̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Centre of South Asian Studies

Professor Joya Chatterji awarded Wolfson History Prize 2024

Anonymous — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 12:51:06 +0000

This year’s Wolfson History Prize has been awarded to Joya Chatterji, Emeritus Professor of South Asian History and Fellow of Trinity College, for her book Shadows At Noon: ̽��ֱ��South Asian Twentieth Century, first published in 2023.

̽��ֱ��book charts the story of the subcontinent from the British Raj through independence and partition to the forging of the modern nations of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Chatterji’s history pushes back against standard narratives that emphasise differences between the 3 countries, and instead seeks to highlight what unites these nations and their peoples.

Interwoven with Chatterji’s personal reflections on growing up in India, this distinctive academic work uses a conversational writing style and takes a thematic rather than chronological approach. It adds to the discussions of politics and nationhood typical of other histories of the region by weaving in everyday experiences of food, cinema, and domestic life.

As a result, the cultural vibrancy of South Asia shines through the research, according to the Wolfson History Prize judges, allowing readers a more nuanced understanding of South Asian history.

A judging panel that included fellow Cambridge historians Professors Mary Beard and Richard Evans, and headed by panel chair Professor David Cannadine, described Chatterji’s book as “written with verve and energy”, and said that it “beautifully blends the personal and the historical”.

“Shadows at Noon is a highly ambitious history of 20th-century South Asia that defies easy categorisation, combining rigorous historical research with personal reminiscence and family anecdotes,” said Cannadine.

“Chatterji writes with wit and perception, shining a light on themes that have shaped the subcontinent during this period. We extend our warmest congratulations to Joya Chatterji on her Wolfson History Prize win.”

“For over 50 years, the Wolfson History Prize has celebrated exceptional history writing that is rooted in meticulous research with engaging and accessible prose,” said Paul Ramsbottom, Chief Executive of the Wolfson Foundation.

“Shadows at Noon is a remarkable example of this, and Joya Chatterji captivates readers with her compelling storytelling of modern South Asian history.”

Shadows at Noon was also longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction 2024 and shortlisted for the Cundill History Prize 2024.

Now in its 52nd year, the Wolfson History Prize celebrates books that combine excellence in research with readability for a general audience.

Recent winners have included other Cambridge historians: Clare Jackson, Honorary Professor of Early Modern History, for Devil-Land: England Under Siege, 1588-1688 (2022) and David Abulafia, Professor Emeritus of Mediterranean History, for ̽��ֱ��Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans (2020). Helen McCarthy, Professor of Modern and Contemporary British History, was shortlisted for Double Lives: A History of Working Motherhood in 2021.

Chatterji wins for Shadows at Noon, her genre-defying history of South Asia during the 20th century.

Wolfson Foundation

Joya Chatterji at the award ceremony for the Wolfson History Prize 2024

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

Yes

̽��ֱ��historian gathering fragments of the past to understand how humans tick

cg605 — Tue, 07 Sep 2021 09:19:43 +0000

After he began studying at Cambridge, Sujit Sivasundaram, found the freedom to let his imagination and curiosity roam. Yet his interests and intellectual life continue to be shaped by the global South. Today, as Professor of World History, he is passionate about bringing the untold and forgotten stories from the past to life, so that we can understand the conditions and possibilities that frame human existence.

Young Indian politicians get a taste of Cambridge life

ag236 — Mon, 05 Dec 2016 11:42:53 +0000

̽��ֱ��visit to Cambridge was part of a trip to the United Kingdom organised by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, which aims to provide a platform for the young Indian political leaders to learn about the UK’s political landscape and the wider UK-India relationship.

Having spent a few days in London –including sitting through a Prime Minister’s Question Time session—the group arrived in Cambridge to visit the ̽��ֱ��’s Centre of South Asian Studies and to meet with various student society representatives.

At the Centre of South Asian studies, the delegation was welcomed by Dr David Washbrook, Senior Research Fellow at Trinity College, who offered an overview of the ̽��ֱ��’s historical links to India.

Professor Polly O’Hanlon, a fellow of Clare College, explained how British scholarship about India evolved in the second half of the 20th century, leading to the creation in 1964 of the Centre of South Asian Studies –the first of its kind in the UK.

Dr Edward Anderson, Smuts Research Fellow in Commonwealth Studies, gave an overview of the Centre’s work, its library and archives, and its MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies.

