In recent times, the collective political imagination has retreated from the hard task of imagining a just future, and shifted towards the comfort of nostalgic, simplified, and even false narratives about the past. Manjushree Thapa’s keynote explores how South Asia’s immense complexity challenges those from the region to resist this tendency of withdrawal and turn, courageously, towards the future once more.

South Asia has long been shaped by the intellectual and material exchange across the Arabian Sea, the Himalayas, and the Indian Ocean. Across this long history, South Asia has created and exchanged knowledge in hundreds of Indo-European, Dravidian, Sino-Tibetan, and Austroasiatic languages, large and small. Thapa turns to the present: a South Asia where hopes for democracy are strained by social inequality, economic uncertainty, environmental crisis, and renewed authoritarianism. Drawing on her long engagement with Nepal’s political transformations, she asks what kinds of stories might help resist a reactionary nostalgia.

The entire world loses out when a region so worldly and so erudite, turns away from the task of imagining the future. In her keynote, Manjushree considers how the climate crisis and economic insecurity can make nostalgic narratives about the past seem appealing and proposes creative ways of imagining a just future.