Long-Term Research Fellowships in India sponsored by the American Institute of Indian Studies

FAIN: RA-235170-16

American Institute of Indian Studies (Chicago, IL 60637-1539)
Philip Lutgendorf (Project Director: August 2015 to October 2022)

18 months of stipend support (2-4 fellowships) per year for three years and a contribution to defray costs associated with the selection of fellows.

This proposal seeks support for the award of annual fellowships to post-doctoral scholars in all fields of the humanities to enable them to undertake their research projects in India for up to nine months. (edited by NEH staff)

Media Coverage

Berkeley News (Media Coverage)
Date: 9/6/2017
Abstract: former AIIS/NEH fellow Robert Goldman, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley was awarded the 2017 World Sanskrit Award by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations for completing the massive Ramayana translation project with Princeton University Press
URL: http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/09/06/robert-goldman-wins-world-sanskrit-award-for-2017/

Associated Products

Embodied Divinities and Professional Dancers on the Ramlila Stage (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Embodied Divinities and Professional Dancers on the Ramlila Stage
Author: Pamela Lothspeich
Abstract: Ramlila is an annual performance tradition in India that tells the story of the Hindu god Ram, typically over 10-15 days but sometimes up to a month. It has evolved from a recitative-pantomime style of ritualized performance on unbounded field(s) to a culturally hybrid form of mimetic theatre on an open-air proscenium stage. Drawing on extensive research at over twenty Ramlilas in the state of Uttar Pradesh, this paper considers the distinctive role of the svarups or those who play the parts of the divine leads. Beginning with the celebrated Ramlila at Ramnagar, this paper argues that conventions at this ‘preservationist’ Ramlila work to performatively replicate existing social and gender hierarchies and normativities in Indian society, ones rooted in the nineteenth century when it was founded. Moving to ‘ordinary’ neighborhood Ramlilas, it further suggests that although such productions are often more progressive in their casting, many of the actors who step onto the Ramlila stage are compelled to simultaneously enact a number of social embodiments, and this is especially true of the men who play the parts of svarups and female characters, and also the professional dancers who are sometimes brought in to entertain and occasionally, signal moral depravity. In sum, this paper shows that those who do the affective work of performing divinity and gender in Ramlila must conform to certain social expectations around class, caste, gender, and even skin tone.
Date: 03/23/2018
Primary URL: https://www.eventscribe.com/2018/AAS/biography.asp?h=Participants
Primary URL Description: web site for the Association for Asian Studies annual conference
Conference Name: Association for Asian Studies annual conference

Lovely Fairies and Crafty Ghosts in Indian Tales (Book Section)
Title: Lovely Fairies and Crafty Ghosts in Indian Tales
Author: Pamela Lothspeich
Editor: Andrew Teverson
Abstract: not available
Year: 2019
Publisher: Routledge
Book Title: The Fairy Tale World

Impersonation in South Asia (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Impersonation in South Asia
Author: Pamela Lothspeich
Abstract: This symposium brought together seventeen scholars from a variety of ranks, disciplines and countries doing groundbreaking work on the subject of impersonation/guising/embodiment in modern and early modern South Asia. The expected outcome of the symposium is an edited volume on Impersonation in South Asia, which will be the first scholarly source to examine impersonation both in contemporary performative and quotidian contexts across South Asia. We understand impersonation as the temporary assumption of an identity or guise of a group that is not one’s own in social and aesthetic performative contexts, including the same as expressed in literature. Pamela Lothspeich organized the symposium and delivered a paper, "The Affective Work of Performing Divinity in the Theatre of Ramlila."
Date: 10/11/2018
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

