted to see their facial expression when they were answering my questions but it was not possible with the mask on. The mask also reduced the sound of my voice so I had to speak louder to make sure they understood me. I remember one particular example when I went to ward number 5 of Buddhabhumi municipality to meet the ward chairperson. When I finished my interview, he suggested that I should meet a local NGO director who lived just five minutes away from the ward office. So, I decided to see him, but because the meeting with him was not planned in advance, I did not have a printed copy of the questionnaire with me, which was fine for me because I knew what to talk about. Since we maintained social distancing and wore masks, it was very difficult for me to make him understand what I wanted ask. When he told me about his problem, I wrote my questions in my notebook and showed him. It worked but I was not able to cross-question him or talk about anything that could help build a rapport with him.
Similarly, I interviewed a female ward member who spoke with a very low voice, so I had to stop her a few times; that also contributed to weakening the communication. As she was wearing a mask I could not see her expression, and I could not tell why her voice was so low. This information could have contributed to my research. The case was comparable with other interviewees; I could only focus on their tone and see their eyes when they were talking. I was nodding my head more often and saying “ok,” to make them feel that I was attentive while they were answering my questions. Though I made these efforts, I still felt that the connection with my interviewees would have been better if I interviewed them in times when masks and social distancing were not the new normal.
Despite all these “new normal” adaptations, I was able to conduct my field visit to study the planning process, that starts every year in January and ends in June. This process is broadly divided into three phases: 1) Prepratoion, 2) Project selection and 3) Proposal Review and approval (LGOA, 2017).2 During the preparatory phase the budget ceiling is determined. This phase of planning was not affected by the pandemic. However, the project selection phase, which includes the collection of proposals by organizing neighborhood or settlement assemblies from April to May, was delayed because of the pandemic. Later they were conducted with a limited number of citizens. Out of the 10 wards of Budhhabhumi municipality, a total of 6 wards conducted a small gathering of 12-15 people and collected their project proposals. Over 90% of these attendees were male. Another 2 wards did not organize any gathering, and instead included the project proposals that were raised the previous year but had not been addressed that year, whereas remaining 2 wards mobilized elected members and local volunteers to collect project proposals from the people from different settlements. As the attendance of local citizens in the project selection process was limited, there was a possibility that need-based projects were not prioritized and were not participatory. Also, none of the ward chairpersons interviewed considered non-participation as a challenge. On the other hand, citizens interviewed said that COVID-19 was used as an excuse to limit participation. I found that digital literacy was very low in this municipality, especially among people over 50, who were not using smart phones or the internet. So it is understandable that the internet was not used as a primary means to contact people, but none of these wards even used the telephone to reach out to maximum number of local residents.
The third phase involves reviewing the project proposals at the municipal level; they are later approved by the municipal assembly in late June. The third phase was less affected by COVID, as by that time the restrictions had been relaxed to some extent and meetings were being held taking appropriate measures. However, the sectorial priorities presented during the budget assembly in June, were slightly different from the previous years. The municipality allocated a portion of the budget to the employment needs of returnee migrants who had lost their employment abroad. Such programs were mostly in animal husbandry and vegetable farming. Also, additional budget allocation towards the health sectors was noted. It seemed that some efforts were made to minimize the economic damage done by COVID but the amount allocated was extremely low.
Figure 2 : ( From left to right) Ward member,
two Health Volunteer and a staff of Ward No.7
urthermore, when COVID hit Nepal, immediate action had to be taken by allocating budgets toward tasks like quarantine and isolation space, testing, and contact tracing. This was not foreseen in the previous planning cycle. Buddhabhumi municipality did not have an additional budget for disaster management, therefore an immediate budget was made available by cancelling some planned programs targeted towards women and marginalized communities. Thus, during the pandemic, the issues of marginalized communities were sidelined. Not only did they lose their source of income, they also lost the municipal budget directed towards them. Moreover, women’s attendance at settlement assemblies was was almost nil.
On the bright side, although the institutional participatory process was reduced, other participatory practices emerged. For instance, the local networks, youth clubs, community-based organizations acted together to assist local government in collecting data from people who were facing difficulties in getting daily meals. The distribution of relief material was also carried out with the help of volunteers who willingly participated in helping the local government. Therefore, though COVID adversely affected participation in the institutional planning process, it also opened other areas of participation to help the community through local networks. More research will be needed to explore the new form of participation during the pandemic.
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Notes
1 The Kathmandu Post Daily (21 July 2020). Retrieved from: https://kathmandupost.com/national/2020/07/21/government-decides-to-lift-the-four-month-long-coronavirus-lockdown-but-with-conditions
https://kathmandupost.com/national/2020/07/21/government-decides-to-lift-the-four-month-long-coronavirus-lockdown-but-with-conditions
2 Government of Nepal (2017), Local Government Operation Act- 2017
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Publications
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Puruṣārtha Series
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Claveyrolas Mathieu, and Pierre-Yves Trouillet |
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eds. 2021. Les Hindous, les autres et l’ailleurs. Frontières et relations. Purushartha 38. Paris: Éditions de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales. |
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Authored Books |
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Guenzi Caterina |
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2021. Words of Destiny: Practicing Astrology in North India. Albany: State University of New York Press. SUNY series in Hindu Studies. |
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| Markovits Claude |
| 2021. India and the World: A History of Connections, c. 1750-2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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| Prevot Sandrine |
2021. L’Inde, une société de réseaux.
La Tour d’Aigues: Éditions de l’Aube .
