Workshop Programme 2010

15 July:

09.15-09.45     Registration with Coffee

09.45-10.00     Introduction

10.00-11.00     Keynote (Speaker: Michael Mann, Chair: Sonja Hegasy)

11.00-11.15     Break

11.15-12.45    Panel 1:  Print, Satire and Colonialism

Swarali Paranjape (University of Heidelberg): Marathi satire in the era of colonialism

Chaiti Basu (University of Heidelberg): Panchu Thakur: Indranath Bandyopadhyay’s (1849-1911) Response to the Colonial Cultural Encounter in Late 19th Century Bengal

Prabhat Kumar (University of Heidelberg): Situating Cartoon in the Hindi Literary Sphere

                        Chair: Heike Liebau (ZMO, Berlin)

12.45-13.45     Lunch

13.45-15.45    Panel 2: Print, Identity and Nationalism

Dhrupadi Chattopadhyay (University of Heidelberg): ‘Transcreating’ spaces? A review of nineteenth century Indian Writing in English, with a special focus on Toru Dutt

Simin Patel (Oxford University): A Cosmopolitan Crisis: The Bombay Riots of 1874

Pragya Dhital (SOAS, London): Paper chains: an investigation of cross-border commerce in north Indian print-media

Luzia Savary (ETH, Zürich): Muslim Reformist Discourse on Women in Late 19th-Century India: Discussions on Pardah in the Hyderabadi Urdu Magazine for Women Mu‘allim-i nisvān

Chair: Michael Mann (Humboldt University, Berlin)

15.45-16.00     Break

16.00-17.00    Panel 3: Islam and identity in South Asia

Shazia Ahmad (SOAS, London)): Proselytizing through Print: The Ahmadiyya from 1880-1908

Sadia Bajwa (Humboldt University, Berlin): The Genealogy of the Nationalist Historiography of Pakistan: An Analysis of Historiography in the Context of the Emergent ‘Muslim Nationalist’ Discourse, 1857-1947.

                        Chair: Dietrich Reetz (ZMO, Berlin)

16 July

09.15-09.30     Coffee & Tea

09.30-11.30     Panel 4: Transnational history, knowledge and communication

Uffa Jensen (MPI, Berlin): Universal Knowledge of the Self? The Transnational History of Psychoanalysis in Calcutta (and Berlin and London), 1910-1940

Maria Moritz (Jacobs University, Bremen): A South Asian Cosmopolitan: Bhagavan Das and the critique of the Theosophical Society, (1913-1914)

Amelia Bonea (University of Heidelberg): Telegraphy and news: Changing perceptions of time and place in nineteenth-century Indian newspapers

Tobias Delfs (Zürich University): Between individual freedom and external necessities: Misbehaviour of Protestant missionaries in 18th and early 19th century India

                        Chair: Harald Fischer-Tiné (ETH, Zürich)

11.30-11.45     Break

11.45-12.45     Panel 5: Politics of imperialism and (post)-colonialism

Manuela Ciotti (Leiden University): Fairs and counter-fairs’: Colonial and postcolonial India through the exhibition ‘The Empire strikes back: Indian art today’, London Saatchi Gallery, 2010’

Alexis Wearmouth (University of Dundee): The Origins and Growth of Foreign Direct Investment in the Calcutta Jute Industry by a Scottish Multinational Enterprise – a Case Study of Thomas Duff & Co, 1872-1896.

Chair: Aditya Sarkar (University of Göttingen)

12.45-13.45     Lunch

13.45-15.15     Panel 6: Labour: Technology, identity, policies

Anna Sailer (University of Göttingen): The Many Names of Jute. Concepts of Labour in Late Colonial Dictionaries and Manuals

Nitin Varma (University of Heidelberg): Making tea: technology, labour process and coolie labour on Assam tea plantation

Sara Elmer & Christine Whyte (ETH, Zürich): Why was slavery bad? The global anti-slavery movement in Nepal and Sierra Leone, 1920-1930

Chair: Rana Behal (International Research Centre, Humboldt University, Berlin)

15.15-15.30     Break

15.30-17.00    Panel 7: New Media and social identities

Mette Gabler (Humboldt University, Berlin): The Good Life – Buy 1 Get 1 Free. Messages of Outdoor Advertising for Social Change in Urban India

Fritzi Titzmann (Humboldt University, Berlin): Translocal and local dynamics of a global media phenomenon: Changing female subjectivity and agency in the Indian online matrimonial market

Pierre Gottschlich (University of Rostock): Apu, Neela, and Amita: Stereotypes of the Indian Diaspora in Mainstream American TV Shows

                        Chair: Anna Sailer (University of Göttingen)

From 7             Conference Diner

17 July

09.15-09.30     Coffee & Tea

09.30-11:00    Panel 8: Individual project presentation

Patrick Hesse (Humboldt University, Berlin): Dialectics of freedom and tradition: Religion and the communist movement

Lisa Sturm (Humboldt University, Berlin): The American-India Trade in the Context of Global Transformations 1784-1830

Jamilia Adeli (Humboldt University, Berlin): Art, market and the media: Contemporary art (worlds) in India since economic liberalization

                        Chair:  Maria Framke (Jacobs University Bremen)

