Centre of South Asian Studies: Seminars

Professor Robert Travers - 'A historian as petitioner: Ghulam Husain Khan Tabataba'i and the late Mughal context for colonial state-formation in eighteenth century India'

Professor Polly O'Hanlon - Kingsley Martin Memorial Lecture - 'Discourses of caste over the long durée: re-framing Brahmin identity in modern India'

Professor Jaideep Prabhu - 'Jugaad innovation: the implications for South Asia'

Luna Sabastian - 'Benoy Kumar Sarkar - interwar internationalism, geopolitics, totalitarianism'.

Dr Ammara Maqsood - 'Love as understanding: marriage, aspiration and the joint family in middle-class Pakistan'.

Dr Farzana Haniffa - 'Moor "culture" in independent Ceylon: the 1940s establishment of the Moors Islamic Cultural Home'

Dr Mishka Sinha - 'The work of art in the age of digital reproduction: history, violence, self and nation in the many (re)makings of 'Mother India'

Dr Tom Simpson - 'Find the river: rediscovering Tsangpo-Brahmaputra in the age of empire'

Professor Nira Wickramasinghe - 'The registration of slaves and resistance in nineteenth century Jaffna

Professor Vinita Damodaran - 'A scientific life: E.K. Janaki Ammal and the patriarchy of science in the nineteenth and twentieth century'

Dr Tania Saeed, Lahore University of Management Sciences - Islamophobia and Securitization. Religion, Ethnicity and the Female Voice

Dr Matthew Nelson - 'Religious freedom and public order: fundamental-rights lawfare and the construction of majoritarian national identities in Pakistan and Malaysia'

Dr Aparajita Mukhopadhyay - From Grand Tour to Deshbhraman: railways and changing attitudes to travel in colonial India

Dr Rajesh Venugopal - Nationalism, development and ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka

Professor Justin Jones - 'Eve's mistakes?  Islamic feminism and the pursuit of female religious authority in contemporary India'

Dr Moin Nizami - Connecting Ottoman Hijaz and British India: intellectual networks and legacy of Imdadullah Makki

Pakistan Elections 2018: Key economic challenges facing Imran Khan's government

A panel discussion hosted by the Centre of South Asian Studies, moderated by Dr Kamal Munir (Director, Centre of South Asian Studies) with a panel comprising Dr Natalya Naqvi (LSE), Omar Iqtidar (Citibank), Dr Adeel Malik (Oxford University), and M.K....

Professor Neeladri Bhattacharya - The Kingsley Martin Memorial Lecture: Koh-i-Noor: violence, law, and the moral politics of colonialism

Professor Chris Baker (Chulalongkorn University) - 'Ayutthaya in Asian history from the 13th to 18th century'

Dr P. Sanal Mohan (Mahatma Gandhi University, Kerala and Smuts Visiting Fellow, Centre of South Asian Studies) - Global Christianity and the transformation of the emotional world of Dalits: a critical

Dr Arundhati Virmani and Dr Jean Boutier (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Social, Marseille) - Depicting the British abroad: discontinuities in Johan Zoffany's Tuscan and Indian experience, 1772-1

Professor David Gilmartin (NC State University) - Nature's sovereignty: the Indus Basin and India's Partition

Professor David Gellner (University of Oxford) -

Professor James Manor (School of Advanced Study, University of London) - As caste hierarchies wane: explaining inter-caste violence, accommodations and stalemates in rural India

Dr Debjani Bhattacharyya (Drexel University) - '"A naturally forming harbor?": silt, geological testimony and law in the Bengal Delta

Dr Partha Pratim Shil (University of Cambridge) - 'How does a constable cognise? Notes for a social history of police power in colonial Bengal'

Dr Sarah Hodges (University of Warwick) - 'Plastic history, caste and the government of things in modern India'

Professor Janaki Nair (Jawaharlal Nehru University) - 'An inheritance of loss: private debt to public charity in princely Mysore'

Asma Jahangir (Human Rights Lawyer and activist) - The rule of law and democratic development in Pakistan

Ms Jahangir delivered the annual Centre of South Asian Studies Lecture on South Asian Public Affairs.

Professor A.R. Venkatachalapathy - 'Dirty words: a history of swearing and abuse in Tamil'

Professor Venkatachalapathy, of the Madras Institute of Development Studies, examines the ways in which swearing and abusive language have changeover the years, and how this reflects and informed changes in Tamil-speaking society.

Professor Ajay Skaria - 'Thinking religion with Gandhi today'

The 43rd annual Kingsley Martin Memorial Lecture was delivered by Professor Ajay Skaria, of the University of Minnesota, who imagines thinking about religion alongside Gandhi: using some of Gandhi's comments and writings to pursue questions which were not those Gandhi...

Dr Taylor Sherman - Was postcolonial India ever socialist? Ideas, policy and practice, 1947-64

Dr Sherman, of the London School of Economics, examines one of the pillars of Nehruvian India: socialism. She demonstrates how India had, by 1960, developed its own distinctive brand of socialism and socialist thought and how this more 'individualistic' socialism...

