 We would like to make a start and we are going to begin with a quick announcement about the book that this seminar is going to be launching. Over to you, Rani. Do you want to come to the mic? Good evening everybody, I'm Rani from Soa Srilanko Society. We run the bookstore here on a regular basis. If you want the book today and you are very keen there is a leaflet going around which you can take and you get a discount. If you want to get the paperback version please sign up because we will have that in a few months time. Thank you. And you get a signed copy by both authors, whichever one you get. Thank you. Okay, well that's my welcome to that of Rani's to this seminar. I'm Shan Hawthorne. I work in the department of school actually of history, religions and philosophies. And the reason why I'm going to be chairing this event this evening is that I am one of the co-editors of the book series in which this book appears which is the Bloomsbury series of religion, gender and sexuality. And I have one of my co-editors here today, Sonia, where have you gone? There you are, right at the front. From Kingston University, one of our other editors is Dawn Llewellyn at the University of Chester. Now the whole series was set up with the explicit intention of addressing the neglect of religious studies perspectives and in fact often hostility to religious identities and discourses in gender queer and sexuality studies. But more importantly than that, we've wanted to open up a space in which gender critical approaches to religions can be and in fact must be much more engaged with questions for whatever better word, intersectionality, particularly with respect to those bodies of theories that we might name coming from subjugated knowledge, but particularly critical race, disability, post and decolonial theory. These have hitherto been really rather marginal in the fields of religion and gender. And it was with this in mind that Tej and Verinda's work seemed to be really ideally placed as the first book in this series given that they, as I hope you'll see tonight, really exemplified the kind of work that we hope to publish. And we're really proud that their book is the first in the series because it really sets the tone and the ethos of what we want to achieve. Now, some of the background context to what we're doing here tonight is to think through how scholars have thought about religion and I know perhaps in development studies that religion seems one of those things that you shouldn't really have to concern yourselves with, but we're particularly interested in the relationship that it has to what gets named as the political and how so many approaches to the relationship between these two things have focused on maintaining the clarity of their difference. That is the difference between the political and the religious because their difference is largely constitutive. In fact, it's foundational to any kind of understanding of modernity. It's also foundational to Eurocentric understandings of social and political organisation. That, of course, informed the organisation of space, of populations in the colonial era, not least in the ways in which partition occurred or was arrived at in 1947. Religion seemed to be an important factor in the way in which space was divided. Now, when one begins to address the question of the relationship of the religious to the political, other significant mechanisms of what I say are mechanisms of division that are also themselves significant part of how modernity narrates itself were inherited from colonial conceptuality as well. For example, around caste, gender and intra-religious difference. Now, the choices within the scholarship that's tried to understand the relationship between these things has tended to repeat the starkness of the separability between their objects of analysis. In other words, they end up repeating a Eurocentric framework that, as we'll see tonight, is almost entirely inadequate for making sense of the creativity of, at the very least, altering sociality and meaning-making. What the fields of religion and gender, religious studies, political science and yes, development studies have needed in order to reach for what morning joy has called intellectual adequacy in a post-colonial world is an approach that is resistant to methodological nationalism and, in fact, seizes on the creative and what I would argue is also the ethical potential of border crossing. Indeed, border defying. So, account for the lived realities of populations living in the aftermath of schematic events like partition, their material culture, its embeddedness in unpredictable forms of mobility, affect, culture, cultures of memory, and so on. And this is what we really have with Tage and Verinda's wonderful work. When I first read a very early draft of the manuscript, I was absolutely captivated. I think most of my commentary as I worked through it were really exclamations of, yes, exactly. This is what we need. This is brilliant. This was exactly what I had been looking for. I hadn't quite known how to go about doing the kind of analysis and bridging work and kind of exquisitely attuned, exquisite sensitive attunement to the complicated ways which people grapple with these terms and arrangements that the colonial period left us as its remainder. But which has to be done if we're going to go on using words like religion and gender and caste at all, not fall into the tired old Euro-centric imperialist taxonomies that commit us to repeating their logic. This book is a manual for doing much better scholarship. It's not doctrinaire, it's provocative, and it's stimulating in the true sense of those terms. Tage and Verinda don't just stop with giving us a satisfyingly complicated and faithful account, and again in all the senses of that term, of subaltern engagements with hegemonic structures. They give us a way in which to avoid reductive and thus entirely distorted renderings with a vexed questions around resistance and agency and of caste, gender and relationship to those things that get named as religion, but also get us to think beyond these framings. This work is about subaltern registers of resistance, but it's also about so much more than this. In fact, it performs what it sets out to understand. It makes full use of the metaphors and practices of border crossing to provoke new ways of knowing and understanding, and it really is an exemplar of the best that socially engaged scholarship has to offer. What we're going to do tonight is hear from both Tage and Verinda about the process of arriving at the forms of theorisation that they did in this particular book, over really quite a long period of time, over 10 years. We're going to start with Tage, followed by Verinda. We're going to have a very brief musical interlude by Sara Cosmi, followed by a response from Akanksha Mehta, who's a lecturer in gender, race and cultural studies at Goldsmith, and then we'll have a period of question and answer, and then you're all very, very welcome to join us for a reception in the senior common room, which is on the first floor, and basically you just follow the people if you don't know how to get there. So I'm not going to take up any more time. I'd just like you to welcome both Tage, Verinda and also Akanksha and Sara for what's going to be a really wonderful and provoking evening. Thank you. Thank you, Sean, for your very generous comments for your inputs into the book project through the course of it developing into a book. It has taken 10 years from the point of the inception of the project, but actually it's probably taken about maybe 27 or eight years in terms of the actual ethnographic kind of fieldwork that I'll be talking about as I go here. I have a number of people I'd like to thank, but I'm probably going to do that at the end rather than as I begin to just give you a sense of what the book is about. So the title that we've given for this talk actually was a ploy to get you in here. It's not really about religious nationalism at all, but the concern, and rightly so, on religious nationalism, its rise, its ascent, its penetration of majoritarian right-wing religious nationalism and the ways in which the state in India as well as Pakistan utilizes religion as the colonial state once did in order to further its authority over politics and the economy makes inroads into and shapes the social and cultural space. The problem of religion, therefore, is not about whether or not its influence is on the rise of decline. That's neither here nor there, and those debates have been had within religious studies, and neither of us are scholars of religious studies, either of our social scientists, political science, development studies, sociology. So, therefore, why are we engaging in this field? A lot of the Eurocentric notions about religion, a lot of the debates around secularization, questioning enlightenment principles which appear in discourse to instill ideas about rationality, which are also very much present within contemporary social science engagements and political discourse on religion, particularly in contemporary South Asia with not just ascent penetration now of right-wing forces. We see that religion is not just something that is out there, it's very much part of the body politic and sociality. So, the successes of populism in India and Pakistan show their ongoing similarities, 72 years after the partition of the partition. So, in some ways, this book is about the long partition, the ongoing partition. We're looking at bordering processes. And the looming blasphemy laws, for instance, in Pakistan, which see the rise of the social in terms of