Paper Lives: Mobility, Citizenship and Belonging after Partition (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: Paper Lives: Mobility, Citizenship and Belonging after Partition
Abstract: implications of the passport for citizenship in the modern states of India and Pakistan after Partition.
Author: Haimanti Roy
Date: 11/14/2019
Location: Nehru Memorial Museum and Library
Primary URL: http://nehrumemorial.nic.in/en/events/icalrepeat.detail/2019/11/14/955/-/paper-lives-mobility-citizenship-and-belonging-after-partition.html
Primary URL Description: Nehru Memorial Museum web site
Secondary URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl3_496qBO4
Secondary URL Description: Youtube--complete lecture

Ras and Affect in Ramlila (and the Radheshyam Ramayana) (Article)
Title: Ras and Affect in Ramlila (and the Radheshyam Ramayana)
Author: Pamela Lothspeich
Abstract: This article gives insight into why verses from the "Radheshyam Ramayan," an early-twentieth century epic poem in Hindi–Urdu by Pandit Radheshyam Kathavachak, have been so widely adapted in India's theatre of Ramlila. Through a close reading of Kathavachak's chapter/scene "Dhanuṣ-yajña" (The Bow Ritual), and its staging at one amateur Ramlila in the author's hometown of Bareilly, this article argues that the text's bold, charming dialogues are very much suited to the themes and dramatic styling of Ramlila. Kathavachak's vigorous battles of wits between rivals are used to great effect not only in actual battle scenes, but also in rousing scenes like "The Bow Ritual" where Lakshman engages in fierce repartee with Parashuram after Ram's breaking of the bow. This article also brings together contemporary understandings of the critical terms ras (also spelled "rasa") and affect to help explicate this style of theatre
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/719419
Primary URL Description: web site of the journal
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Asian Theatre Journal 36,1

One flower from each garden: contradiction and collaboration in the canon of Mughal painters (Book Section)
Title: One flower from each garden: contradiction and collaboration in the canon of Mughal painters
Author: Yael Rice
Editor: Larry Silver and Kevin Terraciano
Abstract: unavailable
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://shop.getty.edu/products/canons-and-values-ancient-to-modern-978-1606065976
Primary URL Description: publisher web site
Publisher: Getty Research Institute
Book Title: Canons and Values: Ancient to Modern

Moonlight Empire: Lunar Imagery in Mughal India (Book Section)
Title: Moonlight Empire: Lunar Imagery in Mughal India
Author: Yael Rice
Editor: Christiane J. Gruber
Abstract: not available
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://www.academia.edu/38511403/Moonlight_Empire_Lunar_Imagery_in_Mughal_India
Primary URL Description: academia.edu site
Publisher: Agha Khan Museum
Book Title: The Moon: A Voyage Through Time

