Conference brochure can be downloaded here - Tereza Kuldova

A Contested Phantasm: The Tata Nano as Phantasmagoria, Predator and Hooptie - Kenneth BoNielsen ............................................................................................................................................... 21‘Speaking’ the Imaginations of an ‘Emerging India’: The Indian Prime Minister’s discursiveprojections of a new India post 1991 - Anandita Bajpai ................................................................... 21Making Her Mark in History: Mayawati’s Public Statues in Uttar Pradesh, India - Melia Belli ........ 22An Indian Summer: Corruption, Class, and the Lokpal Protests - Aalok Khandekar ........................ 23‘Beggars of Lahore’, film screening & Talk: Begging in Mumbai: why do people donate to beggars? -Sheba Saeed ...................................................................................................................................... 24PRACTICAL INFORMATION ................................................................................................................... 25CONFERENCE VENUE ......................................................................................................................... 25Museum of Cultural History .......................................................................................................... 25Map................................................................................................................................................ 25CONFERENCE HOTEL ......................................................................................................................... 26Cochs Pensjonat ............................................................................................................................ 26Map................................................................................................................................................ 26CONTACT: CONFERENCE ORGANIZER ............................................................................................... 26TRAVEL ............................................................................................................................................... 27Map................................................................................................................................................ 27MAILING LIST OF CONFERENCE SPEAKERS ........................................................................................... 283 | P a g eIndian Phantasm Conference, 10 th -11 th December, Oslo, © Tereza Kuldova, 2012

CONFERENCE PROGRAMDAY 18:00 – 8:45 – Coffee, tea, snacks & Registration8:45 – 9:00 – Welcome (Tereza Kuldova, Organizer & Rane Willerslev, Museum Director)Session 19:00 – 9:30 – Rachel Dwyer: Bollywood’s India9:30 – 10: 00 – Kjersti Larsen: Regime Change, Indian Images and Re-Casted Aesthetics in Zanzibar10:00 – 10:30 – Aditi Sen: Des Pardes: Portrayal of Africans and Asians in Bollywood Movies10:30 – 11:00 – Coffee Break & SnacksSession 211:00 – 11:30 – Caroline Osella: Cha-cha heels, strapless lurex gowns and Swaroski abayas: onGlamour and Glitz in a south Indian urban Muslim trading community11:30 – 12:00 – Tereza Kuldova: Designer Boutiques are Good to Think: Heritage Luxury on View inIndia12:00 – 12:30 – Clare Wilkinson-Weber: ‘Body Drapes’ and Bindis12:30 – 14:00 LunchSession 314:00 – 14:30 – Jean-Claude Galey: Fantazying with an Imaginary: Current Indian aesthetics incultural interaction14:30 – 15:00 - Némésis Srour: Body language in Bollywood movies of the 21st century: shaping of atransnational self15:00 – 15:30 - Mithuraaj Dhusia: Dark Dreams: The Phantasms of Contemporary India15:30 – 16:00 – Coffee Break & SnacksSession 416:00 – 16:30 – Kristin Hanssen: Authentic Bauls are Mad and Carefree16:30 – 17:00 – Marion Wettstein: The last noble savages: Contemporary Western Representationand Perception of the Nagas of Northeast India17:00 – 17:30 – Geir Heierstad: Being an artist by caste. Three narratives of image making inKumartuli, Kolkata17:30 – 18:00 – Break & SnacksFilm Screening & Discussion18:00 – 19:00 Flyoverdelhi by Paolo Favero & Angelo Fontana19:00 – 19:30 Discussion with Paolo Favero20: 00 – Conference Dinner4 | P a g eIndian Phantasm Conference, 10 th -11 th December, Oslo, © Tereza Kuldova, 2012

DAY 28:30 – 9:00 – Coffee, tea, snacksSession 19:00 – 9:30 – Aneeta Rajendran: Popular Forms: Escapes from Alter-normativity?9:30 – 10:00 – Paul Boyce: Imagining Intimacies: Social and sexual transitions in West Bengal10:00 – 10:30 – Xenia Zeiler: Indian Digital Games and their Globally Debated Representations ofHinduism10:30 – 11:00 – Coffee Break & SnacksSession 211:00 – 11:30 – Manuela Ciotti: A pavilion state of mind: ‘India-out-of-India’ at the 54 th Venice ArtBiennale11:30 – 12: 00 – Lars Jørun Langøien: Yoga and the spiritual authenticity of India12:00 – 12:30 – Michal Tošner & Tereza Kuldova: Dreaming India in the Heart of Europe12:30 – 14:00 – LunchSession 314:00 – 14:30 – Samrat Schmiem Kumar: Indian (global) modernity and subaltern spaces: Anencounter with the ‘(un)modern dham’14:30 – 15:00 – Sanjay Srivastava: Sudden Selves: ‘Personality Development’, Tupperware and the‘Chain of Confidence’15:00-15:30 – Kenneth Bo Nielsen: A Contested Phantasm: The Tata Nano as Phantasmagoria,Predator and Hooptie15:30 – 16:00 – Coffee Break & SnacksSession 416:00 – 16:30 – Anandita Bajpai: ‘Speaking’ the Imaginations of an ‘Emerging India’: The IndianPrime Minister’s discursive projections of a new India post 199116:30 – 17:00 – Melia Belli: Making Her Mark in History: Mayawati’s Public Statues in Uttar Pradesh,India17:00 – 17:30 – Aalok Khandekar: An Indian Summer: Corruption, Class, and the Lokpal17:30 – 18:00 – Break & SandwichesFilm Screening18:00 – 18:45 – Beggars of Lahore by Sheba Saeed18:45 – 19:15 – Presentation and Discussion with Sheba Saeed19:30 – Farewell Champagne & Tapas5 | P a g eIndian Phantasm Conference, 10 th -11 th December, Oslo, © Tereza Kuldova, 2012

PAPER ABSTRACTSBollywood’s India - Rachel DwyerSOAS, University of LondonThis richly illustrated paper presents some of my forthcoming book, Bollywood’s India (Reaktion,2013), which is a study of the imaginaries of Hindi cinema, whose interpretations of contemporaryIndia are a guide to understanding dreams and hopes, fears and anxieties. Often dismissed asescapist entertainment, this paper seeks to explore the nature of this escapism and to examine whatis entertaining about these hugely popular films which eschew realistic depictions of the everyday,arguing that this is the best guide we have to the way modern Indians are thinking about the newIndia. It seeks to look at cinema as a repository of imaginaries and imaginary worlds, showing waysthat change is imagined in films, where narratives, images and sounds, meanings are condensed anddisplaced by star images and intensified by melodrama. It also considers how the Hindi cinema inturn shapes the way that people see modern India and interpret it – creates images, words, musicand affect which in turn generate images of India.Rachel Dwyer is a professor of Indian Cultures and Cinema at SOAS, University of London. Her mainresearch interest is in Hindi cinema where she has researched and published on filmmagazines and popular fiction; consumerism and the new middle classes; love anderoticism (of the wet sari and of the kiss and saying ‘I love you’); visual culture (sets,locations and costumes); religion (Hinduism and Islam); emotions (anger andhappiness); Gandhi and the biopic; cinema in East Africa. She has written a book inthe British Film Institute’s ‘World Directors’ series about one of the great figures ofthe Hindi film industry, Yash Chopra, with whom she has worked for severalyears. She later wrote the BFI’s guide to ‘100 Bollywood films’.Regime Change, Indian Images and Re-casted Aesthetics in Zanzibar - KjerstiLarsenMuseum of Cultural History, University of OsloIndian films have for long been widely appreciated in Zanzibar and the imaginaries they representhave influenced contemporary aesthetics and life-style ideals. Indian movies were from the 1920sshown in the various cinema halls in town. Still with the introduction of TV—Television Zanzibar(TVZ) was inaugurated in January 1974, the first colour TV station in East Africa—and later on, thevideo people started to watch films at home or, as were the case for most people at that time, in theneighbours’ house. Watching TV and videos in “private” settings changed the context in which filmswere seen and thereby also the manner in which the audience related to and “used” thesenarratives. The stories as well as their elaborate wrappings in particular geographical, social andmoral environments were somehow turned into examples of modernity in terms of attitudes,6 | P a g eIndian Phantasm Conference, 10 th -11 th December, Oslo, © Tereza Kuldova, 2012

