New Directions in South Asia

This paper explores the lifeworlds of third gender khwaja saras in Pakistan within the expansive, underexplored religious tradition of Faqiri. Faqiri refers to the transgressive, often antinomian, tradition of Sufi holy poverty. Khwaja saras in Pakistan have been the locus of well-meaning activism and legislation to integrate them into the state as rights-bearing subjects through the secular category of Trans, which has also produced a strong backlash from right-wing conservatives. Drawing on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in which my khwaja sara interlocuters turn to Faqiri to explain what Trans and other categories fail to capture, I argue that both khwaja sara lifeworlds and Faqiri produce gendered selves that cannot be flattened into secular categories. Moreover, what unites those “in Faqiri” – from low-caste Hindus to transgressive mystics to occult practitioners to peripatetic animal entertainers is a subaltern religious imagination that defies and exceed the state’s conceptions of “Islam” and “religion” and “Sufism.”

This paper examines how modernity has altered the notions of authority in a South Asian Muslim devotional community. In focus are the Da’udi Bohras, a close-knit community of Shi‘i Isma‘ili Muslim merchants led by a lineage of holy men called da‘i al-mutlaq (or da‘i, the summoner). In response to colonial modernity, the Indic caste of Bohras (Gujarati, traders) became a global Isma‘ili community, claiming to be the true heir to the Fatimid-Isma‘ili heritage. This redefinition has also seen the representation of the da‘i shifting from a miracle-performing “perfect guide” to a scholarly figure. Such articulations have significant implications for the post-colonial identity of the Bohras and Muslim communities in South Asia.

In this paper I examine the Christian Medical College (CMC) founded by a Protestant medical missionary, Dr. Ida Scudder (1870-1960) in 1900 in Vellore, South India. I focus on the work conducted in the department of the Rural Unit of Health and Social Affairs (RUHSA), an NGO offshoot of the CMC founded in 1977. I draw primarily on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at RUHSA in the summer of 2023, supplemented with archival records from “The Ida Scudder Papers,” an extensive archive dedicated to Ida Scudder and the CMC. I use one of the self-help groups on campus as a case study to explore how developmental ideals are translated into action, and how the women within the self-help group interact with those ideals. I argue that the racial capital accrued by foreign missionaries has found new expressions in both caste and religious positionality in modern day medical missionary endeavors.

In scholarly treatments of Sanskrit textual traditions, the genre of commentary (bhāṣya) has generally overshadowed a closely adjacent genre known as vādagrantha, no doubt a result of its capacious and elusive nature. This paper focuses on the Svāminārāyaṇa-Siddhānta-Sudhā, a 21st-century vādagrantha text of the theistic Vedānta school Akṣara-Puruṣottama Darśana. It first engages with definitional questions concerning the nature and purpose of this genre—which appears prominently across the Vedānta, Nyāya, Mīmāṃsā, and Buddhist traditions—and locates its conceptual origin in the eponymous Nyāya notion of vāda. The paper demonstrates the significance of this genre in two respects: 1) its concern first and foremost with ideas, as opposed to the shastric texts alone, and in turn 2) its crucial relevance in systematising the beliefs of a religious tradition in a Sanskrit philosophical register, in view of a particular socio-historical context.