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| Raj Kapil |
| 2021. Science moderne, science globale. Circulation et construction des savoirs entre Asie du Sud et Europe, 1650-1900. Turnhout: Brepols Publishers [translation of Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650-1900. Palgrave, 2007].
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| White David |
| 2021. Dæmons Are Forever: Contacts and Exchanges in the Eurasian Pandemonium. University of Chicago Press . Weber, Jacques. 2021. La France et l’Inde des origines à nos jours. Vol III, Regards croisés. Paris: Les Indes savantes. |
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Edited Books
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| Cécile Guillaume-Pey et Thomas Galoppin (eds) |
2021 Ce que peuvent les pierres. Vie et puissance
des matières lithiques entre rites et savoirs, collection
« Religions. Comparatisme – Histoire – Anthropologie » des Presses Universitaires de Liège |
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Journal Issues |
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Gururani Shubhra, Loraine Kennedy and Ashima Sood, eds. |
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2021. Engaging the Urban from the Periphery. South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal 26. |
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| Michelutti Lucia, and David Picherit, eds. |
| 2021. Brigands. Terrain 74.
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Book Chapters
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Boivin Michel |
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2021. “Religion and Society in Pakistan: From Pīr’s Domination to Individual Connected Piety.” Pp. 287–99 in Routledge Handbook of South Asian Religions, edited by K.A. Jacobsen. London; New York: Routledge. |
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| Boivin Michel |
| 2021. “Sufism and Vernacular Knowledge in Sindh.” Pp. 461–73 in Routledge Handbook of Sufism, edited by L. Rigeon. London; New York: Routledge.
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| Caru Vanessa |
| 2020. “Le Fil de coton.” Pp. 173–77 in Le Magasin du monde. La Mondialisation par les objets du XVIII e siècle à nos jours. Paris: Fayard. |
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| Claveyrolas Mathieu |
| 2021. “La Régulation de la pluralité dans l’hindouisme mauricien. Histoire, acteurs et pratiques.” Pp. 131–52 in Réguler les pluralités religieuses. Mondes indiens et chinois comparés, edited by V. Goossaert, and P. Van der Veer. Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS.
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| Emmanuel Francis |
| 2021. “Multilingualism in Indian Inscriptions: With Special Reference to Inscriptions of the Tamil Area.” Pp. 42–163 in Linguistics and Textual Aspects of Multilingualism in South India and Sri Lanka, edited by G. Ciotti, and E. McCann. Pondicherry: École française d’Extrême-Orient & Institut français de Pondichéry ⟨hal-03185234⟩.
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| Guillaume-Pey Cécile |
| 2021. “A Script ‘Good to Drink.’ The Invention of Writing Systems among the Sora and Other Tribes of India.” Pp. 159–84 in The Social and Cultural Contexts of Historic Writing Practices, edited by P. Steele, P. Boyes and N.E. Astoreca. Oxford: Oxbow books
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| Guillaume-Pey Cécile (with T. Galoppin) |
| 2021. “Que peuvent les pierres? Entrée en matière.” Pp. 9–29 in Ce que peuvent les pierres. Vie et puissance des matières lithiques entre rites et savoirs, edited by T. Galoppin and C. Guillaume-Pey. Presses Universitaires de Liège.
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| Landy Frédéric |
| 2020. “Trois façons d’écrire sur le confinement en Inde.” Pp.75–82 in Chronique du vécu d’une pandémie planétaire, edited by H. Breton. Paris: L’Harmattan
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| Landy Frédéric |
| 2020. “Les Enjeux contemporains de l’engagisme pour l’Union indienne.” Pp. 167–74 in Regards d’ici et d’ailleurs sur l’engagisme, edited by M. Marimoutou, and J. Play. Proceedings of the international colloquium, la Réunion, November 8–11, 2018
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| Lardinois Roland |
| 2021. “Devenir écrivain lorsqu’on est ingénieur. Autour du cas Chetan Bhagat dans la littérature indienne contemporaine de langue anglaise.” Pp. 103–22 in Narrations auctoriales dans l’espace public, edited by C. Bisenius-Penin, and J.E. Glesener. Presses de l’Université de Nancy.