aesthetics and life-styles. Indian films have always been generally appreciated. Of particular interestto this paper, however, is how the films have engendered reflections on modernity and processes ofmodernization and the paradoxes involved in such political and economic transformations. Besides,for Zanzibaris of Indian origin the films seemed to provide information on how to be and live asIndian not only in India, but also elsewhere.Kjersti Larsen is Professor in the Department of Ethnography, Museum of CulturalHistory, University of Oslo. Her main research interests include: ritual andperformance; religion, knowledge and gender; everyday life politics and socialchange; modernity identity and mobility, African societies and Indian Ocean region;Islam and Muslim practices. Larsen has been a visiting scholar at the Centre forCross-Cultural Research on Women, University of Oxford; Centre d’ÉtudesAfricaines, École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales; International Institute forthe Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM), Leiden University, Netherlands. She conductsresearch in Muslim societies in East Africa; at the Swahili Coast, particularly in Zanzibar (1984-present) and in Northern Sudan, mostly in the Bayoda desert (1997-2008). Larsen has severalinternational publications, including the monograph Where Humans and Spirits Meet: The Politics ofRituals and Identified Spirits in Zanzibar, Oxford: Berghahn (2008).Des Pardes: Portrayal of Africans and Asians in Bollywood Movies - Aditi SenQueen's University, Department of History, CanadaWhen Bollywood actress Rimi Sen gave her director Rohit Shetty a compliment and aid '[H]e is sogood that he can even make a Black African look good,' it was not a ere reflection of her ignorancebut a deep rooted cultural bias that has dominated Indian popular culture for decades and continuesto do so. Indian actresses have happily portrayed African and Asian women in ways that were alwaysa strange blend of cultural clichés and received Indian values. His paper focuses on the depiction ofAfricans and South East Asians in Bollywood movies. Instead of focusing on movies like Padosan andGumnaam where dark skin one has been lampooned, I look at films like Hum Saya, Do Gaj Zameen keNeeche, man and Aankhen where these nationalities have been reviewed through the Indian yes.Drawing from racist jokes commonplace in Indian popular culture, Bollywood comedies haverepeatedly relied on racism to evoke humor. The paper looks at dramas and thrillers that haveperpetuated overt racism and are totally unaware of their political incorrectness. Thepaper then analyzes the reasons behind these depictions and how recent socio-politicalconditions and economic relations have played a role in shaping stereotypes that areuniquely Indian.Aditi Sen is an historian of South Asian religion, gender and sexuality and food history.Aditi's doctoral dissertation focused on The Rig Veda and the Atharva Veda—two essential texts fromAncient India that document orthodox and folk religion respectively. Her current research is on lowbudget Bollywood horror films. She focuses on this marginalized industry particularly since it7 | P a g eIndian Phantasm Conference, 10 th -11 th December, Oslo, © Tereza Kuldova, 2012

subverts the constructed narrative of Hinduism and religious moral codes by creating a separatesphere of morality and religious system.Cha-cha heels, strapless lurex gowns and Swarovski abayas: on Glamourand Glitz in a south Indian urban Muslim trading community - Caroline OsellaSOAS, LondonCalicut (Kozhikode) Muslims have been engaged in modernist projects of rational self-improvement –including strong commitment to Islahi (‘salafi’) Islamic reformism - since the 1930s. But the 19th and20th centuries also saw a heyday of trade, wealth accumulation and frantic spending and hospitality,as the community thrived from its Indian ocean business links, especially those with Gulf Arabs.Lucrative commodity export and gold smuggling have been replaced with export of labour asfortunes reversed, Calicut dwindled, and the newly oil rich Arabs became patrons and employers.Memories of Calicut’s past of ‘luxury living’ bleed into contemporary dreams of Gulfie excess and thelifestyle opportunities of post 1980s India. While commodity trade dwindles, Calicut’s women - asmajor consumers of fast fashion - continue to keep the bazaar moving. Shopkeepers and non-Muslims alike claim to recognize a particular Muslim aesthetic – flashy, prone to excess and show,attached to the cheap transient shine: thinly euphemized codes for ‘vulgar’. I discuss someethnography of women and girls’ fashion, and both accept but also give trouble to local distinctionhierarchies and their category of ‘Muslim style’. I draw attention to the importance of the figure ofthe girl child and the connectedness of mother-daughter relationships. Finally, I ask the ethnographyto suggest to us how recent moves towards giving objects their due (Object Oriented Ontologies)might shift our analyses of fashion cultures.Caroline Osella is Reader in south Asian Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies,London. Recent publications include ‘Desires Under Reform’, *Culture andReligion*2011, and (ed) ‘Islamic Reformism in South Asia’ (CUP 2012). Currentprojects: Research with Zayed University, Abu Dhabi, on Arab-Gulf encounters; Abook thinking through 20 years’ Kerala fieldwork and unpicking processes by whichcategories, identities and subjectivities congeal and get put to work.Designer Boutiques are Good to Think: Heritage Luxury on View in India -Tereza KuldovaMuseum of Cultural History, University of OsloThe paper’s title is a paraphrase of Arjun Appadurai’s book chapter entitled Museums are Good toThink: Heritage on View in India, the idea behind being one of re-positioning the increasinglyquestion of negotiations of Indianness within the realm of the largely understudied and emerging8 | P a g eIndian Phantasm Conference, 10 th -11 th December, Oslo, © Tereza Kuldova, 2012

