Introduction by Vidya Dehejia, Barbara Stoler Miller Professor of Indian and South Asian Art
Daud Ali is an historian of pre-Mughal South Asia. He taught history at SOAS, University of London, and joined the University of Pennsylvania in 2009. He is Professor and Graduate Director in the Department of South Asia Studies. His area of training and expertise is early medieval South Asia, but his research interests have expanded to include the history of mentalities and practices in pre-Sultanate South Asia. Future and ongoing projects include collaborative projects on the history of friendship in early and medieval South Asia, a translation of a Buddhist text on erotics, as well as a study of the production of the King Bhoja cycles in Western India. His most recent publications include the edited volumes Garden and Landscape Practices in Precolonial India: Histories from the Deccan (2011); Knowledge Production, Pedagogy and Institutions in Colonial India(2011); Ethical Life in South Asia (2010); and the monograph Courtly Culture and Political Life in Early Medieval India (2004).
Peter Sutoris is a scholar of development, a documentary filmmaker, and an educator. He is the director and producer of The Undiscovered Country, a film about education, development and environmental degradation in the Marshall Islands. He has lived and worked in South Asia, the Pacific, the Balkans and South Africa. He earned his BA at Dartmouth College, and is a PhD candidate and Gates Scholar at the University of Cambridge. His current research focuses on cross-cultural scalability of development interventions, with a focus on environmental education. His book, Visions of Development examines the Indian state’s postcolonial development ideology between Independence in 1947 and the Emergency of 1975-77 through an analysis of films made by the Films Division of India between 1948 and 1975.
Shankar Ramaswami is Lecturer on South Asian Studies and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of South Asian Studies at Harvard University, where he teaches courses on anthropology, cinema, literature, and religion. He completed a B.A. in Economics at Harvard College and a Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of Chicago. He is currently working on a book, entitled Souls in the Kalyug: The Politics and Cosmologies of Migrant Workers in Delhi.
Projit Mukharji is the Martin Meyerson Assistant Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He earned an MA and MPhil from Jawaharlal Nehru University, and a PhD from SOAS at the University of London. His publications include the co-edited volumes,Crossing Colonial Historiographies: Histories of Colonial and Indigenous Medicines in Transnational Perspective (2010), and Medical Marginality in South Asia: Situating Subaltern Therapeutics (2012), and the monographs Nationalizing the Body: The Medical Market, Print and Daktari Medicine(2011); and the forthcoming Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies, and Braided Sciences, (2016).
Gajendran Ayyathurai is a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, and a member of the Critical Caste Studies Group, at the University of Göttingen, Germany. He earned his PhD in Anthropology at Columbia in 2011. He has taught at William Paterson University and Hunter College. His teaching and research interests include the Anthropology of South Asia; History of Modern South Asia; South Asian Diaspora; Historical Anthropology of Dalits and Non-Dalits; Buddhism and Dalits; Subaltern Religious Movements in South Asia; Historical Anthropology of South Asian Indentured Labor; and Comparative Historical Anthropology of Caste and Race. His current work-in progress is entitledCasteless Humanism: The Deep History of Anticaste Consciousness, Iyothee Thass, and Tamil Buddhism.
On 18th February 1983, from 9:00 am to 3:00 pm, more than 2,000 Bengali-speaking Muslims were killed in the town of Nellie and its surrounding villages in Assam, India. People’s homes were burnt down and their fields destroyed. Most of those who died were old people, women and children. To date, the Nellie massacre remains on the margins of India’s public history, and is virtually wiped out from the nation’s collective memory.
The documentary film What the Fields Remember revisits the massacre three decades later. From the survivors’ retelling of the event, and their struggles of coping with loss and memories that refuse to fade away, the film attempts to explore ideas of violence, memory and justice, to understand how physical spaces continue to mark people’s relationship to history and memory, and to raise larger questions around collective memory – of what we choose to remember and why we choose to forget.
