News Type: Event

In this week’s faculty seminar, our visiting faculty Dr. Sumaira Nawaz presented a paper titled ‘A World-Facing Sovereignty: Political Change and Minority Voices in Kabul’s Siraj ul-Akhbar, c. 1911-1918’ on December 10, 2025. Dr. Kena Wani, Assistant Professor, Social Science, was the discussant.

About the Speaker

Sumaira Nawaz is a scholar of global intellectual history and received her PhD from the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University. Her work engages with print culture, migration and mobility, book history, and Muslim modernity. She has studied at SOAS and the University of Delhi.

Abstract

In the essay “A World-Facing Sovereignty,” I turn to Kabul’s foremost Persian-language newspaper Siraj ul-Akhbar (1911–1918) that strengthened Afghanistan’s image as a site of Islamic revival among readers within Afghan frontiers and beyond. To insert Afghanistan within the interconnected print-spheres of the Middle East and South Asia, the editor Mahmud Tarzi regularly translated news from the Ottoman Empire, Qajar Iran, and British India within Siraj. In the process, Tarzi wrote of the Ottoman and Qajar constitutional revolutions as moments of deep anxiety and caution that had caused political turmoil and civil strife in the region. As one of the last independent Muslim polities, Afghanistan, he reasoned, could not risk such upheavals within its borders, even though the Afghan state welcomed support from Young Turk technocrats to aid its burgeoning press and infrastructural development projects. Cross-border news from colonial South Asia too did not always hold a favorable tone towards Afghanistan, with the Hindu nationalist Arya Samaj Press accusing the Afghan state of discriminating against non-Muslim minority groups within the region. In the course of this essay, I investigate how these accusations became a site of interaction and exchange between Afghan and South Asian Urdu presses, pushing Tarzi to re-frame the legitimacy of the Afghan ruler Habibullah Khan’s reign through the language of minority protection and equality before law. The objective through this analysis is to illustrate that South-South textual exchanges did follow stable pathways to Pan-Islamic unity but in fact sharpened divisions among disparate Muslim readers.

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Welcome to CLAT 2026!

The Common Law Admission Test (CLAT) is a national level entrance exam for admissions to undergraduate (UG) and postgraduate (PG) law programmes offered by 25 National Law Universities around the country. CLAT is organised by the Consortium of National Law Universities consisting of the representative universities.

Instructions for Candidates at NLSIU

• CLAT 2026 examination will be held on December 7, 2025 (2:00 P.M. to 4:00 P.M).
• Candidates are permitted to enter the Test Centre premises from 1:00 P.M. onwards.
• Entry into the Test Centre will not be permitted after 2:15 P.M.
• Candidates shall be allowed to leave the Test Centre only after the test is over.
• Candidates must enter the NLSIU campus through Gate 1.
• Entry to the University campus is restricted to candidates only. Parents and guardians are not permitted.
• No parking facility will be available. Vehicles will not be allowed entry into the campus.
• Candidates must show their Admit Card to enter the Test Centre.
• Admit Card and Photo ID proof will be verified at the verification desk.
• Candidates must carry a print copy of their Admit Card and Photo ID Proof.
• Candidates are requested to follow the queue and markings outside the gate.

For other test related instructions and important dates, you may check: https://consortiumofnlus.ac.in/clat-2026/

How to get to NLSIU?

If you need help in reaching our campus, please click here

The M. K. Nambyar Chair on Constitutional Law is hosting Rohit De and Ornit Shani to speak on their recently released book, Assembling India’s Constitution: A New Democratic History. The talk will take place at the Basement, NLSIU Library, between 5:30 and 6:30 PM on Monday, December 15, 2025.

The event will begin with a panel discussion, followed by an audience Q&A.

About the Book

De and Shani’s book challenges canonical understandings of the making of India’s Constitution. Most scholarship has foregrounded the work of the Constituent Assembly, assuming that “constitutional politics and details were beyond the imagination, interest and capacity of the Indian people, and that this process did not occupy their concerns” (7). By contrast, De and Shani argue that the Constitution was fit together through “disparate and simultaneous constitution-making efforts across the country,” stemming from “large and diverse publics” (13-14). In other words, the people contributed to the assembling of India’s Constitution.