After meeting MPhil students, the delegation was taken into the Centre of South Asian Studies’ library, where Kevin Greenbank, the Centre’s Archivist, displayed many of the Archives’ treasures. These included a panoramic photograph from the Delhi Durbar of 1911, Edwin Lutyens’ plans for New Delhi (including many for buildings that were never built) and miniature paintings from 1842.

Commenting on the visit, Dr Anderson said: "Cambridge has an extremely rich and diverse history of connections with India – a relationship that is today as important as ever. ̽��ֱ��visiting students seemed to really enjoy hearing about this shared heritage, and our students from the MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies were also able to learn a lot from the young Indian politicians".

Explaining the motivation behind the visit, Shria Gandhi, Political Officer at the UK’s High Commission in Delhi, said:

“This group represents 6 political parties across 10 Indian states. They are the next generation of Indian leaders. ̽��ֱ��idea is to expose them to UK institutions –its Parliament, businesses, media, higher education institutions—so that 15 or 20 years down the line, when they are members of parliament or ministers in the Indian government, they will want to collaborate with the UK. ̽��ֱ��idea is to promote the UK-India bilateral relation, and who better than future leaders of India as ambassadors to promote that relationship?”

Ronak Hegde, 29, from Maharashtra, and a member of the youth wing of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), shared his impressions of the Centre of South Asian Studies: “I am always curious to know about my past history. If anyone gives me new insights into my own background I am always grateful.”

This sentiment was echoed by Richa Singh, 29, the first elected woman President in the 128-year history of the Allahabad ̽��ֱ�� Students’ Union, and a member of the Samajwadi (Socialist) Party: “Cambridge is a very important place for us, and the Centre of South Asian Studies gives us a deeper understanding of India and its relations to the UK.”

Hasiba Amin, 26, General Secretary of the National Students’ Union of India (NSUI), the student wing of the Congress Party, explained the importance of visiting Cambridge.

Referring to India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, she said: “I am a big Nehru fan, and Cambridge played a role in making Nehru what he was. He chose democracy. He understood the importance of criticism. Cambridge had a role to play in that.”

Leni Jadhav, 30, also a General Secretary of the NSUI, added: “We know some of the Cambridge colleges from Bollywood films, and what I’ve seen is just as beautiful. But I was very pleased to have met people who are interested in topics that are of great interest to me as an Indian. Now I’m keen to meet students, and learn about what they do, about their sports activities, about their cultural life –the things the students here do apart from studying.”

Cambridge’s track record in research and innovation was the biggest draw for Alok Kumar Singh, 28, president of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the student wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh party:

“I’m a biochemist, and I admire Cambridge because of the work of Nobel winner Venkatraman Ramakrishnan. Some of the greatest recent discoveries in molecular biology have happened in this university.”

A fellow member of the ABVP, 20-year-old Harikrishna Varma explained that he was most interested in understanding the difference between student politics in both countries:

“I want to know how political dynamics play out in ̽��ֱ�� life. ̽��ֱ��way they work here seems to be better for academic life. In Indian party politics there is more rhetoric and less detail. Here there is more space for nuanced opinions.”

Abhishek Gupta, 23, of the student wing of the Aam Aadmi Party, said: “When you hear the name of Cambridge, you think about very high levels in education. We know of the high standards of education set by Cambridge, and we need more universities like this in India.”

̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge has enjoyed a close relationship with India for over 150 years. From the mid-19th century, when the first students from India arrived in Cambridge, scholarship and lasting friendship have been the foundation of academic partnership. Three Indian Prime Ministers were educated at Cambridge, and the ̽��ֱ�� is now home to distinguished academics from India across all fields of the arts, humanities, social, physical, biological and medical sciences.

In March 2017, to mark the anniversary of India’s independence, the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s museums will launch a year-long programme of India-focused exhibitions and events.

A delegation of 12 Indian student politicians affiliated to various political parties visited Cambridge on 1 December to gain a greater understanding of links between the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and India

Cambridge has an extremely rich and diverse history of connections with India – a relationship that is today as important as ever.

