South Asian Religions Unit

The Steering Committee of the South Asian Religions (SARI) Unit invites colleagues to submit proposals for the 2026 AAR Annual Meetings: June 2026 (online) and November 2026 (in person) in Denver, CO. 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: “FUTURE/S”

The SARI Steering Committee encourages full panel submissions (i.e., papers Sessions and roundtables rather than single papers) except for papers for the New Directions panel (see below). For the 2026 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 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 2026 AND upload your individual paper proposal in the AARʼs PAPERS system, labeled as a "New Directions” submission.

Trans* Religion(s) in South Asia - Meghan Hartman (mhartman@barnard.edu)

Do trans people have a genre problem? Countless memoirs demand articulations of “journeys” for a cisgender audience; rehearsals of dysphoria and tight self-narrativization unlock the key to legal and medical transition. The endless iteration of trans confession goes on. These are genre problems that emerge from the implicit assumption that the possibility of transness (when it is only narrowly understood via medical transition and legal definition) is thanks to a modern secular state. This panel seeks to overturn this assumption that often alienates trans* from religion. 

Instead, we are interested in the ways trans* and religion work together throughout various contexts and historical periods of South Asia. Trans* is a capacious analytic in its own right, not simply as an invocation to think about gender identity, but also think about affect, kinship, caste, techniques of embodiment, religion, hagiography, normativity and much more. We invite papers to think about potential questions such as the following: how might early modern theologies in South Asia be a richer place to think about trans* than what modern genres afford? In what ways has caste/class informed gender shifting in religious practices? How might the mapping of transness itself be insufficient or illuminating when thinking of gender nonconformity in religious traditions of South Asia? What might subversive normativities look like (e.g. the norms governing groups or communities seen as anti-normative?) What to make of religious mythologies used in service to grant rights to gender minorities while reifying other hegemonies? 

Special attention to methodologies, and their strengths/pitfalls, is encouraged. For instance, what restrictions or levity might an ethnographer enjoy that a historian of premodern South Asian religions might not? And vice versa? How might a historian resist models of recuperation in service of modern evidentiary standards to prove trans people always existed? And of course, how does the invisible immediate we call translation inform your work? Trans and queer scholars, please send in your work! You are encouraged to apply.

Devotional Uses of AI – J. Barton Scott (barton.scott@utoronto.ca)

Since the release of ChatGPT as commercial technology in 2022, consumer-facing AI platforms have rapidly transformed the visual landscape of South Asian religions, resulting in new kinds of images (as of Hindu deities) and new modes of producing and circulating images. This panel will ask how AI is reshaping a variety of religious traditions through empirical attention to the kinds of usages that have emerged and rapidly assumed hegemonic status in the past three years and counting.

Religion, Speculative Fiction, and Pedagogy - Aalekhya Malladi (aalekhya.malladi@mcgill.ca) 

Building on the insightful dialogue that came out of the Bollywood, Hindutva, and Pedagogy panel this year, this panel interrogates the role of speculative fiction in teaching religions broadly and South Asian traditions more specifically. This panel will consider questions such as how can we teach religious studies through “fictional” religions? How do representations of religions in speculative fiction media (film, literature, television) spark conversations among students about religion in our own world? How can speculative fiction help students to think differently about the category of religion? How does the rise of superhero/fantasy genre films in India reflect the changing cultural and political landscape? What can we learn about religion from fan culture? 

The Political Theology of God in South Asia – Zehra Mehdi (zm2261@columbia.edu)

The panel invites a discussion on the diverse ways in which  minorities ( religious/caste, sexual/gender, national/migrant) invoke of imaginaries of God (s)  apprehend their personal and/ or political predicament. 