luxury market. On a closer inspection of the interactions between designers and their customers inDelhi and Lucknow based upper-end fashion and designer boutiques and studios, it turns out thatthese spaces are as much spaces of consumption, leisure and shopping as of negotiations of upperclass Indianness, cultural values, tradition, heritage and nationalism. And so while the museums inIndia have mostly lost their luster, the designer studios that often strikingly resemble old fashionedmuseums – with their private collections, desire to educate and pass on the values ofconnoisseurship, taste and elite culture, and desire to preserve, revive and recreate the grandeur ofIndia’s past – have turned into the jadu ghars (wonder houses) of the ‘new’ neoliberal India. Withinthe space of the designer boutique, heritage is commodified, idealized, sanitized and sold with apromise of turning into an inalienable possession. What is not possible in a museum is made possiblein the designer boutique – heritage can be touched, possessed, appropriated,played with, experienced, exploiting fully its corpothetic potential forengagement and eventually bearing a promise of a transformation of thewearer. So, what happens when museum value of an object blends withcommodity value within a shared space of aesthetic economy?Tereza Kuldova is a PhD fellow at the University of Oslo, Museum of CulturalHistory and is currently finishing her thesis entitled Designing Elites: Fashionand Value in Urban India and has published on Indian fashion, artification and the urban Indian male.‘Body drapes’ and bindis - Clare Wilkinson-WeberWashington State University, VancouverAppropriation of 'Bollywood' tropes has intensified in recent years in American media and consumerproducts. In this paper, I intend to focus in particular upon the ways in which Bollywood sartorialcodes are reproduced and marketed, whether in film or television set pieces that stage pastiches ofsongs and dances, or Halloween and fancy dress products. What is most interesting about thesesimulations is less with whether they are "accurate" so much as what the selection and amplificationof certain features suggests about (to borrow Taussig's book title) mimesis and alterity. Of specialinterest is the fascination with excess that marks these endeavors and how it intersects withimperatives, acknowledged explicitly and implicitly by Hindi film costume producers. Rather thanseeing costume pastiche as dynamic hybrid practices employing the passive ingredients of mediaproducts, I will argue that costume pastiche is a response to a global Bollywood imaginary that is fedambiguously and contradictorily by the Mumbai film industry itself.9 | P a g eClare Wilkinson-Weber is a social anthropologist interested in arts, media, gender, andwork. Her research has been focused on India, where she has done two major studies.The first was a study of the economics and aesthetics of the Lucknow embroideryindustry, and led to her book, Embroidering Lives: Women's Work and Skill in theLucknow Embroidery Industry, published by SUNY Press in 1999. Since 2002, she hasbeen researching costume production in the Bombay (Mumbai) film industry, collectingIndian Phantasm Conference, 10 th -11 th December, Oslo, © Tereza Kuldova, 2012

over 100 interviews with designers, tailors, embroiderers, wardrobe managers (dressmen) andcostume suppliers (dresswalas). Planned future projects are to study the changing roles of women infilm production, and a comparative analysis of film costume production in Vancouver B.CFantasying with an Imaginary: Current Indian aesthetics in culturalinteraction - Jean-Claude GaleyEHESS, ParisThis presentation intends to nurture a discussion on the dynamics presently at play on differentaesthetic stages. It will briefly make use of a series of examples belonging to different registers andgenres (dance, music, theatre, literature and cinema) so as to contextualize and analyze what theircreative processes involve in relation to their respective ‘traditional’ moorings. Building up from anethno-historical approach, the argument will contrast distinct modes of transmission, questioningthe status of creation, pointing how public audiences and the role of media’s impact the nature ofstyles while en-gendering new works and forms of restitution. It will also show how performance andperformative dimensions growingly transform the nature of training, skills and knowledge. Remarkswill be made on how artists entertain unprecedented provocative and playful displays appropriatingpostures, fashions and techniques imported from outside while soliciting with more or less radicalshifts a cultural past they re-appropriate and adjust to present concerns. In the venture, the paperwould have first to specify a precise definition of the terms fantazy and imaginary. Both arenecessary to read what the observed material say. Still, what they exactly mean and imply in such acultural and anthropological approaches radically differ from their use in psychoanalytical, literary oreven more daily discourses. It will also ensure that notions like ‘processes’ and ‘transition’ would notbe approached or understood in isolation as if constituting by themselves analytical concepts. Forboth actually involve and result from the interaction of distinct spaces and times, often mobilizingthe combined presence of two different universes of values. As such, they could not be credited topossess any analytical relevance of their own, and request to be approached as mere products ofcombined relational, interactive and comparative levels. The examples mobilized here in the exercisewill therefore con- tribute to illustrate from what and to where creativity unreflexively proceeds.Jean-Claude Galey, né en 1946, est un anthropologue et ethnologue indianiste francais. Il estdirecteur d'études à l'EHESS rattaché au Centre d'études de l'Inde et de l'Asie duSud et professeur au Department of Social Anthropology de l'université d'Oslo.Parallèlement, il est éditeur de la revue Social Anthropology aux CambridgeUniversity Press. Ses travaux sont publiés autant en français qu'en anglais. Lesprincipaux intérêts de recherche de Jean-Claude Galey sont les castes, la royauté,les mouvements sociaux-politiques et religieux, les cérémonies religieuses, lamorphologie sociale, mais aussi les théories de l'anthropologie et l'ethnohistoire .Indfluencées par les travaux de Louis Dumont, ses recherches sur les nouvellesformes d'identité dans le sous-continent indien sont issues d'une enquête ethnographique dans unancien état (le Tehri-Garhwal, Uttar Pradesh) auxquels s'en adjoindront d'autres : Karnataka, Madhya10 | P a g eIndian Phantasm Conference, 10 th -11 th December, Oslo, © Tereza Kuldova, 2012

Pradesh, Gujerat. Son approche comparative et historique s'appuie sur le résultat de ces enquêtes oùil a accordé un intérêt particulier au rôle joué par le lien de créancier à débiteur.Body language in Bollywood movies of the 21st century: shaping of atransnational self - Némésis SrourEHESS, ParisThe huge place allocated to cinema in India enables the anthropologist to draw a picture, throughthe visual study of popular arts, of what is on India’s mind today. How it represent itself and its placein the world. The study of body language in films, can be understood as an exploration into culture’sidentity, people’s social and political self. Since the nineties, India has had an increase consciousnessof the existence of its diaspora and the actual production of films cannot deny this and is speciallymarketed towards this urban middle-class audience, which has recently emerged in India. In themind of the producers and filmmakers, this urbanised audience inside and outside India has a verysimilar frame of mind, one that longs for modernity. This I argue enabled the rise of a new bodylanguage: a transnational one. The Indian Bollywood icons of the 21st century need to be globalised,to ensure they’ll cross and reach audiences overseas. Thus, the norms of beauty forfemale and male bodies are changing to fit into the western norms; the sari ismodernised, making it more sexy and sizzling than the traditional one; a new way ofdepicting family ties emerges, enabling the rise of an individual self which isdepicted through the very cinematographic language.Némésis Srour is a PhD student at l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales(EHESS) in Paris. Affiliated to the Department of Anthropology and South Asian Studies, research inthe fields of anthropology of the body and visual anthropology, specializing in indian and middleeasterncinemas.Dark Dreams: The Phantasms of Contemporary India - Mithuraaj DhusiaUniversity of DelhiThe purpose of this paper is to explore the multiple ways in which contemporary Indian horror filmsallow articulation of the dark underbelly of the Indian society. Mainstream Indian cinema, with aneye on the box-office more often than not fixates on the staple romance-cum-action journey of theheroic male protagonist/s. Horror films, in contrast, generate a set of alternative explorations thatmove beyond this male heroic project and carefully assimilate a number of non-normative socialissues that hardly find voice in their more mainstream counterparts. Unfortunately, Indian academicscholarship has neglected the study of horror films produced in India. Western film scholars writingon Indian cinema too have ignored a more sustained study of Indian horror films limiting themselves11 | P a g eIndian Phantasm Conference, 10 th -11 th December, Oslo, © Tereza Kuldova, 2012