Dr Edward Anderson

Kevin Greenbank shows members of the Indian student delegation a panoramic photograph of the 1911 Delhi Durbar

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

A glimpse of India

Anonymous — Mon, 26 Oct 2015 10:45:02 +0000

For most people, owning a mobile phone also means owning a video camera. There is no cost at all in sharing with others the scenes you film, thanks to YouTube and other such sites, so you can film nearly everything you do. In 1935, this was not the case. A cine film camera was expensive, film was not cheap and developing it was particularly pricey. You could not waste hours of expensive film waiting for your cat to do something funny, your baby to belch hilariously or some stranger’s dog to chase deer across a national park. People filming home movies had, therefore, to be more selective about what they filmed. There is as much difference between one of these films and most YouTube clips as there is between a letter written in 1935 and the majority of the emails you have sent recently.

As the archivist of the Centre of South Asian Studies’ Collection, I am effectively responsible for a set of home movies which, when analysed, bears great resemblance to the sort of documents historians, anthropologists and others working in the arts, humanities and social sciences have relied on for many years. Some, like newspapers, document significant events. In our own collections, for example, we have film of the funeral of Lord Brabourne (Gradwell 1), footage of the aftermath of the Quetta earthquake of 1935 (Berridge 4), a train derailed by pro-independence activists in c.1938 (Berridge 5) and two very harrowing films of the catastrophic results of the mass migrations that followed Partition in 1947 (Williams 1 and 2) as well as footage of refugees arriving in Lahore in the same period (Burtt 3 and 7). Others, a bit like official documents, show the working of the Empire, the ways in which the infrastructure of the Raj was built, such as the building of the railways (Berridge 1), or the vast canal systems of the North-West (Stokes 12 and 13).

Some of the films are similar in tone to the letters in our paper archive – made to be sent home so that people could show those back in the UK what their new life was like, such as the first few films of the Hunter Collection, which are actually filmed to look like a letter inviting viewers on a holiday to India and showing them what they will see when they arrive. And some show, often accidentally, the lives of Indian people (Banks 5), as well as the lives of the British who ran the Imperial system – the garden parties (Meiklejohn 8), hunting/horse-riding (Banks 2) social gatherings and sports, and also more personal, domestic scenes in which we are shown the homes and gardens of British India (Stokes 3).

̽��ֱ��Collection is perhaps most interesting, though, when the films reveal something unintended by the film-maker, enabling an insight into the situation in which the film was made or into the mindset of the person holding the camera. ̽��ֱ��writer of a letter, diary or government document is able to exercise absolute control of the narrative that is presented, but this is not always the case in a film, as those being filmed can act in ways that tell us more about the context in which the document was created.

Two examples jump out at me – one is a flippant example of what films can reveal, the other asks some interesting and important questions about social attitudes and about what a British woman is willing to have her audience see when viewing the films she made, or about what is acceptable in certain social settings. I shall leave these deeper questions without an answer, though – my role as an archivist is to prepare, preserve and present our collections, not to interpret them. There is, however, a growing branch of academic study which is using film collections such as ours as tools for visual anthropological study: the work of my colleague Dr Annamaria Motrescu-Mayes would be an excellent starting point for those who wish to read further on this subject, and a good deal of it is based on the films mentioned in this article.

̽��ֱ��two films come from the Kendall Collection and both are, somewhat unusually, made by a woman, Lady Kendall, who was the wife of a judge in Allahabad. Kendall 1 shows mainly domestic scenes: the garden being tended, a children’s party, people walking in the family garden. Towards the end there is footage of a wedding. These scenes are interspersed with footage of Indian agricultural workers operating an irrigation system. This juxtaposition is, in itself, interesting.

While it shows the lifestyle of an affluent member of British Indian society, however, it also reveals something quite simple. It is clear that this was the first film taken on a new camera. You can tell this not because of the quality of the footage, but because of the way the camera was used – the film-maker treats it like a still camera. She points it at an object or scene, captures the image and then turns it off. What this leaves is a dizzying collection of short clips, mostly lasting between one and two seconds. Even when longer scenes are filmed – the wedding at the end or the agricultural scenes, for example – these are taken in short episodes. In the whole 10 minutes of the film, there are very few times when the camera is turned on for longer than four or five seconds. It is very difficult to watch, and even harder to watch to the end without getting a headache.

It is entirely understandable, however. We are used to watching what we have filmed straight away, and if we are doing something wrong, we can correct it with our next recording. Lady Kendall had to wait until the film she was using was completely recorded and then take it to be developed. Given that she shot 10 minutes of film in sections of a few seconds at a time, it is likely that it took quite a while to fill the whole reel. After viewing it she corrects her use of the camera – if you watch the whole Collection, you will see that the shots in subsequent films gradually lengthen.