Subasri Krishnan is a filmmaker and heads the Media Lab at the Indian Institute for Human Settlement (IIHS), where she teaches and curates the Urban Lens film festival. She is the Director of the International Association of Women in Radio and Television Asian Film Festival, to be held in New Delhi in March 2017. Her films include Brave New Medium, on internet censorship in Southeast Asia, and This or That Particular Person, which looks at the idea of official identity documents and the Unique Identity number. The latter film was awarded Best Short Documentary Film at the International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala (IDSFFK), 2013.
Sumit Guha earned a BA from St. Stephen's College and an MA in History from Jawaharlal Nehru University, and a PhD in History from the University of Cambridge. He has taught St. Stephen's College and the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta. In 2000, he was appointed S.P. Das Distinguished Professor at Brown University, and in 2004, jointed Rutgers University of New Jersey. Since 2103 he has been Frances Higginbotham Nalle Centennial Professor in History at the University of Texas at Austin.
His publications include The Agrarian Economy of the Bombay Deccan 1818-1941 (1985); Environment and Ethnicity in India, c. 1200-1991 (1999);Health and Population in South Asia from earliest times to the present (2001), and Beyond Caste: Identity and Power in South Asia, Past and Present (2013).
Introduction by Univerisity Professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (English and Comparative Literature)
Tapati Guha-Thakurta is the Fall 2016 Ahuja Family Distinguished Visitor. She is the Director and Professor of History, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, where she has taught since 1989. She earned a D.Phil. in the History Faculty at the University of Oxford, and has taught at Presidency College and the University of Calcutta. Prof. Guha-Thakurta has been a Fellow at the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and Humanities, Los Angeles, and at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. She has been a Visiting Professor at Smith College, the Yale Centre for British Art in New Haven, the University of California at Berkeley, and Jawaharlal Nehru University.
Professor Guha-Thakurta’s most recent book is In the Name of the Goddess: The Durga Pujas of Contemporary Kolkata (2015). Her publications include the monographs The Making of a New 'Indian' Art: Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal, c.1850-1920 (1992); Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Post-colonial India (2004), and the exhibition monographs, In her own Right; Remembering the artist Karuna Shaha (2000); Visual Worlds of Modern Bengal, (2002); The Aesthetics of the Popular Print, Birla Academy (2006), and The City in the Archive: Calcutta’s Visual Histories (2011). She co-edited (with Janaki Nair and Anjan Ghosh) Theorising the Present; Essays for Partha Chatterjee (2011); and with Partha Chatterjee and Bodhisattva Kar, New Cultural Histories of India: Materiality and Practices (2012).
Co-sponsored by the Alliance Program at Columbia University
Dr. Christophe Jaffrelot is Senior research fellow at CERI-Sciences Po/CNRS, and Professor of Indian Politics and Sociology at the King’s India Institute (London). Among his publications are The Hindu nationalist movement and Indian politics, 1925 to 1990s (1999), India’s Silent Revolution(2003) and The Pakistan Paradox. Instability and Resilience (2015).
Introduction by Vidya Dehejia, Barbara Stoler Miller Professor of Indian and South Asian Art
Tapati Guha-Thakurta is the Fall 2016 Ahuja Family Distinguished Visitor. She is the Director and Professor of History, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, where she has taught since 1989. She earned a D.Phil. in the History Faculty at the University of Oxford, and has taught at Presidency College and the University of Calcutta. Professor Guha-Thakurta has been a Fellow at the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and Humanities, Los Angeles, and at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. She has been a Visiting Professor at Smith College, the Yale Centre for British Art in New Haven, the University of California at Berkeley, and Jawaharlal Nehru University.