Authors

• Rohit De is a legal historian at Yale’s Department of History. He was awarded the J. Willard Hurst Prize for his last book, A People’s Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic.
• Ornit Shani teaches Modern Indian History at the Department of South Asian Studies, University of Haifa. Her previous book, How India Became Democratic: Citizenship and the Making of the Universal Franchise won the 2019 Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay New India Foundation Prize

Panellists

• Aparna Chandra heads the M. K. Nambyar Chair on Constitutional Law at the National Law School. She primarily teaches constitutional law and comparative public law. Her last book, Court on Trial: A Data Driven Account of the Supreme Court of India, builds on a decade of original empirical research to interrogate the functioning of the Indian Supreme Court.
• Vanya Vaidehi Bhargav is an intellectual historian of Modern South Asia at the National Law School. In her first book, Being Hindu, Being Indian: Lala Lajpat Rai’s Ideas of Nationhood, she challenges the idea that Lajpat Rai can be reduced to an ideological ancestor of modern Hindutva.

Moderator

Jai Brunner teaches constitutional law and jurisprudence at the National Law School. His current research interests lie in using legal theory to identify problems of indeterminacy in Indian Supreme Court reasoning.

We invite curious and interested students, parents, schools, and career counsellors, to the open house on the NLS BA (Hons) programme at Hyderabad on Saturday, December 13, 2025.

This conversation will revolve around BA education and practice, focussing on the multidisciplinary curriculum and pedagogy of what NLS has to offer in this programme. The session will be hosted from 11 am to 1 pm. It is intended to guide students in their Class XI and XII in making an informed decision about their higher education journey.

The open house will be conducted by our faculty member Dr. Parashar Kulkarni, Associate Professor, Centre for the Study of Social Inclusion (CSSI).

Kindly register ahead for the open house by filling out this form. 

About the NLS BA (Hons) Programme

NLSIU pioneered and developed an integrated 5-year BA LLB (Hons.) degree that transformed Indian legal education. Several NLS graduates have pursued further degrees in humanities, social sciences, and business and then embarked on very successful careers in these fields.

As NLSIU develops into a multi-disciplinary university, in line with national and state education policies, the NLS BA (Hons.) programme draws on 35 years of experience in offering the integrated 5-year BA LLB (Hons.) programme. The NLS BA (Hons.) programme curriculum has been carefully designed by faculty teams after extensive stakeholder consultations with eminent academics and practitioners from across the country’s top universities to provide their inputs and advice on the curriculum.

Our faculty come from leading universities within India and beyond. We have faculty strength in the following areas:

• History: Modern South Asia, Urban History, Labour History, Global History, Post-Independent India, Development and Planning, Indian National Movement (19th and 20th century)
• Politics: Western Political Thought, Tagore, Gandhi, Periyar and Indian Political Thought, Political Economy, Urban Politics, Land, Indigeneity, Political Parties, The Indian State and Democracy, Comparative Methods in Political Research
• Sociology and Anthropology: Social Theory, Caste and Tribe, Capitalisms, Development, Land Politics, Cinema and Popular Culture, Religion, Urban Anthropology, Ecology
• Economics: Development Economics, Environmental Economics, Labour Economics, Econometrics, Microeconomics, Macroeconomics, History of Economic Thought, Game Theory

Our faculty have rich research agendas and publication records across law and the social sciences which will inform classroom teaching and learning.

Read more about the programme.

The Chair on Consumer Law and Practice, NLSIU and  the Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) organised an online panel discussion on ‘India’s Emerging Digital Data Protection Architecture: Possibilities and Concerns’ on December 12, 2025.

Watch The Full Video

Panellists 

• Ghanashyam Hegde – Vice President & General Counsel, Indian Sub-Continent, Australia & New Zealand at Procter & Gamble
• Lagna Panda, Partner, AP & Partners
• Manisha Kapoor, CEO & Secretary General, ASCI
• Shashank Mohan, Associate Director, Centre for Communication Governance, NLU Delhi

Moderator 

Dr. Garima Gupta, Assistant Professor, NLSIU

About the Session

The Supreme Court of India has declared privacy and informational self-determination as fundamental rights. Taking this into account, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (DPDPA) provides for a framework to balance between individual autonomy and legitimate public and commercial uses of data. The Act governs the processing of digital personal data.

