Pakistan Lecture Series 2011

Qasid Mallah

Dr. Qasid Mallah received his MA (1997) and PhD (2000) from the University of Wisconsin - Madison. His professional training is in experimental archaeology (ceramics), with a specialization in survey and excavation. He is currently Professor and Chair in the Department of Archaeology at Shah Abdul Latif University in Khairpur, Sindh, Pakistan. He has written numerous articles for international journals on Indus period archaeological finds and ancient civilization. He is also the editor of a research journal entitled Ancient Sindh.

• October 10-23, 2011: University of Wisconsin - Madison Wednesday,

October 12: Indus Archaeology Lunch Meeting, Department of Anthropology

Thursday, October 13: Center for South Asia Lecture Series

Lakhan-Jo-Daro, Sindh: New Excavations at an Urban Center of the Indus Civilization

Indus valley civilization is one of the largest civilization of the world which covers huge area of South Asia i.e. the entire length of present Pakistan and parts of India. More than 2000 settlements are recorded with several major urban centers. The largest settlements so far known are Harappa, Mohenjo-daro, Dholavira, and Ganweriwala. Recent excavations at the site of Lakhan-Jo-Daro are revealing this new site as another large urban center

The settlement of Lakhan-Jo-Daro is located along right bank of Indus River in a development area of Sukkur City at Latitude 27°.43′.27 North and 68°.50′.51 East degrees longitude. Until now three major mounded areas such as western mounds central mounds and eastern mounds; collectively all mounds encompass area more than three kilometer radius. The central mounds are further divided as “A” , “B” , “C” and “D” mounds. These mounds have been investigated since 1988 and six excavation seasons (1994, 1996, 2000, 2006, 2008 and 2009/10 ) have been launched. In the course of the most recent excavation project important new features of Indus architecture and artifacts have been recovered that confirm the overall significance of the site. This lecture will provide an overview of the site and recent discoveries in the larger context of contemporary studies of the Indus civilization.

• Friday, October 14: Archaeology Brown Bag

The Archaeology of the Hakra River System in the Thar desert of Sindh, Pakistan

The now dry river system that runs parallel to the Indus has been referred to by many names, including the Saraswati-Ghaggar-Hakra-Nara River. This system has long been known to have supported large numbers of settlements in the upper reaches, but only recently have the lower reaches of this river system been investigated. This presentation will include discoveries made over the past 10 years in the course of surveys by faculty and students of the Department of Archaeology, Shah Abdul Latif University, Khairpur, Sindh. These discoveries have begun to shed new light on the settlement patterns of human communities along this river system, dating from the Mesolithic and Neolithic, through the Early Harappan, Harappan and post Harappan periods. Surveys and preliminary excavations of a wide range of archaeological sites provide a complete chronological sequence of the region. The presentation conveys all detail about each developmental phase of the culture and explains how the people of Hakra system were interacting with those who living on Indus river system and in further regions of Gujarat.

• Friday, October 21: Annual Conference on South Asia

Excavations at Lakhanjo-daro, Sindh: New discoveries in the Southern Indus

• October 24-25, 2011: New York University

Lakhan-Jo-Daro, Sindh: New Excavations at an Urban Center of the Indus Civilization

• October 26-29, 2011: Harvard University

Lakhan-Jo-Daro, Sindh: New Excavations at an Urban Center of the Indus Civilization

Naiza Khan

Naiza Khan is a leading contemporary artist from Pakistan. She is also a founding member and former coordinator of the VASL Collective of artists, as well as a major curator of Pakistani art. As an artist, Naiza Khan’s work engages with the most compelling issues facing Pakistan today, including the contested role of women, and the question of participation in public space by marginal groups. Her work has been widely exhibited and discussed in academic and popular forums nationally and internationally, and subject of a number of academic studies, including Iftikhar Dadi’s Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia. As a founding organizer of the VASL Collective, Khan has played a key role in providing the growing artistic community in Pakistan with an indispensable forum for participation among its members, and in exchanges with the international art world (see www.vaslart.org). And as curator, Naiza Khan’s recent exhibition, The Rising Tide: New Directions in Art from Pakistan 1990-2010 shown at the Mohatta Palace Museum in Karachi, has showcased the most important work produced in the last two decades in Pakistan. The Rising Tide is possibly the first professionally curated exhibition in Pakistan, accompanied with a major catalog, and the show has attracted widespread international press coverage, including in The New York Times and BBC. In sum, Naiza Khan’s numerous achievements in her own art, as well as her devotion to the project of developing the contemporary art of Pakistan make her an ideal choice for the AIPS PLS speaker series, as she will articulate the importance of contemporary art in shaping Pakistan today to the US academic audience.

To view Naiza Khan's CV, please click here.

• October 10-11, 2011: Yale University

Monday, October 10:

The Rising Tide: New Directions in Art from Pakistan over the last decadeA confluence of modernity and tradition, the everyday and the heroic, the miniature and the immense, the “city” in Pakistan offers a rich and fertile space for artistic interrogation of place, temporality, belonging, and violation. Conceptualizations of urbanity are significant for understanding how space is realized and re-worked by artists. This lecture examined how languages of belonging and displacement are mobilized, anchored and sustained between layers of urban everyday life and contemporary artists’ studio practices. It discussed these issues in the context of the major exhibition “The Rising Tide” curated by Naiza Khan at the Mohatta Palace Museum in Karachi in 2010.

