Research Fellowships for Senior Humanists to Work in India

FAIN: RA-50039-06

American Institute of Indian Studies (Chicago, IL 60637-1539)
Ralph W. Nicholas (Project Director: September 2005 to July 2010)
Philip Lutgendorf (Project Director: July 2010 to July 2013)

Funding details:
Original grant (2006) $228,000.00
Supplement (2008) $106,800.00

Three or four fellowships per year.

This proposal seeks support for the award of fellowships to post-doctoral scholars in all fields of the Humanities to enable them to undertake their research projects in India.

Associated Products

The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern Science (Book)
Title: The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern Science
Author: Anupama Rao
Abstract: Focusing on western India in the colonial and postcolonial periods, this work shines a light on South Asian historiography and on caste discrimination, to show how persons without rights came to possess them and how Dalit struggles led to the transformation of such terms of colonial liberalism as rights, equality, and personhood.
Year: 2009
Primary URL: http://www.worldcat.org/title/caste-question-dalits-and-the-politics-of-modern-india/oclc/262428411&referer=brief_results
Publisher: University of California
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780520255593
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

Small Town Capitalism in Western India: Artisans, Merchants and the Making of the Informal Economy, 1870-1960 (Book)
Title: Small Town Capitalism in Western India: Artisans, Merchants and the Making of the Informal Economy, 1870-1960
Author: Douglas E. Haynes
Abstract: This book charts the history of artisan production and marketing in the Bombay Presidency from 1870 to 1960. While the textile mills of western India's biggest cities have been the subject of many rich studies, the role of artisan producers located in the region's small towns have been virtually ignored. Based upon extensive archival research as well as numerous interviews with participants in the handloom and powerloom industries, this book explores the role of weavers, merchants, consumers, and laborers in the making of what the author calls "small-town capitalism." By focusing on the politics of negotiation and resistance in local workshops, the book challenges conventional narratives of industrial change. The book provides the first in-depth work on the origins of powerloom manufacture in South Asia. It affords unique insights into the social and economic experience of small-town artisans as well as the informal economy of late colonial and early post-independence India.
Year: 2012
Primary URL: http://www.cambridge.org/aus/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521193337&ss=cop
Access Model: this book can be purchased
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780521193337
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

Prizes

John F. Richards Prize in South Asian History
Date: 1/4/2013
Organization: American Historical Association
Abstract: Professor Haynes book is a “magisterial account of the process Douglas Haynes calls ‘weaver and small-scale capitalism.’ Based on an exhaustive investigation he makes even the technical aspects of the weaver economy lucid to the non-specialist reader. He cogently and powerfully situates his work in the larger fields of social, economic and political history. The work marshals an impressive amount of evidence, including an innovative use of oral history sources, to complicate standard South Asian models of political economy.”

Neoliberal Logics of Voice: Playback Singing and Public Femaleness in South India (Article)
Title: Neoliberal Logics of Voice: Playback Singing and Public Femaleness in South India
Author: Amanda Weidman
Abstract: This article explores the impact of neoliberal logics of voice on the music - making and performance practices of female playback singers in the South Indian Tamil film industry. As singers whose voices are first recorded in the studio and then “played back” on the set to be lip-synched by actors, playback singers have been professional musicians and public celebrities since the 1950s. Their careers are governed by practices of voice cultivation and by modes of performance and public self-presentation, in the studio, on stage, and increasingly in mediatized contexts. Since the 1990s, neoliberal logics of flexibility, entrepreneurship and self-marketing have redefined the role of the playback singer and the way singers conceive of their work in both social and aesthetic terms. These changes have occurred within a broader context in which anxieties about globalization and expanding commodity culture are reflected in debates about the place of women in public.
Year: 2014
Primary URL: http://repository.brynmawr.edu/anth_pubs/8/
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Culture, Theory and Critique

Oratory, Rhetoric, Politics (Book Section)
Title: Oratory, Rhetoric, Politics
Author: Bernard Bate
Editor: Jack Sidnell
Editor: N.J. Enfield
Editor: Paul Kockelman
Abstract: abstract not available
Year: 2014
Primary URL: http://www.worldcat.org/title/cambridge-handbook-of-linguistic-anthropology/oclc/866563672&referer=brief_results
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Book Title: Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Anthropology
ISBN: 9781107030077