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| Leucci Tiziana |
| 2020. “The ‘Moresca’ and the ‘Kolāṭṭam’ Sticks-Dances in Pietro della Valle’s 17 th Century Travel Accounts of South India.” Pp. 143–56 in Perception & Reception of Early Dance, edited by B. Segal, and S. Butler. Cambridge: EDC, Victoire Press. |
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| Leucci Tiziana |
| 2020. “La herencia del Romanticismo y del Orientalismo en el ballet de temática india La Bayadera (1877) de Marius Petipa.” Pp. 143–54 in Marius Petipa. Del ballet romantico al clasico. Marius Petipa from Romantic to Classic Ballet, edited by L. Hormigon. Madrid: Publicaciones de la Asociación de Directores de Escena de España. |
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| Mahias Marie-Claude |
| 2020. “Alimentation et distinction sociale en Inde. Pluralité des végétarismes: interprétations et transformations.” Pp. 121–36 in “Vous n’en mangerez point.” L’Alimentation comme distinction religieuse, edited by E. Mazetto. Brussels: Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles.
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| Servan-Schreiber Catherine |
| 2020. “Le Parfum de la colonie. Le Cinéma colonial européen et l’image du corps de l’Autre sexualisée.” Pp. 451–60 in Sexualités, identités et corps colonisés, edited by G. Boëtsch, N. Bancel, P. Blanchard, S. Chalaye et al. Paris: Éditions du CNRS.
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| Servan-Schreiber Catherine |
| 2020. “Le Concours de chant dans la promotion des langues indiennes à Maurice.” Pp. 131–54 in Langues de l’Inde en diaspora. Maintien et transmission, edited by M. Appasami. SCITEP Editions.
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| Servan-Schreiber Catherine |
| 2021. “Sources populaires pour l’histoire de l’engagisme en Inde du Nord. Tradition orale, littérature et iconographie.” Pp. 177-197 in Regards d'ici et d'ailleurs sur l'engagisme, edited by M. Marimoutou and J. Play. La Réunion, Conseil Départemental de La Réunion.
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| Weber Jacques |
| 2020. “L’Hindouisme en Inde du Sud au XIXe siècle.” Pp. 22–45 in Regards d’ici et d’ailleurs sur l’engagisme, edited by M. Marimoutou and J. Play. Saint-Denis: Conseil départemental de La Réunion.
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Journal Articles
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Amaral da Silva Corrêa, Otávio. |
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2020. “A Transexualidade como Terceiro Sexo e a Divindade às Hijras: religião, violência e Estado.” Revista Brasileira de Estudos da Homocultura 10(3):276–94. |
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| Amaral da Silva Corrêa, Otávio. |
| 2020. “La Migration et Marseille. Un rapport entre la mer et l’urbanité.” Ponto Urbe 27:1–26.
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| Amaral da Silva Corrêa, Otávio. |
| 2020. “Solidarity through a Network System: The Case of Indian Migrants in Marseille/France.” Nova Revista Amazônica 8(3):21–31. |
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| Boivin, Michel (with Annabelle Collinet and Sepideh Parsapajouh) |
| 2020. “Bodies & Artefacts: Relics and Other Devotional Supports in Shiʿa Societies in the Indic and Iranian Worlds. An Introduction.” Journal of the Material Culture in the Muslim World 1(2): 187–94. [Guest editor with Sepideh Parsapajouh and Annabelle Collinet: “Bodies and Artefacts in the Muslim World”].
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| Boivin, Michel |
| 2020. “The Polyvalent Qadamgāh Imām ʿAlī in Hyderabad, Sindh: A Preliminary Study in Relics, Political Power, and Community Setup.” Journal of the Material Culture in the Muslim World 1(2):243–62 [Guest editor with Sepideh Parsapajouh and Annabelle Collinet: “Bodies and Artefacts in the Muslim World”].
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| Bouquillion Philippe and Christine Ithurbide |
| 2021. “La globalisation culturelle et les nouveaux enjeux d’hégémonie à l’heure des plateformes. Le cas indien.” Réseaux 226–227(2–3):71–98
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| Caru Vanessa |
| 2021. “Peste et politiques urbaines à Bombay, 1896-1914.” Métropolitiques
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| Etter Anne-Julie |
| 2020. “Creating Suitable Evidence of the Past? Archaeology, Politics, and Hindu Nationalism in India from the End of the Twentieth Century to the Present.” South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal 24/25.
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| Etter Anne-Julie |
| 2020. “Temples et pyramides. La Place de l’Égypte dans l’étude des antiquités de l’Inde (XVIIIe-XIXe siècle).” Anabases 32:165–81.
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| Gauthier Églantine |
| 2020. “Esthétiques et valeurs d’une danse populaire. Du sega tipik au séga ‘zip an ler.’” Recherches en danse 9.
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| Guenzi Caterina |
| 2020. “Le Paysage des vies antérieures. Expliquer et traiter les maladies dans l’Inde brahmanique.” Carnets du paysage 37:146–55.
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| Gururani Shubhra, and Loraine Kennedy |
| 2021. “The Co-Production of Space, Politics and Subjectivities in India’s Urban Peripheries.” South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal 26.
