Completed PhD Thesis Completed Doctoral Projects/As First Supervisor

Farha Noor

This study aims to trace and investigate various conceptualisations of leisure, idleness, and otium in modern Bengali and Urdu prose. While it acknowledges that concepts are created and established through encounters, interactions, and translations, the project aims to rethink what a conceptual study of related concepts in a multilateral and multilingual landscape like colonial and post-colonial South Asia can bring to the field of conceptual history. Locating modernity and its associative shifts in the way time, space, and attitudes towards the literary are felt as central to understanding otium in this context, it proposes that the literary and the leisurely are deeply entangled. The project goes on to read this complex conceptualisation through an investigation into the emotional manifestations of leisure and idleness in Bengali and Urdu literary texts. Claiming emotions as central to the study of such dynamic concepts, this study attempts to engage with some of the elusive and understudied leisurely feelings that are intricately associated with the literary in modern South Asia.

Jolita Zabarskaite

This doctoral thesis is about the importance of ‘Greater India’ as a concept, a movement, a set of institutions, and a framing idea in the formative years of Indian nationalism and state-building. It grew out of an Orientalist scholarship framework that dealt with the question of Hindu and Buddhist influences in South-East Asia. The theme, which arose partially as a justification for European colonization of South-East Asia, was renamed and popularized as ‘Greater India’ by Indian intellectuals, scholar-nationalists, and publicists. This idea of Indian civilization across the sea became the basis for claiming the greatness of (a Hindu) India in the past, and by extension the importance of a recognition of that past glory in order to revive it in the future.

Daniela Cappello 

My project focuses on practices of obscenity in the Bengali anti-establishment literature of the 1960s, most notably on the Hungry Generation Movement (1961-1965). Assuming that the “aesthetics of obscenity” was seen as a form of political resistance by many anti-establishment writers and artists of Western counter-cultures, this study aims at showing how some practices of dissent were used in post-Independence Bengali literary culture to shape an alternative identity for the Bengali urban intellectual. Moreover, this very debate on obscenity and ensuing censorship made space for a wider discussion on freedom of speech which filled political newspapers and reviews throughout India. Despite the alleged “indigeneity” of the movement’s background, the study wants to show how the Hungryalists actually “filtered” through their writings some of the most typical practices of Western counter-cultures, as was the case for obscenity, in order to break with the Bengali cultural establishment. 

The study will focus on the Bengali Hungry Generation movement by investigating its “little magazines” and other kinds of small publications (i.e. bulletin, leaflets, anthologies) which were seen as an alternative cultural practice intended to reshape the Calcutta postcolonial literary space. These little publications represented in fact the only press promoting new literature and socio-political protest whereas the big publishing industry remained silent due to government censorship. The Hungryalist movement exemplifies the wave of postmodern experimental writings of the 1960s – which was widespread in little magazines – attempting to subvert the urban (Calcutta) cultural establishment that was still imbued with colonial influences. Despite the trial that sentenced the authors to jail for obscenity in their poetry, the movement had a great impact on the shaping of literary counter-cultures in Bengal. The research therefore raises questions about the much debated search for a postcolonial cultural identity which constantly evolved throughout the decades after the Independence of India. Following this assumption and using written, oral and visual sources, I intend to explore this subversive literary culture of post-Independence Bengal. 
 

Oyndrila Sarkar

Oyndrila's doctoral project explores the antecedents of the construction of the Indian state through a study of the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India (GTSI) and its survey operations. It studies the work and the working relationships the GTSI entailed, and inanimate objects viz. the tools and instruments of surveying seen as relevant social actors in these survey networks, and looks at the men, materials and the non-methodical methods of state formation on the borderlands of what became the Indian state. 
 

Arian Hopf

Die Untersuchung der Aligarh-Bewegung, die in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts durch Sayyid Ahmad Khan gegründet wurde und sich durch eine intensive Auseinandersetzung mit der christlichen Mission und der Wissenschaft auszeichnet, steht im Fokus dieses Projekts. Sowohl Mission als auch Wissenschaft wurden als Bedrohung für den Islam wahrgenommen. Die Aligarh-Bewegung strebte in dieser Situation anders als andere kontemporäre Reformbewegungen eine komparatistische Methode an, die den vollständigen Einklang des Islam mit der Wissenschaft und damit seine universelle Überlegenheit belegen sollte. Dieser komparatistische Weg erforderte eine einheitliche Terminologie, die Übersetzungsprozesse mit europäischen Religionskonzepten nach sich zog. Das Projekt soll diese Übersetzungsprozesse, die keineswegs als schlichte Übertragung von Konzepten vom einen in den anderen Kontext missverstanden werden dürfen, sowie die Wechselseitigkeit der Austauschprozesse über Religion aufzeigen und analysieren. Ziel des Projektes soll es darüber hinaus sein, die der Aligarh-Bewegung häufig vorgeworfene These einer reinen „Verwestlichung“, die auf der Annahme eines essentialisierten Standardislams gründet, kritisch zu hinterfragen und die Pluralität des Islam herauszustellen.

Johanna Hahn

Dhrupadi Chattopadhyay

Conversion to Christianity has never easily lent itself to visions of the Indian nation. Christianity in Bengal has been habitually read as an external stimulus which fostered the Bengal Renaissance, but ironically had negligible contributions in the internal struggles of the colonial public. Reading into the silences of this assessment has been used as an incentive in this dissertation. To this end, the literary production of the Hindu upper caste converts to Christianity has served as a case in point. The complicated socio-political location of theChristian converts—ostracized socially by the Hindu majority but privileged in terms of education and class/caste—in an age of political turmoil and vigorous social reform allows a unique entry point into the literary culture of colonial Bengal. Examining the English and the Bengali writings of the convert authors, this work makes a strong case for re-introducing the religious as a crucial axis of enquiry for studying entangled literary cultures.

Sukla Chatterjee

Jürgen Schaflechner

Max Stille 

In recent years, scholarship on Islamic preaching has emphasised the importance of the sensual process of mediation and the multitude of forms of preaching far beyond the Friday sermon. In contemporary Bangladesh, much of Islamic preaching takes place in “preaching gatherings” (Bg. oẏāj māhˡphils, *Ar. waʿz maḥfils) held in tents erected on harvested fields and public space in towns, continuing late into the night. The audience varies in size but always follows the discourse of the preacher along protocols known from poetic and religious assemblies, closely interacting responding to the sermons vocally and emotionally. 

How to analyse such congregations and their sermons and what do we learn from them? In my monograph, I trace processes that simultaneously involve, one, Islamic scholarship and hopes for religious salvation, two, imaginative processes triggered by the preachers’ narrations, three, bodily responses to the preacher’s vocal performance and patterns of call and response, and, four, the practice and learning of community consensus. All these levels come together in a process of reception. 

I argue, on an abstract level, that expanding insights from literary studies to oral material can help us to understand the experience of contemporary Islam and public culture in Bangladesh and beyond. The advantage of literary and rhetorical studies is their focus on form and their ability trace multilayered processes of reception in necessary detail and depth. At the same time, I make a methodological intervention to widen the scope of these approaches by bringing them in contact with ethnographic research and the rhetoric of music and sound. This allows to grasp the interrelation of bodily sensations and imagination in public literary and religious practice. It opens up a unique window on the subject formation in what might be termed an Islamic fly-over-state.