Kendall III is more complex, although it also has at its heart the problems associated with making the switch from taking photographs to shooting films. In this film, Lady Kendall shows a picnic in the hills. After showing a group of friends (and a larger group of bearers and other servants) making their way up to the picnic site, she tries to take what is essentially a photograph of the scene, composing it to suit what she wants the image to show. She does this, though, with the cine camera running.

This provides us with a very revealing moment – it starts 42 seconds into the film (just after footage of a tennis match and some shots of mountains), and only lasts a second. Standing behind the people, seated on their blankets and smiling and laughing through their sandwiches, is a servant in livery.

For some reason, Lady Kendall, who has been quite happy to show the servants involved in carrying the picnic things up the mountain, does not wish to have this servant in this shot, so she asks one of the party to stand and obscure him from the camera’s view. ̽��ֱ��servant initially sways slightly to his right to try and stay in the shot, but then steps across to his left, remaining firmly visible. ̽��ֱ��friend moves back across to block him again, clearly taking direction of where she should stand, at which point Lady Kendall stops filming.

This attempt to create a mise-en-scène clearly fails, but in doing so it opens up many questions and lines of enquiry. Why the servant wants to remain in the shot, where he is clearly not wanted, for example. It also suggests that there are some situations in which it is acceptable for servants to be shown in the film, and others where it is not. Why this might be is not immediately clear, but this does show that a film can helpfully shed light on social attitudes, conventions and mores in a way that a written account would not. A diary entry or letter about this picnic would have simply not mentioned the presence of the servant, obscuring him far more effectively than Lady Kendall’s friend is able to do in this short piece of footage.

Inset images: stills from the Kendall III film (Centre of South Asian Studies Archive).

This article was first published in CAM Issue 75 (2015).

Kevin Greenbank, archivist at the Centre of South Asian Studies, explores the ways in which the home movie offers fascinating insights into the lives of those in front of, and behind, the camera – as rare footage of a 1935 Raj picnic shows.

̽��ֱ��Collection is perhaps most interesting when the films reveal something unintended by the film-maker

Kevin Greenbank

A glimpse of India

Centre of South Asian Studies

Stills from the Kendall III film

̽��ֱ��Centre of South Asian Studies Archive

̽��ֱ��Centre of South Asian Studies’ film archive was largely collected by its remarkable first archivist, Mary Thatcher, who was commissioned in 1967 to begin a search for archival material that was otherwise in danger of being lost.

Her brief was to focus on ordinary British men and women who worked in India, either in the Civil Service or its associated governmental concerns, those who lived in the Princely States, or were in the private sector, or served as missionaries or teachers. ̽��ֱ��resulting trawl of families who had returned to Britain after Independence has resulted in an archive of international importance and renown.

̽��ֱ��Collection deals mostly with the British in India (Indian collections would generally be restored to Indian archives, rather than being kept out of the country) and includes papers, photographs and films, and an oral history collection.

The unique collection of amateur cine films comprises films mostly made in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. Where the archive has a film, it also normally has accompanying papers and photographs, providing a rare level of documentation and analysis.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

A democratic cacophony

sjr81 — Fri, 23 Oct 2015 09:00:23 +0000

In a remote village in a forgotten corner of West Bengal lives an old man called Fakhruddin Gazi. He has lived in the village for every one of his long years. However, since India was partitioned in 1947, Fakhruddin Gazi has lived in fear, unable to leave the small landholding his family has owned for generations.

A thousand miles away in Rajasthan, the state’s first female Chief Minister is showered with garlands and the kind of affection usually reserved for pop stars, not politicians. ̽��ֱ��masses clamour to touch her feet. Devotees deify her with all the reverence of a Hindu goddess.

Just down the road in Jaipur, an enterprising and popular middle-aged man is making and receiving calls on one of his three mobile phones. ̽��ֱ��conversations he conducts link voters to politicians, slum-dwellers to local officials. If you need a fake birth certificate, a government job, or your home connected to the electrical grid – his is the number you need to call.

In Gujarat, a casually employed labourer is being interviewed. ̽��ֱ��man is a Dalit, a member of the lowest caste in India’s order of social stratification. Dalits used to go by another name – ‘untouchables’. He tells Dr Manali Desai, who has travelled from Cambridge to interview him, about his political leanings.