Disgust and Untouchability: Towards an Affective Theory of Caste (Article)
Title: Disgust and Untouchability: Towards an Affective Theory of Caste
Author: Joel Lee
Abstract: The caste order – like all social hierarchies – structures emotions in particular ways, and in turn depends on emotions, thus structured, for its reproduction over time. In North Indian vernaculars, to ask who feels ghṛṇā (disgust) towards whom is often to trace the boundaries of the touchable body politic. Ghṛṇā karnā – doing disgust – describes a set of practices often identical to those known in a political register as ‘practices of untouchability.’ Thus, ve ham se ghṛṇā karte hain (‘they are disgusted by us,’ or, better, ‘they practice disgust on us’) is among the more common ways that Dalits describe their treatment at the hands of privileged castes. This article tracks usages of ghṛṇā in two vernacular North Indian sources from the early twentieth century in order to throw critical light on the inculcation of disgust as advantaged and disadvantaged caste observers have described it. In Hindi tracts composed by members of the Hindu reformist organization the Arya Samaj, ghṛṇā appears as an impediment to the majoritarian project of Hindu encompassment of its erstwhile ‘untouchable’ other; Arya Samajist polemicists seek to expose Hindu disgust towards Dalits and to redirect it towards new targets. In oral traditions that circulated among Dalit castes engaged in sanitation labour in the late colonial period, parables of encounter between ‘touchable’ and ‘untouchable’ give utterance to a critique of ghṛṇā as antithetical to moral action and as opposed to life. Grounded in historical and ethnographic evidence, the article develops preliminary ideas towards an affective theory of caste and untouchability.
Year: 2021
Primary URL: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19472498.2021.1878784
Primary URL Description: Taylor & Francis web site
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: South Asian History and Culture 12, 2
Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Deceptive Majority: Dalits, Hinduism and Underground Religion (Book)
Title: Deceptive Majority: Dalits, Hinduism and Underground Religion
Author: Joel Lee
Abstract: The idea that India is a Hindu majority nation rests on the assumption that the vast swath of its population stigmatized as 'untouchable' is, and always has been, in some meaningful sense, Hindu. But is that how such communities understood themselves in the past, or how they understand themselves now? When and under what conditions did this assumption take shape, and what truths does it conceal? In this book, Joel Lee challenges presuppositions at the foundation of the study of caste and religion in South Asia. Drawing on detailed archival and ethnographic research, Lee tracks the career of a Dalit religion and the effort by twentieth-century nationalists to encompass it within a newly imagined Hindu body politic. A chronicle of religious life in north India and an examination of the ethics and semiotics of secrecy, Deceptive Majority throws light on the manoeuvres by which majoritarian projects are both advanced and undermined.
Year: 2021
Primary URL: http://services.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/anthropology/social-and-cultural-anthropology/deceptive-majority-dalits-hinduism-and-underground-religion?format=PB
Primary URL Description: Cambridge University Press web site
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781108826662
Copy sent to NEH?: No

Draupadī, Yājñasenī, Pāñcālī, Kṛṣṇ ā: Representations of an Epic Heroine in Three Novels (Book Section)
Title: Draupadī, Yājñasenī, Pāñcālī, Kṛṣṇ ā: Representations of an Epic Heroine in Three Novels
Author: Pamela Lothspeich
Editor: Nell Shapiro Hawley and Sohini Sarah Pillai
Abstract: When we consider the place of epic heroines in literary adaptations of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana over the past 150 years, we immediately notice some striking patterns. Women in these works are often tasked with serving as signs of "Indian womanhood," "tradition," or "Hindu culture" and as such, are brought to bear in socio-political discourses in the public sphere. What complicates this is that public consensus about what these terms (even in the Mahabharata itself) constitute has shifted over time.
Year: 2021
Primary URL: https://www.sunypress.edu/(F(ox0gDH1S2WExoz9RQucEprdTVvACyUSy_R1xDa1j2FgGhTXkoO6OFiIyL1P4xgQA0gZa70kXMCHDAykAMljH9fFzbcRnVSdjs7Mxm5SSxTQv3hMQLpQHL-NNbPPJu_IBbAWBXQIzQh7tycruho9a4G_j0rh-pWRgAHJgNJ7ntMI1))/p-6997-many-mahabharatas.aspx
Primary URL Description: SUNY Press web site
Publisher: SUNY Press
Book Title: Many Mahabharatas
ISBN: 978-1-4384-824

The Konkan: Regional History on an Indian Ocean Coast (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: The Konkan: Regional History on an Indian Ocean Coast
Author: Ananya Chakravarti
Abstract: South Asian historiography, which often takes as the bounds of its political imagination the geographical limits of state power, has been peculiarly blind to regions like the Konkan coast of western India, whose political fragmentation belie other forms of regional integration. This coast was, and is, the borderland mediating between the vast world of the Indian Ocean, and the mercantile, diasporic, ecumenical and imperial networks that operated within it, and the interior of the South Asian subcontinent. Despite its clear historical import, the coast has escaped the notice of historians as a coherent cultural region, due to its perennial political fragmentation. This paper presents an overview of a monograph project, which draws upon both early modern archival and ethnographic research to show how the Konkan must be understood as an interconnected and coherent region for both South Asian and Indian Ocean history. I focus in particular on two groups of mobile peoples and two cultural phenomena in demonstrating the regional coherence of the Konkan zone: 1) slaves and the Konkani migrant community of Kochi, Kerala and 2) deities of place and the Konkani language. By following the pathways of these people, their cosmologies and languages, I demonstrate how the Konkan coast may be 'mapped' as an Indian Ocean borderland.
Date: 01/08/2022
Primary URL: https://aha.confex.com/aha/2022/webprogram/Paper33079.html
Primary URL Description: AHA conference program
Conference Name: American Historical Association

