A lecture by Ghazal Asif Farrukhi, on her dissertation " the S.S. Pirzada Dissertation Prize in Pakistan Studies "Honorable Mention" recipient for 2021. Dr. Farrukhi's lecture will be based on her dissertation, Marvi's Sisters: Hindu Belonging and the Muslim State in Pakistan (Johns Hopkins University, 2021).
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DATE: Monday, November 7, 2022
TIME: 5 pm Berkeley | Calculate Your Local Time
VENUE: 341 Dwinelle Hall (Located on Level F)
LIVESTREAM: ISASatUCBerkeley
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DISSERTATION ABSTRACT
Marvis Sisters: Hindu Belonging and the Muslim State in Pakistan, is based on two years of archival research and extended ethnographic fieldwork among longstanding Hindu communities in Sindh, Pakistan. The dissertation examines minority belonging in a modern Muslim polity by exploring how secular power operates through disciplining gendered Hindu and Muslim selves, and how it intervenes in the rhythms of everyday life to alter older forms of intimate and neighborly relations between religious communities. Pakistani Hindus negotiate variable modes of state neglect and overt regulation in creative ways, to imagine different, sometimes competing modes of political claim-making in their ancestral homes. At the same time, anxieties and pitfalls about having been rendered strangers in such a place seep into the everyday: from neighborly or intimate relations, through the constitution of domestic life, to embodied histories and practices. In this landscape, how might historical memory interrupt regimes of governance, and how do womens practices of kin-work, sexuality, and desire inform alternative modalities of belonging? Focusing on the imbrication of governance techniques with intimate social relations, this dissertation unravels the ties between the state, the domestic, and the religious other.
SPEAKER BIO
Ghazal Asif Farrukhi, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at LUMS University, is an anthropologist broadly interested in postcolonial regimes of legality and governance; domesticity, kinship, and sexuality; secularism, Hinduism, and Islam; and everyday life, memory, and identity in multi-religious and multi-ethnic societies. Her research and scholarship engage these themes in the context of Hindu communities in Sindh, Pakistan. Dr. Farrukhi is currently working on a book project that examines how the structural condition of living as religious minorities in a modern Muslim polity has shaped political aspirations, everyday lives, and intimate relations for Sindhi Hindus. A second, related project is concerned with the long-standing yet invisibilized struggle for caste emancipation in Pakistan. Writing from this project has appeared most recently in South Asia. Dr. Farrukhi received her doctorate from Johns Hopkins University in 2021.
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The Syed Sharifuddin Pirzada Endowment on Pakistan, established by Rafat Pirzada and his wife, Amna Jaffer, and named after Rafat Pirzadas father, Syed Sharifuddin Pirzada, supports i) the Syed Sharifuddin Pirzada Dissertation Prize on Pakistan (an annual dissertation prize for the best work in the humanities, social sciences, law, or public health on Pakistan, the region that is Pakistan, or things to do with Pakistan), and ii) the Syed Sharifuddin Pirzada Lecture on Pakistan (an annual lecture that spotlights the winner of the S.S. Pirzada Dissertation Prize). Rafat Pirzada is a Silicon Valley based entrepreneur and venture capitalist.
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The event is FREE and OPEN to the public.
