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Faculty Publications
Director, South Asian Studies; Associate Professor,
Department of History, University of Toronto
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Itineraries of Self-Rule: Essays on the Centenary of Gandhi's Hind Swaraj, Special Issue of the journal Public Culture, 23:2 (Spring 2011) with Faisal Devji. Addressing the recent revival of interest in Gandhi among scholars, artists and activists, this special issue of Public Culture guest edited by Ritu Birla and Faisal Devji considers Gandhian thought in its robust itinerancy, as a global formation and moveable practice, as well as in its world-making power. Based on interdisciplinary conversations across Johannesburg and Mumbai on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of Hind Swaraj, the articles here wrench Gandhi from hagiography and the nation-state, and map new sightings of Gandhi in history, film, visual culture, and contemporary politics. Itineraries of Self-Rule engages the transnational contexts of Gandhi's early thought, its inward-looking ethical terrain, and political performativity to consider new channels for reading its current afterlives and emergent forms of global politics more broadly.
Director, South Asian Studies; Associate Professor,
Department of History, University of Toronto
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In Stages of Capital: Law, Culture, and Market Governance in Late Colonial India (Duke University Press, 2009), Ritu Birla brings research on nonwestern capitalisms into conversation with postcolonial studies to illuminate the historical roots of India’s market society. Between 1870 and 1930, the British regime in India implemented a barrage of commercial and contract laws directed at the “free” circulation of capital, including measures regulating companies, income tax, charitable gifting, and pension funds, and procedures distinguishing gambling from speculation and futures trading. Birla argues that this understudied legal infrastructure institutionalized a new object of sovereign management, the market, and along with it, a colonial concept of the public. In jurisprudence, case law, and statutes, colonial market governance enforced an abstract vision of modern society as a public of exchanging, contracting actors free from the anachronistic constraints of indigenous culture.
Birla reveals how the categories of public and private infiltrated colonial commercial law, establishing distinct worlds for economic and cultural practice. This bifurcation was especially apparent in legal dilemmas concerning indigenous or “vernacular” capitalists, crucial engines of credit and production that operated through networks of extended kinship. Focusing on the story of the Marwaris, a powerful business group renowned as a key sector of India’s capitalist class, Birla demonstrates how colonial law governed vernacular capitalists as rarefied cultural actors, so rendering them illegitimate as economic agents. Birla’s innovative attention to the negotiations between vernacular and colonial systems of valuation illustrates how kinship-based commercial groups asserted their legitimacy by challenging and inhabiting the public/private mapping. Highlighting the cultural politics of market governance, Stages of Capital is an unprecedented history of colonial commercial law, its legal fictions, and the formation of the modern economic subject in India. The book is the winner of the 2010 Albion Book Prize from the North American Conference on British Studies. It has garnered over twenty reviews in journals as wide-ranging as the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, the Law and History Review, the Harvard Business History Review, Studi Culturali (in Italian), the Law and Society Review, and the Economic Times of India.
Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Toronto
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Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics (Duke University Press, 2012) shows how a new social world of lesbian and queer activism in India has come to be. Drawing on over two years of fieldwork with queer activists, Naisargi N. Dave traces the critical events and everyday practices that constitute queer activism in India. Through focusing on extraordinary historical moments as well as everyday politics of care and critique, Dave theorizes activism as an ethical practice of problematization, invention, and creative relational practice. Dave tracks the emergences and closures and reformulations of such an ethics through a range of historically linked settings: a lesbian letter-writing network in the early 1990s, a ‘health club’ where married women would meet, a lesbian helpline and a splinter queer advocacy collective, same-sex desiring activists in the women’s movement, and rights groups that took to the streets as a response to a sense of exile. This provocative and dynamic book demonstrates how activism is not only a kind of ethics but is affective through and through, emerging in the confrontation between what is previously unimaginable and the world as it is.
