Host City USA: Ahmedabad

Urmila Mohan

Dr. Urmila Mohan is a public anthropologist of material culture and studies how sociocultural values are circulated through cloth, bodily practices, and belief. She earned a PhD in anthropology from University College London, an MFA in studio arts from Pennsylvania State University, a BA (hons) in anthropology from Victoria University of Wellington, and a BFA in communication design from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad.

Dr. Mohan’s research includes an ethnography of devotees who make garments for their deities and also wear specific clothing; this was published as Clothing as Devotion in Contemporary Hinduism. She also undertook a curatorial study of Balinese ritual textiles at the American Museum of Natural History, resulting in an exhibition and catalogue, Fabricating Power with Balinese Textiles. Besides, she is the author of the monograph, Masking in Pandemic U.S..

Dr. Mohan has written extensively on material practices and theorizes them in her edited volume, The Efficacy of Intimacy and Belief in Worldmaking Practices. Earlier, she had co-edited The Material Subject: Rethinking Bodies and Objects in Motion and a special issue of the Journal of Material Culture titled “The Bodily and Material Cultures of Religious Subjectivation”.

As part of her commitment to interdisciplinarity, Dr. Mohan founded the digital, open-access publication, The Jugaad Project. She is also a member of several global working groups, including the Matière à Penser network for embodiment studies.

Dr. Mohan’s Fulbright-Nehru project is an ethnographic study of weavers of silk ikat (resist-dyed) textiles in Gujarat, India. She is contextualizing ikat handloom innovation as a process of socio-technical ‘enchantment’ that engages weavers, traders, and consumers. She is also connecting woven cloths’ agency with changing socioeconomic and spiritual practices via weavers’ technical, bodily, and material adaptations. Her research adds to studies of how artisanal communities and heritage are shaped in India; it is doing so by analyzing shifts in practices/meanings due to migration, the influence of kinship on technology adoption and craft expansion, changing roles of women in weaving families, and the effects of the geographical indications patenting system.

Vinay Lal

Dr. Vinay Lal is a cultural critic, writer, and professor of history and Asian American studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He earned his BA and MA from Johns Hopkins University in 1982. This was followed by a year-long stint in Australia and India on a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship studying cinema. He earned his PhD with distinction from the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Prof. Lal was the William R. Kenan Fellow (1992–93) at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University and immediately thereafter moved to UCLA where he has remained ever since.

Prof. Lal’s intellectual and research interests include comparative colonial histories, the politics of knowledge systems, cinema, cultures of sexuality, the global histories of nonviolence, and the thoughts of Mohandas Gandhi. He has authored and edited 21 books, including the two-volume Oxford Anthology of the Modern Indian City (2013); The History of History (2003); The Fury of Covid-19: The Politics, Histories, and Unrequited Love of the Coronavirus (2020); and Insurgency and the Artist: The Art of the Freedom Struggle in India (2022). Prof. Lal is a founding member of the Backwaters and Metaphysics Collective and the editor of the three volumes that emerged from this initiative. He is also the Academic India (Humanities) Delegate (2022–25) of the Oxford University Press. He maintains an extensive academic YouTube channel – https://www.youtube.com/user/dillichalo. He also writes frequently for the Indian Express and Open Magazine. His forthcoming books include two volumes of his collected papers on Gandhi.

Gandhi’s march to the sea at Dandi has long been recognized as a pivotal moment in India’s anti-colonial struggle. Prof. Lal’s Fulbright-Nehru study, based on archival, museum, and field research in India, is attempting to furnish a different understanding of this paradigmatic instance of nonviolent resistance in world history. The argument is that the Salt March can be read more productively – interculturally and intertextually – alongside Gandhi’s satyagraha march in South Africa (1913) and the traces it has left around the globe.

Aparna Kapadia

Dr. Aparna Kapadia is associate professor of history at Williams College. She is a social historian of early modern and modern South Asia. Her research particularly focuses on western Indian regional cultures, identities, and power structures as well as the subcontinent’s links with the Indian Ocean networks. Dr. Kapadia studied at St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, from where she received her PhD in 2013. From 2009 until 2011, she was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford.

Dr. Kapadia is the author of In Praise of Kings: Rajputs, Sultans and Poets in Fifteenth-Century Gujarat (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and co-editor of The Idea of Gujarat: History, Ethnography and Text (Orient Blackswan, 2010). Her articles have appeared in several peer-reviewed academic journals like The Mediaeval History Journal and The Journal of Asian Studies. From 2021 to 2024, she served as associate editor at the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. Dr. Kapadia also enjoys writing for popular asudiences. Since 2019, she has been publishing a column on a variety of topics in South Asian history called “Off Centre” in Scroll.in, one of India’s leading independent English-language digital publications.

For her Fulbright-Nehru project, Dr. Kapadia is conducting research for her upcoming book, Walking with the Mahatma: Kasturba Gandhi’s Political Life. This will be the first historically grounded and archivally researched biography of Kasturba (1869–1944), Mahatma Gandhi’s wife, which seeks to illuminate her pivotal but overlooked role as a political activist during India’s anti-colonial movement.

Lynna Dhanani

Dr. Lynna Dhanani obtained her doctorate from Yale University and joined the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Davis, in 2020 as an assistant professor of religious studies. She is currently working on her first major monograph, tentatively titled “Authority and Wonder: The Devotional Worlds of Hemacandra and Other Medieval Gujarati Hymn-makers”. Her research explores the confluence of interreligious polemics, philosophical debates, devotional themes, and poetics in the Sanskrit hymns of the celebrated 12th-century Svetambara Jain, Hemacandra, a court pandit to two Hindu kings of medieval Gujarat. Having dedicated herself to the study of multiple Indian religions for more than two decades, Dr. Dhanani has a wide range of interests, including Jainism, Sanskrit and Prakrit languages and literature, Indian philosophy and aesthetics, yoga, tantra, and especially South Asian religious art.

In 2023, she co-curated an exhibition at the UCLA Fowler Museum called “Visualizing Devotion: Jain Embroidered Shrine Hangings”, and is currently a co-author for the exhibition book. As a recipient of the Neubauer Collegium Visiting Fellowship (2022–23) and as part of the “Entanglements of Indian Pasts” project, she has shared her work on the great 20th-century Jain scholar Muni Jambuvijaya and his manuscript preservation projects. In 2022, she was the main organizer of the field-defining conference “Beyond Boundaries: In Honor of John E. Cort”, which brought together numerous scholars in honor of Dr. Cort, a prolific scholar in the fields of Jain and South Asian studies.

Dr. Dhanani’s Fulbright-Nehru project is exploring the diversity of Jain hymns produced in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and Apabhramsha languages in 11th–13th century Gujarat by the polymath Hemacandra and his contemporaries; the objective is to understand better their perceptions of the broader religious and intellectual worlds in which they flourished and their relationship with religious centers and the royal courts. In this context, she is exploring several libraries across north-west India and engaging local scholars, Jain communities, and Indian institutions in order to collect and analyze these hymns. This work will inform her first book manuscript as well as other publications.