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| Hermann Denis et Fabrizio Speziale |
| 2020. “Scientific Knowledge and Religious Milieu in Qajar Iran: Negotiating Muslim and European Renaissance Medicine in the Subtleties of Healing.” Iran, Journal of the British Institute of Persian Studies 58(2) .
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| Kennedy Loraine |
| 2020. “Federalism as a Moderating Force? State-Level Responses to India’s New Citizenship Law.” South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal 24/25
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| Kennedy Loraine, Ashima Sood, Debdatta Chakraborty, and Ram Mohan Chitta |
| 2020. “Interrogating Data Justice on Hyderabad’s Urban Frontier: Information Politics and the Internal Differentiation of Vulnerable Communities.” Information, Communication & Society: 1-20.
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| Landy Frédéric, Laurent Ruiz, Julie Jacquet, Audrey Richard-Ferroudji, Muddu Sekhar, Hélène Guétat-Bernard, Marlène Oger-Marengo, and Venkatasubramanian Govindan. |
| 2021. “Commons as Demanding Social Constructions: The Case of Aquifers in Rural Karnataka.” International Journal of Rural Management 17(1):1–28.
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| Landy Frédéric |
| 2020. “Ce que nous dit la COVID-19 des injustices spatiales en Inde/What COVID-19 Tells Us about Spatial Injustices in India.” Justice spatiale/Spatial Justice 15.
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| Landy Frédéric |
| 2020. “Entre tropicalité et Anthropocène : ‘nature’ et ‘culture’ dans l’Inde hindoue.” Belgeo 3.
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| Landy Frédéric |
| 2020. “Agriculture et environnement en Inde: des raisons d’espérer?” Les Cahiers d'Outre-Mer 281(1):69–78.
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| Landy Frédéric |
| 2021. “Inde, une agriculture en crise.” Paysans et société 386:29-36.
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| Leucci Tiziana |
| 2021. “The 16 th Century Portuguese Travel Accounts on the Origin of the Indian Dancer Character of the ‘Bayadère’ in the European Literary and Stage Productions.” Choreologica. The Journal of the European Association for Dance History (EADH, London) 11(1):75–134 [Edited by R. Barros, M. Inglehearn, and G. Whitlock].
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| Loprin Élodie, Romain Perez, Édith Szafran, Anne Cartier-Bresson, Vanessa Caru, Zoé Headley, and Anne-Julie Etter |
| 2020. “Connaître, documenter et conserver la photographie de studio indienne. L’Exploration d’un fonds photographique d’Inde du Sud.” Technè 50:93–103.
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| Lardinois Roland |
| 2021. “Caste in Higher Education in India (A Review article of Ajantha Subramanian, The Caste of Merit. Engineering Education in India, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Massachusetts), London (England), 2019.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History ii(3):443–58.
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| Markovits Claude |
| 2021. “Cosmopolitanism and Imperialism in Nineteenth Century British India.” Humanity 12(1):47–58.
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| Michelutti Lucia, and David Picherit |
| 2021. “Le Bandit et ses mythes. La production collective du charisme violent.” Terrain 74:4–21.
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| Michelutti Lucia, and David Picherit |
| 2021. “The Bandit and His Myths.” Terrain 74 [translation of “ Le Bandit et ses mythes. La production collective du charisme violent”].
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| Mohammad-Arif, Aminah, and Jules Naudet |
| 2020. “Introduction. Academia, Scholarship and the Challenge of Hindutvaism: Making Sense of India’s Authoritarian Turn.” “The Hindutva Turn: Authoritarianism and Resistance in India.” South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal 24–25.
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| Mohammad-Arif Aminah |
| 2021. “Les Musulmans en Inde. Une minorité pas comme les autres.” L’Inde: une puissance singulière. Questions internationales 106.
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| Mohammad-Arif Aminah |
| 2021. “‘Diversity in Unity’ within an Islamic Revivalist Movement in India: Conversion and Subjectivities in the Tablīghī Jamāʻat.” Archives de sciences sociales des religions. Special Issue “Réguler les pluralités religieuses: mondes indiens et chinois compares,” edited by V. Goossaert, and P. van der Veer, 193:153–73.
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| Mohammad-Arif Aminah, and Jules Naudet |
| 2021. “La democracia india frente al desafío del nacionalismo hindú.” Nueva Sociedad 291 [translation of “La Démocratie indienne à l’épreuve du Hindutva.” L’Homme 236:205–23].
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| Mohammad-Arif |
| Aminah. 2020. “Résister sous Modi.” Mouvements 104:137–44.
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| Mohammad-Arif and Jules Naudet |
| Aminah, and Jules Naudet. 2020. “La Démocratie indienne à l’épreuve du Hindutva.” L’Homme 236:205-223.
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| Mohammad-Arif |
| Aminah, and Jules Naudet. 2020. “Introduction. Academia, Scholarship and the Challenge of Hindutvaism: Making Sense of India’s Authoritarian Turn.” In The Hindutva Turn: Authoritarianism and Resistance in India, South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal 24–25.
