The impetus of nation-state building is driven by prioritizing particular metanarratives shaped by majoritarian ideologies and identities. In this process of simplification that centers on select nationalist, racial, ethnic, and cultural subjectivity, the intersecting and minority positionalities get eclipsed, and their presences are erased by the predominant ideological machinery. In this context of silencing and assimilating of the marginalized voices, our papers explore ‘defiled’ women's bodies and trauma, Indigenous activism, gendered dynamics of environmental pollution, and contemporary Sri Lankan poets unpacking the biases of the nation-state.

Paulomi Sharma’s paper studies South Asian war memories and trauma in visual depictions of women survivor narratives in the context of the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War. By locating the Birangona as the central figure of analysis - women who were sexually violated and subjected to sexual slavery by the Pakistani army during the war – I will examine the moments of silence and verbal inarticulation in the Bangladeshi documentary Narir Kotha (Women and War, 2000). In this, I attribute the failure of converting ‘traumatic memory’ into ‘narrative memory’ (Mieke Bal) to the postcolonial divide between tradition and modernity that created unique notions of female identities and were played out within the discourse of the nation in post-war Bangladesh.

Dinalo Chakma’s paper studies select Indigenous Chakma songs from the 1960s to 1990s. In the postcolonial era, the inception of nation-state building ideology has marginalized the Indigenous communities of the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT). The nation states-Postcolonial Pakistan and Bangladesh- have conducted systemic military operations in the zone, relegating the already marginalized communities to the further. One significant event in this regard was the construction of a hydroelectric dam in the 1960s that displaced the Chakma people and their homelands. This event also marks a distinct shift in the Chakma Indigenous song from preserving cultural history towards an ongoing political resistance. With the introduction of mass media technologies and the inclusion of political subject matter, Chakma songs utilized their traditional storytelling practices to cultivate a new era of their songs. This paper contends that the Chakma cultural resistance through musical shifts did not only complement the political struggle but it called for a paradigm shift in the way Chakma identity, culture, and community are perceived.

Sayantika Chakraborty’s paper looks at environmental contaminants and its impact on the bodies of indigenous women in the deltaic region of India’s Sundarbans, world’s largest mangrove forest. The elevated status of Sundarbans on a global level (UNESCO world heritage site) brought in the state government’s interest in developmental projects in the region. This has exacerbated the onset of environmental stressors, such as increased salinity in the water and man-made disasters, for example, motorboats with their oil spills and industrial waste. As a result, the female bodies have become toxic sites of variegated political and ecological exploitations by the postcolonial nation-state, manifested in ‘symptoms’ such as UTIs, preeclampsia and miscarriages. Thus, in my paper, I discuss the indigenous female health in Postcolonial India, with reference to the data collected during my fieldwork.

Deepthi Siriwardena’s paper explores the works of two contemporary Sri Lankan English poets, Marlon Ariyasinghe’s Froteztology and Nipuni Ranaweera’s Take Me in Small Doses, to highlight the critical outlook taken towards the state-building attempts of the modern Sri Lankan nation state. The modern Sri Lankan nation state is a highly fraught space due to its multi-colonial legacies and hierarchical class structures. After independence, the country has been on a sociopolitical mission to erase the “foreign” western influences and build its “authentic” postcolonial identity - an identity that is influenced by the Sinhala-buddhist majority ethos. The analysis will show how contemporary poets like Ariyasinghe and Ranaweera, representative of the majority ethos, nevertheless unpack the biases and complications inherent in this state-building attempt through their poetry. Their poetry will be shown to hone in particularly sharply on the racial, gender and class blinders that founds the modern postcolonial Sri Lankan nation state.

We plan to hold four presentations (12-13 minutes each) followed by at least 15 minutes of QnA.