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CISAR Newsletter: October 8, 2019
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Join us at 5:30 for refreshments before the event at 6 p.m.
Time: 5
:30 PM - 8:00 PM
Location: C.K. Choi 120
Presenter: Suraj Yengde
Suraj Yengde is an award-winning scholar and activist from India, and the author of Caste Matters. He is an inaugural postdoctoral fellow at the Initiative for Institutional Anti-racism and Accountability, Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. He has published in the field of caste, race, ethnicity studies, and inter-regional labor migration in the global south.
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Time: 5
:00 PM - 6:30 PM
Location: C.K. Choi 120
Presenter: Shahzad Bashir
Co-sponsored by: Interdisciplinary Histories Research Cluster, the Department of Asian Studies, the Early Modern Research Cluster, and CISAR.
India was the scene for the production of a vast, internally diverse chronicle literature in Persian during the period 1500-1900 CE. During the nineteenth century, European scholars (such as the famous Elliot and Dowson) made selective use of this material to create the modern understanding of South Asian history that remains dominant to the present. I will discuss concepts pertaining to time that undergird a variety of understandings of the past in the original literature, highlighting matters left out by nineteenth-century interpreters and their later followers invested in nationalist histories. The exploration is part of a larger project aimed at questioning the framework for 'Islamic' history in modern scholarship.
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Singing Nanak: Anahata Sabd (The Unstruck Melody)
This event is the second in our series with Green College, "Mehfil: Music, Text and Performance of South Asia." Stay tuned for monthly events all year long.
Date:
October 16, 2019
Time: 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Location: Coach House, Green College
Presenter: Chaar Yaar
Co-sponsored by: UBC Green College, the Interdisciplinary Histories Research Cluster, UBC Asian Studies, and CISAR.
In this special concert, in the intimate setting of Green College's Coach House, Chaar Yaar weave a musical journey through the sacred texts of the first Sikh Master, Guru Nanak Dev, celebrating the cosmic and the worldly, the transient and the timeless, the self and its other. This is their grateful remembrance of the Guru in the 550th year since his birth.
The group Chaar Yaar came into existence about 17 years ago. As the name Chaar Yaar or "Four Friends" suggests, it comprises 4 musicians : Composer, vocalist, poet Madan Gopal Singh, guitarist and banjo player Deepak Castelino, sarod player Pritam Ghosal and the multiple percussionist Amjad Khan.
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Date: October 17, 2019
Time: 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM
Location: C.K. Choi 120
Presenter: Heba Ahmed
Co-sponsored by: Interdisciplinary Histories Research Cluster, Department of Asian Studies, and CISAR.
Since the 2014 formation of the central government by the Bharatiya Janata Party
(BJP) in India, violence against minorities has increased significantly. Of particular note is
the violence against Indian Muslims, the largest religious minority in India. Databases
compiled by different civil society organisations¹ have documented incidents of Muslims
being lynched to death, mostly on accusations of cow slaughter or petty theft. This talk will
examine the discourse of anti-Muslim violence in contemporary India, and attempt to answer
why hate crimes against Muslims are rising with little to negligible public indignation.
Violence against Muslims in India today will be interrogated vis-à-vis India's anti-
colonial/postcolonial pasts, which witnessed militant 'cow protection movements' in which
the beef-eating Indian Muslim was identified as the chief antagonist. Indian Muslims have
also been burdened with the guilt of the Partition of India. The cumulative effect of these
disputed pasts is that in the present, Muslims can hardly take legal recourse against the hate
crimes committed against them without being further victimised. This has led to Indian
Muslims existing under conditions of what Judith Butler has called "precarious life" (2004).
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South Asia at UBC Beyond CISAR
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Date:
October 15, 2019
Time: 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Location:
Lobby Gallery, Liu Institute for Global Issues, 6476 NW Marine Drive, UBC
Presenters:
Tsengdok Rinpoche, Patrick Dowd, and Sonam Chusang.
Organized by: UBC Himalaya Program
On October 15th, the Liu Institute and the Himalaya Program are hosting an exhibition reception to mark the opening of "Golden Letters Arrayed Like Stars and Planets: The Tibetan Culture of Language and Letters". The exhibition features sacred Tibetan scriptures, calligraphy, and other textual objects gathered from three continents. The curator of the exhibition, Anthropology doctoral student Patrick Dowd, will be joined by Tsengdok Rinpoche and Sonam Chusang to reflect upon the language's historical and contemporary importance to global culture.
Light snacks and refreshments will be served.
Please note that this exhibition runs through January 4, 2020.
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Due Date: October 18, 2019 at 4:00 PM
The Centre for India and South Asia Research (CISAR) at The University of British Columbia invites submissions for the 2019 Nehru Humanitarian Graduate Scholarship in Indian Studies. The annual $1,000 scholarship is offered by Dr. and Mrs. D. P. Goel to a graduate student pursuing the political, historical, economic, religious, social, or cultural study of India. The award is made on the recommendation of the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies, in accordance with findings of the Adjudication Committee of the Centre for India and South Asia Research.
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Deadline: November 15, 2019
SACPAN 2020 will take place at Simon Fraser University Vancouver, 28-29 February 2020, with special opening event on February 27. This year's theme is "GAPS, FRONTIERS, and BLINDSPOTS in SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES."
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CISAR Graduate Student Travel Grant 2019-20
Due Date: November 15, 2019
The Centre for India and South Asia Research offers 2 conference/workshop travel grants per year at up to $500 each for current graduate students at UBC to support travel to present papers on topics related to any part of South Asia or the South Asian Diaspora. Applications due November 15, 2019.
Recipients of the travel grant will be invited to speak in the annual seminar series at CISAR.
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Join the Canadian South Asian Studies Association (CSASA)
South Asianists from across Canada gathered last June at UBC, and decided together to establish a national scholarly association for faculty actively researching and teaching on South Asia-Canada and graduate students enrolled in related Canadian M.A. and Ph.D. programmes, to be known as the Canadian South Asian Studies Association (CSASA) as a non-profit member affiliated with the
Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences. Ideally, we hope to have some kind of CSASA presence at the next
Congress (2020), at Western University.
As a first step, all graduate students, faculty members, and researchers with research interests in South Asia are invited to join CSASA-L, a newly created listserv hosted at Athabasca University, where subscribers can share professionally relevant information related to teaching, research, resources, and events on South Asia-Canada. If you would like to join, please read the
listserv rules and enter your
subscription details.
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Our 2018-2019 Annual Report is ready! Take a look at last year's events and activities, with special new highlights on South Asia-related programs across UBC -- and learn more about CISAR's work.
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We've compiled a list of courses for Winter 2019/2020 with South Asia content. You can checkout the list
here.
If you're a UBC faculty member teaching a course with content pertaining to South Asia, feel free to contact us to list it on the CISAR website.
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Date: October 13, 2019
Time: 6:30 PM - 8:30 PM
Tickets: $20
Co-sponsored by: Canada Council for the Arts | Conseil des arts du Canada, Nanak Foods, Indian Summer Festival, Mo Dhaliwal, the Interdisciplinary Histories Research Cluster, and CISAR.
Celebrate the inspiring legacy of Baba Guru Nanak Dev Ji, the founder and first Guru of Sikhism, on his 550th birth anniversary with a night of music, poetry and song while gazing upon the infinite expanse of the universe.
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