Discussion with Joel Lee author of Deceptive Majority (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: Discussion with Joel Lee author of Deceptive Majority
Abstract: Joel Lee (Williams College), author of Deceptive Majority, in conversation with Ashish Koul (Northwestern) and Anupama Rao
Author: Joel Lee
Date: 02/07/2022
Location: virtually
Primary URL: https://icls.columbia.edu/events/discussion-with-joel-lee-author-of-deceptive-majority/
Primary URL Description: web site of Institute of Comparative Literature and Society

Divine Embodiment in the Theatre of Ramlila (Book Section)
Title: Divine Embodiment in the Theatre of Ramlila
Author: Pamela Lothspeich
Editor: Pamela Lothspeich
Editor: Harshita Mruthinti Kamath
Abstract: With its many forms of guising, Ramlila is serious play, and by this it is not mean simply or primarily the metaphysical and “classical” connotations of the term “līlā.” Over-attention to this centuries-old term risks obfuscating the material conditions of Ramlila performers and invisibilizing the social structures of inclusion and exclusion on the ground of Ramlila culture. Rather, what should be emphasized is the very real fun and sociality that often occurs in Ramlila—onstage, backstage, and offstage. On a social level, the sartorial and somatic guising of performers clearly creates a space for jouissance—pleasure, abandon, and escape. While sociality is a significant feature of Ramlila, this chapter primarily considers the ritual role and social significations of the svarūps who serve in divine roles in Ramlila.
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

Art as Communication: Small Diplomacy and the Formation of the Grey Collection,” (Article)
Title: Art as Communication: Small Diplomacy and the Formation of the Grey Collection,”
Author: Rashmi Viswanathan
Abstract: In the early 1960s the aspiring patron and neophyte collector Abigail Weed Grey (1902–1983) organized a multiyear international exhibition program of modern arts, Communication through Art (1964–69), that brought modern arts and artists from South and West Asia to the United States and vice versa. Keenly aware of her position as an outsider to the art world and viewing herself as a non-elite patron, Grey was impelled by an ecumenical faith in the capacity of modern art to foster intercultural understanding. She strategically used the logistical aid of the United States Information Agency (USIA), a diplomatic body established in 1953 under President Dwight Eisenhower to propagate American culture internationally during the Cold War, to promote her progressive and spiritually inflected agenda of creating “One World thru Art.” Through her travels and as the result of close partnerships with Asian artists and institutions, Grey amassed a collection in the 1960s and 1970s that introduced many Americans—both artists and art-viewing publics—to modern arts from beyond the North Atlantic. This article focuses on Grey’s exchanges with and in India and the emergence of the collection against the transcultural context within which it was formed. On the one hand, she was navigating Indian discourses of modernism, twenty years on the heels of the country’s independence, that were inflected by a strained faith in earlier revolutionary discourses. On the other hand, locatable within a broader US project of cultural diplomacy, the collections and patronage of Grey sit rather uncomfortably within a well-trodden history of Cold War–era imperialism. Neither representative of nor particularly concerned with US diplomatic interests, she nonetheless instrumentalized its Cold War–era diplomatic apparatus during a time of simultaneously invigorated and increasingly fractured diplomatic engagement with India.
Year: 2021
Primary URL: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00043249.2021.1872298
Primary URL Description: publisher web site
Access Model: open
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Art Journal
Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Silencing the Other: Eknath’s Hindu-Turk Samvad and Thomas Stephen’s Discurso sobre a Vinda de Jesu Christo (Book Section)
Title: Silencing the Other: Eknath’s Hindu-Turk Samvad and Thomas Stephen’s Discurso sobre a Vinda de Jesu Christo
Author: Ananya Chakravarti
Editor: Paola von Wyss-Giacosa
Editor: Giovanni Tarantino
Abstract: This essay compares two dialogic texts in Marāṭhī from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: the bhakti sant Eknāth’s Hiṇdu-Turk Saṁvād [Hindi-Muslim Conversation] and the English Jesuit Thomas Stephens’ Discurso sobre a vinda de Jesu Christo [Discourse on the Coming of Jesus Christ], popularly known as the Krisṭapurāṇa. The former text is attributed to a Brahmin who spent much of his life in the heartland of the Marāṭhī cultural universe, while the latter was authored by a well-travelled European missionary who wrote the first Christian purāṇa from the margins of the Marāṭhī cultural universe in Portuguese Goa. By considering the ways in which these roughly coeval texts stage inter-religious dialogue within the Marāṭhī literary universe and considering Stephens’ work in light of the history of accommodatio, this chapter considers how silence in religious debates may and may not be read as signs of the tolerance of religious difference.
Year: 2021
Primary URL: https://brill.com/display/book/9789004464926/BP000012.xml
Primary URL Description: publisher web site
Secondary URL: https://brill.com/display/title/60316
Secondary URL Description: publisher site
Publisher: Brill
Book Title: Through Your Eyes: Religious Alterity and the Early Modern Western Imagination,
ISBN: 978-90-04-4649