A Muslim Conspiracy in British India: Politics and Paranoia in the Early Nineteenth-Century Deccan (Book)
Title: A Muslim Conspiracy in British India: Politics and Paranoia in the Early Nineteenth-Century Deccan
Author: Chandra Mallampalli
Abstract: As the British prepared for war in Afghanistan in 1839, rumours spread of a Muslim conspiracy based in India's Deccan region. Colonial officials were convinced that itinerant preachers of jihad - whom they labelled 'Wahhabis' - were collaborating with Russian and Persian armies and inspiring Muslim princes to revolt. Officials detained and interrogated Muslim travellers, conducted weapons inspections at princely forts, surveyed mosques, and ultimately annexed territories of the accused. Using untapped archival materials, Chandra Mallampalli describes how local intrigues, often having little to do with 'religion', manufactured belief in a global conspiracy against British rule. By skilfully narrating stories of the alleged conspirators, he shows how fears of the dreaded 'Wahhabi' sometimes prompted colonial authorities to act upon thin evidence, while also inspiring Muslim plots against princes not of their liking. At stake were not only questions about Muslim loyalty, but also the very ideals of a liberal empire.
Year: 2017
Primary URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/muslim-conspiracy-in-british-india/60A9214E8905C2D8E923625196A308BC
Primary URL Description: Cambridge University Press web site
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781108164634
Copy sent to NEH?: No

Slaying Men with Faces of Women: Liberalism and patronage in the trial of a South Indian maulvi, 1839-40 (Article)
Title: Slaying Men with Faces of Women: Liberalism and patronage in the trial of a South Indian maulvi, 1839-40
Author: Chandra Mallampalli
Abstract: not available
Year: 2017
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Modern Asian Studies 51,3

Being “Wahhabi” in South India, 1839-42: Defying the Colonial Patronage Order (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Being “Wahhabi” in South India, 1839-42: Defying the Colonial Patronage Order
Author: Chandra Mallampalli
Abstract: paper presented in the panel In panel: Politics and Paranoia: Portraying Muslims and Islam in India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka
Date: 10/12/2018
Primary URL: https://confsouthasia.wiscweb.wisc.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/48/2018/10/2018-Annual-Conference-on-South-Asia-Program-Book-FINAL.pdf
Primary URL Description: conference program
Conference Name: Madison South Asia Conference

Bhakti and Power: Debating India's Religion of the Heart (Book)
Title: Bhakti and Power: Debating India's Religion of the Heart
Editor: Christian Novetzke (with John Stratton Hawley)
Abstract: Bhakti, a term ubiquitous in the religious life of South Asia, has meanings that shift dramatically according to context and sentiment. Sometimes translated as "personal devotion," bhakti nonetheless implies and fosters public interaction. It is often associated with the marginalized voices of women and lower castes, yet it has also played a role in perpetuating injustice. Barriers have been torn down in the name of bhakti, while others have been built simultaneously. Bhakti and Power provides an accessible entry into key debates around issues such as these, presenting voices and vignettes from the sixth century to the present and from many parts of India's cultural landscape. Written by a wide range of engaged scholars, this volume showcases one of the most influential concepts in Indian history?still a major force in the present day.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/documents/1833/Washington-low-res-S19.pdf
Primary URL Description: publishers catalogue
Access Model: book
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Type: Edited Volume
ISBN: 0295745509
Copy sent to NEH?: No

Mah Laqa Bai: Remains of a Courtesan’s Dance (Book Section)
Title: Mah Laqa Bai: Remains of a Courtesan’s Dance
Author: Scott Kugle
Editor: Nilanajana Gupta
Editor: Pallabi Chakravorty
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2018
Publisher: Routledge
Book Title: Dance Matters Too: Memories, Markets, Identities