Professor Guha-Thakurta’s most recent book is In the Name of the Goddess: The Durga Pujas of Contemporary Kolkata (2015). Her publications include the monographs The Making of a New 'Indian' Art: Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal, c.1850-1920 (1992); Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Post-colonial India (2004), and the exhibition monographs, In her own Right; Remembering the artist Karuna Shaha (2000); Visual Worlds of Modern Bengal, (2002); The Aesthetics of the Popular Print, Birla Academy (2006), and The City in the Archive: Calcutta’s Visual Histories (2011). She co-edited (with Janaki Nair and Anjan Ghosh) Theorising the Present:Essays for Partha Chatterjee (2011); and with Partha Chatterjee and Bodhisattva Kar, New Cultural Histories of India: Materiality and Practices (2012).
Ali Riaz is University Professor and the Chair of the Department of Politics and Government at Illinois State University, at Normal, Illinois. His primary areas of interest are political Islam, madrassahs, South Asian politics, and Bangladeshi politics. He has taught at Dhaka University and was a Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington D.C. From 1995-2000, he was Senior Broadcast Journalist for the BBC World Service, Bengali Section, in London. Among his many publications are Islam and Identity Politics among British-Bangladeshis: A Leap of Faith (2013); Inconvenient Truths about Bangladeshi Politics (2012); a volume of essays co-edited with Christine Fair,Political Islam and Governance in Bangladesh (2011), another edited volume, Religion and Politics in South Asia (2010); Faithful Education: Madrassahs in South Asia (2008); and Islamist Militancy in Bangladesh: A Complex Web (2008). His talk will be based on his most recent publication, Bangladesh: A Political History since Independence (2016).
Karuna Mantena is Associate Professor of Political Science and Chair of the South Asian Studies Council at Yale University. Since 2011, she has served as co-director of the International Conference for the Study of Political Thought. She earned a BSc(Econ) in International Relations from the London School of Economics, an MA in Ideology and Discourse Analysis from the University of Essex , and a PhD in Government from Harvard University. Her research interests include modern political thought, modern social theory, the theory and history of empire, and South Asian politics and history. Her first book, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (2010), analyzed the transformation of nineteenth-century British imperial ideology. Her current work focuses on political realism and the political thought of M.K. Gandhi.
Abstract: A sepulchral note has finally entered the insistently optimistic global discourse on climate change produced by the Conference of Parties (COP). With the introduction of the language of "loss and damage," several parties to the UN framework convention on climate change (UNFCCC) have acknowledged that climate change may not be mitigated or adapted to, that there is lasting damage to human settlements and ecosystems, even to species being. In this paper I explore how the language of loss and damage allows us to speak of the damage wrought by the social as much as by the environmental, embodied in female figures of the traumatized, the mad or the psychically afflicted. These figures, explored more specifically on silt islands in Bangladesh, provide a further vantage to a consideration of extinction as not only the sudden vanishing of species, as it is represented in extinction studies, but also as modes of self-extinguishing. They remind us that life is not only about self-preservation but also about destruction.
Naveeda Khan is Associate Professor, Anthropology Department, at the Johns Hopkins University. She earned a PhD from Columbia University in 2003. Prof. Khan is the author of Muslim Becoming: Aspiration and Skepticism in Pakistan (2012), which was awarded the 2012 American Institute of Pakistan Studies Book Prize, as well as Beyond Crisis: Re-evaluating Pakistan (2010). She is presently working on a new manuscript tentatively titled "Towards a Romantic Anthropology: River Life and Climate Change" based on her research on the Jamuna River in Bangladesh.
Introduction by Sheldon Pollock, Arvind Raghunathan Professor of South Asian Studies, MESAAS
Parimal G. Patil is Professor of Religion and Indian Philosophy, and Chair of the Department of South Asian Studies at Harvard University. He earned his PhD at the University of Chicago. Professor Patil is a philosopher and intellectual historian of religion who is interested in South Asian intellectual practices and their relevance to broader issues in the Study of Religion, Philosophy, and Area Studies. He is particularly interested in Indian Buddhism, its intellectual history in Southern Asia, and Buddhist, Hindu, and Jaina debates in aesthetics, epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of language. His current work includes a book length project on one such debate during the "final phase" of Buddhism in India, and articles on Buddhist narrative literature, epistemology, and philosophy of language. More recently, he has become interested in classical South Asian literature and literary theory, and its relevance to historiography and religious ethics. His publications include Against a Hindu God: Buddhist Philosophy of Religion in India (2009); and with Lawrence J. McCrea, Buddhist Buddhist Philosophy of Language in India: Jñanasrimitra on Exclusion.
