South Asian Religions Unit
Call for Proposals for November Meeting
The Steering Committee of the South Asian Religions (SARI) Unit invites colleagues to submit proposals for the 2025 AAR Annual Meeting in Boston, MA. SARIʼs mission is to provide a venue for new research on the many religious cultures, literatures, and histories of South Asia as they have developed in global contexts. We have a strong preference for sessions in which the papers cover a range of South Asian traditions, regions, and languages. Some themes already identified as potential papers sessions are listed below—please contact the associated colleagues for details about potential collaborations. Panels and papers are also encouraged that respond to the 2025 AAR Presidential Theme: “Freedom.” For more information on Dr. Leela Prasad’s Presidential Theme please visit: Freedom.
The SARI Steering Committee encourages full panel submissions (i.e., papers Sessions and roundtables rather than single papers) with the exception of papers for the New Directions panel (see below). For the 2025 Annual Meeting, SARI has a flexible allotment of panel formats: three 2-hour sessions and two 90-minute sessions. SARI can also sponsor one additional paper session if it is co-sponsored with another Unit. In your proposal, you may specify your preferred panel format (120 or 90 minutes), but the time allotted for accepted panels varies based on the overall programming needs. We especially encourage roundtables as they tend to create more dynamic conversations between participants and audience members. If relevant, list any potential co-sponsoring Unit with your proposal.
If you are looking for collaborators towards proposing a panel session, please feel free to reach out to colleagues on the SARI listservs and/or contact the SARI co-chairs SherAli Tareen (SherAli.Tareen@fandm.edu) and Bhakti Mamtora (mamtora@arizona.edu) for assistance or to email the colleagues listed below if there is a topic that is interesting to you.
All Papers Session Panel Proposals must be submitted through the PAPERS system on the AAR website.
New Directions in South Asian Religions
The SARI Steering Committee accepts individual paper submissions for the “New Directions in South Asian Religions” to provide space for new scholarship in our field. To be eligible, applicants must (1) be ABD doctoral students (or recent graduates) from a Ph.D. program in South Asian religions and (2) never have presented at the national AAR meeting. Accepted panelists will be mentored by a senior colleague with appropriately specialized expertise. To apply, email your proposal (and any other queries) to Aarti Patel (abp6177@psu.edu) and Aalekhya Malladi (aalekhya.malladi@mcgill.ca) co-convenors of the panel for 2025 AND upload your individual paper proposal in the AARʼs PAPERS system, labeled as a "New Directions” submission.
Merchant Masculinity and Religion – Whitney Kelting (m.kelting@northeastern.edu).
Religion and Food in South Asia – Aarti Patel (abp6177@psu.edu)
Anthropology of Hinduism: Histories, Possibilities, and Stakes (possible co-sponsorship with Hinduism Unit) – Ridhima Sharma (ridhima.sharma@mail.utoronto.ca)
Religion in Collections - Avni Chag (a.c.chag@vu.nl) and Leah Comeau (lcomeau@sju.edu)
This panel seeks to interrogate and challenge value-laden categories such as public knowledge, heritage building, and cultural preservation in museums and other institutions that hold religious objects from South Asia. We ask of these collections, in what way is meaning conditioned by material assemblages and social infrastructures? Topics might include lives of religious objects, affective impacts of object displays, performances of devotion and expertise, and how both the contemporary lives and histories of objects become rooted with their keepers and curators.
Languages of Freedom and Unfreedom in South Asian Religions – Aniket De (ande@ucsd.edu)
Towards a Comparative Study of Female Devotional Exemplars (“Saints”) from South Asia - Karen Pechilis (kpechili@drew.edu)
We seek scholars who have performed detailed study of historical female saints from South Asia, religion location open. Female saints are of enduring interest to scholars, teachers, and students because they are vibrantly related to poetry, song, life story, and the arts and because they direct attention to the analysis of women and gender in the study of religion. This panel seeks to bring together scholars who are performing detailed study of specific historical female saints in order to leverage that new information to rethink the terms of past comparative analysis and its assumptions about women, gender, and devotion, and to identify its implications for theorizing devotion generally today. The group will together decide what aspect of freedom (the AAR 2025 theme) to emphasize in the comparison.