The Poetics of History in Padmakar’s Himmatbahadurvirudavali (Book Section)
Title: The Poetics of History in Padmakar’s Himmatbahadurvirudavali
Author: Allison Busch
Editor: Tyler Williams, Anshu Malhotra, and John Stratton Hawley
Abstract: Allison Busch places Padmakar Bhatt and his Himmatbahadurvirudavali in the context of the literary and political imaginary of the eighteenth century. She shows how Padmakar inherits the genre of the virudavali (itself a multi-faceted tradition) from Sanskrit, but also a rich lexicon from the vernacular, Arabic, and Persian. The form and language of his work thus reflect the changed political and cultural realities of his time. The seamless movement between modes of versified poetic description in the Himmatbahadurvirudavali reflects Padmakar’s simultaneous function as both historian and poet.
Year: 2018
Primary URL: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/text-and-tradition-in-early-modern-north-india-9780199478866?lang=en&cc=gb
Primary URL Description: Oxford University Press web site
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Book Title: Text and Tradition in Early Modern North India
ISBN: 9780199478866

Stigmas of the Reality Stage (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Stigmas of the Reality Stage
Author: Amanda Weidman
Abstract: Contest-based music and dance reality shows, as well as shows that partake of the reality TV aesthetic in different ways, have become a major component of television programming in South Asia since the mid-2000s. This panel will address the forms of value and legitimation, as well as of exposure and publicity, that are sought and generated through the affordances of the “reality” format and the small screen more generally. We address three sets of questions. First, reality shows are a complex combination of elaborate staging and the claim to present “reality.” What new forms of performance and new values are generated in these shows, with their emphasis on visibility and liveness? How do the conventions of reality TV coincide with or contradict other modes and sites of performance? Second, what kinds of subjects (citizens, performers, contestants, judges, “experts,” fans, audiences, etc.) are produced on and through these shows? How are social and political identities (e.g. caste, class, gender, religious community, nation) produced or elided? What forms of celebrity are emergent from these shows? Third, what regimes of vision and viewing are at work in these shows?
Date: 10/18/2019
Primary URL: https://register.southasiaconference.wisc.edu/schedule
Primary URL Description: conference program
Conference Name: Madison South Asia Conference 2019

Caps, Heads and Hearts (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Caps, Heads and Hearts
Author: Scott Kugle
Abstract: The matter of this essay is a hat. Wearing a cap is so ubiquitous for Muslim males that i tpasses unnoticed, while veils on Muslim women attract inordinate attention. In recent scholarship by Emma Tarlo and Annelies Moorson Islamic dress,“fashion” speaks exclusively of women’s clothing. They emphasize the connection between aesthetics and ethics, a useful theoretical reminder for this essay about men’s caps. It discusses caps in general, and in specific will trace a single distinctive cap—the one that I wear as a legacy from my Sufi teacher in India, a cap of simple design but complex symbolism. A Sufi cap does not merely display its wearer’s allegiance to others. It also reminds its wearer—by the very pressure of its matter against his forehead—of the ideals of the Order to which he took vows. These ideals are easily neglected because they urge one to forget oneself: the process of being reminded, whether by one’s clothing or other skillful means, is the essence of dhikr, remembering God and thus being reminded of the nothingness of one’s own mind. Purifying one’s heart of the pollution of egoistic mind is grueling and difficult, and progress along its path is marked by backsliding as much as progress. Without love, there is little hope for success,for only passionately love can push us toward effacement. For this reason, the Chishti Sufis celebrate the cap that is awry, raised like a dome, peaked like a goal, cornered like a system, but tilted to show deference to beauty and love within the material constraints of this embodied world.
Date: 12/06/2019
Primary URL: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1D_RNLxTXmo37vQIckpBhV46-s_QO_tW-OhwlR5hRATM/edit
Primary URL Description: conference web site
Secondary URL: https://islamicstudies.stanford.edu/conferences/islam-objects-and-everyday-life
Secondary URL Description: conference web site
Conference Name: Islam, Objects & Everyday Life

Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India (Book)
Title: Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India
Author: Mytheli Sreenivas
Abstract: not available
Year: 2021
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Type: Single author monograph
Copy sent to NEH?: No