Assistant Professor of Fine Art, University of Toronto
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Embellished Reality: Indian Painted Photographs (Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum Press, 2012). A painted photograph, understood broadly, is paint on a photographic surface applied through retouching, tinting, hand-colouring, or other methods. This can range from only a few brushstrokes to an opaque layer of paint that entirely covers the photographic print. Painted photographs can seem surprising or remarkable to the contemporary eye but were common in the early history of photography when paint and the photograph had a far closer relationship than they do today. Ranging from the quickly executed to the stunningly beautiful, painted photographs were markers of modernity, combining past and present visual forms into new hybrid varieties. Introduced in the latter half of the nineteenth century, at a time when the world was seemingly getting smaller through ever-increasing trade, travel and tourism, painted photographs gave colour to black-and-white images of a changing world and new ways of being. This book traces the evolution of painted photographs in India from the 1860s, a few decades after the invention of photographs, to the 2000s, long after the introduction of colour photography. It focuses on a collection of more than seventy works at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. These include portraits of princely rulers, merchants, and elite and non-elite patrons produced by professional photography studios, painters, and those who fell somewhere in between. Dominated by portraiture, these images mark rites of passage such as coronation, marriage, honeymoon, pilgrimage, festivals, and even death. This book explores photographic history in India and Europe to show how Indian painted photographs fit into both local and transcultural practices of photographic manipulation.
Assistant Professor of Fine Art, University of Toronto
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Bollywood Cinema Showcards: Indian Film Art from the 1950s to the 1980s (Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum Press, 2011). This book tells the story of a unique but little-studied form of Bollywood advertising: the showcard. While Bollywood films have achieved worldwide recognition, the visual culture of advertising that surrounds them has not received as much attention even though it has been a dominant part of the urban and rural landscape across northern India for much of the 20th century. Showcards are collages using film stills that have been cut and assembled on a board and hand-painted. They are unique works of art, combining old and new painting styles with photography, resulting in dramatic, colourful compositions. While billboards and posters are a part of global cinema advertising practice, hand-made showcards seem to be uniquely South Asian. This book traces the evolution of Bollywood showcards over four decades-from the 1950s, just after India's independence, to the 1980s, just before its entry into the global economy. Essays by Deepali Dewan, Kajri Jain, and Rajesh Devraj examine how showcards are made, displayed, circulated, and how they intersect with other South Asian visual forms. These are supported by full-colour illustrations and catalogue text co-authored by Alexandra McCarter that elaborates on the evolution of graphic design.
Assistant Professor of Visual Studies, University of Toronto
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Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art (Duke University Press, 2007) is a fascinating account of the printed images known in India as “calendar art” or “bazaar art,” the color-saturated, mass-produced pictures often used on calendars and in advertisements, featuring deities and other religious themes as well as nationalist leaders, alluring women, movie stars, chubby babies, and landscapes. Calendar art appears in all manner of contexts in India: in chic elite living rooms, middle-class kitchens, urban slums, village huts; hung on walls, stuck on scooters and computers, propped up on machines, affixed to dashboards, tucked into wallets and lockets. In this beautifully illustrated book, Kajri Jain examines the power that calendar art wields in Indian mass culture, arguing that its meanings derive as much from the production and circulation of the images as from their visual features.
Jain draws on interviews with artists, printers, publishers, and consumers as well as analyses of the prints themselves to trace the economies—of art, commerce, religion, and desire—within which calendar images and ideas about them are formulated. For Jain, an analysis of the bazaar, or vernacular commercial arena, is crucial to understanding not only the calendar art that circulates within the bazaar but also India’s postcolonial modernity and the ways that its mass culture has developed in close connection with a religiously inflected nationalism. The bazaar is characterized by the coexistence of seemingly incompatible elements: bourgeois-liberal and neoliberal modernism on the one hand, and vernacular discourses and practices on the other. Jain argues that from the colonial era to the present, capitalist expansion has depended on the maintenance of these multiple coexisting realms: the sacred, the commercial, and the artistic; the official and the vernacular.
Associate Professor of History, University of Toronto
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Embattled Identities: Rajput Lineages and the Colonial State in Nineteenth-Century North India (Oxford University Press, 2002) is a study of the encounter between the Rajputs of North India and the British in the nineteenth century focuses on factors such as caste, kinship, and colonial relations. It examines the reconstitution of Rajput identity through property and inheritance strategies, marriage, female infanticide, feuding, banditry, rebellion and collective violence.
Professor of Anthropology, University of Toronto
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Archaeological Approaches to Technology (Emerald Group Publishing, 2007) offers a unified, consistent approach to ancient technologies, teaching readers to look for insights revealed by comparisons among them. Without seeking to replace traditional studies of specific technologies, it explores the range of archaeological approaches to technologies by enabling comparisons across types of crafts. These comparisons, in turn, reveal how archaeological specialists have used technology studies to address a wide variety of social questions about our ancestors. With case studies organized by process or functional topic, rather than material type, Professor Miller's scholarship creates a framework for collaboration among researchers in different locations working in different disciplines, traditions, and approaches.