community arbitration, vigilantism and mob rule, in policing and disciplining minorities, namely Christians and Ambees, for instance, in Pakistan, and, of course, in India. We have just, on November 9, was a very momentous day in the region, which was just 10 days ago. We saw how, on the very same day that the Indian Supreme Court ruling on Yogyoddha, which sanctioned the building of a Ram Temple on the site of the Babri Masjid, which had been desecrated in 1992, on the very same day, the Pakistan government, and, of course, in communication with the Indian government, opened the Kirtarpur Corridor with a somewhat coordinated two-nation agreement on the lines of partition. This is based on a sharpened logic around minorities and majorities for whom shrines, and interestingly, and this is kind of writing this into this presentation now, it's a kind of politics around shrines in the performance of nationalism and carving out communities, through, on the one hand, communities whose sites can be seen to be desecrated, or, on the other hand, another community which can seem to be resurrected in Kirtarpur in the post-aftermath of the post-partition era that is emerging. Both Prime Ministers, who in February 2019, two countries who were on the brink of war and have been over the past 72 years were both present at that commemoration of the opening of the Kirtarpur Corridor. So in a play of showing appeasement to one minority, while sanctioning the desecration and announcing the building of the Munder on the site of another, the Indian government has shown that utilising religious boundaries continues to gain political mileage for violence, identity politics, utilising religious national difference. But our focus in the book is about another register, that of resistance in the face of hegemony in all of its forms, social, political, economic, which is often not always encased, sorry, which is often, but not always encased, in the rituals and spaces of religion. It is this resistance from below which continues to evolve in synchronicity with hegemonic power, and which falls beyond and beneath the realm of populism. Just as power and hegemony erect, construct, and manage the logics of borders and nationalism, caste and gender are highlighted in terms of the resistance of it. Human agency is key to this interpretive framework. Drawing on, but not confined to, a Gramscian tradition where hegemony is present and looming, but never all encompassing, or all pervasive. As a consequence, our primary attention to the contemporary social field offers methodological and conceptual possibilities to analyze what people do in terms of looking at Michelle Dessertot's work, what people do rather than what they say they do. Thus, the point at which formal religion-making in terms of identity construction, those identities, religious boundaries, which were all part of the colonial project, are also part of a nexus of religion-breaking, which is one of the contributions, I think, of the book. Shrines enable us to locate persistence of practices in multiple sites, upon and through which multiple discourses crisscross, and whilst the lens of communalism pervades in historical textual constructions, the significance for contemporary devotees is much more closely associated with the idea of the possibility of impeding or even transforming the social and the material. So, that's a critical view of how structures and hierarchies of gender and caste operate in terms of social organization. Characterizes a Punjab in a way which is about social stratification and some of the literature and religion of Punjab, and there is a lot of it. We'll talk about the enchanted universe in terms of Herjot Oberoi's contribution, and we actually argue that it's a stratified universe, and we're looking at very much rooting it within the social material and the political. In our conclusion, we begin with a story of a friend who appears throughout the ethnographic analysis and is also in our acknowledgments. I think I need to say this in terms of my own discipline of development studies. It's around the kind of reluctance to talk about religion. So, this friend who was very active in leftist circles in Pakistan during the period of General Zia tells a joke in Punjabi that talks him in very much frames his own atheism. And the joke goes, when Karl Marx dies, the angel Gabriel is puzzled as to whether he should be sent to heaven or hell. So, he asks God what to do. God says, let him come and talk to me. So, Marx has led into an audience with God who has sat up on his throne. Gabriel leaves the two talking. A few hours pass and Gabriel is worried. So, he opens a crack in the door to God's chamber to observe a strange scene in which God and Marx are sitting on the floor opposite each other and chatting. Suddenly, God says, don't just stand there, comrade Gabriel. Come and join us. So, while this kind of idea and the kind of reluctance to talk about religion is happening, I think in some ways that joke is narrated at many parties and gatherings, and of course very much about the kind of reluctance of the left as well and of social sciences more broadly of engaging with religion, we also have seen the rise, the ascent and penetration of majoritarianism and we might also label it as fascism in South Asia. So, in some ways that's a warning signal that in fact we've been missing out on those kinds of conversations, which that joke in many ways achieves. So, our studies utilise a kind of Gramscian methodological criteria rather explicitly in terms of his schema for the study of subalternity, culture and resistance. And this is in terms of his discussion of popular cultures, class struggle and dominant class ideology in terms of how he shaped his notion of the war position in which popular culture or popular religion were a part of life and the world. And as such, that life and the world and that popular culture engaging with it can possibly be a source of conflict and also a site of struggle. So, we're kind of positing a feminist Gramscian marxism in trying to position the theoretical thrust of the book as being very conscious of gender, caste and class depression in terms of providing immense possibilities to break the aforementioned closures and bringing hegemony resistance and agency into focus. So, the hierarchical and this is kind of bringing us to Punjab so, I'll give you the border here. So, there are a number of contributions of the book that makes but I'll probably focus on two in particular. One is methodological nationalism and challenging it and using the idea of bordering processes and bordering logics as an analytical lens through which to understand the social. So, our study is looking at Punjab across what is either seen as Indian or Pakistani Punjab depending on what your position on it is east-west Punjab but we, in many ways, the project was designed as a way of thinking of almost no imaginary race that only 72 years ago was geographically at least one. Of course, bordering processes are not all just about geography or cartography. Bordering processes are also about the social and so there's a lot about the coloniality of the religious categories in terms of the ways in which the colonial state utilised knowledge about societies as a way of controlling for political control and so a lot of the resistances then we see and we have seen the fieldwork we were doing in the shrines which are across Punjab so you can kind of see that line that cuts through the Radcliffe line. Our fieldwork doesn't do it seamlessly of course there's border crossing that is required to do this and the border crossing is also not just physical it is also one where it requires an imaginary to think outside of the categories of religion. Oftentimes, and of course religious nationalism itself in Pakistan as being the homeland of Muslims in South Asia and India now of course as being a majoritarian Hindu nation or at one point seeing it as a secular nation. So I'll use this map now as the backdrop is one which is kind of looking at Punjab as being the land of five rivers but there's a lot of mythology and nostalgia about this which needs to also be problematised. So there's a lot of the literature on the region of Punjab and those is the idea of Punjabiith of identity, of being Punjabi through language, culture, history religion even as a shared sense of identity can also produce and what we've highlighted in terms of the gendercast matrix that we apply is that it ignores the fact that this is a highly unequal society we see a lack of recognition of caste even existing in Punjab in Pakistan and in East Punjab we can see in terms of the codification of the census as a tool of enumeration of society that it has 31% of schedule caste populations which is of course official statistic but shows that this is a society which is in many ways structured through caste so one of the contributions of the book is to look at actually through the social how religion and what people do rather than what they say they do rather than saying this is my identity and this is a place that I go to practice these rituals this is what I do and understanding those practices as perhaps and not always informing a subaltern notion of existence within existing material relations I think how much time I have how much time do I have yeah it's okay I'll carry on okay it's okay fine it's fine okay so okay so bordering logics and overcoming methodological nationalism so that's one contribution I've highlighted the most obvious is this idea of even thinking across the Radcliffe line which is a remnant of the colonial period but is also something that still very