primarily to the Ramsay phenomenon of the late 1970s and 1980s. In the process, the face of Indianhorror cinema has generally been synomynous with that of Hindi horror films. However, horror filmsare also produced in a number of other Indian languages such as Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, Marathiand Bangla. In the present paper, I will examine how horror films made in the post-globalised Indiaespouse the cause of subalterns both within specific communities and in the larger framework of theentire nation. I shall grow on the following films to sketch my argument: Kanchana (Tamil, 2011),Ragini MMS (Hindi, 2011), Kana Kanmani (Malayalam, 2009), Punnami Nagu (Telugu, 2009), 13B(Hindi, 2009) and Manichitrathazhu (Malayalam, 1993). The issues these films deal with include thetransgendered, woman empowerment, abortion, animal poaching, denotified and nomadic tribes,and the intrusion of technology in the private space of a postmodern individual.Mithuraaj Dhusiya teaches English Literature at the Department of English,Hans Raj College, University of Delhi, India. Currently, he is pursuing his Ph.D. onIndian horror films from the University of Delhi. His research interests includecinema from all over the world – the more horrific the better, gender studies,sexualities studies, Hindi and Urdu poetry. He has presented papers at severalinternational and national conferences.Authentic Bauls are Mad and Carefree - Kristin HanssenUniversity of OsloBengali intellectuals (bhadralok) imagine Bauls to be like beats and hippies, whose ganja smokinghabits are signs of eccentricity “prized among the Bauls.” Dressed in orange robes, they roam aboutthe countryside, singing songs about a secret form of knowledge, only dimly understood by theuninitiated. Imagined to be unconstrained and independent, Bauls are also represented as emblemsof Bengali culture, who epitomize the freedom denied laywomen and men, but which the educatedclasses are increasingly attracted to. In contrast to this view, my evidence suggests that singers ofBaul songs do not constitute a separate and bounded community. Rather, they are part of a largerfluid Vaishnava complex. Curiously, however, this connection has not been recognized in literaturedescribing Bauls. Instead scholarly accounts reflect the values and desires of the educated classes(bhadralok), dismissing Vaishnava elements as inessential. This paper takes a closer look at thedisjuncture between bhadralok ideals versus the views and values held by theBauls I worked with.Kristin Hanssen received her doctorate from the University of Oslo, Norway. Shehas worked extensively with Vaishnava Bauls in rural West Bengal, focusing ontheir everyday experience of begging, and their local take on the significance ofrenunciation. She is the author of several articles on popular perceptions of body substances assources of impurity as well as physical and spiritual wellbeing. Her current interests include religionand modernity.12 | P a g eIndian Phantasm Conference, 10 th -11 th December, Oslo, © Tereza Kuldova, 2012

The last noble savages: Contemporary Western Representation andPerception of the Nagas of Northeast India - Marion WettsteinUniversity of ViennaThe Nagas are a group of local cultures living in the borderlands of Northeast India and NorthwestMyanmar. Recently, the Nagas have received a lot of attention in Europe, with several new coffeetable books edited and exhibitions in ethnographic museums having been launched. In many of thecoffee table books, the Nagas are presented as the last noble savages of the world, tucked away inthe furthest corner of India, evoking the magic of the mysterious ‘other’. What fascinated theEuropean audience back in the 1930s, when most of the museum’s Naga artifacts were collected, isstill today the biggest attraction: the colorful, splendid material culture, especially in dress andornament. In quest of these material expressions, most of the (still few) tourists visiting the Nagasget heavily disappointed. Their chance of encountering remains of the former Naga material cultureis small: Everyday life in Nagaland is dominated by western style dress of Korean origin, the ancientcustoms and ritual have long vanished, and the fierce headhunters have to be tipped for the snap.This paper examines the contemporary representations of the Nagas in Western publications andexhibitions and juxtaposes it with the everyday reality of today’s Nagaland.Marion Wettstein is a postdoctoral researcher in anthropology at the University ofVienna, with a currentproject on dance in Nepal. She has been doing research onmaterial culture in Nagaland from 2003 to 2010. Her interests include materialculture and arts, performance, ritual and mythology, and identity processes.Being an artist by caste. Three narratives of image making in Kumartuli,Kolkata - Geir HeierstadDepartment of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of OsloThrough the narratives of three young members of the potter caste in Kumartuli, Kolkata, this paperprovides a glimpse into the modern lifeworlds of a group that still works within their caste’sseemingly traditional occupation. The Kumbhakars of Kumartuli is the city’s most renowned makersof murtis, sacred and profane statues. Not only do they belong to one of the only remaining castebased neighbourhoods of the megacity, they also carries the burden of linking Hindu Bengalis to theirimagined tradition by providing high quality statues to the numerous religious festivalsof West Bengal. In order to survive in a highly competitive marked the need forformalised higher education, as well as avant-garde artistic skills, are emphasised bythe young informants, who all state that being an image maker is in their blood.13 | P a g eIndian Phantasm Conference, 10 th -11 th December, Oslo, © Tereza Kuldova, 2012

Geir Heierstad, senior lecturer in South Asia studies at Institute of culture studies and orientallanguages, University of Oslo. Prior to that he worked as a senior researcher on India’s foreign andsecurity policy at the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies. At present his research focus on theintersection between political culture and foreign affairs at the subcontinent, as well as India’sdemocracy and issues relating to water sharing. Heierstad, being an social anthropologist by training,wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on modernity and caste within the potter caste of Kumartuli in Kolkata.‘Flyoverdelhi’ - Film screening & Talk - Paolo FaveroUniversity of Antwerp, BelgiumBased on an anthropological research on modernity and globalization in New Delhi, FLYOVERDELHIoffers a series of snapshots on the life of young middle class men and women in this Indianmetropolis. Young managers, sports professionals, journalists, tourist guides, airline hostesses, anddj’s tell their experiences of growing up in a country that since 1991 has definitely opened up to theglobal market. The changes in lifestyles, the relationship to tradition, the growth of feelings of pridetowards an India projected, in their visions, to become one of the leading powers in the world, theideas of the ‘West’, issues of love, sex and marriage, are the themes addressed by the characterspresented in the film. With a visual language echoing the one of the video-clip alternated with more,stylistically speaking, ‘classical’ moments, the film introduces the viewer to a modern India seldomdepicted in Western mass media, awakening also questions regarding the meaning of globalization intoday’s world.Funded by Swedish Bank Tercentenary Fund and by the Ax:sson Jonsson Foundation (Stockholm,Sweden), the film has been presented, among other places, at the 25th NAFA InternationalEthnographic Film Festival (Stockholm, Sweden, May 2005), the Bollywood and Beyond Film Festival,(Stuttgart, Germany, July 2006), the Focus Asia, Documentary Film Festival (Lund, Sweden, November2006) and broadcasted by Kunskapskanalen (the Swedish National Television Educational Channel)and Italian Rai News 24. It has been produced by Paolo Favero and is at present time available fordistribution.Paolo Favero is Associate Professor in Film Studies and Visual Culture at theUniversity of Antwerp and works in the area of visual and digital culture. With aPhD from Stockholm University Paolo has devoted the core of his career to thestudy of India and Italy. He has also created various visual projects aiming attranslating anthropological questions in languages available to wider audiences. Heis the author of India Dreams: Cultural Identity among Young Middle Class Men inNew Delhi and director of the film Flyoverdelhi (screened by Swedish and Italian nationalbroadcasters). He has published, among other, for Cultural Anthropology, Social Anthropology,Anthropological Quarterly and was a member of the Executive Committee of the EuropeanAssociation of Social Anthropologists (EASA) between 2009 and 2011.14 | P a g eIndian Phantasm Conference, 10 th -11 th December, Oslo, © Tereza Kuldova, 2012