From Provisional to Permanent: The Architectural Evolution of South Asian Sacred Spaces in North America – Tilak Parekh (tp459@cam.ac.uk)

The religious landscapes of North America and Europe are currently witnessing a profound architectural shift: the transition of South Asian sacred spaces from adaptive reuse—converted churches, warehouses, and community centers—to monumental, purpose-built environments. This panel interrogates the "materiality of the sacred" by examining the architectural, structural, and civic evolution of contemporary South Asian religious centers, including the Hindu mandir, the Islamic masjid, the Sikh gurdwara, the Jain derasar, and the Buddhist vihara.

Moving beyond the study of rituals that take place within these walls, we analyze the agency of the built environment itself. How does the shift from provisional drywall to permanent brick, imported marble, or monumental concrete alter the experience of the practitioner? We explore the transnational flow of design, the negotiation of traditional architectural canons and Islamic spatial principles with modern Western zoning laws, and the politics of visibility. As these structures transform from invisible, provisional spaces to permanent civic landmarks, they reshape local skylines and sensory regimes. This session invites papers that analyze the construction of the sacred, investigating how material, structure, and space function not merely as containers for the holy, but as active participants in the production of diverse South Asian religious subjectivities.

Future of the study of South Asia at Colleges and Universities – Karen Pechilis (kpechili@drew.edu)

In our contested U.S. context, including shifting enrollments, budget cuts, and attacks on diversity as well as the Humanities, how has the study of South Asia, especially South Asian religions, been affected, according to faculty members’ experiences? How are courses on South Asian religions contextualized at the institution – program, department, major, etc.? What is attracting students to such courses and/or programs today? What are some differences experienced by type of institutional context (large R1, small liberal arts, tiers, etc.)? How can we work together to shape the future? The particular focus would be U.S. colleges and universities, though some comparative information could be helpful.

Sovereignty in Colonial India – Brian Pennington (bpennington4@elon.edu)

Classic notions of sovereignty entail ideas of territory, legitimacy, and power, while Leela Prasad has recently invited us to think about it in terms of the subjective and narrative realms that colonialism could not touch. This session will examine the contours of sovereignty in British-ruled India and seek to expand on these generative insights.

Muslim Utopias in India Amidst Attempted Erasures – Claire Robison (crobison@bowdoin.edu) and Tim Dobe (dobetimo@grinnell.edu)
What does it mean to imagine an ideal place grounded in Muslim identity when it is hotly contested, even threatened with erasure? What forms of Muslim identity may be safely celebrated in public and who ‘gets’ to represent them? What space is there to be a Muslim ally in Hindu religious spaces or to imagine religious utopias outside of sectarian divides? While complicated by the legacy of Partition and entanglements of political Islam with modern South Asian nation-states, Muslim and Islamicate notions of and experiments with ideal space continue to hold weight in India as well as neighboring South Asian nations. This ranges from the cultivation of utopian public spaces, such as renovated Mughal gardens in urban India, to multireligious solidarities and spaces centered in Muslim nonviolence. How do efforts to sustain, revive, or imagine such utopian spaces contest both an exclusivist vision of India and provide alternate visions of what Islam and Muslim culture on the subcontinent can be?

Orality and Aurality in South Asian Religions  - Maharshi Vyas (mmvyas@unc.edu)

This panel seeks to bring forth research that offers innovative approaches to theorizing the oral, aural, and sonic dimensions of South Asian religions. The panel invites papers that examine the sensory interplay between sound, speech, and silence within religious practices; socio-political contexts; public spaces; or the construction of history and memory. Topics may include, but are not limited to, sound and performance, sound and technology, or other explorations of how sonic practices shape South Asian religious life and experience.

Black Studies and South Asian Studies – Anand Venkatkrishnan (anandv8@uchicago.edu)

The world systems of race, caste, and colonialism have long brought together Black and South Asian peoples and perspectives in conflict and cooperation. However, the same is only intermittently true for the fields of study, especially in the American Academy of Religion, of which they are both subject and object. This panel invites reflections on Black and South Asian histories of diaspora, displacement, and devotion, and on the critical theories and methods that accompany and elude their respective fields.

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.

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.