much is a presence there the patrolling of the boundaries of religion are also part of the bordering logics in terms of correct religious practice in terms of the imposition of religious authority high caste male patriarchal religious leadership on the one hand and the kinds of practices and things we've published elsewhere on women's practices Dalit practices which are relegated to the margins and are included in this idea of formal religion or even of society that is even worth counting so far lens is focused in that direction we also see that there there's the the idea of borders in motion to use Victor Conrad's concept that borders in motion we saw in terms of the field as being an organizing principle about how society was just getting on our project not only set out to explore practices, sites and figures across that line and across Punjab but it also endeavoured to examine how other exclusionary logics such as religious categorization, state intervention naming, labelling practices operated across the various sites and contexts we set out to resist the straight jacket of methodological nationalism from the onset by not taking on labels or categories that face value which was only made possible because of our access to both sides of the border and there's a whole thing we write about neither of us have Indian or Pakistani passports and that of course offers one entry in terms of access in transcending the border although the Qatar port corridor is only open to Indian passport holders so that's some place that we will not be able to access unless you have an OCI card on the other hand it's also about the idea of even being able to imagine or construct a field and I think perhaps one of the biggest contributions of the book and I think this is probably why it took so long to actually write was coming to grips with the kind of social realities the things we were observing in the field the kinds of rituals and things we couldn't even understand what was happening until you spent the time doing that kind of long-term ongoing ethnographic work but in many ways one of the challenges is also trying to open up borders and to think critically about the borders not only as sites of difference but also as sites where change, challenge and resistance are also taking place so another point is also the making and breaking of religion and I think this is where the potentials in terms of the the arguments against looking at and the idea of kind of false consciousness also emerges quite a bit in terms of the religion literature, in terms of social science engagement is what kind of you know what kinds of practices are going on and what are the meanings of thinking about agency and I'm kind of highlighting women's practices, Dalit's practices what do they highlight in terms of the labels that are given but in terms of the social realities and grievances about the means of production about ownership about proprietary rights that those sites can tell us especially in the context when mainstream politics have been captured by majoritarian politics there's been a silencing through populism of those other zones in which people are actually engaging with so for instance a shrine which comes up on the road between where it started off as a water tap begins as a water tap and a story emerges around and it becomes sacralised as a site where truck drivers will stop and slowly over time you see a shrine emerges and slowly over time you see a slightly more elaborate shrine so these kinds of examples were things that we were coming across during our field work during this extended period of time so you begin to read than what people are doing and if you look at face value or reading the signs and symbols on that particular shrine you would see and this was one of the entry points into us starting this project where in East Bendab in India there was a very noticeable presence of green flags and green charters which looked as though there was an immigration of Muslims from other parts of India but in fact as our field work began to inform us that this was part of the social that was happening all around us within the population itself and so that shows that the life of a shrine in itself or the life of society is responding to the broader political context but is also engaging with the material there's one other point that we engage with the myth of the egalitarian or the metanarrative of egalitarianism that exists in Punjab so if anyone's ever travelled to Punjab you will probably hear lots of sayings about this you know it's a place of harvest abundance and on the other hand this idea that actually there's no caste here it's a castles society it's not Brahminical in fact Brahmins are impoverished so this is the kind of rhetoric that you would hear the egalitarian metanarrative also provides a myth and so we ended up reading that myth in many ways textually in terms of what people said they were doing and what they were doing in terms of practices but also the idea of the resistance to change so many arguments within formal institutionalised religion would be that oh change doesn't happen because Dalets women other subaltern groups they're not religious enough so this is one conversation that exists within that particular zone another one is that in fact these are groups that are splintering off from within this area of resistance may not be seeing it as resistance at all in their own terms and I think there's a lot of complexities around thinking about what actual agency hegemony and resistance means when we're looking at this kind of sphere of religious practice so I hope I've not confused you too much about the kind of theoretical points that the book makes but I think Brenda's going to be highlighting some of the empirical examples so while while I get my laptop set up you can some of you have met this chat before because some of you have heard me talk about this before and I'm sorry I haven't been able to prepare something too different for I know at least two of you have heard some of this before so for you two at least I'm sorry I haven't but maybe many of you have it so in a sense I'm going to talk about two examples from the work that we did but I don't want us to think about these two examples in terms of ethnographic vignettes rather I think I want to think about them as things that we just ignore or that we don't look at when we have a view of religion or the social in which well religion can only be a single thing because if you look at this image there is a multiplicity of religious symbols going on right this this guy his name is well actually you've got his full name there but if we just had his name up there PAWPU you couldn't tell what his religious affiliation was he when I was younger I might have had a black beard like that but his term looks a bit like mine there's a cross there there's green and so there's a and there's a shrine with a turban on top of it so there's a multiplicity if you like there's also you can't see it on the covering there's a 786 and there's Arabic writing on it so how would we describe this if we were restricted to a language of religious identification which meant that you only have you only come from one religious background or one religious tradition pretty hard to describe I mean it's pretty easy to describe in one sense because you could say oh look there are Christian symbols and there are Islamic symbols and there are these symbols going on and this is a confused person a confused person is not what we generally think of as the revolutionary subject a confused person is someone we want to educate in the 19th century is someone we wanted to reform yet this picture was taken in 2009 2010 10 maybe this one so it obviously had survived this person it certainly survived 100 years of colonial reform and like we kind of say that if there's a nice bit in the book where we talk about religion as the opium of the masses for Marx but it's the opiate for the states of Pakistan and India who have gone kind of quite wild on the ways in which they use religion so what does Papu tell us about this shrine so he says that basically and this is the centre of that village or the old village he says my Baba my grandfather was here and my father and now I'm here some people ask me who was in the tomb and make a fuss some say he was a Christian some say he was a Muslim his name was Baba Gudbach and his father was Baba Mehavdas my family is also buried here so around the shrine there are many other gravestones and we've been doing service looking after this shrine since the time of my grandfather his name was Pratap Singh so now the rest of my family they go to church but we mostly stay here we go to the church sometimes you know our elders they used to eat Maldanga so he's expressing himself as a Dalit but this is the only way he expresses his identity as a Dalit which is through what they used to do there's no other assertion of identity in this narrative and he says actually there are four Kirbans which are the Sikh sword buried over here because you know that's what we really are wink wink and that's how he was talking to me so a shrine with this kind of level of multiplicity is relatively rare in present day West Punjab some of the prominent sites of these kinds of figures through the 19th century the Nazis the Beragis have kind of left have fallen into ruin but the persistence of caste inequality and discrimination is referenced here because people talked about well talked about to me about the ways in which people would come and say to him and to his family look just tell us just become a Christian or just become a Muslim after this site