Popular Forms: Escapes from Alter-normativity? - Aneeta RajendranUniversity of Delhi & Lund UniversityThe "lesbian" is almost entirely phantasmal – familiars, as it were; always just this side of flesh andblood – in Indian cinemas with a few (in)famous exceptions. Fleeting suggestions are made in the oddfilm; fetishized readings are possible to construct through out of turn assemblies of clips and strongmisreadings of contexts, but in the main, the spaces the lesbian inhabits are almost entirelyfantastical in most Indian cinematic cultures. While films like Fire, that exclusively seek to"rehabilitate" the woman-oriented-woman, are content to un-imagine a historiography for thelesbian with the claim "there isn't a word for us in this country," other diasporic films like Bend It LikeBeckham play creatively with popular sporting culture's evasions that supplies a minority sportingsubculture with metaphors (Martina Navratilova's homosexuality) that help routinise the genderdeviance and final sexual conformity of its female-footballer protagonists. This paper argues thatmainstream "pulp" films Kalyug (Hindi, 2005), Girlfriend (Hindi, 2004), even as theyexclusively eroticise “alternative” sexual subjectivities, offer viable constructs of female sexuality thatis not entirely heteronormative, along with films like Deshatanakkili Karayarilla (The Migratory BirdDoes Not Cry, 1987), a mainstream Malayalam film without a single "lesbian" character, but with twodevoted female friends at its centre, even as modern-day reinventions of the “buddy” film, in Kal HoNa Ho (2003) and Dostana (2008) for instance, offer startlingly “wholesome” representations of gaymen. Mass-market “products,” where pleasure can be derived from the successful combination ofplot, music and visual spectacle, can, I argue, serve in the hands of critical viewers, as better tools fordestabilizing sexual binaries than do films like Sancharam or Fire, made often with an eye on analready conscientised, often entirely Western audience. Further, the consumableness of thespectacle of homosexual or homoerotic abjection in some of the other films mentioned,raises interesting questions about the nature of spectator identification and desire: this paper will tryto probe why we find this abjection satisfying. This paper will thus examine if and how popularforms permit escapes from some of the normativities of both homosexuality andheterosexuality.Aneeta Rajendran did her PhD from the Center of English Studies, JawaharlalNehru University, Delhi, on the subject of female non-heteronormativity incontemporary Indian literary and visual cultures: this thesis, awarded in 2010, istitled "In the Realm of the (Un)Familiar: Studies in Contemporary Lesbian Indiantexts, and is due to be published as the first book-length examination on thesubject, in 2013. Her scholarly interests extend to translation studies, contemporary Indian cinema,and popular visual and literary cultures. Aneeta Rajendran is Assistant Professor at the Departmentof English, Gargi College, University of Delhi. She will be spending the academic year beginningSeptember 2012 in residence at the Center for Gender Studies, Lund University, Sweden as she hasbeen awarded an Erasmus Mundus postdoctoral fellowship.15 | P a g eIndian Phantasm Conference, 10 th -11 th December, Oslo, © Tereza Kuldova, 2012

Imagining Intimacies: Social and sexual transitions in West Bengal - PaulBoyceUniversity of Sussex, UKThe talk will present photographic images and ethnographic film excerpts taken from threeinterrelated and ongoing projects that explore the interpenetration of sexual subjectivities, socialand visual life-worlds in contemporary India. Based on visual fieldwork in Kolkata and elsewhere inWest Bengal, the projects explore the lives of people of transgender and people who practice samesexsexualities, through photographic and filmic collaborations. These seek to displace a view of thesexual as empirical and factual through representations of experience, self and space whereinboundaries between exterior and internal perceptions are permeable and blurred, and where samesexand trans-sexual subjectivities are characterized by flux and change rather than fixed identitiesand contextualization. Sexualities are illustrated across both immediate and intangible personalinsights, which in turn, shed new light on broader, labile landscapes of tradition and modernity,socio-economic change and continuity, the spiritual and the profane - in West Bengal specifically andIndia more generally. Film and photography lend themselves to non-linear modes of ethnographicrepresentation and argument and the work raises wider questions concerning the non-linear,ephemeral and enduring paths of ‘modern Indian lives’ and their relationship to peoples’ intimateaspirations and desires.Paul Boyce is a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the University ofSussex. His work explores contemporary sexual subjectivities in India, socioeconomicchange and cultural continuity. He also works in applied fieldsrelating to HIV prevention and rights, in India and elsewhere. He is especiallyinterested in the limitations of sexuality as a domain term for analysis in socialtheory and action and in using visual work as a means to explore 'sexual lifeworlds'.Indian Digital Games and their Globally Debated Representations ofHinduism - Xenia ZeilerUniversity of BremenDigital media are inherent part of popular culture in contemporary India. One of the increasinglyimportant digital media genres – especially for a broad urban middle-class audience – is digitalgaming. Though it rapidly evolves in South Asian contexts, research on digital games so far primarilyconcentrates on European and U.S. settings. But digital games influence cultural and socialtransformations in India, in general, and also contribute to (re)shape and (de)construct details ofreligious ideas and beliefs. As such, this popular digital media genre serves as one of many platformsto negotiate the phantasm of contemporary India and (ideal or desired) representations of Hindu16 | P a g eIndian Phantasm Conference, 10 th -11 th December, Oslo, © Tereza Kuldova, 2012

symbols, ideas and beliefs on the subcontinent and in the ‘West’. Digital games – produced in theWest as well as in India – included some ‘Hindu’ topics ever since digital media emerged. But alreadythe first entirely India-developed digital game, ‘Hanuman: Boy Warrior’ (SONY 2009), caused heateddebates on representations of Hindu values and an alleged disregard of Hindu deities in gamingenvironments. This paper analyses the game’s narrative and the intense debate initiated byDiaspora-based Hindu organisations In India and beyond. It aims at disclosing underlying processes ofnegotiating religious and cultural identity and authority in contemporary global/transcultural Hinducontexts. A second case study presented here then discusses recent developments in Indian Gamesshowing a more open and playful approach to religion. The digital game ‘Ra.One’ (SONY 2011) basedon the Bollywood Science-Fiction Blockbuster toys with certain aspects of Hindu mythology andoutspokenly advertises representations of Hindu religiosity comprehensible to an internationalpublic. The paper wishes to address some of the key questions emerging in the new field of researchon Indian digital games. It discusses the role of digital games as an important media genre and asplatform for the negotiations of dreams and desires of contemporary Indian popular culture andsociety.Xenia Zeiler studied at Humboldt-University Berlin and JNU New Delhi andconcluded her Ph.D. in Cultural and Religious History of South Asia at the Universityof Heidelberg. Her dissertation analysed texts and contextual recenttransformations of the goddess Dhūmāvatī. Her research interests include Ethno-Indology, transformations in contemporary Hinduism, and Hinduism and ModernMass Media. Since 2008, Xenia Zeiler is a Lecturer for South Asian Religions at theUniversity of Bremen, Germany.A pavilion state of mind: ‘India-out-of-India’ at the 54 th Venice Art Biennale -Manuela CiottiAarhus UniversityArt historian John Clark has argued: ‘Art exhibitions often transparently perform a diplomaticfunction. They show one society to another’ (2005: 51). A large-scale exhibition such as a Biennale ismore than a ‘bilateral show’: it is a multi-gaze event where optics and counter-optics are distributedacross the exhibiting spaces of the hosting city. This paper is set in the city of Venice which, since1895, hosts the Art Biennale. Articulated around national pavilions - a direct legacy from 19 th centuryuniversal expositions, the Biennale’s career is intertwined with international history and hasshowcased western art for several decades before opening up to non-western artistic production.Viewed here both as an archetypical cultural form - which has known a vast geographical spread anda continuous palingenesis - and as a historical formation, the Venice Biennale remains one of themost coveted global stages for contemporary art. Against the backdrop of the increasing number ofcountries opening their national pavilions in Venice, this paper examines India’s participation as agovernment-funded national pavilion at the 2011 Biennale edition. The 2011 India pavilion was abelated institutional recognition of the rise to visibility of contemporary Indian art in India and17 | P a g eIndian Phantasm Conference, 10 th -11 th December, Oslo, © Tereza Kuldova, 2012

