Asian Studies Centre

Alessandra Mezzadri speaks at the South Asia Seminar on 7 November 2017 Drawing from Marxian and feminist insights, this presentation, based on a recently completed book, theorizes the garment sweatshop in India as a complex 'regime' of exploitation and oppression, jointly crafted by global, regional and local actors, and working across productive and reproductive realms. The analysis shows the tight correspondence between the physical and social materiality of garment production in India; it illustrates the great social differentiation and complex patterns of labour unfreedom at work in the industry; and it depicts the sweatshop as a complex joint enterprise against the labouring body, which is systematically and inexorably depleted and consumed by garment work, even in the absence of major industrial disasters, like Rana Plaza. By placing labour at the very centre of the analysis of processes of development, the book critically engages with key debates on industrial modernity, modern slavery, and ethical consumerism.

Yasser Arafath speaks at the South Asia Seminar on 10 October 2017 As the entry of the Portuguese opened up a turbulent time in the Indian Ocean, Muslim scribal elites across the region presented them within the image of idolatrous infidels. Writing in Arabic, the scribes from Malabar categorised this period as the Age of Fasad (social disorder) and advocated for ‘valour’ as the counter strategy. However, by transliterating sufis and prophets, vernacular scribes in Malabar insisted on the emotion of ‘piety’ for recreating the glory of the bygone Islamic past, as the fasad situation continued. This paper examines this textual/ lyrical transition- from Arabic valour texts to Arabi-Malayalam pietistic poetry- when a large number of Muslims began moving away from maritime towns to settle down in agrarian hinterland.

Jason Keith Fernandes speaks at the South Asia Seminar on 6 June 2017 Exploring the emotional terrain of the citizenship experiences of groups in Goa this paper argues that through the linguistic choices made by the government of Goa it is not merely caste that is at the centre of citizenship experiences but in fact untouchability itself. Given that languages are not abstract forms but actively embodied practices, and that their linguistic forms and cultural productions are marked as impure and hence untouchable in the caste-Hindu centric Goan polity it is the lower-caste Catholic that is at the bottom of the pile. What obtains in Goa is not different from many other parts in India, allowing the suggestion that India is marked not an egalitarian, but a casteist polity.

Jon Wilson speaks at the South Asia Seminar on 16 May 2017 Histories of the British empire in India often present it as a stable and effective form of state power and a coherent ideology. Drawing on the argument of his recent book, India Conquered. Britain’s Raj and the Chaos of Empire, Jon Wilson argues in contrast that the British never built a stable state in India. Their power was fractious and anxious, limited in scope but prone to unreasonable violence. Focusing on the late C19th and C20th in his paper, Dr Wilson will argue that we need to see the shift from imperial power to a nation state as a far more radical break than historians currently tend to suggest.

Teena Purohit speaks at the South Asia Seminar on 30 May 2017 This talk examined the writings of Jamal al-din al-Afghani (1838-1897) with particular attention to his polemical piece against Syed Ahmad Khan (1817-1898), entitled “The Refutation of the Materialists” (1881). Scholars have assumed that al-Afghani was anti-imperial and wrote this diatribe because Syed Ahmad Khan was pro-British. It is the speaker’s intention to show that al-Afghani was not consistently anti-imperial, and in fact shared with Syed Ahmad Khan many similar views on the role of science, education, and progress. Teena Purohit reads “The Refutation” and ancillary treatises to show how al-Afghani invokes the idiom of heresy for his arguments about reform: on the one hand, al-Afghani mounts an accusation of heresy against Syed Ahmad Khan and his followers, and on the other hand, he deploys “heretical” concepts to rationalize and legitimize his aspiration to serve as a redemptive leader for all Muslims.

Akeel Bilgrami (Columbia), Shruti Kapila (Cambridge) and Saeed Naqvi (Foreign Correspondent and Author) speak in Oxford on 2 June 2017

Hayden J. Bellenoit speaks at the South Asia Seminar on 23 May 2017 The transition to colonialism in South Asian history has been a vibrant and hotly contested part of India’s history. The role of scribes as historical actors of change in India’s history has only recently been explored. This talk will examine how the formation of early agrarian revenue settlements exacerbated late Mughal patterns in taxation, and how the colonial state was shaped by this extant paper-oriented revenue culture and its scribes. It proceeds to examine how the service and cultural histories of various Hindu scribal communities fit within broader changes in political administration, taxation and patterns of governance, arguing that British power after the late eighteenth century came as much through bureaucratic mastery, paper and taxes as it did through military force and commercial ruthlessness. In particular, this paper explores the cultural and service experiences of various Kayastha scribes and how they fit within the transitional period of the mid-late 18th century between late Mughal and early colonial rule.

Pankaj Mishra, Shruti Kapila and David Priestland speak at St Antony's College on 3 May 2017 Shruti Kapila lectures at the Faculty of History and is a Fellow and Director of Studies in History at Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge. Her publications include a co-edited special issue ‘Bhagavad Gita and Modern Thought,’ Modern Intellectual History (2010), and, as editor, An Intellectual History for India (2010).

Pankaj Mishra’s From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia became the first book by a non-Western writer to win Germany’s prestigious Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding. Mishra regular contributes literary and political essays to the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, The Guardian, the New Yorker, London Review of Books and Bloomberg View.

David Priestland is Professor of Modern History at St Edmund Hall. His landmark overview of world communism, The Red Flag: Communism and the Making of the Modern World, was published in 2010. His following book, Merchant, Soldier, Sage: A New History of Power (2012), discussed the rise of market cultures in global history. He is now working on the history of market liberalism with special reference to the former communist world.

Dilip M. Menon speaks at the South Asia Seminar on 25 April 2017 Gandhi’s lauded text Hind Swaraj is born of and located within the 19th century crisis of liberal democracy and its resolutions of an intimate animosity towards the masses. Gandhi shares considerable terrain with Indian liberals writing in the late 19th and early 20th century; the text can be seen as articulating a certain kind of conservatism that attempts to think with “recovering liberties” that Christopher Bayly charts in all its nuances of a global historicism, statistical liberalism and a benign sociology. While Gandhi draws upon this burgeoning corpus of liberal thought in India, his work is characterized by its typical impatience with ideas, and a method that combines random observation with apodictic statements. The Hind Swaraj resisted many of the impulses of Indian liberalism, even when thinking from within it, in its attempt to forge a politics of indigeneity.

Tarak Barkawi speaks at the South Asia Seminar on 7 March 2017 The shock of repeated defeats, massive expansion, and the pressures of operations on multiple fronts transformed the Indian Army in World War II. It had to commission ever greater numbers of Indians as officers. Recruitment of other ranks reached beyond the favoured Martial Races. In the field, officers bent and then broke the rigid ethnic rules around which the army was organized, in small and large ways. The right rations, the right type of recruit, the officer knowledgeable in specific languages or religions, were not always available. Nonetheless, the army managed to recover, reform, and go on to victory. Colonial knowledge and the official Orientalism so evident in the ethnic structuring of the army was less relevant to managing the army at war. In large measure, Indian soldiers fought the Japanese led by a combination of emergency-commissioned nationalists (the new Indian officers) and British officers who were new to India and did not speak their soldiers’ language. The reasons why the Indian Army fought effectively for their colonial rulers were not to be found in stereotypes of Martial Races or South Asian warrior values.