Asian Studies Centre

David Gilmartin speaks at the Intellectual History for Pakistan workshop on March 1st, 2016 This talk is licensed with Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 2.0

Phyu Phyu Thi and Matthew J. Walton speak at the Southeast Asia Seminar on 1 March 2017. Research and training conducted by the Myanmar Media and Society (M.MAS) project in 2015 encountered persistent expressions of fear and antagonism directed towards religious Others as well as articulated memories of solidarity and peace. People would often seek to reconcile the contradiction between these memories and contemporary narratives that demonize religious Others. Our research suggests that these attempts at reconciling contradiction can make important contributions to peace. This paper will draw on oral history research conducted throughout 2016 in six cities in Myanmar among populations of different faiths that seeks to uncover people’s memories of inter-religious peaceful co-existence.

Layli Uddin speaks at the Intellectual History for Pakistan workshop on March 1st, 2016

Akbar Zaidi speaks at the Intellectual History for Pakistan workshop on March 1st, 2016

Ali Usman Qasmi speaks at the Intellectual History for Pakistan workshop on March 1st, 2016

Chris Moffat speaks at the Intellectual History for Pakistan workshop on March 1st, 2016

Nauman Naqvi speaks at the Intellectual History for Pakistan workshop on March 1st, 2016

Dr Katherine Butler Schofield speaks at the South Asia Seminar on March 8th, 2016 How do we write histories of the ephemeral: of affective and sensory experience, of devotional states and journeys, of the live performance of music and dance--of the tangible yet transient texture of the experiential moment? More critically, how do we write such histories when the moment has long passed into silence? Can emotion, devotion, and the arts tell us critical things about the harder-edged worlds of political, economic and social history that we couldn’t otherwise access? What is the relationship between the aesthetic, the affective, the ethical, and the political in South Asian history? And how do we track and account for changes in the texture of ephemeral experience over time?

In this paper, Katherine Butler Schofield will be considering these questions in relation to music and listening in the late Mughal world, c.1748–1858. In 1691, the Mughal notable Sher Khan Lodi put the dilemma most succinctly: that "it is impossible to capture the essence of music in pen and ink on the surface of the page." All we have left, he wrote, are the "sibilant scratches of a broken pen." Nevertheless, he, and many others like him, tried their best over and over again to put down in words their own histories of the ephemeral as it pertained to musical experience. The speaker's recent European Research Council project has uncovered a vast and rich archive of writings on music in the late Mughal world, hitherto almost entirely unexplored. Through a series of short examples she will discuss some of the new genres of writing on music that emerged in Hindustan c.1748–1858 and explore their wider historical implications. In doing so, she will also evaluate the act of writing on music at this time: what it entailed for late Mughal and early colonial men and women; what they thought was important, or possible, to record in writing; and why.

Katherine Butler Schofield is a historian of music in the Mughal empire and the colonial Indian Ocean. Through stories about ill-fated courtesans, overweening ustads, and captivated patrons, she writes on Mughal sovereignty and selfhood, friendship and desire, sympathy and loss, and power, worldly and strange. She has just finished a 1.2M Euro European Research Council grant (2011–15) on the ways in which music and dance were transformed c.1750–1900 in the transition to colonialism in India and the Malay world. Her first book, with Francesca Orsini, is Tellings and texts: music, literature, and performance in North India (Open Book, 2015).

Professor Chaudhuri speaks at the South Asia Seminar on a public meeting held in Calcutta, on December 15th, 1829. On December 15th , 1829, a large public meeting was held amidst much excitement at the Town Hall in Calcutta. The speakers, principally from the British mercantile community in Calcutta, but including, prominently, Dwarakanath Tagore and Rammohun Roy, spoke on behalf of a petition to be sent to the English Parliament arguing for what they called "The Colonization of India". The debate centred on the upcoming renewal of the Charter Act, and this community pressed for further abolishing remaining monopolies the East India Company held. I will show how the disputes generated on the subject played out in Calcutta at the time, and also, crucially, show how Rammohun’s involvement in the event and his later evidence before the Select Committee was misread by leading Marxist historians affiliated to the CSSSC in the 1970s.

Rosinka Chaudhuri is Professor of Cultural Studies and Dean (Academic Affairs) at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC).

She has published: Gentlemen Poets in Colonial Bengal: Emergent Nationalism and the Orientalist Project (Seagull: 2002), Freedom and Beef-Steaks: Colonial Calcutta Culture (Orient Blackswan: 2012) and The Literary Thing: History, Poetry and the Making of a Modern Literary Culture (Oxford University Press: 2013, Peter Lang: 2014), and has edited: Derozio, Poet of India: A Definitive Edition (Oxford University Press, 2008), and, with Elleke Boehmer, The Indian Postcolonial (Routledge, 2010). Her most recent publication is A History of Indian Poetry in English, published by Cambridge University Press, New York, in March 2016.

She has also translated and introduced the complete text of the letters Rabindranath Tagore wrote his niece Indira Debi as a young man, calling it Letters from a Young Poet (1887-94) (Penguin Modern Classics, 2014); this received an Honorable Mention in the category A.K. Ramanujan Prize for Translation (S. Asia) at the Association for Asian Studies Book Prizes 2016. Currently, she is editing and introducing An Acre of Green Grass: English Writings of Buddhadeva Bose for Oxford University Press, New Delhi. Her current research is tentatively titled Young Bengal and the Empire of the Middle Classes.

This seminar series is organised with the support of the History Faculty.

Professor Pradip Dutta speaks on Tagore at the South Asia Seminar Vishwabharati, the university that Tagore founded, was an early experiment in producing a global habitation. While many of the ideas that motivated this institution hold out resonances for the contemporary debate on cosmopolitanism, Tagore worked in the field of modern Indian thought. The tradition was strongly inflected by Vedantism.

In its modern incarnation Vedantism produced a universalism that announced its location. The presentation will look at how Tagore extended the theology of neo-Vedantism, shifting it away from its metaphysical orientation to outline a theory of global survival of which Vishwabharati, established in the rural hinterlands of Bengal, was designed as the institutional beginnings.

Professor Pradip Datta has worked on communal relations in Bengal and in contemporary India. He is now exploring non-antagonistic modes of identity formations through his work on Vishwabharati , the global university founded by Tagore. His publications include Carving Blocs (1999), Khaki Shorts Saffron Flags (co-author, 1993), Heterogeneities (2008).

This seminar series is organised with the support of the History Faculty.