Dr Michael Buehler - The politics of Shari'a law: Islamist activists and the state in democratising Indonesia

Dr Buehler, of the School of Oriental and African Studies, introduces a legal and constitutional history of Indonesia before going on to examine the role of Islamist activists looking to create a constitution based on Shari'a law. He also looks...

Professor Raj Brown - The emergence of the Indian and Chinese economic powerhouses: historical and institutional perspectives

Professor Brown, of Royal Holloway, University of London, examines empirical and historical data on China and India, investigating the role of the state and changing strategies to achieve success in a new global environment.

Dr Mark Condos - Fear, violence, and the making of British power in India

Dr Condos, of Queen Mary, University of London, investigates the representations of colonial British character. He argues that the commonly presented traits of stoicism and courage masked an underlying fear and vulnerability, and that the pervasive anxiety in British colonial...

Professor Su Su - The uniqueness of downtown Yangon

Professor Su from Mandalay Technological University and a Charles Wallace Burma Trust Visiting Fellow at the Centre of South Asian Studies, examines the nature of the architecture and cultural heritage of central Yangon, arguing that, although both authenticity and integrity...

Harsh Mander: Looking away: inequality, prejudice and indifference in new India.

Activist and writer Harsh Mander delivers the inaugural Centre of South Asian Studies Lecture on Public Policy, examining the invisibility of poverty in Indian society.

Dr Rochelle Almeida (New York University) - Britain's Anglo-Indians: the invisibility of assimilation

Dr Almeida introduces the topic of her forthcoming book about Anglo-Indians in Britain and the ways in which the adjusted their identities to fit in with the country in which they found themselves.

Dr Sajjad Hassan - 'South Asia’s Minorities – Rough road to citizenship'

Dr Hassan, of the Centre for Equity Studies - Missal, New Delhi, investigates the challenges facing minority groups in South Asia, particularly in the face of majoritarian constructions of national identities. He advocates an increased role for states, working together...

Professor Ravi Ahuja - "Produce or perish”. The crisis of the late 1940s and the place of labour in postcolonial India.

Professor Ahuja (University of Göttingen) investigates the intense period of industrial unrest that followed the end of the Second World War, unsettling social and economic structures and changing the regime of labour regulation with lasting effects.

Professor Jonathan Spencer - Three scenes from rural life: Cambridge to Colombo and back again, 1954 to 2016

In the 1950s a small group of researchers initiated a conversation, fuelled by bouts of intense fieldwork, about land, kinship and social order in rural Sri Lanka. The research was revisited in the 1980s. The third scene in the lecture...

Dr Humeira Iqtidar - Tolerance in Islamic thought: South Asian innovations

Dr Iqtidar introduces her work into piety and liberalisation in Islamic thought among migrant populations from the Tribal Areas of Pakistan.

Dr Sudeshna Guha - Looking into 'Indian' pasts: archeology, history and ways of seeing

In this seminar, Dr Guha critiques the ‘archaeology of origins’, which is on the rise within South Asia, and considers the practices and visual documents of archaeology as artefacts of history.

Professor Laurent Gayer - Peacecraft: living with religious diversity in Amroha, India

Professor Gayer of CNRS/CERI - Sciences Po, Paris, examines cases in which communities in Indian cities overcome tensions to resist communal violence and how different religious communities do, in some cases, co-exist.

Professor Edward Simpson - The Indian village: from Marx to Modi

Professor Simpson, of the School of Oriental and African Studies, relates the findings of his research project into the changes found in Indian villages one the past 60 years.

Professor Rosalind O'Hanlon - Intimate voices of empire: women and letter writing in eighteenth century India

The Dr B.H. Farmer Seminar. Professor O'Hanlon examines the letters written in India by women in the eighteenth century, revealing what they can tell us about gender and society.

Dr John Zavos: 'Translating cultures of service in the diaspora: devotion as social action in the BrAsian city'

Dr Zavos, University of Manchester, explores the transformation of ideas of devotional service and charity in the context of diasporic identity formation amongst South Asian communities in Britain. The paper is preceded by a tribute to the Centre's former Director,...

Dr Anjali Bhardwaj-Datta: Rebuilding lives, redefining spaces: women in post colonial Delhi, 1947-1980

Dr Bhardwaj-Datta (University of Cambridge) investigates Delhi's gendered spaces and how they were reordered by the aftermath of Partition, looking at how social space was redefined, presenting a new social history of the city and the villages on the urban...

Professor Chris Fuller - 'Imperial empiricism and the decline of the Raj: caste, religion and official anthropology in the early twentieth century'

Professor Fuller, of the London School of Economics, examines how official anthropologists overcame the empiricism of nineteenth century work on caste and religion, and investigates why the impact of their work was limited in informing the political situation in colonial...

Dr Sunil Amrith: 'Crossing the Bay of Bengal: the rise and decline of a South Asian region'

Dr Amrith, of Birkbeck, University of London, details the various crossings of the Bay of Bengal, as world powers sought access to new resources in the East, and various waves of migrants crossed the ocean in search of new lives,...