“Since the BJP came there have been no more riots. We live peacefully. It is not as it used to be. There is progress everywhere. It has become America now... nice cinemas and long roads have been built. It all seems like a dream.”

This is India on any given day. A cacophony of more than a billion voices and stories all straining to make themselves heard. Some shout, some whisper, others scream. Few are silent. Each and every voice – Brahmin or Dalit, Muslim or Hindu, old or young – has something unique to tell us about the nature of democracy in India: its flaws and foibles, its puzzles and paradoxes, its successes and its shames. All have their part to play in informing our understanding of the world’s largest democracy; a democracy often celebrated, regularly condemned and impossible to ignore.

Some of the stories Cambridge academics are uncovering – like Professor Joya Chatterji’s experiences with Fakhruddin Gazi – interrogate the foundations and principles of post-partition democracy, highlighting a legacy of injustice and inequality against a sub-class of India’s own citizens. ̽��ֱ��work of others, like social anthropologist Dr Anastasia Piliavsky, directly challenges the Western world’s accepted notions of what democracy should look like, arguing that our rush to brand Indian politics as a basket case of corruption and crime is, in part, a failure in our own understanding as to the needs and sensibilities of more than 800 million registered voters in India.

Chatterji’s work on refugees, minorities and the rights of marginalised groups in West Bengal and beyond raises questions about the history and meaning of citizenship for minority communities in India, particularly for individuals like Fakhruddin – an Indian Muslim caught on the ‘wrong side’ at the time of partition.

Once the head of a Sunni family that owned several acres of good paddy land and many heads of cattle, Fakhruddin has lived with the consequences of partition since the late 1940s. In the upheaval that came with the new international border and the Radcliffe Line, his family fled to East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) while he stayed to tend to the graves of his ancestors.

Gangs grabbed most of his property and burned his home while the police did nothing. In 1965, India enacted ‘enemy property’ ordinances that gave the state unfettered powers – which could not be challenged in any court – to seize the property of anyone ‘fraternising with the enemy’. Since then, Fakhruddin has been afraid to leave the tiny plot he still has, for fear of being dispossessed.

“My work looks at the origins and precise nature of minority citizenship,” says Chatterji, Director of the Centre of South Asian Studies. “Unless you understand its legacies of impoverishment, deprivation and seizure of property, addressing contemporary problems of minorities in India’s democracy will be less straightforward.

“Minority citizens are seen as ‘lesser’ and this is enshrined in the constitution. Even when India and Pakistan accorded these citizens formal membership, they set them apart legally from full citizenship in vital ways. Their standing is diminished.”

Chatterji has made extensive use of records kept in the National Archives of India, and many regional archives across the subcontinent, to supplement extensive fieldwork and oral history. Despite the current status quo and unwillingness of governments to tackle the issues surrounding minority citizenship, Chatterji does have hope for the future.

“There is much that is great about Indian democracy and much that is not. My work on internally displaced Muslims has persuaded me that the impact of partition on minorities who stayed behind was far less benign than has often been assumed. However, I do see lots of light in popular organisation and mobilisation around a host of issues of injustice in India. We don’t see this emanating from the state or high politics, but the country is absolutely teeming with everyday movements on the ground. ̽��ֱ��state has to pay attention to them. There are protests all the time; we have an Arab Spring of sorts in India every day.”

Sociologist Dr Manali Desai is another researcher with an ambivalent view on India’s future. Her recent work has looked into the reshaping of the country’s political landscape and how the ruling BJP party (historically seen as conservative and elitist) has won the significant backing of many lower-caste voters in states like Gujarat.

While the rise, and aspirational voting habits, of the Indian middle class has been much discussed and documented, Desai believes that the BJP’s paradoxical success in attracting voters from the Dalit and Other Backward Classes (OBCs) – when the personal benefits of voting BJP cannot be demonstrated – has a great deal more to tell us about 21st-century India.

“ ̽��ֱ��BJP claims that the people of Gujarat support [Prime Minister] Narendra Modi because of the development he has brought to the state,” says Desai. “Yet numerous studies show that social development in Gujarat lags behind that of many states and the benefits of development have not reached beyond the middle classes.”