11.00-11.15     Break

11.15-12.15    Panel 9: Education in South Asia: Experiments and controls

Monika Freier (MPI, Berlin): Teaching Ideals and Feelings: Moral Education in Colonial Northern India

Jana Tschurenev (ETH, Zürich): Imperial Experiments in Education. Monitorial Schooling in India and Britain (1789-1835)

Chair: Nitin Sinha (ZMO, Berlin)

12.15 – 13.00   Lunch

13.00-15.00     Round Table

Harald Fischer-Tiné (ETH, Zürich)

Margrit Pernau (MPI, Berlin)

Dietrich Reetz (ZMO, Berlin)

Dietmar Rothermund

Call for Papers 2010 - ZMO, Berlin

Workshop, 15.07.-17.07.2010

Identifying new themes in South Asian History

We organise this workshop with two objectives, one, strategic and another thematic. One of our aims is to bring the scholars working at the doctoral and post-doctoral stages on South Asia together. Often we, the co-organisers, have felt that the dialogue between  people working on South Asia in different universities and research centres in Germany has greater potential to be integrated into a stronger research network or networks than has been realised. The idea is to facilitate this dialogue across places, disciplines, and themes.

Keeping this objective in mind, we have tried to keep the thematic base of our workshop quite broad, although with a strong objective of addressing new fields and research areas in the social history of South Asia. To this end, we have chosen three themes that, we believe, open up a wide range of historical and contemporary questions and debates. The disciplinary focus of the workshop is on History but we strongly encourage participants from other disciplines to apply.

Space, technology and transnationality have emerged as key fields in understanding the social histories of both modern and early modern periods. While on the one hand concepts like circulation have been applied to explore the diverse regimes of mobility of goods, people, ideas, and artefacts both at the micro and macro levels, the global turn and the paradigm of ‘connected histories’ on the other has reinvigorated the historical research on the nature and forms of international ties in different aspects, say political, state formation, religion and, not least, the economy. Our aim is to further this development by looking at overlapping historiographical trends and historical practices by addressing one or more than one of these key issues.

The intersection between technology and space, for instance, has a great potential to chart out not only independent histories of those technologies (for example, print; infrastructural technologies like metalled roads, telegraph, post, railways and motor cars; technologies of ‘entertainment’ like cinema, gramophone and so on), but also to unravel the processes that constituted, influenced and altered the nature of social and physical space and sociabilities. Some of the questions that can be addressed through this are:

What was the role of new infrastructural technologies in producing/changing the nature of existing urban spaces?

How did these technologies, or did they at all, affect the spatial linkages, say between urban and rural parts?

These changes can be mapped through a number of vectors – commodity exchange, mercantile networks, mobility and migration of people, money remittances and reimbursements (through post and telegraph), and so on.

We are very specific on getting contributions that deal with gender. Although in recent years the study of technology has come a long way from its earlier avatar (which mostly revolved around policy studies) the role of gender is still inadequately addressed. For instance, railway historiography has given us the fact that subsequent to the introduction of railways the number of third class passengers and the practice of pilgrimage increased. And from the historiography on nationalist discourse we know that women had become the site that reflected the ‘pure’ and ‘uncontaminated’ of the traditional culture that helped reconfigure the nationalist/elitist response to colonialism. Did this reconfiguration deny women the right to step outside? Did the new technology fail to break the binary of inside (home) and outside (world)? These two seemingly disparate historiographies can be brought together by looking at the gendered form of mobility. In each of these aspects, we intend to weld the discursive and the material, and avoid a narrowly limited focus on either.

Print and other forms of media provide another crucial mediation to approach the varied aspects of social history. How did printed texts and visuals, musical and cinematic productions, shape cultural, moral, emotional, didactic and political views, say along the lines of community, caste, class, region, gender and race? How, more broadly, did new forms of representation and new aesthetic forms insert themselves into the lives of people? With the use of rich (and new) empirical sources how could we address the issues of print and performance, textuality and orality, and ‘high’ and ‘low’ productions. How these productions were consumed at different spaces (bookshops, reading rooms, railway platforms, and book fairs) and how they simultaneously created new spaces and habits (for example, by the 1930s, at least amongst the European population in India, it had become a standard practice to read a novel while travelling) are questions that need to be unravelled by further historical research.

For a long time research on South Asia focussed on local, regional or national levels, while neglecting more trans-territorial and 'global' questions. New insights could be gained by exploring, for instance, questions about how transnational mobility and migration influenced worldviews and ideologies. What kinds of international networks were built up with South Asian participation and to what degree did these networks affect the political, social, economic and ideological constellations within India?

Please send the abstracts (400-500 words) to the organisers no later than 15 April. Other than those who will be directly participating in the workshop (through paper presentation), we invite all interested scholars working on South Asia to take part in the workshop. We hope, in this way, to begin the work of building up a new network of younger scholars working on South Asia. Currently, we are in the middle of making application for funding and therefore we strongly request our participants to arrange for their travel and accommodation. 

Organisers:

Nitin Sinha (Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin), Anna Sailer (Centre of Modern Indian Studies, Georg August University Göttingen), Aditya Sarkar, (Centre of Modern Indian Studies, Georg August University Göttingen), Maria Framke (Jacobs University Bremen)

Contact:

Nitin Sinha, nsinhan@@googlemail.com