Religion and Hindu-Christian Relations after the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami (Book Section)
Title: Religion and Hindu-Christian Relations after the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami
Author: Kristin Bloomer
Editor: Michelle Voss Roberts
Editor: Chad Bauman
Abstract: Fluid identities and exchanges between Christians and Hindus have long marked India’s coastal South. After the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, however, all differences were momentarily leveled as waves indiscriminatingly killed more than 8,000 people in Tamil Nadu alone. A close ethnographic account of the immediate responses of local people and religious leaders in the face of this acute loss and suffering bespoke a shared sense of humanity and even erasure of religious and caste difference. Over the fifteen years following the tragedy, however, as church leaders, foreign investors, and politicians tried to make the most of the disaster, a darker picture unfolded. The ocean’s killer waves receded only to make room for new tides of money and competition, renewing differences and threatening earlier religious fluidity. The rupture between the Indian and Burmese plates rippled into social ruptures as human need, greed, and tribalism remade the religious and environmental landscape.
Year: 2021
Primary URL: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003139843-23/religion-hindu%E2%80%93christian-relations-2004-indian-ocean-tsunami-kristin-bloomer
Primary URL Description: publisher site
Secondary URL: https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Handbook-of-Hindu-Christian-Relations/Bauman-Roberts/p/book/9780367689742
Secondary URL Description: publisher site
Publisher: Routledge
Book Title: The Routledge Handbook of Hindu-Christian Relations
ISBN: 9780367689742

The Brush of Insight: Artists and Agency at the Mughal Court (Book)
Title: The Brush of Insight: Artists and Agency at the Mughal Court
Author: Yael Rice
Abstract: Over the course of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Mughal court painters evolved from illustrators of manuscripts and albums to active mediators of imperial visionary experience, cultivating their patrons’ earthly and spiritual authority. Featuring over 80 color illustrations, The Brush of Insight traces this shift, demonstrating how royal artists created a new visual economy that featured highly naturalistic royal portraits and depictions of the emperors’ dreams. These images, in turn, shaped the perception of the Mughal emperors’ preeminence in all domains—temporal and spiritual—from the reign of Akbar to that of his son and successor, Jahangir. In analyzing a wide range of visual materials including manuscripts, albums, and coins, art historian Yael Rice documents how manuscript painters and paintings challenged the status of writing as the primary medium for the transmission of knowledge and experience. With compelling material and original arguments, The Brush of Insight probes how pictures and illustrated books became central to imperial modes of seeing and being in early modern Mughal South Asia.
Year: 2023
Primary URL: https://uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780295751092/the-brush-of-insight/
Primary URL Description: publisher web site
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780295751092
Copy sent to NEH?: No

