To celebrate diversity and construct discursive spaces in South Asia that are more inclusive than exclusive, this panel envisages a symphony of participation that interrogates, retrieves, and recovers moments of critical and celebratory nuggets from a diverse episteme that construct South Asia and discourses around it. Thus, in celebrating the critical underpinning of the ethical urgency to look beyond the single-issue strategies of reading and creating South Asia, this panel extends a conversation that accentuates the uneven power relations through representation and critique on discursive blind spots making South Asian Literature ethnocentric at best and calcified at worst. Instead of situating multiverses of enunciatory and decentering tropes, the lack of reflexive critical inquiries and a deeply entrenched colonialist insular tradition associated with a Eurocentric mindset eclipses any spaces of joy or celebration that is inclusive, diverse, and reflective of the heterogeneity of South Asia.

The intended audience for this panel includes all MLA participants and anyone interested in expanding the fluid notions of being and becoming in studying South Asian identities in historical, cultural, and temporal-spatial contexts.

Thus, each panelist represents a complex collage of diverse thoughts from literature and culture across diverse geo-cultural regions; each paper is part of a symphony that celebrates a segment of being included and celebrated even within flattened and repressive political and cultural uber-structures. In leading conversation, Puspa Damai’s paper, “Other South Asias: The Case of the Badi Women of Nepal,” talks about appropriating minority identity and performative politics in a controversial Nepali language novel while addressing essentializing minority identity politics celebrating minority expression and the politics therein. Damai examines Nathiya, a controversial novel by a non-Dalit woman, to discuss the project of imagining South Asian sub-continentalism that is not casteist, patriarchal, or [H]Indo-centric. As if taking the cue, Kritish Rajbhandari’s paper celebrates S Asia’s language plurality by talking of Nepalbhasa’s Newari literature texts showcase linguistic freedom, plurality, and history that remain celebratory of modern Nepali identity.

In a critical turn this time mindful of voices left out or flattened in spaces of cultural joy, Parvinder Mehta’s paper talks of the emplacement of minority Sikh characters by Bollywood’s largely Hindu upper-caste representations that have appropriated Sikh mainstream representations, even within the context of boisterous, grand, celebratory moments upholding a tapestry of cultures from South Asia. Similarly, Akshara Dafre’s “Identity and Politics in North East Indian Hip Hop” talks of the North East (of India) where hip hop has facilitated the creation of a unique, shared “Northeast identity” within the space of Indian hip hop. Using the example of the “Anthem for the North East,” Dafre explores the ways in which artists take on a complex political stance that goes beyond the quotidian understandings of hip hop as a tool for resistance for the oppressed.

The call for papers received a very positive response with several good abstracts. That is why we have selected four participants. The panelists will maintain time strictly so that there is 15 minute discussion period at the end of the session.