Brought to Life by the Voice: Playback Singing and Cultural Politics in South India (Book)
Title: Brought to Life by the Voice: Playback Singing and Cultural Politics in South India
Author: Amanda Weidman
Abstract: To produce the song sequences that are central to Indian popular cinema, singers' voices are first recorded in the studio and then played back on the set to be lip-synced and danced to by actors and actresses as the visuals are filmed. Since the 1950s, playback singers have become revered celebrities in their own right. Brought to Life by the Voice explores the distinctive aesthetics and affective power generated by this division of labor between onscreen body and offscreen voice in South Indian Tamil cinema. In Amanda Weidman's historical and ethnographic account, playback is not just a cinematic technique, but a powerful and ubiquitous element of aural public culture that has shaped the complex dynamics of postcolonial gendered subjectivity, politicized ethnolinguistic identity, and neoliberal transformation in South India.
Year: 2021
Primary URL: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520377066/brought-to-life-by-the-voice
Primary URL Description: University of California Press web site
Access Model: open access
Publisher: University of California Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780520377066
Copy sent to NEH?: No

“British Missions and Indian Nationalism, 1880–1908: Imitation and Autonomy in Calcutta and Madras,” (Book Section)
Title: “British Missions and Indian Nationalism, 1880–1908: Imitation and Autonomy in Calcutta and Madras,”
Author: Chandra Mallampalli
Editor: Martha Frederiks and Dorottya Nagy
Abstract: The central aim in this essay is to show that by the end of the nineteenth century, missionaries and Indian nationalists were engaged in a contest not so much over conversion, but over the cultural personality or imagining of the Indian nation. Rather than competing for the “souls of Indians,” they competed for the “soul of India.” Missionaries supported Indian nationalism when, even in its most Hindu colors, it manifested signs of “the Christian impact” on India. Conversely, Indian nationalism achieved its greatest autonomy from missionary influence when it ceased to allow Christian religious or societal norms to measure its own legitimacy. This dialectical quest for agency and autonomy within nationalist consciousness can be viewed with greater clarity by applying theoretical tools found in some of the more recent studies on nationalism to the specific urban contexts of Calcutta and Madras from 1880 to 1908.
Year: 2021
Primary URL: https://brill.com/view/book/edcoll/9789004399600/BP000011.xml
Primary URL Description: publisher site
Publisher: EJ Brill
Book Title: Critical Readings in the History of Christian Mission, Volume 3
ISBN: 9004395458

Public Impersonators: Gender, Caste, and Social Ontology in the Marathi Vernacular Moment (Book Section)
Title: Public Impersonators: Gender, Caste, and Social Ontology in the Marathi Vernacular Moment
Author: Christian Novetzke
Editor: Pamela Lothspeich
Editor: Harshita Mruthinti Kamath
Abstract: This is an essay about God who pretends to be a man who pretends to be other kinds of men. Impersonation involves a dialectic of power that both plays on binaries and often opposes them as well. This dialectic is often formed as a juxtaposition of the normative—the personation—and the nonnormative—the impersonation. Like all dialectics, impersonation registers friction and power differentials. Here public impersonation is taken to be premised on a differential of social power and simultaneously a demonstration of that differential. This performance of impersonation can have many impulses: the reassertion of dominance perhaps, but also an expression of protest or cultural critique. Impersonation can find motivation in anxieties about social mobility, but it can also convey empathy and confessions of social inequality. For these reasons, this paper will view public impersonation as a social didactic and public practice that often exposes the nature of social inequality, even if unintentionally. The focus here will be on practices that would be positioned within the “social liberal” context of demonstrating social inequality around caste as a means of critiquing that inequality rather than reinforcing it.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/mimetic-desires-impersonation-and-guising-across-south-asia/
Primary URL Description: U Hawaii Press site
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Book Title: Mimetic Desires: Impersonation and Guising Across South Asia,
ISBN: 9780824892777