eyond. While the production, display and trade of Indian art are largely fostered by privateenterprise, the India pavilion represented a counter-example to the trend of institutional absence.Entitled ‘Everybody agrees: It’s about to explode’, the pavilion made an appearance after almostthree decades of India’s absence in Venice. Rather than focusing on aesthetic changes or artistictrends showcased through India’s national participation at the Biennale over time, this paper focuseson its politics of presence. This requires both an analysis of the history of India's participation since1954 as well as an attention to globality as a feature of the Biennale itself. Further, the paper maps anumber of trajectories taken up by the art works exhibited in 2011.Manuela Ciotti is Assistant Professor in Global Studies at Aarhus University. She has carried outextensive fieldwork with Dalit communities in rural and urban north India. Herresearch interests range from modernity, gender, politics to art and society. As‘Framing the Global’ fellow (2011-2014) at Indiana University Bloomington, she hasbegun a new project entitled ‘Modern and Contemporary Indian Art and the Global:Culture, Capital, and the Development of Post-colonial Taste’. She is the author of thefollowing books: Retro-modern India. Forging the Low-caste Self (Routledge 2010),Political Agency and Gender in India (Routledge forthcoming) and Femininities andMasculinities in Indian Politics (Berghahn Books forthcoming).Yoga and the spiritual authenticity of India - Lars Jørun LangøienNTNU, TrondheimIn this paper I want to explore the image of India as a source for authentic spirituality and religiosity,and a keeper of truth that many perceives as lost in “the West." Having done fieldwork amongWestern practitioners of Ashtanga Yoga at the Shri K. Pattabhi Jois Ashtanga Yoga Institute inMysore, India, I will look into what motivates them to start practicing yoga and eventually travel toIndia to deepen their practice. This will entail exploring their visions of India. For many of theseaspiring yogis India is imagined as an inherently spiritual place, where people are more in touch withsome original and “truer” state of being human. In India “spirituality is everywhere.” Yoga is seen as apowerful Indian spiritual practice that is “authentic” and universally applicable, and can lead to amore “harmonious” and balanced. Why has “spirituality” and “authenticity” become such valuablenotions to the Western mind, and why has India come to be seen as such an important depositor ofthese “entities.Lars Jørun Langøien is a research fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology atNTNU, Trondheim. Having done fieldwork among Western yoga practitioners inMysore, India, he is currently writing his PhD-thesis exploring motivations for doingyoga and how the practice has impact on the practitioners’ minds, bodies and lifeworldsintrospection.18 | P a g eIndian Phantasm Conference, 10 th -11 th December, Oslo, © Tereza Kuldova, 2012

Dreaming India in the Heart of Europe - Michal Tošner & Tereza KuldovaUniversity of West Bohemia & University of OsloThe “Heart of Europe” is self-signifying term for the Czech Republic, which creates the borderlandbetween the west and east of Europe. In the post-socialist times of this little country, India playedindeed an interesting role. After forty long years of isolation behind the ‘iron curtain’, during whichthe citizens were fed the totalitarian Marxist-Leninist doctrine, the doors into the world opened,people enjoyed freedom of speech and no less began seeking new worldviews and lifestyles,previously unattainable. The nineties Prague was suddenly marked by the youth’s desire to penetratethe world of spirituality, wisdom of the Far East, Buddhism and Hinduism. Suddenly the bookstoreswere flooded with popular literature on anything from Indian spirituality and Ayurveda to tantric sex.Teahouses that screened documentary movies and presentations by the new generation of Czechtravelers flourished. India became the number one destination of the post-communist generation ofspiritual seekers, who often travelled to North India (and Varanasi and Rishikesh in particular) asbackpackers, conceiving of their journey as a pilgrimage with the hope of meeting the ‘real Sadhu’,getting an advice for their future reincarnation, and of at least a degree of enlightenment. Theytravelled to an India of Oriental imagination, an India of holiness and wisdom and a phantasmaticgate to spiritual life. The travelers were systematically denying the existence of modern India, whichdid not fit into their dreams of India, predicated often upon the Orientalist narrative of the EuropeanOther. Not only will this presentation deconstruct this particular imagination and desire to view Indiain one particular way, but it will also point to the consequences of this systematicdenial in the narratives of the spiritual travelers that returned home from theirspiritual journey, often disillusioned but yet at the same time determined toperpetuate this narrative. This is a narrative both about India and the boom ofdesire for India in the 90s Prague.Michal Tošner is a researcher and lecturer in social anthropology at theUniversity of West Bohemia, Czech Republic. He is writing on anthropologicaltheory, theory of science and technology and has been doing multi-sited research in urban localities.Indian (global) modernity and subaltern spaces: An encounter with the‘(un)modern dham’ – Samrat Schmiem KumarUniversity of OsloOver the last decade, the temple town of Vrindavan in Uttar Pradesh, India has witnessed increasingstate led interventions, most significantly through a multitude of urbanization and touristdevelopment projects. This paper proposes that Vrindavan, is a space where India ‘encounters’ itsparticular desire for (global) modernity. The central and regional government see the town as asignificant pilgrimage and tourist site for millions of people inside as well as outside of India. A spacewith a myriad of social and environmental problems that needs to be socially and economically19 | P a g eIndian Phantasm Conference, 10 th -11 th December, Oslo, © Tereza Kuldova, 2012