and the feeling of suspicion was quite prominent in the interview that we did and this kind of air of threat I think is very important so that's the kind of first point about sites like this that there is a there is always a kind of underlying sense of tension or violence in the era of minoritisation of religious groups generally the second point and this is really just for you Sarah and Chris the second point is really about how do we why is it that we why is it that we don't see these sites outside of the kind of ethnographic residue right so oh look this is fun right look someone who's playing with their religious categories what do we call it now like fluid identities we've discovered this in a kind of post post something turn too old now I would say when I was studying at SAAS it was postmodern I could say that with some conviction but now we have done with our posts so in a way it's partly I think because the academic the canon of academia has been so invested in methodological nationalism religion itself as a subject area has been so invested in certain kinds of classificatory regimes and doing of those classificatory regimes that if we move to think about other sites like if we think about gender or we think about caste then we get a different angle or if we think about just the local in a different way and this is why I've got the name of the friend colleague local historian who took us to this shrine a guy called Iqbal Quesa who again some of you might know in this room Iqbal Quesa is not a academic he's actually a social he's an amateur social historian we would call him in the kind of British sense yet he knows about 25, 30 sites like this across Lahore, greater Lahore he knows about gravestones that have got multiple markings on them he has a whole catalogue of and that's because his understanding of that area which he's really interested in is deeply rooted in a locality and a materiality and that location in materiality and locality doesn't come from us going in as kind of academics or ethnographers we learnt our way of seeing through these folks the reason why the book took so long is because you have to sift through a lot of academic ways of seeing which don't really help you because we had to theorise what was a local practice which is about thinking about your material relations about thinking about gender relations and because I'm just conscious of time I'm not going to go into this little bit about Scott I am just going to cross the border and talk about another another site and this is someone called Jenny you haven't put her surname she's called Jenny Shah which again the Shah would give away something about her but would be very nicely misleading if you knew what it meant Jenny itself you can't tell religious affiliation why we love this picture of course is that very unusual to see a woman in East Punjab with a hookah in her hand maybe now in West Punjab also you see less women though in villages you see a lot of women with hookahs in the hand in West Punjab but again we don't see this imagery so much of a woman with a hookah hookah is a, you should all know this now Shisha isn't it in the contemporary students speak so she's smoking a Shisha and she's wearing this pink turban Jenny herself is a why she's called Jenny Shah is because she's a shrine caretaker in Jolander in Hoshi Arbor and how does she become a shrine caretaker well a very standard story she spent 20 years cleaning the floor of the shrine and the guy who was the saint in the East Punjab context a spiritual figure he passed on the shrine or the seat of the shrine to Jenny to this woman and then around that there are lovely stories that she would leave the shrine with her hair which is to the level of her devotion apocryphal stories of course because her who was she herself outside of that context a daily wage labourer someone who was thrown out of their family house came to the shrine as a refuge someone who again from a Dalit background for whom the shrine itself you could see as a refuge very few stories of women we found very few stories of women but again is that our eye this Jenny herself actually I don't know how many of you saw Ajay Baradwaj's film it was shown here a few times but Jenny herself is a feature of Ajay Baradwaj's film Ajay is not an academic though he may be trying to get his PhD now but he's not formally an academic he's trained as a documentary filmmaker he went back to his village after his grandmother died to start filming his village and as he started to film he started finding all sorts of characters and all sorts of people he was not looking at religion he wasn't looking at shrines he was again just looking at his locality but with a certain eye it was with a certain sensitivity why don't we have this sensitivity there are a number of reasons for that but our argument is basically it's because of the way in which we think about religion that because we think about religion as a category somewhat outside of the social stratifications of this area we lose a certain kind of perspective and when we lose that perspective and I gave this talk I gave a much longer version of this talk in Melbourne actually and quite a few ex-academics from universities around the East Wing job came there were eight of these guys and one of them piped up who was a management science professor so maybe that's what you expect from management science one of them piped up and said this isn't anything to do with religion this is just people's culture and I was like thank you thank you very much because of course what else is that so our perspective on religion is yes on people's culture it's part of people's everyday life but you have to be able to turn your lens to relate it you can't again journey is not someone that we can easily classify or characterize in relationship to the question of singular religious identity so in terms of our commitment to analysing gender and caste at sites and institutional processes what we found was that yeah there was an operation of exclusion so when you go to larger shrines even they work on the basis of certain forms of exclusion so women are excluded from the inner sanctums places like Datasab in Lahore women are not the law may have changed last week or the local ruling women are not allowed to perform rituals in the central Sikh shrine in Amritsa at the golden temple the Haramandasab so these exclusions of women and Dalits have historically been excluded from many Gurdwaras even today you will find that there is Dalit exclusion so this kind of notion of exclusion makes you think about well is this just a response is this just a is this just a reactionary are these just reactionary forces where Dalits or women shrines are these spaces of solace they are not spaces in which we have kinds of assertion and there are many other sites that I have not talked about where you see some forms of assertion you do see violent kind of reprisal so one of the themes in the book is about this issue this kind of notion of violent reprisal but another another issue for us in that sense was we were not just interested in this idea of reaction or reactive or like people being reactive to dominance and there in a sense we are kind of lucky or there is something about this region and we didn't take Punjab either geographically or physically we took it as a kind of idea of in relationship to thinking about practices and thinking about texts and in that sense there is a kind of poetic poetic philosophical tradition which is what I kind of call it which is enabling in some senses of some of these practices at least you can tie in some of these practices with a this alternative narration of now the word becomes difficult I would of course say culture but if you don't want to use culture because it's so slippery you could say an alternative narration of spirituality or alternative narration of the relationship between humans and the immaterial material immaterial so we punctuated basically with poetry and it's punctuated with song because that's the one area in which we found someone like so Jani could be represented actually and she may not be singing these songs herself I mean she would probably be singing quite a lot of but she was singing a lot of devotional songs in this film actually but this philosophical tradition allows us in some senses to think outside of the just practice it allows us to connect practices with a certain kind of I don't want to use this word ideology but why not with a certain kind of ideological stream and so what I want to do is on Asara to come and sing to you from this tradition and this is a kind of I'm going to let you do it you want to introduce the text because you might be able to do it much better than me in Promptu sure I can do that I'm going to drink your water as well so this is a text by one of the kind of dissident Sufi poets Bulesha and he's also a big mainstream spiritual figure so his shrine in Kasur is a major site and it's a state control state run site but the kind of interesting I guess difference is also between Bulesha's appropriation by the state and what that Bulesha looks like so at his shrine you will definitely see lots of Quranic inscriptions and verses but not this not his poetry as much and especially not this poem which actually was in a sense kind of lost to us which means that it is not even a major part of the repertoire of most of the Kawas of course Bulesha's poetry has a big presence in Kawali so this particular kafi which is the form and Bulesha is 18th century is and he's a Shah and he's a not the Chenni Shah kind of Shah or maybe he was you know we don't know enough about him