South Asia’s Christians: Between Hindu and Muslim (Book)
Title: South Asia’s Christians: Between Hindu and Muslim
Author: Chandra Mallampalli
Abstract: South Asia is home to more than a billion Hindus and half a billion Muslims. But the region is also home to substantial Christian communities, some dating almost to the earliest days of the faith. The stories of South Asia's Christians are vital for understanding the shifting contours of World Christianity, precisely because of their history of interaction with members of these other religious traditions. In this broad, accessible overview of South Asian Christianity, Chandra Mallampalli shows how the faith has been shaped by Christians' location between Hindus and Muslims. Mallampalli begins with a discussion of South India's ancient Thomas Christian tradition, which interacted with West Asia's Persian Christians and thrived for centuries alongside their Hindu and Muslim neighbors. He then underscores efforts of Roman Catholic and Protestant missionaries to understand South Asian societies for purposes of conversion. The publication of books and tracts about other religions, interreligious debates, and aggressive preaching were central to these endeavors, but rarely succeeded at yielding converts. Instead, they played an important role in producing a climate of religious competition, which ultimately marginalized Christians in Hindu-, Muslim-, and Buddhist-majority countries of post-colonial South Asia. Ironically, the greatest response to Christianity came from poor and oppressed Dalit (formerly "untouchable") and tribal communities who were largely indifferent to missionary rhetoric. Their mass conversions, poetry, theology, and embrace of Pentecostalism are essential for understanding South Asian Christianity and its place within World Christianity today.
Year: 2023
Primary URL: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/south-asias-christians-9780190608903?q=Mallampalli&lang=en&cc=us#
Primary URL Description: publisher web site
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780190608903
Copy sent to NEH?: No

Indian Pentecostals and Dalit Christians: De-centering the Ideal Citizen Subject (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: Indian Pentecostals and Dalit Christians: De-centering the Ideal Citizen Subject
Abstract: This talk presents the experiences of India’s Dalit Christians (formerly called “untouchables”) as a valuable window for examining larger patterns of Global Christianities. As products of mass conversion movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Dalit Christians lived at the margins of Hindu village life and established Christian traditions, and their theologies critiqued caste oppression within both Hindu and Christian contexts. More recently, Dalits have found in Pentecostalism an alternative source of identity and belonging built around ecstatic worship, relaxed caste barriers, belief in supernatural healing and prophecy, and pastoral services that address the needs of mobile, poor, sick, and marginal peoples. I argue that Pentecostalism, like Dalit theology, de-centers India’s “ideal citizen subject” - the upper caste, educated Hindu whose claim to cultural hegemony is grounded in a pure, classical heritage. It does so by presenting an alternative “affective citizenship” that nurtures a sense of belonging through democratic practices and tangible experiences of community and spirituality. The recent surge in Hindu nationalist violence against Pentecostals reacts to this de-centering work and the appeal of Pentecostalism among the marginal.
Author: Chandra Mallampalli
Date: 02/01/2023
Location: University of Chicago Divinity School
Primary URL: https://events.uchicago.edu/event/198081-public-lecture-by-chandra-mallampall?utm_source=CISSR+at+University+of+Chicago&utm_campaign=60144f8f90-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2022_09_26_06_35_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_309ff26828-60144f8f90-577928257
Primary URL Description: University of Chicago site

Following Women’s Money: Population, Development, and Indo-American Birth Control Politics in the Mid-Twentieth Century (Article)
Title: Following Women’s Money: Population, Development, and Indo-American Birth Control Politics in the Mid-Twentieth Century
Author: Mytheli Sreenivas
Author: Mytheli Sreenivas
Abstract: This article traces the history of a transnational birth control movement centered on India and the United States during the 1950s, a transitional decade that followed Indian independence from the British Empire and that witnessed growing US hegemony in a cold war world. I focus on one key philanthropic organization, the Watumull Foundation, and the activities of its leader, Ellen Jensen Watumull. The Watumull Foundation funded birth control activists in India and the United States, including Dhanvanthi Rama Rau and Margaret Sanger, and supported a growing turn toward population control as a chief purpose of the transnational birth control movement. The result was an Indo-American birth control politics in the 1950s that drew upon racialized networks of kinship, marriage, and friendship; was controlled largely by women; and mobilized small donors to bring American philanthropy into Indian development planning.
Year: 2024
Primary URL: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/920127
Primary URL Description: publisher web site
Access Model: open access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Journal of Women's History
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press

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