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| Tignol Eve |
| 2021. “The Language of Shame: A Study of Emotion in an Early-twentieth Century Urdu Children’s Periodical (Phūl).” South Asian History and Culture: 222–43
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| Trouillet, Pierre-Yves |
| 2020. “The Migrant Priests of the Tamil Diaspora Hindu Temples: Caste, Profiles, Circulations and Agency of Transnational Religious Actors.” South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal Free-Standing Articles.
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| Varrel Aurélie |
2020. “A Job in Dubai and an Apartment in Bangalore.”
City 24(5–6):818–29.
doi: 10.1080/13604813.2020.1841446
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| Voix Raphaël |
| 2021. “Frères d’armes Yogis et bandits en pays bengali.” Terrains. Anthropologie et Sciences Humaines 74.
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Book Reviews
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Amaral da Silva Corrêa, Otávio. |
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2021. “Les Hijras. Portrait socioreligieux d’une communauté transgenre sud-asiatique.” Anuário Antropológico 46(2): 323–27 |
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| Amaral da Silva Corrêa, Otávio. |
| 2021. “Quand l’hindouisme est créole. Plantation et indianité à l’île Maurice.” Anthropologie et Sociétés 44(2):230–31
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| Kennedy Loraine |
| 2021. “Gavin Shatkin, Cities for Profit. The Real Estate Turn in Asia’s Urban Politics.” Métropoles 27. |
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Reports
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| Dupont Véronique, and Shankare Gowda |
| 2021. “Transient and Differentiated Resettlement: The Case of Kathptuli Colony, Delhi.” India Housing Report. Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, April 27.
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| Dupont Véronique, and Shankare Gowda. |
| Dupont, Véronique, and Shankare Gowda. 2021. “Impact of Resettlement in the Kathptuli Colony Transit camp, Delhi.” India Housing Report. Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, May 4 |
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Working paper
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| Landy Frédéric, Raghubir Chand, Steve Déry, Pierre Dérioz, Olivier Ducourtieux, et al |
| 2020. “Can Landscape Empower Rural ‘Minorities’ Through Tourism? Eco-Ethnicity in the Highlands of India, Nepal, China, Laos and Vietnam.” IFP-CSH Working Paper 17. |
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Press/Media
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| Levesque, Julien |
| 2020. “Muslim Politics and the 2020 Bihar Election.” The India Forum, December 4. |
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| Levesque Julien |
| 2021. “La Caste joue-t-elle un rôle politique chez les musulmans en Inde?” GIS Asie. Article of the month, April. |
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| Naudet Jules |
| 2021. “En Inde, la pandémie de Covid-19 agit comme un révélateur de la mascarade populiste.” Le Monde, May 20. |
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| Picherit, David |
| 2021. Interview for France Culture radio station, June 3. |
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Marvin Lawson-Body |
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Hello everyone,
My name is Marvin LAWSON-BODY and I am in charge of the digitization of the archives of the CEIAS (Centre d’études de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud—Center for South Asian Studies). My job is to preserve the archives of Center researchers in order to make sure they are taken care of and valorized in the best way possible.
What we mainly want to do is deal with the dual problematic of preserving Center data, on the one hand, and valorizing it, on the other; whether we are talking about research archives, monographs, prints, etc.: “sleeping data is useless data!” Thus, dematerializing the initial data, so-called physical data, makes it possible, while providing a solution to the problematic of accessibility, to also resolve the issue of basic valorization of this same data by making it accessible and available for everyone. Better access gets the data closer to the researcher, and to students.
Given these parameters, we have divided the project into three phases. First, there is the digitization phase. This phase, which is very down-to-earth, consists of direct digitization, or outsourced digitization, of the various documents we wish to keep, regardless of format. The second phase consists in generating the metadata and classification tables needed to upload the data onto a data management platform, such as Didoména, for instance. The final phase consists of valorizing this same data through a properly scientific research process, in order to initiate a dialogue about it, in the hopes that it will find an audience.
This project as a whole, as well as it’s implied stakes, are part of a larger dynamic involving the evolution of the relationship the world of research has with its data and working documents. The transition to the digital era requires that we rethink the mediation, conservation and valorization of research collections—the Condorcet Campus is an embodiment of this process.
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Wahid Mendil
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It is in Nice that, as early as I can remember, between the mountains and the sea, I began to hands-on work. I realized very early indeed that my unbridled curiosity and singular imagination could someday be the driving force of my professional life. Therefore, I very quickly trained in drawing, computer graphics, the Internet and development in multimedia publishing.
After my studies, I closely collaborated with the Academic Delegation for Digital Education - Délégation académique au numérique éducatif of the Versailles Academy, where I was able to express my graphics vision by illustrating and creating the interfaces for various web services and other digital functions training tools aimed at both teachers and students. In parallel, I was able to work with one of the main cultural mediators, the CANOPÉ network, a public resources operator of National Education. It was in this context that I learned about publishing process standards and that I was able to test my graphics research in a number of different output formats: applications, websites, journals, webdocumentaries, animations (motion design), etc.