Translating Across Languages, Genres, and Religion – Aalekhya Malladi (aalekhya.malladi@mcgill.ca)
Orality and Aurality in South Asian Religions – Maharshi Vyas (myvas@ucsb.edu)
This panel seeks to bring forth innovative ways of theorizing the oral, aural, and sonic dimensions of South Asian religions. Papers may explore the sensory interplay between various forms of sound, speech, and/or the lack thereof, i.e., silence within devotional practices, socio-political contexts, presence in public spaces, the construction of history/memory, etc.
Soteriology in South Asian Religions – Abhishek Ghosh (dharma@somaiya.edu)
This panel invitees papers exploring these soteriological concepts—moksha, nirvana, kaivalya, mukti, apavarga, and fanāʾ—as diverse expressions of liberation within South Asian religious traditions. This panel aims to foster a comparative dialogue that illuminates the unique and shared understandings of ultimate freedom across Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, and Sufism.
Political Ideologies of Freedom in Indian Classical Texts – Rodney Sebastian (rodney.sebastian@gmail.com)
Lived Experiences of Hindus: Autoethnographic Studies by Scholar-Practitioners across various Hindu Sampradayas and Disciplines (possible co-sponsorship with Hinduism Unit) – Sriram Subramaniam (sriram.subramanian@hua.edu)
What are the lived experiences of a Hindu - rituals, beliefs, prayers, traditions, philosophy, and more? This panel highlights the diverse aspects of the lived experiences of being a Hindu through autoethnographic studies by scholar-practitioners across multiple Hindu Sampradayas. These studies demonstrate how these scholar-practitioners bring their Hindu experiences into their respective disciplines while bringing out the continuity among seemingly different aspects of Hinduism.
Global Hinduism beyond the Anglosphere (possible co-sponsorship with Hinduism Unit and North American Hinduism Unit) – Aditya Bhattacharjee (abhattac@risd.edu)
Exploring Autonomy and Agency in South Asian Religious Traditions - Kalpesh Bhatt (kbhatt@umw.edu)
What does it mean to be free? What truly defines liberty or autonomy? This panel explores the diverse interpretations of autonomy and agency within South Asian religious traditions, including but not limited to Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Jainism, Islam, and Christianity. We aim to unpack how these traditions understand, shape, and are shaped by the concept of autonomy or freedom. We invite papers that examine autonomy through various methodologies such as textual studies, historical studies, social sciences, and the anthropology of religion.
Roundtable discussion of a recent book:
SherAli Tareen (sherali.tareen@famdm.edu) and Bhakti Mamtora (mamtora@uarizona.edu)
We are hoping to make this a more common feature of SARI annual offerings, with the stipulation that the book to be discussed should touch on the diversity of South Asian religious traditions and/or the complexity of religion as a category in relation to South Asian religions.
This Unitʼs mission is to provide a venue for new and important research in the many religious cultures, texts, and histories of South Asia. Within the area of South Asia, all world religions exist in unique forms, from religions that originated in India — such as Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Tantra, and tribal religions — to religions that have taken on longstanding and distinctive forms in South Asia — such as Islam, Judaism, Christianity, and Zoroastrianism. The focus of our work is thus on the religious, cultural, and intellectual traditions generated in South Asia, but not limited to that geographic region, and changes that have occurred in those traditions over several millennia. Scholars of South Asian religious traditions explore the distinctive manifestations of these traditions within and beyond the subcontinent, their interactions, and their movements to and expressions in other parts of the world. This Unit encourages contextualizing religion within debates on a broad array of parallel and intersecting issues, such as (but not limited to) politics, secularism, literature, philology, globalization, modernity, colonialism and postcolonialism, history, society, media, popular culture, material and visual culture, and economics. Our scholarship often emphasizes sessions and papers that look at more than one tradition and thus frequently entail some degree of comparative approach. Our website is https://sari.arizona.edu.We also have a listserv, which is essential to the work of our Unit. Information on joining the listserv can be found on our website.
| Chair | Dates | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Bhakti Mamtora, University of Arizona | mamtora@arizona.edu | - | View |
| SherAli Tareen | stareen@fandm.edu | - | View |