Academic freedom across South Asia is under growing pressure, narrowing the spaces in which scholars, students, and public intellectuals can research, teach, debate, and speak openly. Universities, research centres, and think tanks are increasingly affected by political interference, censorship, harassment, funding pressures, punitive legislation, and — in some cases — arrest.

In association with the British Association of South Asian Studies (BASAS), Contemporary South Asia journal (Taylor & Francis), and the Contemporary South Asia Podcast, this event asks what it means to (re)claim space for academic freedom in South Asia. It will explore how scholars and students are resisting intimidation, sustaining critical inquiry, and building formal and informal networks of solidarity within the region and beyond. The discussion will also consider the role of the BASAS South Asian Studies Observatory of Academic Freedom (SASOAF) in documenting attacks, publicising cases, and supporting those affected.

Panellists

Dr Dhaneswar Bhoi University of Edinburgh

Prof Maya Tudor Oxford University

Dr Madura Rasaratnam St George’s, University of London

Dr Laraib Niaz University of Cambridge

Prof Christophe Jaffrelot KCL

Prof Jeevan Sharma University of Edinburgh

Prof Pritam Singh Oxford Brookes

Dr Ashraf Hoque UCL

This episode explores the intersections of migration, labour, and aspiration within the urban handicraft economy of contemporary India through an ethnographic study of Shilparamam, an artisanal market in Hyderabad. Focusing on biographical narratives of artisans, shopkeepers, and their assistants who have migrated from regions such as Mithila (Bihar), Mednipur (West Bengal), Manikpatna (Odisha), and Agra (Uttar Pradesh), Chandan examines how urban markets mediate relationships between local economies and craft production. It privileges the site of distribution over production to understand how artisans position themselves within the infrastructures and affective landscapes of the city. The analysis unfolds in three parts: first, it introduces the concept of “surrogate migration,” where objects and kinship-based networks substitute for physical mobility; second, it discusses how artisans draw upon artisanal and familial histories to frame themselves as agents of regional development and community leadership; and third, it considers how Shilparamam becomes a space of aspiration and temporary mobility for youth entering the craft sector. By attending to the affective and relational dimensions of craft labour, Chandan contributes to broader discussions on urban informality, artisanal subjectivity, and the reconfiguration of rural-urban ties in India's contemporary craft economies. keywords: Urban handicraft markets, Migrant artisans, Surrogate migration, Hyderabad, craft production.

Across rural Punjab, formal state institutions are often experienced as distant, opaque, and unreliable. In this context, intermediaries occupy central roles in the everyday political and social life of villages. This article examines how their authority is built and sustained through dhara bandi (a Punjabi term for factional loyalty and social-political alliances, maintained through everyday acts of mediation, presence, and performance). Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Bhi Nagar, a pseudonym for a central Punjab village, I show how intermediaries’ practices – hosting gatherings in baithaks, mediating disputes, navigating bureaucracies, and cultivating digital visibility – both bind villagers in durable networks of allegiance and render the state locally intelligible. These actors are not merely brokers who facilitate access to resources; their performative labour enacts authority, sustains factional cohesion, and materializes the state in everyday life. By linking local practices of factionalism to the symbolic authority of national leaders, intermediaries also translate national charisma into tangible forms of engagement that reinforce the perception of state responsiveness. This analysis situates intermediaries at the heart of rural governance in Punjab, contributing to broader debates on hybrid governance, the endurance of weak states, and the everyday production of political order.

We discuss Dhaneswar's study examining the daily social realities and emotive experiences faced by Dalit university students. The study analyses their mental and emotional suffering caused by the university’s social dynamics, casted behaviours, particularly from upper-caste groups. These contour Dalit students’ casted experiences, potentially leading to self-harm with, in extreme cases, a fatal outcome. The study analysed the gathered data through theoretical frameworks such as ‘humiliation’, ‘disgust’ and ‘everyday social dynamics’ in the university. In a mixed-method approach, quantitative survey data was collected from 250 students and qualitative responses from 10 case studies and 5 focus group discussions with Dalit students in a university located in Odisha, India. Using data triangulation, the study reveals the underlying causes of mental health struggles among Dalit students. The study shows how societal bias, stigma, discrimination, untouchability and a pervasive sense of ‘unseeability’ within the university environment plays a significant role in fostering despair and self-harm.

This paper explores the politics of invisibilising waste through peripheral spaces and built infrastructures of landfills. In particular, it examines the socio-spatial making and unmaking of the Bhalswa landfill in Delhi, from colonial to post-colonial times. It seeks to understand the processes and politics behind the opening of the landfill and the recent attempts at its closure, which have effectively failed. In doing so, it analyses the association of waste with urban marginalities both physical and social—in terms of the spaces it occupies and the lower-caste and class communities residing in the neighbouring areas of the landfill. Furthermore, the article critically explores the role of technology recently installed around the landfill in eliminating the waste crisis by invisibilising it – both spatially and materially, by incinerating waste and converting it into energy for profiteering purposes and creating new peripheries, i.e., in the atmosphere. This ‘dirty’ landscape of discarded materials, thus, offers us complex insights into the production of spatial inequalities, entrenchment of caste-based social hierarchies and the limits of technology.

Post-truth is increasingly linked to the decline of democracy through its association with fake news and misinformation. In recent literature, however, there has been a shift in discussing post-truth as a type of political discourse premised on desire. Building on this shift, I develop a new interpretive methodological framework to analyse textual data for post-truth narratives. The framework is premised on identifying and analysing the relationship between elite rhetoric of desire, emotions, and citizens’ positionality within the narrative using discourse analysis. I apply this approach to 1209 newspaper articles from three leading Pakistani newspapers during national elections between 2008 and 2018. I identify post-truth narratives on democracy and find that post-truth narratives highlight the democratisation attempts in the country. I argue that post-truth discourse can play an important role during democratisation, acting as a powerful mobilising strategy as opposed to being associated with the decline of democracy.

Interview with Bharti Arora, an Assistant Professor of English at the Department of English, University of Delhi.

Special Section titled: Decolonial praxis/es of solidarity in Indian literary and cultural discourses on social movements

For the full journal issue, see: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/ccsa20/33/1

Summary

The special section probes how Indian literary and cultural discourses represent the making, unmaking, and remaking(s) of solidarity among citizen subjects, who agitate for their rights vis-à-vis hegemonic discourses of the nation-state. Such an exploration becomes significant to challenge what Mignolo (2018) calls ‘the colonial matrix of power’ (141),and the ways in which this matrix creates and enforces a regime of domination, management and control of South Asian states and their indigenous resources. The biggest challenge that confronts decolonised states is the reconstitution of ‘epistemological decolonization, as decoloniality to clear the way for new intercultural communication, for an interchange of experiences and meaning, as the basis of another relationality in opposition to the universalist projections of the western civilization’ (Mignolo 2021, 4). Werbner and Davis (2005), like Mignolo (2021) have cautioned against the idea of the nation-state, which is based on the hegemony of a particular group/community over all others, where the ideological apparatuses of civil society and state are controlled by a particular community. This vision comes closer to deploying exclusionary tactics of racism, which constructs ‘minorities into assumed deviants from the normal’ (Yuval-Davis 1997, 11), and systemically excludes them from accessing resources of the state.