I then devoted my skills as a web designer to a variety of projects developed at the EHESS (Didomena, Datu, Savoirs, Passés Futurs, Vivo, etc.).
My graphic style is strongly inspired by flat design, extremely minimalist, and characterized by streamlined geometry, whose major influences come from the international style developed in Europe in the 1950s.
I am really happy to have joined the CEIAS, one of the biggest social science research labs on the Indian sub-continent, and to be able to participate at each step of the way in the creation and management of the various communications tools, such as the monthly agenda, the newsletter and social networks, but also the bilingual website and other graphic compositions. Proposing, creating and reinventing are the three main pillars of my daily practice as an infographics specialist.
So it’s with my singular background and technical experience that I commit to burgeoning, developing and working with new ideas, offering solutions to researchers, by first being in direct contact with the problematics of conception and improvement of public service and with a social science lab in which the digital humanities are playing a greater and greater role.
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Farewell
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Nadia Guerguadj
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In these troubled times, it is a pleasure to look back on the ten years Nadia Guerguadj spent with the CEIAS. Among other qualities, she brought us her competence as a webmaster, her great talent as a graphic designer, her adaptability, discernment and devotion to her job. Her caring accompaniment of the students and her pedagogy when it came to technology ultimately convinced us that recruiting her had been the right decision. But she was presented with an opportunity to make an old dream, to work at the paleontology lab at the Museum du Jardin des Plantes, come true. So even if we know we are losing a “gem,” we sincerely wish her all the best for the future!
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“Chère Nadia, Un très grand merci pour le travail que tu as accompli toutes ces années ! Au plaisir de te revoir à bientôt. ”
La direction |
“On dit que personne n’est irremplaçable,
mais tu es une sacrée exception à la règle !
Je t’embrasse très fort. ”
Corinne
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“Merci pour tout ce que tu as fait au CEIAS !
Merci pour ta disponibilité, pour ton efficacité,
pour ta rapidité ! Bien à toi. ”
Manu
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| 1. CASBS Fellow |
| Jules Naudet |
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Jules Naudet has been invited to join the CASBS (The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences), as a Fellow for the year 2021-2022. This center, created by Robert K. Merton, is a residence for researchers that works as an “incubator of human-centered knowledge” by bringing together about thirty social science researchers from different institutions and disciplines each year. These researchers are invited to talk and debate during daily group lunches, a weekly seminar, a monthly seminar and many other group events. Each fellow brings a writing project. Mine will be to write the manuscript of my Habilitation à diriger des recherches and my book on the sociability of Indian elites. Several major social science works were written during this fellowship, such as John Rawls’ Theory of Justice, Edward Said’s Orientalism, and M.N. Srinivas’ The Remembered Village.
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| 2. New PhD |
| Asad ur Rehman |
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On June 14th, Asad ur Rehman successfully defended his thesis in political sociology, in front of a jury composed of Stéphanie Tawa Lama (supervisor), Christophe Jaffrelot and Mohammed Waseem (rapporteurs), Shandana Mohmand, Laurent Gayer and Fabrizio Speziale.
Asad’s thesis describes and analyses political intermediation in the increasingly urbanizing Punjab province of Pakistan. By employing the heuristic of engagement, it investigates the formation and functioning of an intermediation complex that mediates the needs, demands and expectations of citizens vis-à-vis formal and informal political institutions.
To understand such a complex, the thesis identifies its actors and their respective functions through a mixed method approach, using (i) a household survey to collect primary information related to the social, economic and political behaviors and expectations of ordinary citizens; (ii) interviews of political leaders; and (iii) participant observation of everyday life and political events (elections, protests, panchayat meetings…).
This varied methodology was necessary to contextualize the myriad social and political interactions taking place in the local cultural context. The thesis indeed aims at situating the formation and evolution of the intermediation complex in (i) socio-political domains and (ii) cultural-moral values. Therefore, it discusses the historical role that socio-economic structures like biraderi, land tenure and class have played in the development of intermediary political arrangements; and it highlights the significant contribution of cultural values in giving tenacity to such arrangements.
Finally, this thesis underscores the importance of studying both the structural and cultural aspects of political intermediation if one wants to understand political processes/events such as elections, public service delivery, everyday problem-solving and claim-making. It highlights the practical and theoretical significance of observing both the formal and the informal political spheres when looking at the changes and continuities in state-society relations in Punjab. In so doing, the thesis contributes to the conceptualization of a relational perspective on politics in Punjab.
Congratulations to the new Doctor!
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Obituaries
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| K. Saradamoni, courtesy of Asha G.