Assistant Professor of History, University of Toronto
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Gender, Sainthood, & Everyday Practice in South Asian Shi’ism (University of North Carolina Press, 2007) offers a study of devotional hagiographical texts and contemporary ritual performances of the Shi'a of Hyderabad, India, Karen Ruffle demonstrates how traditions of sainthood and localized cultural values shape gender roles. Ruffle focuses on the annual mourning assemblies held on 7 Muharram to commemorate the battlefield wedding of Fatimah Kubra and her warrior-bridegroom Qasem, who was martyred at the battle of Karbala, Iraq, in 680 C.E. before their wedding was consummated. Ruffle argues that hagiography, an important textual tradition in Islam, plays a dynamic role in constructing the memory, piety, and social sensibilities of a Shi'i community. Through the Hyderabadi rituals that idealize and venerate Qasem, Fatimah Kubra, and the other heroes of Karbala, a distinct form of sainthood is produced. These saints, Ruffle explains, serve as socioethical role models and religious paragons whom Shi'i Muslims aim to imitate in their everyday lives, improving their personal religious practice and social selves. On a broader community level, Ruffle observes, such practices help generate and reinforce group identity, shared ethics, and gendered sensibilities. By putting gender and everyday practice at the center of her study, Ruffle challenges Shi'i patriarchal narratives that present only men as saints and brings to light typically overlooked women's religious practices.
Assistant Professor of History, University of Toronto
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Empire’s Garden: Assam and the Making of India (Duke University Press, 2011). In the mid-nineteenth century the British created a landscape of tea plantations in the northeastern Indian region of Assam. The tea industry filled imperial coffers and gave the colonial state a chance to transform a jungle-laden frontier into a cultivated system of plantations. Claiming that local peasants were indolent, the British soon began importing indentured labor from central India. In the twentieth century these migrants were joined by others who came voluntarily to seek their livelihoods. In Empire’s Garden, Jayeeta Sharma explains how the settlement of more than one million migrants in Assam irrevocably changed the region’s social landscape. She argues that the racialized construction of the tea laborer catalyzed a process by which Assam’s gentry sought to insert their homeland into an imagined Indo-Aryan community and a modern Indian political space. Various linguistic and racial claims allowed these elites to defend their own modernity while pushing the burden of primitiveness onto “non- Aryan” indigenous tribals and migrant laborers. As vernacular print arenas emerged in Assam, so did competing claims to history, nationalism, and progress that continue to reverberate in the present.
Associate Professor of Historical Studies, University of Toronto
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The Ismailis in the Middle Ages: A History of Survival, A Search for Salvation was published in 2007 by Oxford University Press. “None of that people should be spared, not even the babe in its cradle.” With these chilling words, the Mongol warlord Genghis Khan declared his intention to destroy the Ismailis, one of the most intellectually and politically significant Muslim communities of medieval Islamdom. The massacres that followed convinced observers that this powerful voice of Shi‘i Islam had been forever silenced. Little was heard of these people for centuries, until their recent and dramatic emergence from obscurity. Today they exist as a dynamic and thriving community established in over twenty-five countries. Yet the interval between what appeared to have been their total annihilation, and their modern, seemingly phoenix-like renaissance, has remained shrouded in mystery. Drawing on an astonishing array of sources gathered from many countries around the globe, The Ismailis in the Middle Ages is a richly nuanced and compelling study of the murkiest portion of this era. In probing the period from the dark days when the Ismaili fortresses in Iran fell before the marauding Mongol hordes, to the emergence at Anjudan of the Ismaili Imams who provided a spiritual centre to a scattered community, this work explores the motivations, passions and presumptions of historical actors. With penetrating insight, Shafique N. Virani examines the rich esoteric thought that animated the Ismailis and enabled them to persevere. A work of remarkable erudition, this landmark book is essential reading for scholars of Islamic history and spirituality, Shi‘ism and Iran. Both specialists and informed lay readers will take pleasure not only in its scholarly perception, but in its lively anecdotes, quotations of delightful poetry, and gripping narrative style. This is an extraordinary book of historical beauty and spiritual vision.