Desai believes that it is precisely the BJP’s ‘development discourse’ that has attracted lower-caste votes in high numbers despite many Dalits and OBCs continuing to face widespread discrimination, lacking access to water and electricity supplies, and being subject to evictions and relocations. ‘Development’ and ‘peace’ were words often uttered in interviews, something the BJP juxtaposed with an ‘unruly and chaotic’ past.

“India is still in the early stages of exploding capitalism, and for hundreds of millions of India’s young, this is all they have ever known,” says Desai. “Urban voters are not aware of rural issues and young rural men seek to migrate to cities to find jobs. This has all helped the BJP’s remarkable rise as India has repositioned itself in the global economy.”

Looking to the future, Desai says: “I am both hopeful and not. ̽��ֱ��established order of things was stultifying the economy and politics, and new technology and innovation, an increasingly young population and a new awareness of India’s place globally are all very positive developments.

“But there has also been a deepening and normalising of Hinduistic strains. This is particularly potent when young people should be opening up, not closing down. That worries me. India has very deep inequalities around caste. When not addressed, they come back with a vengeance. But overall, yes, India will become a more democratic place. Lower-caste parties rule in several states despite being excluded in more and more ways. More quotas and more jobs for lower castes is the only way around this.”

India’s democracy is a subject of consuming fascination to Anastasia Piliavsky, who in 2013 went on the campaign trail with Rajasthan’s future Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje. She was given privileged access to Raje’s campaign machine and the chance to understand what Piliavsky calls “the logic of Indian democracy” – an oxymoron to many.

Politics and corruption in the world’s largest democracy are never far from the headlines, either in Indian newspapers or on news websites around the world. A Google search for ‘Indian corruption’ returns almost as many hits as ‘Indian democracy’.

Piliavsky’s research occupies the liminal area between the two as she seeks to understand why a political system so often regarded as corrupt and amoral continually engages hundreds of millions of voters – and attracts turnouts which are the envy of many Western democracies.

Piliavsky believes that looking at India solely through the prism of Western sensibilities misses the moral significance of ‘relationships’ and ‘community’ that underpins all Indian politics – subjects that Desai also came across regularly in her interviews with Dalits and OBCs.

“In India, politics is about relations and hierarchies,” says Piliavsky. “It is about obligations and loyalties to one’s own. We may call this irruption into the bureaucratic process and law ‘corruption’. Yet it is precisely this ‘corruption’ – the sprawling, tangled web of human relations – that animates India’s democratic process and drives hundreds of millions to the voting booths.”

She contends that attachments to people, rather than ‘left’ or ‘right’, is what draws many into political life and shapes political loyalties. Voters expect politicians to give, be it food, money or public goods, as part of their responsibility to the voters. Many do not see the distribution of food and alcohol as corruption. To them, the betrayal of relations is the real meaning of corruption; when people don’t deliver to those whom they owe.

Getting anything done in India – from buying a car, arranging a marriage or attracting voters – requires ‘approaches’. Cash does pass hands, but there are few quick and easy sales. Each arrangement works through bonds of mutual sympathy, favour and trust. Few in politics can avoid spending large sums of money on their constituencies.

As well as defending a democracy often compared with the scandalised governments of Sub-Saharan Africa, Piliavsky is also more sanguine than many Western commentators about Modi’s Prime Ministership.

“Most of those who voted for Modi did so because they believe him to be a highly effective leader, a man who can get things done. However sound that belief may be, delivering on his many (often improbable) promises is what will keep him in office – not backing a violent ideology rejected by many Indian citizens and the international community alike. Having promised millions of new jobs and having brought many Muslims to the BJP, Modi can now ill afford communal riots.

What India has shown is that no politician is ever good enough. No one can sit pretty, Modi least of all. He’s going to have to work day and night to deliver a small portion of what he’s promised. ̽��ֱ��Indian citizens are not fools, they know he promised too much, and they will watch him closely. There is no cult of personality, only a ‘cult of action’. And if Modi’s electorate does not feel he has done enough by the end of his first term in office, they will expunge him, just as they did with Indira Gandhi before. This is the way of India’s restive, fickle democracy.”

Inset images: Election campaign in the 2014 General Election in India (Michael Bumann); A woman shows her inked thumb as proof of voting (Nilanjan Chowdhury/Al Jazeera).

India is home to one of the most vibrant, engaged and mystifying democracies on the planet. Cambridge academics, across a wide range of disciplines, are working on the ground – with citizens, charities, NGOs, fellow scholars and politicians – to try to untangle it.