at all but as a poet and sort of religious or spiritual intellectual of the Sayyad caste or group which is the kind of like said to be directly descended from the prophet this is here he's saying I am a Churi which is essentially a Dalit subcast and so and this kind of why it's interesting is that it is not just it's not the it's also female so there's a double kind of identification that with the Dalit caste and with the woman that Bulesha is kind of undertaking and he's talking specifically about Labour and the Dalit Labour and it's exploitation under the Mughal regime and the Mughal kind of agrarian system of revenue and so I think I should just sing it because the translation is up there. Oh you have both. Wrong text probably. That's fine. I don't usually sing with this but so you have to bear with me. No I have one so it's okay. Thanks a lot Sarah. There's not much I can say after Sarah singing that but the idea behind including including including this poetry is that again shrines our sites of a performative tradition and our sites of performances where these kinds I mean this this text this textual recovery works alongside a lot of contemporary what's the name of that singer the singer who sings the contemporary Dalit stuff in East Punjab? Ginimae. So Ginimae is a contemporary singer in East Punjab who is singing a lot of assertive songs around Dalit identity or Chamara identity and again this is not seen as not being considered part of the worthy of the academic canon I mean especially in South Asia I do remember giving a paper where I talked about music and performance and it was just seen as not serious in relationship to what are the kind of issues that are going on. So again it's about the lens and I mean there are also epistemological and good epistemological issues in relationship to what kind of value we give to these kinds of textual sources but maybe that's something we would take up in questions. Thanks. So like Varinda just said it's really hard to go after Sarah and I think I say as profound, as beautiful as what she just sang right? So when I asked age how should I respond, how should I frame this response one of the things that she said was think about it this way, talk to people who may not actually read the book talk to people who might read the book after this discussion so that's how sort of I'm going to speak about my reading of the book and what we can think about it and learn from it and sort of push on it and I'm going to take us away from the field of Punjab and thinking about the ethnography in a different way. So I want to start with three sort of narratives. The last one the first one rather is actually leading from what we just talked about, the singer Ginni Mahi. So in the last paragraph of this wonderful book there is a lot about we hear about a Punjabi woman Dalit woman singer Gurkanwal Bharti popularly known as Ginni Mahi. Ginni Mahi sings what can be identifies as devotional hymns or shabbats but in a way that's upbeat and popular she's quite popular, she has a huge following she has a YouTube channel and Instagram and Facebook where she keeps her followers updated. She's a follower of the Ravidasadharam which could be described as a religious spiritual path that broke away from mainstream Sikhism and sent us the teachings of Sant Ravidas and she also focuses a lot of her songs on Ambedkar. She calls herself the daughter of Ambedkar or the daughter of Baba Sahib who she says wrote our constitution and that she's proud to be his daughter and she's continuously connecting the songs and teachings of Ravidas through her religious beliefs and her following in the Ravidasadharam along with the teachings of Ambedkar. She evokes the evolution of caste, Dalit consciousness, equality in almost all her songs interspersed and working together, working alongside with religious registers. I spent some time listening to some of her songs after I finished the book recently and going through some of her social media pages quite obsessively actually and looking at her public interviews to try to think about how we can push this last paragraph of the book even further and start thinking of new things that we can discuss here. So her albums are named after very religious devotional sort of names like Guraad i Diwani, Gurpoorab Hai, Kanshi Waleda and all the songs and especially her most popular songs sent her Ambedkar. One of her songs is called Fan Baba Sahibdi which means Fan of Ambedkar and in an interview she talks about how she combines the teachings of Ambedkar and Ravidas and she says that so many years ago Ravidas and then Ambedkar had said that I want the kind of rule, we want the kind of rule where people live with equality, humanity and without caste division. So she also calls Ambedkar Kaumdi Masihah, the community's Messiah and some of her posts on social media also interestingly evoke Guru Nanak. Gindi Mahi also talks about how her official name, Gurkanwal Bharti, is interesting because her Dalit family chose to give all the children in that family the son name Bharti, all the children in that generation. And she says Pehle India hai, pehle Desh hai isliye Bharti ke naam ke pehchaan di ajarah hai. We are first Indians and that is the identity we want the children to have and that is the identity that was needed. She says that she sings devotional songs because she wants people to remember their Gurus and she wants to find a niche where she can both be comfortable with her religious beliefs as well as with her Dalit woman identity as well as where she can be popular and loved and beloved by the audience. I looked at her Facebook, Instagram post to see what kind of messages are present not only in her songs but also in the way that she has crafted and created this persona around her and a lot of her Facebook and Instagram posts are also using Ambedkar's quotes interspersed with a little bit of Rabidasa's teaching interspersed with images of Guru Nanak. Her social media posts are filled with also crafting a very particular Punjabi femininity that is youthful, popular and appealing but also does not transgress too many boundaries of gender. She in another interview said she dreams of doing a PhD in music and ultimately making a career in Bollywood where she wants to sing like Lata Mangeshkar, Shreha Goshaal and Sunidhi Chauhan. I'll come back to why this narrative spoke to me in just a bit. The second narrative I want to talk about is from my field work and my own ethnography with Hindu nationalist women. So we've already talked a little bit about Hindutva about the rise of religious nationalism in India. I want to sort of think about that and think of what this book offers us to rethink some of these debates and how it speaks to some of the debates happening on religious nationalism. So as you probably already know if you're in this room or you've sort of you know thought about from Tej and Virender's discussions on the project of Brahmanical religious cultural nationalism currently also in parliamentary power in India, the Hindu nationalist movement. And my research particularly focuses on women in this movement. How are women important to this movement, the many ways in which they contribute to the movement, they run various aspects of the movement, they also sort of build and nurture intimate affective practices in the movement and at the same time they also participate in a lot of the kind of ignored in the academic literature like Virender spoke a lot about the sort of limitations of the ways in which we theorize and think and a lot of the literature around thinking about women in the movement thought of them particularly as a problem but also at the same time as victims as you know being sort of like this idea of false consciousness that they're only there because they're being forced to. So in my research I looked a lot at how are women and did a lot of ethnographic work with them and one of the interesting things that I found which also since 2014 has become really well popularized is the role of religious figures and scriptures and I mean not only sort of Savarna upper caste religious figures and goddesses that are continuously evoked in very mainstream discourse as well but also the construction of different types of iconographies and symbolisms that sometimes move around between these boundaries. For example one of the women that I interviewed who was the head of the Delhi chapter of an organization called Durga Wahini the army of Durga Ranjana and she started talking about how not only did she follow symbols and iconographies of sort of goddesses like good Durga and Kali and goddesses that are quite popular in the movement but she had spent a lot of time creating new goddess figures that she took to different neighborhoods depending on the kinds of women that were there. So she said that we are consciously trying to appeal to Dalit women and so we've come up with figures that will appeal to them which have goddess imageries but in different ways one of them is holding a picture of Ambedkar and one of the hands another one is holding a broom to sort of signify the kind of working class Dalit women signify symbols that working class Dalit women would be attracted to. Interestingly she also continuously talked about how she has been praying at numerous Muslim shrines for a child that she was trying to have for many years and she also spoke about all the as she calls them the good and well meaning Muslims in Pakistan that she has found online who are helping her pray at particular shrines across the border that she cannot cross for various reasons including the fact that she spends most of her time talking a