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K. Saradamoni
April 25, 1928 - May 26, 2021
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By Roland Lardinois (CNRS)
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Social scientist K. Saradamoni, one of the pioneers in Dalit and gender studies, passed away in Thiruvananthapuram (Kerala) on May 26, 2021; she was 93. Known for one of the earliest historical studies of caste slavery in Kerala, she had worked as an economist at the Indian Statistical Institute at Delhi from 1961 to 1988 when she retired.
K. Saradamoni was born in a matrilineal Nayar tharavad from Kollam. Her father P. Madhavan Pillai studied in the Trivandrum College and graduated in Chemistry, but due to a heart condition he had to seek employment and worked at the court in Kollam. When he was thirty, a match was made for him with a colleague’s daughter, K. Kunjulakshmi Amma, who was then all of fifteen and had just finished class 8th in the Government school for girls. K. Saradamoni, who got her name from Saradamani Mukhopadhyaya (called Saradamani Devi), the wife of the Bengali guru Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, was the third child of a family of four, three girls first and then a boy. She completed her primary and secondary education from St. Joseph’s convent school in Kollam town. But her father died when she was 9, and although her older sister was going to College in Trivandrum, she had to discontinue her studies after class 10th as the family was experiencing a difficult financial situation. She then became a teacher at St. Joseph’s convent for 5 years while answering Gandhi’s call and becoming involved with her siblings in the National movement.
In 1949, K. Saradamoni resumed her studies and joined the Women’s College in Trivandrum for her intermediate (class 11th and 12th) and then enrolled in the University College where she received her BA Honors in Economics, a three-year course at that time. It was here that she first met Madeleine Biardeau, a young philosopher already engaged in Indian studies, who taught as lecturer in French language at Trivandrum University for two years (1950-1952) while studying Sanskrit with a shastri.
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| K. Madeleine Biardeau and K. Saradamoni, Trivandrum, 1951 (or 1952). Courtesy of Dr K. Saradamoni.
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Before she completed her BA course, K. Saradamoni, on May 4, 1952, married a young man, N. Gopinathan Nair (1923-1991), also from Kollam, whom she had fallen in love with during the years she was a schoolteacher. He was an up-and-coming journalist, the founding editor of Janayugom newspaper, the official newspaper of the undivided Communist Party in Travancore. He did not have much money, nor did he crave for it. But they shared ideals and he was a pillar of support to her all her life till ill health took him away in June 1991.
After completing her BA Hons, K. Saradamoni proceeded to Madras University to complete her M. Litt in Economics. She completed a dissertation in two years on “The Cooperative Movement with Special Reference to Madras State”. Though her professors would have liked her to continue for a PhD, she decided to move back to Kerala and found a job as a gazette officer in the newly formed Bureau of Economic Studies. This was set up by the newly elected Communist Government who had invited the economist Professor Ashok Rudra1 (1930-1992) to be its first director. Meanwhile, in May 1959, she gave birth to her first child, a daughter called Asha. Early in 1961, she moved to Delhi to join the unit of the Indian Statistical Institute which then worked out of the Planning Commission. In 1963, she gave birth to a second child, Arunima.
Sometime in the mid-sixties, K. Saradamoni met Professor Louis Dumont who had set up the Centre d’études de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud (CEIAS) at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, VIe section (later on Ecole des Hautes Etude en Sciences Sociales) in Paris, and who wanted her to come and work there on her PhD. Thus, she went to Paris and joined the CEIAS in 1969. Holding a M. Litt degree in Economics and having 10 years of experience as an economist, she was allowed to write a dissertation (thèse de 3e cycle) on the Pulayas of Kerala. After consulting archival material in the India office library and the British Museum, London, archives in Delhi and conducting fieldwork in Kerala, she completed her PhD in 1971: Histoire économique et sociale du Kérala depuis 1800. Étude des Pulayas. Back in India, she rewrote the work in English and published it as: Emergence of a Slave Caste: Pulayas of Kerala, New Delhi People’s Publishing House, 1980 (new ed, 2021). This was one of the first studies on caste slavery that latter on gained a new interest with the opening-up of Dalit studies. A new edition of this book with a new foreword is coming out soon.
This study was followed by a series of books, many dealing with Dalits and Women, in which K. Saradamoni always scrutinized the cumulative effect of being a woman, a Dalit, and a worker engaged in low paid activities in the rural economy: Divided Poor: Study of a Kerala Village (1981) and Filling the Rice Bowl: Women in Paddy Cultivation (1991). In Finding the Household: Conceptual and Methodological Issues. Women & the Household in Asia (1992), she explored the position of women and gender relations within the household, with field studies from Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, and other countries. The matriliny system of the Nayar society was another field of enquiry. In Matriliny Transformed: Family, Law and Ideology in Twentieth Century Travancore (1999), she examined how matriliny offered identity and security to women and how the system changed in Travancore.
K. Saradamoni also published three books in Malayalam after moving to Kerala. Stree, Stree Vaadam, Stree Vimochanam (1999) is a collection of her articles on women and feminism from 1951, Iver Vazhikaatikal (2010) is a collection of stories about 12 inspiring women for young adults, and Marunna Lokam, Mattuna Aara, is a collection of articles from the US progressist economic magazine, Dollars and Sense, which she translated into Malayalam.
