Dr. Virinder Kalra Monday, April 27 at 4:00 PM Humanities 1, Room 520
 Performing Punjabi Spiritual Practices at the boundaries of Religious Traditions
This presentation will provide an ethnographic context to certain spiritual practices in Punjab and the manner in which they function. Two areas in particular will be focused upon. First, how cultural rituals and events performed largely by women are either conveniently overlooked or seen as contentious by more rigid perspectives on religious belonging. Secondly, participation and worship at spiritual sites draws our attention to the continuum of practices that run between life-course rituals and acts of spiritual embodiment and worship, making it difficult to maintain such rigid distinctions between cultural and religious practice. These practices can also highlight the tenuousness of the boundaries so often drawn to distinguish large religious categories such as Sikh, Muslim, Christian and Hindu Thus, spiritual popular practices offer a lens through which we can better understand the social context within which religious categories operate, an approach which does not rest upon apriori fixed notions of religious belonging. By focusing upon examples in Punjab across India and Pakistan the aim is to demonstrate an underlying vernacular spiritual culture in Punjab within which a cosmology of spiritual acts of belief occupy a central space.
Dr. Kalra teaches in the Department of Sociology at the University of Manchester and is currently engaged in field research in India and Pakistan. His research interests are on the South Asian diaspora and popular cultural practices.
Dr. Farina Mir Monday, May 4 at 4:00 PM Humanities 1, Room 520
 The Punjabi Literary Formation: Language and Affect in a Vernacular Culture
This talk explores the contours of a colonial-era "Punjabi literary formation" in India, by which I mean those individuals who shared in the practices of producing, circulating, performing, and consuming Punjabi literary texts. I argue that the Punjabi literary formation's pragmatic engagements with colonial institutions were far less important than the affective attachments its adherents established with a place, with an old but dynamic corpus of stories, and with the moral sensibility that suffused those stories. The talk will first address the peculiar relationship forged between the colonial state and Punjabi language and literature. On the one hand, the state recognized Punjabi as the sacred language of the Sikhs, while on the other hand it actively worked to replace Punjabi with Urdu as the Punjab's vernacular language. I will conclude with a consideration of how the Punjabi literary formation established affective ties with a spatial milieu
whose imaginative co-ordinates differed from those addressed by nationalist activists at the time.
Dr. Farina Mir holds degrees in English and Asian & Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures from Barnard College (B.A., 1993) and in history from Columbia University (Ph.D., 2002). Trained as a historian of colonial and postcolonial South Asia, her work focuses on the history of the Punjab. Her book, The Social Space of Language: Vernacular Culture in British Colonial Punjab (forthcoming from the University of California Press) is a study of the Punjabi literary tradition during the colonial period (from 1849–1947), with a particular focus on qisse, or epic stories/romances. Mir has published in Comparative Studies in Society and History and the Indian Economic and Social History Review, and has been the recipient of Fulbright, SSRC, and Whiting fellowships, and a Mellon Postdoctoral fellowship. She is currently an Assistant Professor of history at the University of Michigan, where she teaches courses on early modern and modern South Asia.
Dr. Guriqbal Sahota Monday, May 11 at 4:00 PM Humanities 1, Room 520
 Guru Nanak and Rational Civil Theology
By the early sixteenth century, the conditions for a radical
reconstitution of Indic and Islamic religiosity and sociality had begun
to crystallize with the resurgence of antinomian rationalism and the
expansion of mercantile capitalism across northern India. Combining
insights about these dual processes, Guru Nanak formulated discursive
and practical strategies for overcoming the social illusion of egoistic
selfhood determined by the rise of commodity exchange, on the one hand,
and the individualistic soteriological practices of existing faiths, on
the other. Overcoming both required translating traditional religious
concepts and categories into a framework of everyday collective life.
The rational civil theology concertedly formulated in early Sikh
scripture presents challenges for writing a contemporary universal
history of Reason. The presentation concludes with an exploration of the
incomplete sublimation of neo-Kantian notions of Reason in the work of
Georg Lukács by examining a point at which his writings intersect with
early Sikh scripture - and what the completion of such a dialectic may
mean for a postcolonial history of Reason. Dr. G.S. Sahota (BA, UCSC; MA, PhD, University of Chicago) is Assistant
Professor of Indian Literary and Intellectual History and director of
the Dialectics and Society Collective at the University of Minnesota
(Twin Cities). He is currently completing his manuscript on "The Late
Colonial Sublime: Neo-Epics in Indian Romanticism." Publishing widely in
intellectual history and Critical Theory, he also regularly translates
literary works from the Urdu. |