Andrew Sartori is an intellectual historian of modern South Asia, and Professor in the Department of History, NYU. He earned his PhD from the University of Chicago in 2003. His work focuses on the relationship between histories of concept-formation and the history of capitalist society. He has written on the history of the culture-concept, property, political economy, and liberalism. His publications include the edited volumes, From the Colonial to the Postcolonial: India and Pakistan in Transition, co-with Dipesh Chakrabarty and Rochona Majumdar (2007); Global Intellectual History, with Samuel Moyn (2013); and A Companion To Global Historical Thought, with Prasenjit Duara, and Viren Murthy (2014); and the monographs Bengal in Global Concept History: Culturalism in the Age of Capital (2008), and Liberalism In Empire, (2014).
Co-sponsored by the Committee on Global Thought and the South Asia Institute
Location: Room 411, Fayerweather Hall
Introduction by Manan Ahmed, History Department
Jonathan Eacott is Associate Professor in the Department of History, at the University of California, Riverside. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan as well as M.A. in British History from Queen's University, Kingston and a joint B.A. in History and International Development Studies from McGill University, Montreal. Eacott's research focuses on the British and their empire from the eighteenth century to the present. His first book, Selling Empire: India Goods in the Making of Britain and America, 1700-1830 (2016) explores the far-reaching economic, industrial, social, and political importance of decisions made by Britons, colonists, and Americans to assimilate the production and consumption of such India goods as cotton cloth and umbrellas into their local economies and societies, while they associated other India goods, such as hookah pipes and palanquins, with the East.
View directions to Faculty House.
Her publications include the monographs Mysore Modern: Reconceptualising the Region under Princely Rule (2011); The Promise of the Metropolis: Bangalore’s Twentieth Century, awarded the 2005 New India Foundation Book Prize; Miners and Millhands: Work, Culture and Politics in Princely Mysore (1998); and Women and Law in Colonial India: A Social History (1996). She co-edited Theorising the Present: Essays For Partha Chatterjee, with Anjan Ghosh and Tapati Guha Thakurta, (2011); and A Question of Silence? The Sexual Economies of Modern India, with Mary John (1998).
Abstract: This paper looks at the role of media and communication technologies in the imagination of urban spaces in contemporary Bombay cinema. If surveillance practices and their resultant structuring becomes one part of this imagination (No Smoking 2007, LSD 2010, Ugly, 2013), we also see the role of the internet and social media in the framing of spatial encounters in small town India (Masaan 2015). A fascination for ‘obsolete’ technology frames another order of space linked to the recent past (Gangs of Wasseypur 2012, Miss Lovely 2012, Dum Lagake Haisha, 2015), while documentary films like John and Jayne (2005) invoke the call centre imagination within a fractured urban subjectivity. In these films, the themes of violence, love, tragedy and comedy are enacted within a spatial terrain triggered by new media technologies. Taken together these films offer a new geography of the experiential changes unraveling in contemporary India.
Ranjani Mazumdar is Professor of Cinema Studies at the School of Arts & Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her publications focus on urban cultures, popular cinema, gender, and the cinematic city. She is the author of Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City (2007) and co-author with Nitin Govil of the forthcoming The Indian Film Industry. She has also worked as a documentary filmmaker and her productions include Delhi Diary 2001 and The Power of the Image (Co-Directed). Her current research focuses on globalization and film culture, the visual culture of film posters and the intersection of technology, travel and design in 1960s Bombay Cinema.