It seeks to balance two objectives:

* Protecting an individual’s right to privacy; and
* Ensuring that personal data can be used for legitimate and lawful purposes.

The Act also establishes a unified legal framework for how entities in India collect, store and process digital personal data with the twin aims of protecting individual autonomy and enabling responsible, data-driven economic growth. The DPDP Act, 2023 and the recently notified DPDP Rules, 2025, together represent the most significant attempt yet to articulate a unified legal architecture for this balance.

While the DPDPA laid down broad principles around rights of data principals, duties of Data Fiduciaries, cross-border transfer constraints and the institutional creation of the Data Protection Board, the DPDP Rules, 2025 provides for a compliance architecture.

The goal of this panel discussion is to explore how India’s new DPDP Act can be put into practice in a way that protects people’s rights, builds trust in how organisations use data and still allows India’s digital economy and innovation to grow.

Ten years ago, we lost Priya Thangarajah — an aspiring young lawyer and activist who had worked both in India and her native Sri Lanka on issues of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, violence and human rights — when she took her life. Priya was a graduate of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, the National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bengaluru, and Georgetown University, Washington DC, where she was also a Fulbright scholar.

To commemorate her life and work, this Human Rights Day, the Queer Archive for Memory, Reflection and Activism (QAMRA) at NLSIU will revisit three reports Priya authored during her lifetime. Specialists will offer contemporary reflections on the themes they cover, to create a festschrift, a selection of deliberations on her legacy as a scholar.

These themes are:

• Queer couples and Habeas Corpus in India (co-authored with Ponni Arasu);
• Tamil – Muslim relations in Sri Lanka (co-authored with Mirak Raheem);
• Legal protections for queer persons in Sri Lanka

In addition, the panel will also cover a fourth theme, i.e. d. Queerness and mental health, with a focus on suicide.

Panellists

Our distinguished panel of specialists, which will reflect on Priya’s life and work, includes:

