Undergraduate Paper Prize

Lucas Fromm, "Conceptions of Liberation: A comparative analysis of how four Indian philosophical traditions conceptualize Moksa"

Aalia Jagwani, “The Departure” 

Adi Thatai, “A Bite of Home: Family Recipes Adapted from the writings of Saramma Kendangath Joseph” 

Kate Salke, “Yantra and Mantra: Aesthetic, Symbolic, and Ritual Unifiers” 

Thesis Prize in South Asian Studies

Arts

Zeeshan Hassan-Andoh, "Lines and Layers: The Formation of Contemporary Miniature Painting"

Humanities (co-winners)

Srinaath Kidambi Perangur, "Translating Tyāgarāja: The Sanskrit Songs of South India’s Most Famous Classical Composer"

Catherine Michele Nelli - “On Nineteenth-Century Indology: Divergences Between Sanskrit and Colonial French and English Reception of Jayadeva’s Gītagovinda”

Social Sciences

Catherine Michele Nelli - "Between Empire and Post-Colonial Nation-Building: A Comparative Analysis of Nationalism’s Role in French India’s Decolonization in Chandernagore and Pondicherry (1947-1954)"

CSA Undergraduate Paper Prize 

Aryan Srivastava Hate at Scale: Elections, Leader Identity and Hate Speech in Rural Uttar Pradesh *Co-authored by Aarushi Kalra & Saket Tiwari 

Catherine Nelli Krishna Drinking Flames: A Kaṅgra Painting of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa 

Leo Fleissig The Story of Ekalavya: an Embodiment of Hopelessness or a Beacon of Hope 

CCSA Thesis Prize in South Asian Studies 

Jamila Beesley The Architects of the Solutions They Need:” Dalit Feminism in the U.S. Caste Abolition Movement 

Lavanya Krishnan The Politics of Privatisation in India 

Akshaan Parikh Let Us Alone to Die: Plague Camps in Bombay City, 1896–1902

CCSA Undergraduate Paper Prize

Srinaath Kidambi Perangur 
Bhakti and Bhāva: A Brief History and Ethnography

CCSA Undergraduate Paper Prize

Eli Grossman 
Elementary Forms of Meditation: The Magical and Religious Dimensions of Insight Meditation

CCSA Thesis Prize in South Asian Studies

Liam Greenwell 
Frontier Visions: Urban Landscapes, Identity Formation, and the Battle Over Images in Imphal, Manipur

Abstract: Imphal, the capital city of the Indian state of Manipur, is a prime locale in what Sanjib Baruah has called the “battle over images” in Northeast India. Power is fragmented and contingent, with a plethora of state, armed forces, underground, and corporate entities vying for control and civilians making do in the middle. The city has undergone rapid urbanization and is also the site of tensions along the lines of class, ethnicity, generation, and gender. In this context, individuals and groups make visual interventions on both the urban landscape and their own bodies that reinscribe or contest representations put forward by the state and insurgent groups alike.

These assertions may challenge outside narratives of the city as a zone of violence and exception, complicate ideals of Manipuri identity, or reinforce divisions between tribal and nontribal or Manipuri and mayang (outsider). In Imphal, visual interventions carry significance because of multiple levels of official and social censorship that regulate speech, an insular media landscape, and the realities of complicated spatial control. Visuality is therefore a plane on which individuals communicate, assert themselves, and navigate life within the urban landscape. This project begins with an introduction that places it within the emerging field of Northeast India studies and points to some theoretical underpinnings. Then, the first chapter is a discussion of visual interventions on the city, such as graffiti, public forums, bandhs (blockades), newspapers, and commercial film. The second chapter looks at visuality on a different scale: that of the body. This chapter examines youth culture and the Korean Wave, contemporary art and performance, and hegemonic representations of Manipuri art and culture.

CCSA Undergraduate Paper Prize

Luqmaan Bokhary 
The A to Z of "Islam"ization: From Afghanistan to Zia-ul-Haq

Rachel McMahon
Tibetan Refugees: The Evolution of the Suffering Subject

Alexandra Rodriguez 
Early Bengali Women Doctors of Colonial India

Divya Santhanam
Sabarimala Controversy: Female blood as a disruptive force that
threatens the male socio-homo space

CCSA Thesis Prize in South Asian Studies

Hugo Hansen 
Making Maharashtra Straight Again: The Shiv Sena, Collective Violence, and the Discourse of the Bombay Riots

Abstract:  Much of the literature surrounding the ascendance of majoritarian Hindu nationalist politics in India stresses the fundamentally masculine ethos of the outfits committed to realizing their fantasy of a Hindu nation-state in accordance with India’s alleged Hindutva (“Hindu-ness”). When Hindu nationalist organizations destroyed the Babri Mosque in the north Indian city of Ayodha on 6 December 1992, triumphalist Hindus and aggrieved Muslims clashed across India. One month later, in the west Indian state of Maharashtra, Hindu nationalists orchestrated vicious reprisals against their Muslim neighbors in a city emblematic of Indian cosmopolitanism: Bombay. This article presents analyses of the statements of Maharashtra’s very-own Hindu nationalist party, the Shiv Sena, and its fiery “supremo,” Balasaheb “Bal” Keshav Thackeray, to argue that the potency of the Shiv Sena’s anti-Muslim vitriol lay in its masculine homoeroticism. While “masculine Hinduism” accounts for the Shiv Sena’s performative machismo, it speaks little of Hindu nationalists’ constructions of the Muslim other. I argue that the Shiv Sena represented Indian Muslims as the abject, effeminate and passive sexual partner in a metaphorical act of sodomization to reinforce the imagined threat of Muslims’ supposed sexual deviance. In doing so, the Shiv Sena produced a narrative of Muslims’ violent sodomization by a virile Hindu nation.

CCSA Undergraduate Paper Prize 

Anisha Rathod 
Bollyhood: Raja Kumari and the Politics of Desi Rap 

Arundhati Ponnapa 
Culture, Law, and Gender and Sexuality Rights in India 

Rohan Jha 
Diasporic Commentary about South Asia and its Implications

CCSA Thesis Prize in South Asian Studies

Basundhara Mukherjee
The Tremors of Hindutva: The Politics of Hindu Nationalism in Post-Earthquake Kachchh, Gujarat