In 1946, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay published her second book on the United States. In a chapter that connected American racism to imperialism, she wrote, ‘The international colour line has been challenged and stormed by Asia. No more the colonials will allow themselves to be jim-crowed the world over.’ From the 1920s until the 1980s, Kamaladevi challenged white supremacy within India and on the global stage. In the process, she crafted an expansive and intersectional understanding of what would come to be known as the Global South.

Cemil Aydin (Ph.D. Harvard University 2002) is professor of global history at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill's Department of History. Cemil Aydin’s recent publications include the Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia (Columbia University Press, 2007); The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History (Harvard University Press, Spring 2017); “Regions and Empires in Political History of the World, 1750-1924” in An Emerging Modern World, 1750-1870 Ed. by Jurgen Osterhammel and Sebastian Conrad (Harvard University Press, May 2018), pp: 33-277.

Dr. Janaki Bakhle is currently an Associate Professor in History at the University of California, Berkeley. Previously, she taught at Columbia University where she was also the Director of the South Asia Institute. Her research interests include the intellectual history of religion in India, Indian political history, Indian feminist history, nationalism, gender and culture. Her first book, Two Men and Music: Nationalism, Colonialism and the Making of an Indian Classical Tradition, was published by Oxford University Press in 2005.

This paper contrasts two Afghan Pashto critical-literary responses to one of modern war's main characteristics: ontological devastation as a tactic. Large-scale violence over 40 years of occupations in Afghanistan not only destroyed material worlds, but in the process broke the chains of signification embedded in those worlds, creating landscapes in which meaning and reality themselves broke down. Afghan literary authors, however, have long had available tools that link meaning, affect, and ontology, which they use to combat this tactic.

Hasyarnava or The Ocean of Mirth, a medieval Sanskrit political satire, delineates two compelling themes that require serious consideration. First, the Indic traditions underline the centrality of order in a polity. This preoccupation is underlined by the supremacy of the Rajadharma-dandaniti framework. A great deal of violence and cruelty inheres within this framework. Second, if the order is the site for violence and force, it follows that a glimpse of freedom, unshackled from the conventional implications of the purusharthas can only be had in upholding the desirability of disorder.

In 2019, the Indian government unilaterally revoked the autonomy of the disputed region of Kashmir amidst one of the harshest and longest military blockades and communications blackouts in history of the region. While the move was primarily justified as a national security imperative that would also bring economic prosperity to Kashmir, one of the tertiary arguments that was put forth in support of the move was a celebration of the revocation of autonomy as a victory for LGBTQ+ rights.

Abhishek Kaicker is an Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley and an editor of the Journal of South Asian Intellectual History. He has a PhD from Columbia University, an MA from the University of British Columbia, and a BA from Macalester College.

Dr Humeira Iqtidar is Reader in Politics at King's College London. Her research interests bring together postcolonial theory, critical theory and comparative political theory with a focus on modern South Asian Islamic thought. Thematically, her research has been concerned with the place of religion in contemporary political imagination, the politics of knowledge, and the legacies of colonialism. She is the author of Secularising Islamists?

Akeel Bilgrami got a B.A in English Literature from Elphinstone College, Bombay University and went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar where he read Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. He has a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Chicago. He is the Sidney Morgenbesser Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, where he is also a Professor on the Committee on Global Thought. He has been the Director of the Heyman Centre for the Humanities as well as the South Asian Institute at Columbia.