lot of talking about violence against Pakistan. So these could be dismissed as aberrations and personal anecdotes this is just one woman she's longing for a child of course she's going to do all it takes and pray at all the places but as I found through the fieldwork these were not isolated stories these sorts of borders of gender caste religion nation were continuously moving were continuously being contested often in really contradictive ways that don't make sense that want to stop doing that fieldwork in some ways and try to make sense of but this is what we are dealing with so a lot of simplification that we see around Hindutva this book offers us ways to rethink some of those implications to rethink some of those contradictions. The last narrative I want to focus on is on is work that I've recently read by Khalid Aniz Ansari who directs the Dr Ambedkar Centre for Exclusion Studies and Transformative Action located in Saranpur Uttar Pradesh. He talks about caste and Indian Muslims in particular and he talks about how this idea of this growing religious nationalism Hindutva that is victimizing Muslims is perpetuating caste inequality amongst Muslims in different ways so he says something about how 85% of India's Muslim population falls under the Pasmandha Muslim category which translates to those who have fallen behind including what are referred to as backward classes the Dalit Muslims. He says on the same time Muslim politics in North India continues to be dominated by upper caste Muslims who are actually in the minority referred to as ashrabs. So he asks us to think about these differences when we talk about the violence of religious nationalism. He says the victimization of Muslims must be complicated by class and caste and spatial distribution of vulnerability. Take the Mozaffarpur violence of 2013 there were riots in Mozaffarpur in 2013 and there is also a film about it called Mozaffarpur Bakihae. When the rioting mobs attacked Muslim colonies and Muslim areas they spared Muslim juts and Muslim goodgers. When we talk about this kind of violence and think about the kinds of spaces that are being attacked we have to think about what sorts of spaces they are. He says they are mostly subaltern spaces not elite Muslim spaces. They are mostly slums where lower caste Muslims are residing. You have to look at the victims of class and caste. The Muslims who are attacked are mostly from poorer parts of India migrating from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh to Mumbai to Bihandi to Mozaffarpur places that have witnessed horrific riots. And those who are attacked are mostly pasmandas whereas he also says that most Muslims who are benefiting from what he calls a narrative, a homogenizing narrative of Muslim victimhood are apacas Muslims or the ashrabs. So he asks us to rethink how we think about this idea that this idea of the Muslim victim in current India and contemporary India under Modi needs to be complicated by constantly thinking about how caste and class figure in it and not thinking about caste and class and how they shape the practices, the experiences of Muslims in India only perpetuates caste and equality. So I sort of wanted to put these three narratives out there because they allow me to do a few things. One to push the sort of ending of the book. When you ended the book you said it's not a conclusion, it's an epilogue further conversations to think about. So this is one thing that I felt that we could think about the book and take it further. Secondly to contextualize and complicate some of the contemporary debates around religion, gender and caste in South Asia, in Punjab of course as the book wonderfully does but also beyond Punjab to unpack a few ideas and few themes in the book. For example the idea of borders and boundaries. The book makes a very concrete point over and over again that Hindu and Sikh and Muslim were not as porous and not as absolute identities. From Ginni Mahi's songs we think about how these borders move, how these boundaries move for her being a Punjabi woman, a folk singer, a Dalit woman, a woman being a follower of the Ravidasad Haram being a part of this sort of religious movement being an aspiring Bollywood singer who also continues to sing in the register of devotion being popular being youthful and at the same time coming from a lineage where there is a lot of attachment to the nation and to the idea of India given that her family named all the children with the son Imbati and insisting that this was about love for country before love for religion and love for caste. So also the other thing that it makes us think about which stage already picked on is the idea of religion and religion making. We can think about secular liberal ideas of how people interact with religion and the political through religious registers going beyond notions of false consciousness or notions of rescuing and vigilance narratives. This is something that comes up in my own work when a lot of the scholarship around Hindu nationalism and gender and women focuses on the idea that these women would never really want to be in this movement and the women are continuously read as an aberration or there is a reluctance to actually think about how we might want to rethink ideas on feminism ideas on gender through this participation through this very active political participation in violence and I think similarly through participation in any kind of religious forms when the whole you know a few years ago with what's his name, Gurpreet Ram Singh? Ram Rahim. Gurpreet Ram Rahim's court hearing came out. There was a lot of discussion especially amongst what could be identified as secular liberals that like who are these people who are actually following this man who has clearly engaged in sexual violence, who's clearly so weird even were some of the ideas because he had this popular video called Love Charger that he was singing but he had a massive following of women, of Dalit women as well and there was a lot of discussion on who are these ignorant people that are following him, who are these people that are involved in this movement, how can we sort of rescue them from this blind faith so I think this book in particular helps us rethink those notions, helps us rethink ideas around resistance agency, how all of these work and how all of these get complicated and finally the last couple of points I would make is that one of the things that I really appreciated about the book is that it doesn't just take categories of identity like gender and caste and apply intersectional analysis to it, instead it does something quite different, it thinks about how gender and caste are connet with religion, how they are inherently constituted, co-constituted through religion and how religion is co-constituted through gender and caste the last thing that I would say is that you've already mentioned the Kartarpur corridor and the opening and sort of border crossings in all sorts of ways the book allows us to think of all of these digital and transnational border crossings from the ways in which religion was evoked when the Babri mosque was demolished in 1992 where various South Asians sitting in the diaspora here were contributing money and bricks even to go to the building of Ram temple to how we hear about it now the recent news reports of Hindutva groups influencing the parliamentary elections here and urging British Hindus to vote against Labour to how we think of a figure like Ginni Mahi who's appealing to an audience through a lot of digital participation and is appealing to a transnational audience actually and through how we think about registers of global Islamophobia so there's a lot to think here about the way in which the digital and the transnational figures with the border crossings so I'll just stop with that. We have some time for questions we have about half an hour trying to make these questions rather than comments if you can but comments are welcome so I was there short and so we'll take the first question please I want you to wait a bit because it's still a bit garbled but let's see if I can manage something so and I think it picks up on some of the things that Akanksha was just talking about but I was wondering well there's actually a couple of things I think that you mentioned something about how some of the Dalit practices that some of the all women's practices that they may not even ascribe resistance to what they're doing and I wondered about how we ascribe resistance if they themselves are not and at the same time I was wondering and I asked this for instrumental reasons because I'm trying to do similar work and it would be helpful to know how you approach this as someone who is a social scientist engaging with religious and spiritual sites how to read them a social site without diminishing or not adequately taking into account the kind of spiritual dimension of those sites and the kind of the spiritual logics that may be at play when we are primarily treating them as kind of sites of sociality Any more? Take three questions and wind up in the meantime just let me know Thank you I have so many questions and I'm looking forward to reading this book but I was quickly wondering about the poem that's been put up here I mean Buleshares from Pakistani Punjab celebrated and the singer this Jamaar singer in East Punjab I've always seen I'm from West Punjab and I've always felt that of course with this the Ambedkarite turn in politics as it developed in India has enabled groups to develop a politics like this which is very much absent in West Punjab and so for me I've always been it's almost like saying a nigger if you say a chura