developed. Development and ‘new forms’ of religious tourism in the city have become symbolsmarking change, and the arrival of modernity. The paper argues that urbanisation and tourismdevelopment of holy places (dham), such as Vrindavan, symbolize the attempt to domesticate‘sacred time’ and ‘sacred space’: the urban metropolis is under the regime of modern globalhegemonic time. In the subaltern space of Vrindavan, time is perceived as non-linear and singularityor progress is not the primary marker of the city’s significance. The paper aims to conceptualize thecity of Vrindavan, in relation to and within the current debates on Indian global modernity. Thedialectic between the modern framing of space and time that are to be tamed through tourism anddevelopment in Vrindavan and the narratives of the space and time from within thelived mythological space of the city, can be seen as a key trope to theunderstanding of existing discourses about modernity and subalternity in India.Samrat Schmiem Kumar is a Doctoral Research Fellow at the Department of CultureStudies and Oriental languages, University of Oslo. He has an interest inPostcolonial and Subaltern Studies, Peace and Conflict Studies, Indian Philosophy,Modernity, and Migration Studies. He is currently co-editing a book on Peace and Conflict in SouthAsia and working on his PhD dissertation: “Fragmented modernity. Subaltern space(s) and life-worldsin Vrindavan, India”.Sudden Selves: ‘Personality Development’, Tupperware and the ‘Chain ofConfidence’ - Sanjay SrivastavaDelhi UniversityAcross a range of large and small towns in India, a vast number of privately run ‘coaching institutes' –varying from hole-in-the-wall operators to multi-million Rupee corporations – offer ‘PersonalityDevelopment' courses to eager participants that include students, housewives, business-people andcompany employees. ‘PD', as it is popularly known, has become an integral part of the variousprocesses of economic, cultural, and social transformations that have been visible for the past twodecades or so. It is seen as an indispensable part of acquiring a 'cosmopolitan' personality, one that isnecessary for economic as well as social advancement. An allied activity is the proliferation of Multi-Level Marketing schemes such as that promoted by Tupperware. This paper is based on fieldwork atPD centres and among distributors and managers of the Tupperware company. Itexplores certain ideas of transformation among young people and middle-agedwomen in the context of traditional structures of family and gender norms.Sanjay Srivastava is a Professor of Sociology, Institute of Economic Growth, DelhiUniversity. Major publications: Constructing Post-colonial India: National Characterand the Doon School. Routledge, London (1998), Passionate Modernity. Sexuality, Gender,Consumption, and Class in India. Routledge, Delhi (2007), and forthcoming 2012: Entangled Spaces:‘Slum’, Gated Community and Shopping Mall in Delhi and Gurgaon. Routledge, Delhi.20 | P a g eIndian Phantasm Conference, 10 th -11 th December, Oslo, © Tereza Kuldova, 2012

A Contested Phantasm: The Tata Nano as Phantasmagoria, Predator andHooptie - Kenneth Bo NielsenCentre for Development and the Environment, University of OsloWhen Tata Motors announced, in 2006, that their plan to produce an inexpensive ‘people’s car’priced at only one lakh rupees was about to become reality, prospective car buyers across thecountry were jubilant. Before the foundation stone of the factory that would produce the car hadeven been laid, the Tata Nano, as the car would be called, had already become an icon for India’snewfound status as a truly innovative and competitive global economic player. It had also, to quoteAnanya Roy, become a ‘phantasmagoria of middle-class consumption’ among India’s new middleclass that is conventionally portrayed as the natural carrier of the country’s intensified embrace ofeconomic liberalisation. Yet as is well known, the Nano project also encountered fierce resistancewhen the government of West Bengal, where the car factory was to be set up, proceeded toforcefully acquire the land Tata Motors needed without taking local land losers into confidence. Inthis paper I use the Tata Nano’s journey from dream to realisation as a prism through which toaddress three competing and contested imaginaries about contemporary India. Each imaginaryoperates with its own symbolic conceptualisation of the Tata Nano as, respectively, aphantasmagoria, a predator, and a hooptie. These imaginaries are, however, not free-floatingsymbolic and narrative complexes but are rather, I suggest, embedded in the broader configurationof contemporary political economy.Kenneth Bo Nielsen is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Development and theEnvironment, University of Oslo. His research interests include contemporary Indianpolitics, with a main focus on rural social movements and West Bengal. Nielsen is theco-editor of Trysts with Democracy: Political Practice in South Asia (Anthem Press2011), Development and Environment: Practices, Theories, Policies (AkademikaForlag 2012) and Navigating Social Exclusion and Inclusion in Contemporary India andBeyond: Structures, Agents and Practices (Anthem Press, forthcoming).‘Speaking’ the Imaginations of an ‘Emerging India’: The Indian PrimeMinister’s discursive projections of a new India post 1991 - Anandita BajpaiUniversity of LeipzigThe formal institutionalization of the neo-liberal economic reforms in 1991 and the subsequentnoteworthy performance of the Indian economy have triggered the production of a prominent genreof literature that attempts to project India as an ‘Emerging Giant,’ ‘the airplane that has taken off,’ or‘the next big thing.’ Such adulations have added a more recent, albeit prominent, dimension to themultiple imaginations of the Phantasm called ‘India.’ Set against the backdrop of this genre ofliterature that profiles a ‘New India,’ my dissertation proceeds with the primary question of how21 | P a g eIndian Phantasm Conference, 10 th -11 th December, Oslo, © Tereza Kuldova, 2012

India imagines itself vis-à-vis this discourse. I approach this broad question by analyzing how theIndian Prime Ministers, post 1991, attempt to circumscribe the imagination of an ‘Emerging India,’through the medium of their political speeches. This paper will particularly focus on the PrimeMinisters’ discursive constructions of India as an ‘Economic Powerhouse of the 21st century’ in theiraddresses, delivered to audiences perceived as ‘external’ (the larger international community) as alsothose perceived as ‘internal’ (Indians in/outside India). Certain thematic foci include: First, theunderlying Janus-faced objective of producing a national image of India for the world whilesimultaneously concocting a sense of nation-ness for Indians. Second, how ‘externally’ accordedimaginations are reflected in the self-portrayals of an ‘Emerging’ India or how projections of India asan economic power creatively incorporate the ‘expectations’ accorded onto India (the presence andan awareness of the ‘Other’). Third, how temporality is utilized as an instrument to project thisimagination in that the Past and the Future are employed synchronously to project a Present. The‘New India’ is thus concocted by breaking and bridging with the Past as also by projecting an ‘ideal’Future.Anandita Bajpai is a PhD candidate at the University of Leipzig, Germany.She is currently a visiting researcher at the Institute for Asian and AfricanStudies, Humboldt University, Berlin and holds an MA in Global Studiespursued at the Universities of Leipzig and Vienna.Making Her Mark in History: Mayawati’s Public Statues in Uttar Pradesh,India - Melia BelliUniversity of Texas, ArlingtonThroughout Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest and most populous state, monumental bronze and marblestatues of social reformers from the historically oppressed “untouchable” (dalit) caste have becomeubiquitous since 2007. Numbering in the hundreds and measuring up to thirty feet, the statues standsentinel at intersections, outside of governmental buildings, and by the sides of interstate highways.These statues were commissioned by Mayawati, the state’s former Chief Minister, who is herself adalit. The statues are typically arranged in groups- circles or rows- in chronological order and includethe Buddha, dalit heroes such as Bhimrao Ambedkar and Mayawati’s political predecessor, KanshiRam. The statue cycles always conclude with Mayawati’s own image, making her one of the few inIndian history to commission their own public statues. Mayawati’s commissions join public statues ofnational heroes such as Gandhi, which were erected throughout India after Independence in1947. Mayawati’s statues possess two salient functions. First, with their monumental scale;permanent, luxury construction materials; and prominence, they visually secure a place for the dalitsin Indian history and the built environment, not just in the present, but also for the future. This issignificant, as a history and space have traditionally been denied to members of this subalterncommunity. Second, Mayawati’s statues serve her own political agenda by announcing her politicallineage. The statues’ order in the cycles present Mayawati as Ambedkar and Kahshi Ram’s political22 | P a g eIndian Phantasm Conference, 10 th -11 th December, Oslo, © Tereza Kuldova, 2012