Finally, K. Saradamoni had written two more personal books. The Scribe Remembered. N. Gopinathan Nair. His Life and Times (2012), is a personal account on her late husband2, journalist, founder-editor in 1949 of Janayugom, the newspaper of the undivided Communist Party of India, while more recently, she completed her autobiography that should be published soon3.
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Notes
1 See Suman Sarkar and Jean Drèze, “Ashok Rudra,” in Kaushik Basu (ed.), the New Oxford Companion to the Economics in India, New Delhi, Oxford University Press, vol. II, 2012, pp. 601-604.
2 For more details see here, (consulted 15th June 2021) .
3 I am grateful to Asha G. and Arunima G. who kindly provided me with the relevant information regarding the family background of K. Saradamoni, and I thank Silvia d’Intino for supplying me with the photo of Madeleine Biardeau and K. Saradamoni; see also the obituaries published in The Hindu : thehindu.com. ece (access 13th June 2021).
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François Gros
(1933-2021)
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By Claudine Le Blanc (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle)
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François Gros passed away on April 24, 2021, at the age of 87. His mind was still sharp despite his poor health, and his exceptional personality, subtly erudite, complex and secretive, has left its mark on Tamil studies, of which he was a recognized specialist, and more generally on French Indianism and research in Asia.
Classically trained—agrégé in grammar in 1957, certified in Indian Studies—he was also interested in ethnology and prehistory, and when he was recruited in 1963 by Jean Filliozat at the French Institute of Pondicherry, he began studying classical Tamil, which led in 1968 to a remarkable translation of the Paripāṭal (Saintour Prize 1969) and in 1992 to the translation of the Tirukkuṟaḷ “Book of Love,” in the “Connaissance de l'Orient” series (Gallimard/UNESCO). Then, from the end of the 1990s, in an unusual shift among classical Tamil scholars, he turned to contemporary literature in all its facets (including the burgeoning Tamil Dalit literature) and, with M. Kannan of the IFP, he published L’Arbre Nâgalinga in 2002, an anthology that introduced French readers to the richness of Tamil short stories. This was followed by three other collections of short stories (Le Sage se rend au zoo; Les 21 Chevreaux d’Iralappa Câmi, also translated with M. Kannan; Le Vagabond et son ombre by G. Nagarajan, translated with Élisabeth Séthupathy), and a seminal novel of modern fiction, Vâdivâçal by C.S. Chellappa (2014), which evokes the ancient bullfighting art of jallikaṭṭu.
Very concerned about the institutional framework of French studies on Asia, he became head of the École française d’Extrême-Orient in 1977 for twelve years and contributed to its redeployment in South-East Asia (return to Vietnam in 1983; opening of the ÉFEO center in Malaysia at the end of 1987; foundation of the Fonds d’édition des manuscrits du Cambodge in 1988). At the same time, he developed the Paris headquarters and its library and reorganized the publishing activities in Pondicherry where, bringing together the skills of the French Institute and the ÉFEO, he multiplied diversified programs for the study of the literature and culture of Tamil Nadu: poetry and iconography of Tamil Shiva devotion; a multidisciplinary study of a site, Tiruvannamalai, along the model of that published in 1970 with R. Nagaswamy in a true manifesto for multidisciplinarity (Uttaramērūr: Legends, History, Monuments. With the Pañcavaradakṣetramāhātmya edited by K. Srinivasacharya); urban forms of the temple city in the Kaveri Valley (Jacques Gaucher); launch with Prof. Y. Subbarayalu (Thanjavur Univ.) of a pioneering digital Historical Atlas of South Asia.
In the same year in which he succeeded Jean Filliozat as director of the École française d’Extrême-Orient, he took over his chair at the École pratique des hautes études (renamed “History and Philology of South India”) reorienting it and running a seminar unique in France on ancient Tamil literature, while directing theses on the various literatures of southern India (Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada)—either classical, modern or oral. He also co-directed, with Françoise Mallison, and until his retirement in 2002, the research team “Medieval and Modern India. Texts and contexts,” which brought together French and foreign specialists in the textual traditions of North and South India.
A stylist inclined to Atticism despite his legendary copia in conversation, suspicious of the “publish or perish” imperative despite his keen bibliophilia—his vast private library is now preserved at the University of Toronto—François Gros has written relatively little, but the volume published in 2009 in English Deep Rivers: Selected Writings on Tamil Literature gives an idea of the richness of his interests and testifies to the international recognition he has found among his peers, in India in particular, where he was honored in 2012 with the prestigious Kural Peedam Award.
A translator as much as a scholar, François Gros, who quoted Yves Bonnefoy and Propertius as willingly as Tiruvalluvar, has also remarkably illustrated the French language. But his legacy will mostly remain his showcasing, for almost sixty years, South India’s long-standing creativity.
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