• October 11-12, 2011: Cornell University

Tuesday, October 11:

Cartographies of Intimacy: exploring geography and landscape in a Pakistani context

This lecture discussed how artists explore complex ideas around identity through an understanding of landscape that is not focused on the nation or state, but about everyday experience. Urban transitions, the demography of a site, and social exchange have been some of the influences on these artistic practices. The lecture discussed the work of Risham Syed, Christophe and Asiya Polack, Naiza Khan, Mansur Salim, Anwar Saeed, Afshar Malik, and Farida Batool in an attempt to unearth the relationship between geography and personal history.

• October 13-15, 2011: University of Texas at Austin

Thursday, October 13: South Asia Institute Fall 2011 South Asia Seminar Series

Cartographies of Intimacy: exploring geography and landscape in a Pakistani context

• October 15-18, 2011: University of California, Berkeley

Monday, October 17: Center for South Asia Studies Guftugu Series

Between the Temple and the Playground: Recent works by Naiza Khan 

Manora Island, just off the coast of Karachi has a history of a defense fort facing the Arabian Sea. The presence of different religious buildings points to a multi-religious social fabric that once existed on this island. I have been recording the transformation of Manora through photography, video, text and now performance as a strategy for intervention in the public space. The nature of my investigation lies in the social dynamics of this community, and its relationship to the nature of Sufi myth and allegory that is part of the history of this area. The everydayness of this historic, yet non-elite space possesses a different texture from the modernizing urban metropolis of Karachi. Yet on a quieter scale, it evokes the same sense of history, urban decay and transformation that Karachi is undergoing, and which includes issues of gender in public space and disenfranchisement of the less privileged.

• October 18-22, 2011: University of California, Los Angeles

Mobility, Process and Practice: Insights into artistic production in Pakistan and beyond

Over the last decade, there has been a steady increase in Pakistani artists travelling to exhibit their work, as well as through residency opportunities abroad. At the same time, international artists have been visiting Pakistan to find an astonishingly fertile ground for extending their practice and engaging with new processes. This dynamic of mobility has been a catalyst in changing perceptions, forging friendships, creating professional opportunities and dialogue. This lecture explores how art production is realized through interventions and collaborations between artists and artisans in specific spaces, and the shift in artistic practice that often takes place when different cultural positions engage with one another. This lecture discussed the role of artist collectives such as Vasl and Khoj, international creative discourse across borders, and the nature of cultural relationships in South Asia as well as the problems arisen from political instability, and lack of institutional support and funding.

Sana Haroon

Sana Haroon completed a BA at Yale University and a PhD in South Asian History at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Her doctoral work was on the history of religious mobilisation in the Pashtun borderlands, Frontier of Faith (Columbia University Press, 2008). She has also worked on the rise of Deobandi Islam in the Pakhtun north-west and the discourses of religious orthodoxy in early modern Muslim north-India. Sana has taught at the University of East London and at Zayed University in the UAE and is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Sciences at IBA, Karachi.

• March 30-April 3, 2011: Association for Asian Studies Meeting, Honolulu

Reconsidering the Legacies of the Early Nineteenth-Century Jihad of Sayyid Ahmed Shaheed

The story of Sayyid Ahmed Shaheed who led a jihad against the Sikhs in the Pashtun north-west in 1826-31 is widely known and is often referenced as a moment of unusual and transformative political organization and mobilization by Muslims, but primarily for the claims made by W. W. Hunter, entitled The Indian Musalmans in his 1872 pamphlet defining a ‘Wahhabi’ imperative as underlying Muslim militarism before and during the anti-British uprisings of 1857. Following in this trend, popular accounts of Sayyid Ahmed’s movement have remained focused on Sayyid Ahmed as a jihadi, and Sayyid Ahmed’s death on the battle field in the Pakhtun North-West is understood to be the end of his movement and the failure of his scheme.

This lecture proposed an alternative to this view by considering the ways in which Sayyid Ahmed both taught the principles of mystical devotionalism in simplified and easily transmitted terms, and disassociated community based practice and the interrogation of the Quran and the hadith from the authority of ulama of Noth Indian madrassas. Thinking about the manner in which Sayyid Ahmed’s teachings intellectually rationalized and structured community-based religious practice allows us to look beyond the violence, vitriol and short life of the movement, and consider instead the ideas, pedagogies and notions of authority which it introduced.

• April 3-9, 2011: Stanford University

• April 9-19, 2011: Richard Stockton College, University of Pennsylvania, Villanova University

To view Professor Sana Haroon's CV, please click here.

Hassan Miangul Aurangzeb

Hassan Aurangzeb is a Barrister-at Law and member of the Supreme Court Bar Association (Pakistan). He studied at the University of Wales and the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and was admitted to the Bar at Lincoln’s Inn, London. He is currently Advocate of the Supreme Court of Pakistan, specializing in corporate and constitutional law. He has argued cases involving commerce, constitutional issues, elections, and much more.

• March 30-April 3, 2011: Association for Asian Studies Meeting, Honolulu

• April 3-16, 2011: University of Oregon

• April 10-11: University of Washington, Seattle