The Centre for South Asian Civilizations

03/19/2024

📻 Listening to Hindi-Urdu Radio Archives - A workshop with Prof. Isabel Huacuja Alonso

📅 March 21, 2024
⏲️ 3-5PM
📌 MN 4207, UTM (4th floor, 1535 Outer Circle, Mississauga)
🔗 tinyurl.com/radioarchives

An introductory workshop on the theory and methods behind understanding and analyzing Hindi-Urdu aural archives.

In this workshop with Professor Isabel Huacuja Alonso, author of Radio for Millions: Hindu-Urdu Broadcasting Beyond Borders (Columbia University Press 2023), will focus on the theory underpinning the analysis of Urdu-Hindi radio recordings and related archives. Professor Huacuja Alonso will share methods with some guided analysis of recordings from the 1960s-1980s. We recommend that workshop participants have an understanding of Hindu-Urdu spoken language.

This workshop is in collaboration with the Centre for South Asian Studies at the Asian Institute.

02/28/2024

📢 EVENT | Agrarian Crisis in India's Age of Inequality

A talk and photo exhibition with P. Sainath .network

🚜Tues, March 5th, 2024
⏳3-5pm
📍 CDRS 3230 at University of Toronto, Mississauga campus
🔗 RSVP at tinyurl.com/PSainath

Farmers' protests have broken out again in India - a country that has seen at least 400,000 farmers take their own lives in distress, by official count, in the past two decades. Even that awful number is a serious underestimate - with women farmers, for example, being mostly excluded from the farmer suicides lists. Very few women own land - but female labour is predominant at almost all levels of production. As the sector sinks deeper into distress, the pressures on rural women mount exponentially.

The crisis, not just of farming, but of all agrarian society, is exploding at grave human cost. Yet, there is very little understanding of what constitutes an 'agrarian' crisis (as distinct from a farm crisis), and what happens to women as it deepens.

02/17/2024

ONLINE EVENT | Munshis and their “Successors:” The Fraught Genealogies of Modern Hindu Thought

2024 Aziz Ahmad Memorial Lecture

📅 Fri. Feb 23, 2024 | 1PM-2:30PM
🖊️ RSVP: tinyurl.com/Munishis

Abstract:

This talk takes as a point of departure Aziz Ahmad’s observations on “Hindu historiography,” in his book Studies in Islamic Culture in the Indian Environment. Here Ahmad draws a distinction between two streams of scholarship produced by Hindus on the history of Islam in India. According to him, the scholars in the “eclectic” stream saw Islam as taking an ecumenical turn in South Asia. By contrast, “orthodox” Hindu historians viewed the Islamic presence in India as “an alien, aggressive, and hostile interlude.” Ahmad traces this divide to differing positions held by Hindu writers of Persian in the eighteenth-century, of whom such historians were “modern successors” (238). While the oppositional framework here may be overly simplistic, Ahmad’s invitation to reflect on the links between Persianate and modern Hindu intellectual cultures deserves further attention. In this talk, Supriya Gandhi will examine select Persian writings by eighteenth and nineteenth-century Hindu scribes and ask how they might illuminate the complex genealogies of modern Hindu thought.

https://iranianstudies.utoronto.ca/event/aziz-ahmad-memorial-lecture-munshis-and-their-successors/

09/23/2023

📢Join CSACH for a discussion on Dalits and the Left: Eelam writer K. Daniel's Pañcamar

Speakers: Daniel Vasanthan, Srilata Raman, Mark Balmforth & Ashik Kumar

📆September 26, 2023
📚✏️ 3-5PM
💻On Zoom, register to get the link!

🔗 RSVP http://tinyurl.com/dalitsandleft

Before the civil war, communist movements led the way to end the practice of caste and untouchability, especially in the Tamil northern province.

It created a generation of Dalit writers, many of who became leaders on the Left and changed the landscape of Tamil literature.

K Daniel is considered the brightest spark of this generation and his first novel Pañcamar, tells the story of how Dalits in the northern province embraced communism and fought the caste system.

It is a classic of modern Tamil literature, and an essential historical document.

06/06/2023

📢🎞️ Join CSACH for a three-course event with Leena Manimekalai, CSACH's 2023 artist-in-residence! 📢🎞️

🎙️ 1 - Poetry book launch and reading
🎬 2 - Making Media workshop: Student exhibition of short films
🎥 3 - Film and censorship: Montages from Leena Manimekalai's filmography

🗓 Friday, June 9, 2023

🕓 4-7pm

✏ Registration link & full program here

Join us for an electrifying evening of poetry, exhibition of short films, and excerpts from Leena Manimekalai’s powerful filmography

11/17/2022

Join us for a mushaira, a gathering of poets!

Enjoy an evening of Urdu poetry & ghazals feat. the renowned poet, playwright and human rights activist, Salman Haider.

📅 Nov 24, 2022
✏️ Doors open 5:15pm
🎭 MiST theatre, CCT building

Register https://tinyurl.com/salmanhaider

05/14/2022

📢 Join the online event with JV Pawar and Cornel West to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Dalit Panthers and 97th birth anniversary of Malcolm X

📅 May 19, 2022 07:30 PM

✏️ Register here: https://tinyurl.com/may19panel

In conversation with J.V. Pawar, one of the founders of the Dalit Panthers.

04/13/2022

EVENT TODAY! Join Salman Haider, CSAC's summer 2022 Artist in Residence, on a discussion on poetics & resistance in Pakistan

13 April

12:30pm EDT
9:30 AM PT
21:30 Pakistan time

Get link to join here:

Co-sponsored by Institute for South Asia Studies at UC Berkeley Register for the virtual event here. Since the early 2000s, Pakistani civil society has mobilized actively to enlarge the scope of political discourse on various issues ranging from women's rights to the protection of religious minoriti...