̽��ֱ��country is absolutely teeming with everyday movements on the ground. ̽��ֱ��state has to pay attention to them. There are protests all the time; we have an Arab Spring of sorts in India every day

Joya Chatterji

Queuing to vote in India

Nehru and Today's India

To complement the work of Cambridge researchers studying Indian democracy, the ̽��ֱ�� is also active as a neutral and respected convener of debates in India among Indian politicians, writers, artists, economists and diplomats.

Following the success of the inaugural India-Cambridge summit in 2012, the Vice-Chancellor's Endowment Fund supported a major conference in Delhi in February 2015 on 'Nehru and Today's India', which was broadcast on NDTV, one of India's leading news channels.

Both events were conceptualised by Dr Shruti Kapila (Faculty of History), who also provided Indian election analysis for Al Jazeera and Bloomberg TV, and has inaugurated a seminar series on Indian issues in the House of Lords.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Man with a Bouquet of Plastic Flowers

amb206 — Tue, 20 Oct 2015 11:12:20 +0000

Bhupen Khakhar’s portrait of a man holding a bunch of roses belongs to the collection of the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi. ̽��ֱ��painting, titled Man with a Bouquet of Plastic Flowers, captures a keen sense of solitude: the figures and objects it portrays are defined by their separation. ̽��ֱ��man at its centre, dressed in a plain white shirt, looks straight at the viewer, his face shaded and mouth downcast. His crossed arms suggest a containment of emotion. Even the flowers, perhaps a gift, are clasped tight to his body.

Dr Devika Singh, Smuts Research Fellow at the Centre of South Asian Studies, is a specialist in Indian modern and contemporary art and architecture. Her recent research looks at Indian artists who worked post-independence and pays attention, among others, to those who, like Khakhar, attended the art school at the ̽��ֱ�� of Baroda, an institution that sparked a flowering of new talent. These artists drew on a range of artistic currents and, in creating a language that was uniquely theirs, forged their names on an international stage.

Painted in 1976, Khakhar’s portrait of the man with the plastic flowers borrows elements of Indian popular culture and creates something that is quite startling in its juxtaposition of low and high art. “ ̽��ֱ��man portrayed is anonymous but holds centre stage. ̽��ֱ��setting in which Khakhar places him is taken from so-called calendar prints which often feature famous politicians with scenes telling their life stories. Khakhar upends this visual convention,” says Singh. “ ̽��ֱ��episodes in Khakhar’s painting are under-stated rather than dramatic. They speak of domestic intimacy but also of tension and loneliness. There’s an emptiness to the interiors and the small figures are shown as languid in a way that suggests that they’re disengaged from the outside world.”

̽��ֱ��1960s and 1970s marked a critical juncture in Indian art. After the first phase of post-independence nation-building, these decades prompted a crisis as the country wrestled with the multiple and often clashing influences that permeated society. As in other postcolonial states, Indian intellectuals began to reflect on the shortcomings of the first generation of Indian political leaders. In this context, the late 1960s saw the emergence of the Baroda school, a loosely-knit group named after the university’s Faculty of Arts, where the painter and teacher KG Subramanyan had a lasting influence.

Trained at Santiniketan’s Visva Bharati, the university set up by Rabindranath Tagore, Subramanyan was briefly imprisoned as a young man for his support of Gandhi’s anti-colonial struggle. He later went to work in New York on a Rockefeller fellowship before returning to India to resume his teaching at Baroda. During Subramanyan’s stay in the USA, the renowned American art critic Clement Greenberg visited his exhibition at Chemould Gallery. Greenberg was involved in a landmark exhibition organised by New York’s Museum of Modern Art titled ‘Two Decades of American Painting’ that came to India in 1967 and on whose heated reception Singh has written.

Singh says: “ ̽��ֱ��late 1960s and 1970s was a fascinating period for Indian art which reflected the huge societal upheavals taking place. Irony and individualism seeped into the work of contemporary artists – both are apparent in Man with a Bouquet of Plastic Flowers. ̽��ֱ��politics of the time had a big impact whether it was the countercultural movements or the anti-Vietnam protests, and also took on specific garbs with the rise of the Maoist rebellion known as the Naxalite movement. In addition, the development of Indian art should also be conceived internationally. Indian artists travelled to the USA, UK and beyond, and western artists travelled to India. ̽��ֱ��result was a two-way exchange of ideas.”