and so it's a highly offensive term and so I was wondering in your interactions with people in Lahore or all these other areas how did this sort of pan out because you've been using the term dalit and dalit is not a term that is used in West Punjab at all and so there is certainly a politics that is taking place there is certainly a lot that's happening there so I wanted to ask what that may be here sorry that I'm missing okay do you want to go ahead I love the way you guys respond to that wonderful comment especially around digital technologies because over a 10 year period of field work that would have been a huge transformation for people if you want to ask a question can you just raise your hand and I'll be identifying you for the roving mics the first one on resistance the easiest way for me to answer that is sometimes just being is resistance in some of these spaces and sometimes resistance is a conscious act of rebellion in the face of hegemony but I think that space of being and recognizing and I think that's why the broader context of the rise of the forces which is a very heightened, sharpened political context in contemporary India and Pakistan a very conscious of the very Indo-centric kind of leaning of some of the conversations and I think Abraham's question brings it back to thinking in fact what you're looking on one side of the border may not appear as resistance and on the other hand terminology will apply and be offensive in other form it may appear as resistance so I think it's a mixture of both I think you have to be and I think that was the challenge for us in terms to ascribe something as an act of resistance and that required following up through a number of different methods so I don't know if that answers your question so it's a being and actively resisting and then the other was the spirituals kind of going into some ways it kind of relates to that second question in entering into a social world but they very famously kind of argued that social scientists actually can't study religion without being atheists he put it that far and we probably cite him in that but we also kind of say what's the big deal about religion I think that's with the joke that our friend that I narrated with what is the big deal why is there such a resistance to even talk about religion I think now in many ways maybe the book will be important or maybe it will be a drop in the ocean in the context of contemporary India and Pakistan where religious forces are really driving politics and we're still afraid to talk about religion and despite that so entering into the sociality of it I think we are having to and I think a country appointed to that there's so many registers that we've actually been missing as social scientists to actually think do we enter it in terms of the transnational, the digital popular culture some of it is commodified culture but actually there are resistance themes within it so a lot of the kind of domain of the social world which we only kind of touched on and largely it's a very shrines based research that we have done so far could be branched out thinking of you know we need to now be thinking more creatively and also opening up the ways in which we think about you know the social in relation to resistance stop there the next question absolutely I mean I'm actually glad the questions come up because this is one thing that was especially going back and forth across the border one of course is around terminologies one is dalit is a sense of assertion and on the other hand the term giura giuri is an offensive term of insult and you also have and there's a politics around bulisia not knowing what his caste but also saying he's saying it he's using that terminology to locate himself as someone saying you know I'm willing to you know write this and to occupy or you know be in the shoes of a dalit woman or you know a giuri right so I mean I think the use of the terminology in terms of the field work across both sides of the board even the use of the word dalit in shrines spaces is not there in East Punjab as well I mean getting my use uses the word jamada I mean she's changed she's changed now so it's not in East Punjab the word dalit is only used we use it as really as an analytical category because we don't have a word we don't actually have the language to talk about cows but hearing the term in West Punjab I think was the biggest shock for me so in India that's illegal in a public place that's illegal so you go in West Punjab because there's no caste in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan there's no caste there's a denial of caste it's something that's practiced over there in India that's a Hindu practice it could be talked about in lots of ways we don't practice and yet you would hear you know so that's the hegemonic discourse and in closed doors in private in those kind of power relations where you know you'll have someone of a dominant caste with a marginal caste being used very frequently so in many ways I think even having it up here is also an assertion of some sorts and let's recognize caste for what it is in Pakistan and in India because that terminology around Dalit has ended up becoming a category in itself and I think that also raises lots of problems especially when the state begins to kind of wither away some of the constitutional measures that were around conservatio so even the term Dalit at some point will have a changed meaning as well but yeah that's an ongoing conversation I also think the one thing that we do in the book is say that it's not so different in India and Pakistan on some levels the gender caste matrix so if you think about caste assertion of Punjab in East Punjab it starts in the 70s and the Mizduqasan party the recovery of this text comes out of that tradition and in the 70s the Mizduqasan party in West Punjab and the nationalites in East Punjab they're the only people who are talking about caste on the left in West Punjab so there is an actual moment at which and then of course the political trajectories go off because and so caste just disappears in West Punjab but actually at the moment in which it happens at the same kind of time it's just the political trajectories don't go so in the 60s before the grand time of the green revolution in East Punjab people are using this language you know it's only becoming embedded as there's changes going on in the rural infrastructure and so I don't think it's such a big and like I said in now she uses the word Jama' and so I wanted to just say that it's actually a bit like the African American recovery of the N word it's like a Jama' has been totally recovered because it would be similarly seen as disparaging in the 70s but now it's not it's seen as a you know it's seen as this kind of a total assertion but every assertion is met with violence I think this is really important in terms of you know any assertion where it becomes material is met with violence and in West Punjab you see this around Christians is actually read as Dalit in West Punjab and every time you see any kind of assertion you see violence and this is really one of the things it's hard because it's so embedded in the books narrative but it's so important to get there's always this simmering undercurrent of violence threat of violence in any kind of assertion here the context of West Punjab but it's the same East Punjab there's always this despite the laws and despite the so called there's a simmering there's that simmering digital so digital so 10 years yes it changes a huge amount there's online you can ring up and book the big shrines are all online you can get online take credit card bookings you know the whole stuff is but equally these little shrines on the roadside that we've been following you don't find them on the internet the ephemerality is really important that's a really important part is that this is people literally making shrines this is literally what you see and this is a very big distinction from it is literally what people will make will make shrines and we see in the small time we were there we saw shrines and this is across the border you see shrines that come up and they go like they come and they go and we see and this changes the way we think about religion and so the digital helps in that because you can do it a bit quicker but actually it's still a similar process but I do think it's a whole different project you can think about how socially different I don't know that it's more difficult to connect to the material I think also I think what's interesting the ephemeral nature of the shrines that start as a brick and then the gender appears and then one we saw in Chandigarh where it was there for a few months and we saw it every day as we were going driving drop off children to school and you see the next thing is gone and actually was some place of the local construction workers had someone had been injured there and the story was there and then it was gone the construction site was gone and therefore the local devotees were gone but that story I'm not sure how that would relate to the digital the situated the kind of the idea that a shrine what it represents is it performing something or is it actually addressing material social relations I think the digital probably sits slightly aside from that Thank you so much for that wonderful presentation my question is about the relationship between texts and the cultivation of self so as when there to a speaking about sometimes being is an act of resistance and I realise then you're talking about particular forms of self and Chunni and that other gentleman whose picture you showed the way that we know