Performance, persona and Asian heritages at the AAS

To my larger clan,

The Association for Asian Studies (AAS) conference 2026 brought together scholars, artists and thinkers around the theme of Asia's future and its global connectivity. The organisers invited proposals for innovative formats, encouraging participants to move beyond the conventional academic panel keeping in mind the developing culture of academic discourse. What happens when five experts speak, one after another, on an intellectually demanding subject? We expect an audience to listen, absorb, connect and synthesise multiple arguments within a single session. In reality, this may require almost as much intellectual labour from the audience as from the scholars themselves. Could there be another way of engaging with complex ideas - one that is intellectually rigorous but also more immediate, participatory and memorable?

This became the starting point for "Mapping Asian Heritages: Globalization, Indigenous Storytelling and Gender in Historical Novels". Rather than asking scholars simply to speak about selected novels and books, I proposed that they personify their characters - stepping out of the books and into the twenty-first century.

The premise was playful, but the proposition was serious. What might happen if a character from Bahao, The Gardens of Light, Siddhartha, Kafka on the Shore or Aag ka Daryia suddenly found themselves in contemporary Lahore? How might they respond to Bano's world? What would they question, resist or embrace? And what might we discover by encountering history through the consciousness of a fictional character rather than through another scholarly exposition?

The panel therefore became an experiment in Performance as research. The participants were not merely interpreting characters; they were asked to inhabit them - to bring their histories, desires, contradictions and cultural worlds into the present. The boundaries between scholar and character, past and present, text and performance became deliberately porous.

The approach also emerged from what I understand as socially engaged art history: an art history that moves beyond objects, archives and established narratives to engage with people, lived experience, performance and contemporary questions. If cultural histories are carried through stories, memories and acts of remembering, then art history too can become participatory - a space where knowledge is not simply delivered but collectively explored, questioned and performed.

I was fortunate to have an extraordinary group of participants: Sumair Tarar, son of Mustansar Hussain Tarar (the author of Bahao), architect and a serving Customs officer; Dr Khaleeq ur Rehman, a practising urologist and sculptor; Sania Samad, a textile artist and collector; Qurat-ul-Ain Dar, a lecturer and practitioner of art; and Adeel Khalid, an academic. They became not simply performers but interpreters, questioners and, if I may say so, probers of the faith and human histories - each bringing a distinct professional and personal perspective to the characters and worlds they inhabited. Their diversity itself embodied the premise that cultural heritage can be explored through multiple forms of knowledge.

Perhaps this is what innovative scholarship can offer: not intellectual simplification, but another route into complexity. Sometimes we may understand cultural history differently when we encounter it through a voice, personality, gesture or disagreement rather than another lecture.

The experiment also opened another possibility. If characters can step out of books and enter our present, could they eventually inhabit digital or metaverse-like environments, where readers might encounter characters, landscapes, histories and memories interactively?

For me, Mapping Asian Heritages that I conceived and moderated became more than an innovative panel. It became an experiment in how we might read, remember, question and experience Asia differently.

Stay tuned for more insight from the AAS in Asia hosted first time in Pakistan at the LUMS.

Bano

October 2026