South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies

This Thursday, SASAA and the Monash Asia Initiative host Dr Htwe Htwe Thein (Curtin University): Diplomatic Engagement or Reputational Cost? India, Myanmar and the Price of Pragmatism.

In May 2026, India hosted Myanmar's Senior General Min Aung Hlaing for a five-day state visit, his first foreign trip as President, despite widespread expectations that China would be his first destination. Dr Thein argues the visit reflects pragmatic engagement rather than moral endorsement: Myanmar's spiraling instability has become a regional crisis that neighbors can no longer afford to wait out. New Delhi's priorities were both geopolitical and commercial, signalling regional engagement against China's growing influence, reviving stalled infrastructure and connectivity projects, and seeking access to Myanmar's rare earth and energy resources.
Yet none of this erases the moral cost. The world's largest democracy hosted a leader widely regarded as an international criminal while aerial bombardment of civilian populations continued. What, then, did India ask in return for the people still dying across its border?

📅 Thursday 13 August 2026, 1:00–2:30pm (Melbourne / Sydney / Canberra)
Please note the new date — this seminar was postponed from 6 August.

Registration link: https://monash.zoom.us/meeting/register/etUoCVwvSL66T1p_XZNAxw

New in South Asia (Open Access): "A 'Swadeshi' Star Is Born: Locating Visions of Nationalist and Consumerist Utopias in Bal Gandharva's Acts of Female Impersonation" examines the career of Bal Gandharva (1888–1967), the celebrated female impersonator of Marathi sangeet natak, as a site for producing and commodifying respectable Hindu femininity in colonial India.

Radhika Raghav shows how Gandharva's performances — through roles like Shakuntala and Sindhu — advanced stridharma as the moral grammar of middle-class femininity, and how his stagecraft extended into the marketplace through 'Gandharva Fashion'.

The article repositions Gandharva as modern India's first swadeshi star, whose performances offered visions of nationalist and consumerist utopias by marketing femininity as both moral virtue and consumable spectacle.

Read here (free, Open Access): https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00856401.2026.2694215

New in South Asia: "The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh's 'Struggle' for Democracy: Hindu Nationalism, Propaganda and the Internal Emergency of India" examines how the RSS turned the 1975–77 Emergency into a foundational episode for its own political legitimacy.

Neha Chaudhary traces two central narratives in the Sangh's propaganda: the cultivation of symbolic capital through Jayaprakash Narayan's endorsement, and a counter-history recasting the RSS as the principal defender of democratic freedoms against Indira Gandhi's authoritarian rule.

The article argues that the RSS used propaganda as memory-making — refashioning its public image and entering high politics with a legitimacy it had never held before.

Read here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00856401.2026.2690895

New in South Asia: "The 'Violence' of Development: From Babri Masjid to Gyanvapi Masjid in Uttar Pradesh, India" examines how the 1992 demolition of the Babri Masjid reshaped religious and political claims across India, focusing on its afterlife in the ongoing dispute over the Gyanvapi Mosque in Varanasi.

Kerstin Sigvardsson and Suruchi Thapar-Björkert analyse these trajectories through the framework of 'Violence(s) of Development' — tracing how displacement gets disguised as modernisation, and how contested religious sites become vehicles for constructing the Muslim 'other'.

Situating Babri Masjid and Gyanvapi within broader patterns of state-led development, the article argues that violence against religious minorities is structurally embedded within modernisation projects in Uttar Pradesh, not incidental to them.

Read here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00856401.2026.2645486

Applications are open for the 2026 Hugh Owen Prize — SASAA's $500 award for the best undergraduate essay on South Asia (any discipline, any nationality, 4,000 words max). Submit by 31 August.

For more details: https://lnkd.in/gtRi7qeR

New in South Asia: "Ezhava Reform and Hindu Sanghadana in 1930s–40s Travancore" examines the intersections between subaltern anti-caste reform and 'Hindu unity' in early twentieth century South India, focusing on the princely state of Travancore.

Centring the Ezhava reform movement, the article argues that while some Ezhava elites resisted conservative assimilation, others pursued it, engaging with organisations such as the Travancore Hindu Mahasabha to negotiate status and social mobility. It also introduces a neglected archival document suggesting the existence of a Sree Narayana Dharma Samrakshana Yogam, distinct from the well-known SNDP Yogam.

Situating these developments within wider anxieties over Christian conversions, princely state politics, and national Hindu organisations, the article argues that Ezhava reform encompassed greater ideological heterogeneity than previously acknowledged.

Read here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00856401.2026.2681341

New in South Asia:
"Urban Imageries and Educational Aspirations: Perspectives from Delhi's Margins" explores the aspirations of residents in a forty-year-old multi-generational slum for socio-spatial mobility, escape from stigmatised identifications, and the central role of urban education in this pursuit.

Using Edward Soja's critical spatial perspective, the paper examines how acutely stigmatised slum residents articulate hopes for a better future, and how they attempt to overcome marginalisation through education and its associated notions of sophistication and civility. While much existing literature centres the perspectives of planners, elites, and the middle classes, this paper highlights urban imageries from the margins themselves.

Read here:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00856401.2026.2685997

New in South Asia:
Researchers from Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh gathered in Kathmandu for a SASAA–Kathmandu University workshop on Gen Z movements in South Asia. Six papers were presented on topics ranging from country-specific movements to gender, the state, geopolitics, and leadership. The event also included a media studio recording session and a journalist interaction, and drew coverage from major Nepali news outlets.

See the links below for full coverage.

News on Ekantipur, the largest and most popular national daily in Nepal: https://ekantipur.com/news/2026/07/07/international-workshop-on-gen-z-movement-in-south-asia-at-kathmandu-university-42-30.html?fbclid=IwY2xjawS8XF5leHRuA2FlbQIxMABzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEejnHc6Liq1h00YlMEos1R3_OOos4uCUE_xGBfyTkSBi93XtyVuyxn0-LA2S0_aem_RzNq7SqMXSFwsiujTLmqMA

News on Nepal Views, one of the major online news portals in Nepal: https://www.nepalviews.com/story/422193/international-workshop-on-the-gen-z-movement-in-south-asia-at-the-university-of-kathmandu?fbclid=IwY2xjawS8XGJleHRuA2FlbQIxMABzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEeaguVhzIc_4nkk67vP2HksQOUJFFkEGQvuQ_hKnerWJzLdBGjbS9p7Y51yTA_aem_Qg8qxYpVJWM41e8iCJFQNA

New in South Asia: This article examines women's cycling in late colonial India (1890s–1940s), exploring how its meanings and possibilities were shaped by the racial, social, and gendered structures of colonialism.
Drawing on visual and literary sources, newspapers, and autobiographical sources, the article shows how women navigated the constraints of respectability and gender propriety through this technology. Public reactions ranged from ridicule and anxiety to celebration and reformist approval — revealing contradictory interpretations of the female cycling body.
The article shows that women's cycling in India defies binary narratives of emancipation versus restriction, instead revealing the bicycle as a complex site where gender, race, technology, and nationalism intersected.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00856401.2026.2651387

New from South Asia: The rickshaw has long symbolised working-class male labour in Bangladesh, but electrification is changing that. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Dhaka, this article explores how the electric rickshaw is opening the industry to women, elderly workers, and people with disabilities, reshaping the gendered nature of urban work.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00856401.2026.2651452