• RUMI HARISH is a musician, and a social justice and human rights activist. He identifies as a queer transmasculine person. Rumi has written four play scripts and has worked as a music director for various documentary films and theatre productions. He is a regular columnist for different media outlets, including previous columns in Kannada Prabha and Agni Patrika. His biography was recently written by Dadapeer Jyman, a young writer and theatre director. In 2023, Rumi received the Karnataka State Sahitya Academy Award, Sahityasree.
• MANAVI ATRI is a human rights lawyer and researcher working at Alternative Law Forum, Bengaluru, India. She works with the LGBTQIA+ community on issues of self-identification, harassment and the realization of the community’s fundamental rights. Her co-authored work includes Asserting Dignity in Times of COVID, Right to Love, Wages of Hate: Journalism in Dark Times, and Criminalizing the Practice of Faith, and From Communal Policing to Hate Crimes, a report on Dakshina Kannada.
• SHREEN SAROOR is a Sri Lankan peace and women’s rights activist. She founded the Mannar Women’s Development Federation (MWDF) to support women affected by the Sri Lankan Civil War, which MWDF assisted women experiencing war-related gender issues such as widowing, wartime rape and child soldier recruitment. After the War ended, she formed Women’s Action Network (WAN) in 2010 to advocate for women’s issues throughout Sri Lanka, including through law reform and legal assistance. Her work also includes micro-credit loan programs, domestic violence advocacy and support, and reconciliation between Sri Lanka’s ethnic and religious groups. She also advocates for reforms to Sri Lanka’s Muslim laws, campaigns for the rights of female workers, and fights against Islamophobia.
• SARALA EMMANUEL is a feminist activist, researcher and experimental filmmaker based in Batticaloa, Sri Lanka. She is an integral part of diverse movements, including farmer and fisherwomen’s groups, women living with disabilities, grassroots queer collectives, autonomous peace movements, and trade unions. She is also part of regional networks such as Asia Pacific Forum on Women Law and Development, SANGAT South Asia, and DAWN. She is a founder member of the Feminist Collective for Economic Justice and currently acts on the Sub Committee on Gender and SOGI of the Human Rights Commission Sri Lanka.
• ERMIZA TEGAL is a senior Attorney at Law in Sri Lanka leading a chamber in public law and family law. Her practice works closely with victims of torture and domestic violence. Her work involves law reform and human rights advocacy, including protection for victims of torture and gender-based violence, family law reform,  plantation workers’ rights, and a feminist perspective on economic justice for Sri Lanka in the context of the economic crisis. She has served as a legal expert on State advisory committees on law reform. She holds a Masters in Law from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. She was the lead Counsel for several mental health professionals and experts who intervened in the decriminalization case heard by the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka in 2023.
• PASAN JAYASINGHE is a queer researcher, writer and activist from Colombo, Sri Lanka. In these capacities, he has worked as a policy advisor, legal researcher and election monitor in the past. He is currently completing a PhD in Political Science at University College London.
• VINAY CHANDRAN is Executive Director of Swabhava Trust, established in 1999, an NGO in Bengaluru, India, offering support services to LGBTQIA+ people. He is also a peer counsellor, a trainer on gender, sexuality and sexual health issues, as well as a researcher. He has written extensively on the mental health concerns of queer people and is co-editor of the book, Nothing to Fix: Medicalisation of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, and author of several articles at the intersection of sexuality, medicine and mental health.
• KAUSHIKI RAO trained in Bengaluru, India, as a mental health counsellor in 2017 and has been practicing since. She recently completed further training at the Toronto Institute for Relational Psychotherapy and currently practices as a psychotherapist in Toronto, Canada.  She primarily works from an intersubjective and self-psychology lens. She is particularly interested in how relational (social) structures such as caste, gender, race, class generate and inform intrapsychic dynamics.

Introduced by: Siddharth Narrain | Moderated by: Mario da Penha

This will be a hybrid event, with the in-person component at the NLSIU campus, and a virtual arm on Zoom ( Join here)

The Green Room at NLSIU is organising a screening of the play Frankenstein (National Theatre Live) on Wednesday, December 3, 2025 (6 – 8 PM) at NAB 101.

Directed by Danny Boyle, this acclaimed staging features Benedict Cumberbatch in a riveting performance as the Creature.

About the Production

This National Theatre Live adaptation is celebrated for its visceral, cinematic staging. One of its most notable features is its alternating cast: Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller switch roles between Victor Frankenstein and the Creature in different performances. Our screening features Cumberbatch as the Creature, offering a powerful and emotionally layered interpretation of the role.

Danny Boyle’s direction employs minimalist yet dynamic design, expressive lighting, and a striking soundscape to trace the Creature’s journey from birth to betrayal. The nearly wordless opening sequence—depicting the Creature’s first moments of life—remains a landmark moment in physical theatre, demonstrating how movement, light, and spatial design can drive narrative with extraordinary force.

About the Playwright and the Play

Mary Shelley (1797–1851) published Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus when she was just twenty, and the novel has since become one of the most influential texts in English literature. Blending gothic horror, early science fiction, and philosophical inquiry, Shelley’s story interrogates enduring questions of creation, moral responsibility, alienation, and the boundaries of the human. The tale of Victor Frankenstein—who animates life from dead matter only to abandon the being he creates—continues to shape global conversations around scientific ethics, vulnerability, and monstrosity.

In this week’s faculty seminar, Dr. Srikrishna Ayyangar, Associate Professor of Social Science, presented his paper titled ‘Pragmatism and the Populist Challenge in India’s Democracy.’

Abstract

Populist politics are, well, popular, because its supporters and adherents argue that such politics are practical and effective. This paper argues that there is something more fundamental at stake, which is at the heart of our democratic system, liberal promise, left-right wing perspectives, and policy practices. The paper argues that when the rug under Ambedkar’s pragmatism is pulled, everything else comes down along with it. And conflating practicality with pragmatism is perhaps the first inadvertent step in that direction.