that certain forms of social science knowledge or modernist social science knowledge production is actually a site where those selves experience epistemic death and we also know that in some ways metropolitan knowledge production about these people have historically played this very big role in that it's enacting that epistemic death on to the elites of India and Pakistan who are coming to the border or going back and then they're perpetuating this epistemic death in the institutions that they're setting up etc etc and from the performance we got a sense of some of the texts the songs and the poetry that actually are kind of like the river that continues flowing they're the sites where these other forms of non-partition selves keep flourishing is where does your text fit in with this project of the cultivation of new selves is it does it have a relationship to that song that was sung does it have a relationship to the texts that are being sung or performed or remembered at the shrines and things do you see it doing a kind of work in the classroom that enlivens a certain type of self that's a great question so I think there's the book it just walked out it's just walked out so in the form of which it is right now the best one can hope for is that it evokes something in a classroom and generates some kind of debate or as this wonderful response that that kind of response would be great but in the dodgy copy or the digital world when it becomes something that paperback which would be like for 100, 200 rupees or we go and give it out to our friends or the people we talk to it might circulate a bit differently or when we translate it it might circulate a bit differently so that's a single answer to a really great question I think you have to work quite hard to circulate these texts outside of academia outside of the English speaking academia maybe outside of the form of the book the websites or speak it so I think it depends really like what one does with it I don't think the knowledge is neutral of its casing so that would be my response I find it difficult to think about the book of the self as well I'm even trying to so I see the text as something that has just evolved through and I was sort of saying I'm trying to think how many decades in fact so some of the stories that emerge through the pages of the book I mean the one story is from my families it's not even ancestral post-partition village where an elder who was actually the second wife of my great uncle who found it her duty was to let me know that our family our family as the second wife of this great uncle who was the zamindar who was the proprietary landlord and to say we must look after this because this is the shrine of the Muslims who left before and so those kinds of stories circulate yet I never I kind of I take those stories and that kind of gets long my politics is quite different in terms of thinking being a caretaker of the shrine as a dominant cast you're reproducing that so for me to having written that I have to apply the gender cast and for me to take the text out it's about word of mouth and I think it's about political activism also I don't think it can just remain in the classroom I think it has to be an engagement with the social world you're also in so whether it's that family also or it's about narrating that field even thinking about Punjab and thinking gosh we still keep on going to Hindutva looking this side of the border we actually need to be and it's thinking about a politics which is actually thinking critically about borders in South Asia and it's okay to do it in the classroom I think that's one project but I think there are really big projects right now that are around and I think it's a drop in the ocean the text but I think if any of the ideas kind of circulate in ways that inspire others to do other acts or forms of resistance I think for me that would be a huge achievement I mean like some of the questions that I heard they were really nice and they were also in my mind so they are quite bit answered while Nautej was talking about you know these people just being what they are and that's itself an act of resistance your existence or your beingness itself makes a kind of statement that you resist certain power relations in the society and especially when it comes to the gender and caste dynamics and also a class where you actually see these people kind of standing against the power relations I mean that's the thing that when the lady like you know who is singing songs when she is bringing Ambedkar it's a challenge to the established you know homogeneous narratives and that's what actually I think makes as act of resistance rather than just being what they are they are conscious of it they are conscious of the power relations that exist and if they kind of know go they do it because they think that is something that they should be doing but they also are aware of the kind of you know like some kind of violence like reactions coming from the upper caste and upper class kind of groups that's one thing that I was thinking the other thing was more about when you were talking about your 10 and 12 years of field work so you all had this thing when you were saying this upper caste respondents somewhere responded that you know those people don't really kind of follow the religion well and that's why the conception of egalitarianism in Sikhism is not followed well because those people don't really follow the religion as a kind of way of whatever you know their life where I was just wondering when you interact with other groups especially Dalit women and kind of you know lower class people because caste and class dynamics is I think more of a combination you can't really separate in Indian context people have tried in the last like 50 years but now we are coming to this point there we know religion is there everything is there but it's not out of anything I mean when you talk about class so go to the social and economic but 80% of the people Muslim Dalit and Adi was being below poverty line so when you are talking about poverty when you are talking about anything we need to understand these are the groups and the social locations that are suffering most and that becomes the kind of group of oppressed people in here so there I was thinking when we really kind of see these people how do they really respond to these homogenous narratives in your field work of 10 years how do they really see that they are asking about the churi so it's a very offensive word but what makes it offensive the position that one come from let's say people from upper class and upper class you know locations when they call these people churi they basically notify signify the status of your not being worthy of human being and that's what really makes it offensive and in the same way in these locations and the kind of bastis that we go to context this cultural politics that we talk about it's very active and it's been there I think 67 years and it has been transforming to northern part of India in last 25 years that I see but it's been there that people have been singing songs people have been kind of trying to go around villages and trying to educate these people and it's been there from the left moment from the anticas moment all kind of people were participating all of it so yeah yeah that's all it's more a kind of comment and question and confusion in my mind on your last point though 60, 70 years is you're going back to 1947 so that's again taking the nation state India nationalism I'm in the 60, 70 years I'm in so my response though is to say let's go back centuries there are histories and texts which allow us to actually look beyond and that's actually the logical nationalism point we were making is actually looking at resistance to colonialism resistance to patriarchy you know Sufi texts such as the Bolesha one is another one so those traditions are quite live not just in Punjab other parts Maharashtra of course is very significant in terms of contemporary and historical mobilisations too but the kind of cultural sphere is a really important one I'm just conscious of the time frame and not falling back into thinking about how any kind of resistance is just looking back at Indian nationalism it's also kind of imagining alternative ways of being but also of resisting and thinking about those borders that are often times and generally imposed whether it be the categories even understanding poverty which groups how the pie is sliced tells us actually this isn't a religious problem or it's a matter or a caste or it's a matter of region so even that is a bordering practice in terms of what the nation state kind of does I think we're nearly out of time unless there's a really pressing question you have the opportunity to ask questions to both the authors that the drinks deception and the SCR to which you're all welcome to one thing I just want to say before we close well I want to say two things one is an absolute huge thank you to Tage for being there and Sarah for making this really memorable a fantastic launch for both the book and the series but also to remind you that next week's seminar in this place at the same time is going to be titled marginal development states markets and violence in drug affected borderlands which I think will actually connect in many ways but also connect in many ways this evening's seminar has given you some foods of thought that you'll be able to bring to the next seminar to really think through the potential for thought that crosses all of the boundaries not always at all at once but that's something to aim for so thank you all very much for coming thank you Sean