Category Archives: Dissertations

New PhD: Marvi’s Sisters: Hindu Belonging and the Muslim State in Pakistan

Ghazal Asif, Marvi’s Sisters: Hindu Belonging and the Muslim State in Pakistan, PhD., John Hopkins University, 2021.

Abstract:

This dissertation asks how Sindhi Hindu communities living in Pakistan negotiate modalities of religious minority belonging in a modern Muslim polity, in the place their ancestors have lived for generations. Weaving ethnographic, archival, and textual analyses, it examines how mutual imbrications of the state and the domestic Continue reading New PhD: Marvi’s Sisters: Hindu Belonging and the Muslim State in Pakistan

New PhDs in Sindhi Studies: 2020

Fatima Quraishi, Necropolis as Palimpsest: The Cemetery of Maklī in Sindh, Pakistan, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University 2019.

Abstract: The Maklī Necropolis is a vast funerary complex constructed on a ridge along a tributary of the Indus River in southern Sindh, Pakistan. This veritable city of the dead, stretching along four kilometres was established in the late fourteenth century, with monumental construction continuing until the late seventeenth century. The prolonged history of building, during which significant socio-political transformation took place in the region, resulted in a site where multiple architectural traditions and local artistic practices intersected. Continue reading New PhDs in Sindhi Studies: 2020

New PhDs in Sindhi Studies: 2019-2020

The last few years have been very productive in terms of Sindhi studies. Below, four summaries reflect on the dynamics of this field, but also the diversity of approaches.

Mustafa Ahmad Khan
Making Them Look the Other Way! The (Ir)rationality of Road Building in the Sindh Borderlands of Pakistan
PhD in Anthropology, SOAS, University of London, 2019.

Nimrita Kaur Rana,
Being and Becoming: Sindhis in Accra, Ghana
PhD in African Studies and Anthropology, University of Birmingham, 2019.

Kamran
Practising Hinduism in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Devotion and the Politics of Untouchability in Ramdev Pir’s tradition of Sindh
PhD in History and Civilisations, EHESS, 2020.

Remembering Dominique-Sila Khan’s Ramdev Pir and the Ismailis in Rajasthan
By Mahek Khwaja
M.A in English Literature, Editorial Assistant at a publication house in Karachi

You can read all the summaries here: MIFS Newsletter  n°7-8 (July 2020)

Sindhi Multiscriptality, Past and Present: A Sociolinguistic Investigation into Community Acceptance

Sindhī Multiscriptality, Past and Present. A Sociolinguistic Investigation into Community Acceptance

by Arvind Vijaykumar Iyengar

Bachelor of Engineering (Mechanical), University of Pune, India Master of Applied Linguistics (Honours), University of New England, Australia

A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Discipline of Linguistics
School of Behavioural, Cognitive and Social Sciences

University of New England, Australia, June 2017 Continue reading Sindhi Multiscriptality, Past and Present: A Sociolinguistic Investigation into Community Acceptance

PhD thesis: Water, land and politics in Sindh, 1898-1969

Timothy Daniel Haines, ‘Building the Empire, Building the Nation: Water, land, and the politics of river-development in Sind, 1898-1969’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Royal Holloway, University of London, 2011)

“Major attempts to control the natural environment characterized government ‘developmental’ activity in twentieth-century Sind.  This thesis argues that the construction of three barrage dams across the River Indus, along with a network of irrigation canals, enacted human control over nature as a political project.  The Raj and its successor state in Sind, Pakistan, thereby claimed legitimacy through their capacity to benefit humans by re-modelling the landscape.  These claims depended on an implied narrative of material progress, which irrigation development was expected to bring about, in a province considered technologically and socially backward.

In allocating land that was newly made available for cultivation, government officials found an unprecedented opportunity to also re-shape agrarian society.  As well as providing the means by which ‘ideal types’ of cultivator could be encouraged to proliferate, the development of Sind’s irrigation system was based on concepts of modernization that promoted increasing state intervention in agrarian life to render a ‘disordered’ society more easily governable.  This trend was constrained, however, by successive administrations’ need to balance the lure of radical modernization against the powerful claims on new land of local magnates.

The colonial belief in the agricultural, economic, and social benefits of large-scale irrigation projects was transplanted into the post-colonial state.  The construction of irrigation works, the colonization of land, and their political implications before and after Independence are therefore analyzed, in order to demonstrate how and why the logic of large infrastructure schemes remained consistent.  At the same time, differences in how successive administrations framed and enacted barrage projects are shown to have depended on contemporary circumstances.  In the process, the thesis sheds new light on the tensions between and within the central and provincial governments, demonstrating the contested nature of concepts of Imperial governance, nation-building, and material progress.”