heir, thereby visually charting her political lineage and legitimizing her authority. Using informationgained from interviews I conducted with Mayawati’s sculptors, Anil and Ram Sutar, this paperexamines the roles of Mayawati’s statues for her community and her own political agenda. It alsodecodes the icono graphy of Mawyawati’s portrait statues and considers theirrole in the construction and deployment of her public image.Melia Belli is Assistant Professor of Asian Art History at the University of Texasat Arlington. She received her Ph.D. from UCLA in 2009 with a focus on Indo-Islamic architecture. Her research focuses on early modern to contemporarynorth Indian art. Melia’s current project examines the female dalit(“untouchable”) politician Mayawati’s architectural and sculptural memorial commissions in Lucknowthrough lenses of gender, politics, and communal identity.An Indian Summer: Corruption, Class, and the Lokpal Protests - AalokKhandekarMaastricht University & Deepa S. Reddy, University of Houston-ClearlakeIn the summer of 2011, in the wake of some of India’s worst corruption scandals, a civil society groupcalling itself India Against Corruption was mobilizing unprecedented nation-wide support for thepassage of a strong Jan Lokpal (Citizen’s Ombudsman) Bill by the Indian Parliament. The movementwas, on its face, unusual: its figurehead, the 75 year-old Gandhian, Anna Hazare, was apparentlyrallying urban, middle-class professionals and youth in great numbers—a group otherwise notoriousfor its political apathy. The scale of the protests, of the scandals spurring them, and the intensity ofmedia attention generated nothing short of a spectacle: the sense, if not the reality, of a united IndiaAgainst Corruption. Against this background, we ask: what shared imagination of corruption andpolitical dysfunction, and what political ends are projected in the Lokpal protests? What are the classpractices gathered under the “middle class” rubric, and how do these characterize the unusualpolitics of summer 2011? Wholly permeated by routine habits of consumption, we argue that theLokpal protests are fundamentally structured by the impulse to remake social relations in the imageof products and “India” itself into a trusted brand. Taking “corruption” as a site at which the middleclass discursively constitutes itself, we trace the idioms and mechanisms by which the Lokpalagitation re-articulates the very terms of politics, citizenship, and democracy incontemporary India.Aalok Khandekar is researcher in the fields of Cultural Anthropology, Science andTechnology Studies, and South Asian Studies. Currently, I am affiliated with theDepartment of Technology and Society Studies at Maastricht University in theNetherlands.23 | P a g eIndian Phantasm Conference, 10 th -11 th December, Oslo, © Tereza Kuldova, 2012

‘Beggars of Lahore’, film screening & Talk: Begging in Mumbai: why dopeople donate to beggars? - Sheba SaeedUniversity of BirminghamThe begging phenomenon in Mumbai is a complex one in nature and causes for it are multidimensionalranging from socio-economic to religion, crime and politics. Likewise, the beggar doesnot belong to a homogenous group. The beggars are heterogenous in nature belonging to manydifferent categories, from child beggars to adolescent beggars, The elderly and the disabled to namebut a few. Further, the motivation for begging amongst this group also differs and to name again alimited number of reasons, these can range from a genuine socio-economic need and digress fromsacred religious reasons to those of malicious criminal ones. This diverse range of people are allanswerable to a legislation enforced in many states of India which condemns and criminalisesbegging within a wide remit. With the exception of those who may really be misusing the status of abeggar to elicit money from donors, many who have a legitimate reason to beg too have to answerto this legislation which renders them criminal. The complexities of the phenomenon are huge due tothe polysemic nature of the issue of begging. The aim of this paper is to highlight the abovementionedcomplexity via an insight into begging in Mumbai, in particular, why people give tobeggars and in turn arriving at an analysis into the relationship between the beggarsand donors.Sheba Saeed, a Solicitor by profession is a Ph.D. candidate at the University ofBirmingham, UK. She is researching the reasons for begging in Mumbai, India usingan audiovisual format. For her MPhil in History, Film and Television she producedand directed her debut documentary “Beggars of Lahore” as part of an audio-visual dissertation. Thefilm has screened at International Conferences and Film Festivals.24 | P a g eIndian Phantasm Conference, 10 th -11 th December, Oslo, © Tereza Kuldova, 2012

PRACTICAL INFORMATIONCONFERENCE VENUEMuseum of Cultural HistoryUniversity of Oslowww.khm.uio.noMuseum of Cultural History is located in the city center opposite the National Gallery, as such it iseasily accessible, walking distance from the conference hotel. The conference will take place at theConference Hall in the main historical building of the museum (Frederiks gate 3), the film screeningswill however take place in a meeting room in Olavs gate 29. Lunches, dinner, snacks and farewelltapas party will take place within the museum buildings.The Museum of Cultural History is one of Norway’s largest cultural history museums. It holds thecountry’s largest prehistoric and medieval archaeological collections, including the Viking ships atBygdøy, a substantial collection of medieval church objects, a collection of antiquities from theMediterranean countries, and a rune archive. The museum also has a comprehensive ethnographiccollection that includes objects from every continent, as well as Norway’s largest collection ofhistorical coins.Map25 | P a g eIndian Phantasm Conference, 10 th -11 th December, Oslo, © Tereza Kuldova, 2012

CONFERENCE HOTELFor those of you who are staying at the hotel booked by the museum, here is more information:Cochs Pensjonathttp://www.cochspensjonat.no/Parkveien 25 N - 0350 OsloTel: +47 23 33 24 00MapHotel to Museum:CONTACT: CONFERENCE ORGANIZERFeel free to get in touch anytime!Tereza Kuldovawww.terezakuldova.com+4746243793tereza.kuldova@khm.uio.no26 | P a g eIndian Phantasm Conference, 10 th -11 th December, Oslo, © Tereza Kuldova, 2012

TRAVELThe easiest way to get to city center from the airport is by the airport train: Flytoget (170 NOK oneway) – if you are staying at the aforementioned hotel you should get off at Nationaltheatret station.Once in the city center, there won’t be any need of using public transportation, as conference anddinner venues are a walking distance from each other.MapNationalthearet to Cochs Pensjonat (hotel):27 | P a g eIndian Phantasm Conference, 10 th -11 th December, Oslo, © Tereza Kuldova, 2012

MAILING LIST OF CONFERENCE SPEAKERSAalok Khandekar aalok.khandekar@maastrichtuniversity.nlAditi Sen senadit@gmail.comAnandita Bajpai ananditabajpai@gmail.comAneeta Rajendran aneetar@gmail.comCaroline Osella co6@soas.ac.ukClare Wilkinson-Weber cmweber@vancouver.wsu.eduGeir Heierstad geir.heierstad@ikos.uio.noJean-Claude Galley jean-claude.galey@ehess.frKenneth Bo Nielsen k.b.nielsen@sum.uio.noKjersti Larsen kjersti.larsen@khm.uio.noKristin Hanssen kristhanss@hotmail.comLars Jørunn Langøien lars.langoien@svt.ntnu.noManuela Ciotti manuela.ciotti@gmail.comMarion Wettstein marion.wettstein@gmail.comMelia Belli meliabelli@uta.eduMichal Tosner michal.tosner@post.czMithuraaj Dhusiya mithuraaj@gmail.comNemesis Srour nemesis.srour@gmail.comPaolo Favero paolofavero@gmail.comPaul Boyce P.Boyce@sussex.ac.ukRachel Dwyer rd3@soas.ac.ukRane Willerslev rane.willerslev@khm.uio.noSamrat Schmiem Kumar s.s.kumar@ikos.uio.noSanjay Srivastava sanjaysri@iegindia.orgSheba Saeed sheba1saeed@hotmail.comTereza Kuldova tereza.kuldova@khm.uio.noXenia Zeiler zeiler@uni-bremen.deLooking forward to meeting you all in Oslo!All the best & safe journey,Tereza28 | P a g eIndian Phantasm Conference, 10 th -11 th December, Oslo, © Tereza Kuldova, 2012