PRCP Conference Explores Religion, Violence and Agency in
South Asia

The effects of violence on women in South Asia were explored during the second conference of the Kroc Institute’s Program in Religion, Conflict and Peacebuilding (PRCP).

The conference, Women and the Contested State: Religion, Violence and Agency in South Asia, was held April 11-12 at the University of Notre Dame. Participants looked at the subject through the lenses of regional religious traditions and the contested nature of nation-building
in the postcolonial era.

The conference was the centerpiece of the PRCP’s program for the 2002-03 academic year. Each of the program’s three Rockefeller Visiting Fellows and ten invited scholars presented papers. The presentations were richly detailed and highly diverse. They ranged from micro-political modes of resistance in Sri Lanka to multiple strands of violence in Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India. The presenters came from a wide range of academic disciplines including anthropology, political science, history, and religious studies.

Veena Das, renowned South Asian anthropologist and professor at Johns Hopkins University, gave the opening address. She raised the vexing question of how the biopolitical state (a notion she borrows from Michel Foucault), which is invested with the responsibility of preserving and managing life, can also allow and even cause the death of significant parts of the population. “We are living in an era in which the state is more in the business of producing killable bodies than that of managing life,” Das said. She argued that contemporary states are fulfilling their aims “through the agency of crowds, who do their work of killing.” As an example, she cited the mass killings and plundering of Muslims in the Gujarat State of India in February/March 2002.

A second keynote address, “Tradition and Violence in South Asia,” was delivered by the Dutch historian of religion, Peter van der Veer. He argued that, in Gujarat and other cases such as the destruction of the Babri mosque, “ it is sufficiently clear that the institutions of the state are involved in civil society to the extent that political leaders are the main instigators and organizers of communal violence.” He challenged the conventional wisdom that a liberal government and the adoption of a liberal tradition can provide answers to endemic violence that religious traditions cannot provide. This, he contended, is clearly borne
out by the post-colonial Indian state’s inability to ameliorate
communal violence since its independence.

“ Democratization in India implies a growing participation of large sections of the population both in the political process and in communal violence,” van der Veer concluded.

The conference ended with a roundtable discussion at which four Notre Dame academics and one Kroc Institute master’s student teased out the implications of the conference proceedings for religion and peacebuilding in South Asia.

In an “Afterthought” to the roundtable, Professor Fred Dallmayr, a Notre Dame political scientist, said that he was particularly struck by the paper of Yasmin Sakia, a historian from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. It dealt with the effects of violence perpetrated on women in the so-called liberation war of 1971 in Bangladesh based on extensive interviews with victims. “In the middle of this historical narration something happened which was not part of the story or was not written down in the paper: the presenter’s voice suddenly faltered, as if seized by an inner trembling. For a while, she could not go on, and had to collect herself,” Dallmayr said. “A well-prepared and professionally crafted text suddenly was invaded by a subtext which had not been prepared or planned. Thus, perhaps against her own intention, in reporting on women victims in Bangladesh, Yasmin became herself a witness, ‘bore witness’ to the very meaning of violence as a violation and inflicted suffering.”

The PRCP plans to publish the revised papers presented at the conference. Two of the Rockefeller Visiting Fellows, Monique Skidmore and Patricia Lawrence, will edit the volume.

Conference Presentations

Keynote Addresses

"Forms, LIfe and Killable Bodies," Veena Das, Johns Hopkins University

“Traditions of Violence in South Asia” Peter van der Veer, University of Amsterdam

Panels

Resisting Terror: Women, Agency, and Micro-politics of the Sri Lankan Everyday

Alexandra Argenti-Pillen, University College, London
Mangalika de Silva, University of Amsterdam
Patricia Lawrence, Rockefeller Fellow, Kroc Institute; University of Colorado
Mohammed Abu-Nimer (respondent), Rockefeller Fellow, Kroc Institute; American University

Encounters with the Mysterious: Women’s Engagement with Alternative Power Structures in Authoritarian Burma

Bènèdicte Brac de la Perriére, LASEMA-CNRS, Paris
Ingrid Jordt, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Monique Skidmore, Rockefeller Fellow, Kroc Institute; Australian National University
Juliane Schober (respondent), Arizona State University

Between Subjects and Citizens: Women, the “Modern” State, and Violence in Bangladesh and India

Betty Joseph, Rice University
Lamia Karim, Rockefeller Fellow, Kroc Institute; University of Oregon Cabieri Robinson, Cornell University
Yasmin Saikia, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

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