Ajantha Subramanian is Professor of Anthropology and South Asian Studies at Harvard University. Her research interests include political economy, political ecology, colonialism and postcoloniality, space, citizenship, South Asia, and the South Asian diaspora. Her first book Shorelines: Space and Rights in South India (2009), chronicles the struggles for resource rights by Catholic fishers on India’s southwestern coast, with a focus on how they have used spatial imaginaries and practices to constitute themselves as political subjects. She is currently working on a book project titled Gifted: Merit and Caste in Indian Technical Education, which tracks the relationship between meritocracy and democracy in India on order to understand the production of merit as a form of caste property and its implications for democratic transformation.
Introduction by Anupama Rao, Department of History and Barnard College
Saurabh Dube is Professor of History in the Center for Asian and African Studies, El Colegio de México. He earned his PhD in History at the University of Cambridge. He has been a Visiting Professor at Cornell, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Delhi, and was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2007-08. His most recent publications include Subjects of Modernity: Time/Space, Disciplines, Margins (2017); Formaciones de lo contemporáneo [Formations of the Contemporary] (forthcoming, 2017); and the co-edited volumes, with Anupama Rao, Crime Through Time (Themes in Indian History, 2014), and with Ishita Banerjee-Dube, Culturas politicas y politicas culturales: Escenarios de Asia, Africa, Medio Oriente, Mexico (forthcoming 2017).
Organized by the South Asia Institute and the New School University
Vivan Sundaram, born 1943, studied painting in Baroda and London. Since 1990 he has made sculpture, installation, photography and video. He has exhibited in the Biennales of Sydney, Seville, Taipei, Sharjah, Shanghai, Havana, Johannesburg, Kwangju and Berlin, and the Asia-Pacific Triennial, Brisbane. He has participated in group shows at Arken Museum, Copenhagen (2012); International Centre for Photography, New York (2008); Mori Museum, Tokyo (2008); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2006); Tate Modern, London (2001); and Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2001). He has had solo shows at Fowler Museum, Los Angeles (2015), Sepia International, New York (2008, 2006), Walsh Gallery, Chicago (2008, 2005), and Photographers Gallery, Copenhagen (2003).
Presented by the South Asia Institute and the World Music Institute <www.worldmusicinstitute.org>.
Shujaat Husain Khan is one of the leading North Indian classical musicians of his generation. He belongs to the Imdadkhani Gharana (tradition) of the sitar and his style of playing sitar, known as the gayaki ang, is imitative of the subtleties of the human voice. Khan has performed at music festivals in India and throughout Asia, Africa, North America, and Europe. He has headlined at concert halls such as the Royal Albert Hall in London, Royce Hall in Los Angeles, and Congress Hall in Berlin. In 2007, he was the featured artist at musical concerts celebrating India's 50th anniversary of independence at Carnegie Hall in New York, and at celebrations in Seattle and Dallas. Khan was the sole artist representing India in a special performance at the United Nations General Assembly Hall in Geneva commemorating India's independence the same year. Shujaat Khan has been affiliated as a visiting faculty at the Dartington School of Music in England, the University of Washington in Seattle, and the University of California, Los Angeles.
Samir Chatterjee is a virtuoso Tabla player from the Farrukhabad Gharana (school). He has traveled widely across the world to perform at festivals as a soloist or with other outstanding musicians from Indian and western musical traditions. In concert Samir has accompanied many of India's most celebrated musicians and has played with jazz, classical, and experimental musicians and ensembles around the world. Chatterjee performed at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo, Norway in 2007 and has performed several times at the United Nations General Assembly. Chatterjee has been teaching for 35 years and is the Founder-Director of Chhandayan, an organization dedicated to promoting and preserving Indian music and culture. He has taught at Yale University, Manhattan School of Music, the New School, and the Universities of Pittsburgh and Bridgeport.
Time: 7:30pm - 10:30pm