P.C. Saidalavi

The idea of the region has been at the center of knowledge production in many ways. During the colonial expansions, regions such as the Indian subcontinent have been conceived as places where a robust civilization once reigned supreme. The colonialists assumed themselves to be tasked with the responsibility of reviving the lost traditions for the populations of the subcontinent (Chakrabarty 2000; Cohn 1991). Postcolonial scholarship has challenged such assumptions in many ways, arguing that such caricature was produced precisely to legitimize colonial rule, and the elites of the subcontinent took an active part in the construction of such portrayal at least till the 1860s (Nandy 1988; Prakash 1999). From the 1860s onwards, we witness multiple ways of engaging with colonial claims of superiority, including reading of scriptural traditions and myths, construction of alternative myths, and eventually newer conceptions of self and identity for the nation, exemplified in the life of Mahatma Gandhi (Nandy1988; Skaria 2016). In these debates, the region was conceived by the elites to be synonymous with the nationalist assertions of the imaginations of a new state.

This idea of region has also been a key ground for what is termed as ‘Global South’ in recent times, though these scholars do not equate the South as a nationalist region (Banerjee 2020; Nigam 2021). They posit that our conceptual vocabularies of, say the nation-state, citizen, individual, etc. are roducts of particular European social formations and we need to foreground the South as a terrain of theory now to arrive at alternative conceptual components to make sense of our lived reality. Such critiques have taken two forms in recent times either through vernacularizing theory (Menon 2022) or by critiquing and enlarging the constituent elements of Eurocentric concepts(Banerjee 2020; Nigam 2021).

This workshop aims to foreground another genealogy for the region by foregrounding the everyday. Many scholars have noted that with the emergence of the postcolonial state in India, other ideas came to the fore such as language , ethnicity, culture,e and politics to define the idea of region, with the result that notions of region came to be foregrounded and tussled within the concerns of a federal structure (Devika 2008; Kaviraj 1991; Mitchell 2009; Orsini 2012; Pandian2019; Prasad 2000; Radhakrishnan 2021). Yet, there have also been attempts to locate ‘region’ not as a bounded entity but as a node in a large network of transnationalism, migration and cosmopolitanism (Devika 2015; Kumar 2017; Osellaand Osella 2007). We want to push this thinking further by looking at categories such as politics, culture, religion, science, caste and so on, not constrained by federal concerns but as they are constituted, expressed, challenged and reconfigured in everyday life. We work with the premise that particularly since the liberalization initiatives of the 1990s, ideas such as the regional and national have been challenged. As Fredric Jameson (2000) posits, globalization,n and finance capital have unsettled these conceptual binaries in contemporary times, providing a range of options to the ‘local’ actors such as resistance, ethnicization or diverse forms of negotiations (c.f. Appadurai and Breckenridge 1995).

This workshop aims to bring together a group of scholars working on Kerala to think about the idea of ‘region’ as it has shaped, challenged, and mediated their work and how they have used the region as a category in their own work. The idea is to push the boundaries of conceptual registers within which their works are placed. We work with the following set of questions; Is region an important category for thinking about lived experiences and social scientific concepts ? What does a focus on the region enable us to say about broader categories such as capital, nation, federalism, religion, caste, science, and so on? How do we configure the region within a complexly interconnected world? Each participant will share his/her papers in advance, and they will be discussants for each other’s papers during the workshop.

SUB-THEMES

• Region/South as an analytical category
• Globalization and finance capital
• Community, state, nation
• Space and location
• Infrastructure and development
• Religion, ethics, and everyday life
• Hierarchy and caste
• Body, health, and wellbeing
• Family and kinship
• AI, science, and technologies

These themes are merely indicative. We are looking for scholarly works on Kerala that squarely address the issue of ‘region’ from any field.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Abstracts: Submit a 500-word abstract to thinkingregion2025@gmail.com by 28thFebruary 2025.

Notification of Acceptance: Accepted abstracts will be notified by 15th March 2025.

Full Paper Submission: Presenters are required to submit a 5000-word paper by 31st May 2025.

REGISTRATION DETAILS

Registration Fee: 2000 INR (covers shared accommodation and food during the conference)

Registration Deadline: 31st March 2025.

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