Books That Bind: The Persianate Album and Its Widespread Circulation (Book Section)
Title: Books That Bind: The Persianate Album and Its Widespread Circulation
Author: Yael Rice
Editor: Sonal Khullar
Abstract: Between the late sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, manuscript work-shops across South Asia created an astonishing number of albums known as muraqqas, from the Arabic for “patched” or “mended.” In conception and organization, these large, stitched books drew from earlier album-making traditions associated with the Persian-speaking, or Persianate, courts of Iran and Central Asia, but their contents--encompassing drawings, paintings, calligraphies, and prints--were far more global in orientation. During the period in question, large quantities of albums circulated across the Indian subcontinent
Year: 2023
Primary URL: https://uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780295751115/old-stacks-new-leaves/#:~:text=Old%20Stacks%2C%20New%20Leaves%20kicks,A%20visual%20and%20intellectual%20feast.&text=What%20is%20a%20book%2C%20in%20South%20Asia%3F
Primary URL Description: publisher web site
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Book Title: Old Stacks, New Leaves: The Arts of the Book in South Asia
ISBN: 9780295751115

Concealing Caste: Narratives of Passing and Personhood in Dalit Literature (Book)
Title: Concealing Caste: Narratives of Passing and Personhood in Dalit Literature
Editor: Kusuma Satyanarayanan
Editor: Joel Lee
Abstract: The caste system is supposed to be inescapable-you cannot change the caste into which you are born. But are there ways to elude the system? Concealing Caste tells the stories of women and men in India who, though born into communities stigmatized as 'untouchable,' are perceived by others as 'high caste.' Like the literature on racial passing in the American context, the short stories and autobiographical essays in this volume reveal the inner workings of a vicious social order, illuminating the contradictions of caste hierarchy through the experience of those who clandestinely transgress its boundaries. Concealing Caste is the first collection of Dalit writings focused on this public secret. Bringing together Dalit literature from Marathi, Telugu, Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, English and Malayalam-including stories and essays never before translated-this landmark anthology illustrates the agonizing choices and at times devastating consequences faced by Dalits who experiment with identity in a society shot through with the principle of birth-based inequality.
Year: 2023
Primary URL: https://india.oup.com/product/concealing-caste-9780192865243
Primary URL Description: publisher web site
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Edited Volume
ISBN: 9780192865243
Copy sent to NEH?: No

The Epic World (Book)
Title: The Epic World
Editor: Pamela Lothspeich
Abstract: Reconceptualizing the epic genre and opening it up to a world of storytelling, The Epic World makes a timely and bold intervention toward understanding the human propensity to aestheticize and normalize mass deployments of power and violence. The collection broadly considers three kinds of epic literature: conventional celebratory tales of conquest that glorify heroism, especially male heroism; anti-epics or stories of conquest from the perspectives of the dispossessed, the oppressed, the despised, and the murdered; and heroic stories utilized for imperialist or nationalist purposes. The Epic World illustrates global patterns of epic storytelling, such as the durability of stories tied to religious traditions and/or to peoples who have largely "stayed put"; the tendency to reimagine and retell stories in new ways over centuries; and the imbrication of epic storytelling and forms of colonialism and imperialism, especially those perpetuated and glorified by Euro-Americans over the past 500 years, resulting in unspeakable and immeasurable harms to humans, other living beings, and the planet Earth.
Year: 2023
Primary URL: https://www.routledge.com/The-Epic-World/Lothspeich/p/book/9780367252366
Primary URL Description: publisher web site
Publisher: Routledge
Type: Edited Volume
ISBN: 9780367252366
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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