Each paper will be 13 minutes long, followed by a 23 minute discussion.

Arundhati Roy’s novels question the ostracization of certain bodies marked by caste, color, or gender, whether it is Velutha in A God of Small Things or Revathy in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Her novels explore the complex issues of caste and sexual violence on the bodies of lower caste men and women. What happens when hate crimes and violence are perpetrated based on a person's caste, gender, and color? Ruma examines how characters like Velutha and Revathy are banned and assaulted, literally and figuratively, from civil society. She explores how these minorities rescript their identities to overthrow the restrictions placed on their bodies. As an educator and scholar, she explores how a discussion of these intersectional issues in the classroom creates opportunities for transnational connections and solidarities between the texts and the students in the classroom.

11 Hindu men were sentenced to life imprisonment for gang rape, and murder in the Bilkis Bano case were released on India’s 75th Independence Day. This symbolism of freedom is in stark contrast to the northeastern states, where 15 August is considered a black day. In 2004 student-leader Pebam Chittaranjan self-immolated himself to protest militarization, and state-sponsored violence, while the rest of India celebrated freedom. Billie examines the working conditions of teaching cultural and literary texts such as “Red Chingthrao”, “Revolutionary” and “Vande Mantaram”, in the capital city Delhi that highlight violence and normalization of erasures. She problematizes the absence and erasure of the northeastern states in school and college curriculums in India and how her subjectivity as a minority woman educator comes into play in classrooms time and again to address/negotiate this lacuna.

In an abominable miscarriage of justice this year, Bilkis Bano’s convicted rapists have been freed on the 75th anniversary of the Partition. The goal of post-independence India was always to move beyond the Partition. As a result, there has been hardly any language developed to acknowledge the trauma experienced by women during this time. Yet, its aftereffects can be felt in instances of sectarian violence such as the 2002 Gujarat riots. Subsequently, Partition is rarely given adequate attention in North American Universities. By teaching Cracking India and its adaptation, Earth to predominantly non-South Asian undergraduate students within the context of #MeToo and recognized genocides, Nidhi argues that these texts memorialize the Partition’s trauma and its aftermath on women’s bodies, which ultimately became sites on which honor, silence, and nationalism.

In Mahasweta Devi's Douloti the Bountiful, Douloti, a bonded tribal sex worker, dies after vomiting blood on the map of India drawn in a schoolyard to celebrate Independence Day. Her body, devastated by venereal disease, left no space to hoist the national flag. The text signals the erasure of certain identities from the metanarrative of the nation. Using the narrative of 15th August in the text to mirror the acquittal of the rapists in the Bilkis Bano case, Soibam examines the rise of hate and related crimes that frame marginalized bodies. The ghosts of such erasures continue to haunt academic and scholarly spaces of engagement with South Asia. Reflecting on the difficulties of representation and pedagogic engagement of such erasure, her presentation calls for an interdisciplinary engagement with literary and ethnographic texts in social anthropology classrooms to understand South Asia through these lesser-known aspects of marginalization.