Brought up in Bombay, Khakhar trained as an accountant before changing career and finding a voice as a painter. His relatively modest background, and most importantly his unique personality, meant that he was in touch with the vitality of popular culture. At the same time, he was engaged with the high art that was making waves on a global scale. In 1981 he came out as openly homosexual, one of the first well-known figures to do so. From then onwards until his death in 2003, his work spoke explicitly of his sexuality. He and his contemporaries challenged the status quo and found new ways to live and work in a country in which anti-pluralist currents have led to violence and self-censorship.

“Khakhar defies the frameworks that art historians and curators, like me, often use to place artists within a particular context. Some commentators have suggested that he’s a pop artist – but he’s much more. ̽��ֱ��strength of his work, and one of the reasons that it remains significant, is that it’s disruptive and provokes deep questions about society. For instance, he developed new ways of showing the body as a domestic and public object,” says Singh. “His pictures also draw influences from far and wide – from the naïve paintings of Henri Rousseau to Mughal and Italian Renaissance painting. ̽��ֱ��works of the 1970s debunk many nationalist myths, while his later works invite a consideration on the fragility of the human body.”

Friends and colleagues of Khakhar who went on to make their names, include Vivan Sundaram, Mrinalini Mukherjee and Nalini Malani. Their work addresses matters of political, communal and gender identity. Half a century on, these artists have been recognised outside India for their contribution to the unfolding story of 20th-century art. Malani’s work has long been exhibited internationally, including at Documenta in 2012. Yet, the work of Mukherjee, focus this year of a retrospective at Delhi’s National Gallery of Modern Art, deserves to be better known abroad.

In spring 2016, Tate Modern will hold a solo exhibition of Bhupen Khakhar’s work and Singh will contribute to its catalogue. In June she will co-convene a conference, at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and at Tate Modern, on the history of exhibitions of South Asian art in Britain. Khakhar, whose work was promoted in the UK from the 1980s, contributed to this dynamic history. Says Singh: “This was not a one-way traffic. Influences came not only from Britain to India but also from India to Britain. In the late 1960s and 1970s there were countless alliances between London’s left wing intellectuals and their international counterparts.

By virtue of her academic studies in Paris (Lycée Condorcet), Cambridge (King’s College and Trinity College) and London (Courtauld Institute), and her close connections with India, Singh has met and interviewed many artists and actors of the post-independence art world, some of whom are in their 80s and 90s. In many cases, she has been given access to their personal archives, art collections and correspondence.

Drawing on these experiences, she is writing a book on artistic creation in post-independence India for Reaktion Books. Her research also underpins an exhibition on the history of photography in India that she is co-curating at the Media Space of the Science Museum in London. ̽��ֱ��exhibition will be an unprecedented survey of photography in India from the arrival of the medium in India in the 1840s until today.

“Analysing the creative narrative of 20th-century India is a complex enterprise, as the work of artists is both transnational and deeply embedded in the national politics of the time,” she says. “But it’s certainly an extremely enriching project that attests to the vibrancy of artistic creation in India.”

Inset image: Dr Devika Singh.

Almost 40 years have passed since Bhupen Khakhar painted one of the most iconic paintings in the history of Indian modern art. Dr Devika Singh offers fresh insights into a generation of Indian artists whose work reflects the politics and social turmoil of a fascinating era.

̽��ֱ��late 1960s and 1970s was a fascinating period for Indian art which reflected the huge societal upheavals taking place

Devika Singh

National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi

Man with a Bouquet of Plastic Flowers (1976) by Bhupen Khakhar

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

̽��ֱ��Sea-Pie and the sad sailor

lw355 — Fri, 16 Oct 2015 13:02:36 +0000

A woman peeks from the curtain of a wagon, rich men parade on a bejewelled elephant and a pensive scholar clutches the tools of his trade: these paintings, no bigger than playing cards, adorn transparent sheets of mica and were bought in India as souvenirs by sailor Charles Augustus Whitehouse in 1842.

They were painted in India for the colonial tourist trade and are so rare and fragile that Dr Kevin Greenbank, archivist at the Centre of South Asian Studies, admits “I get the shakes when I handle these.”

“They represent an important period in Indian art – the Company School of painting – when Indian art developed perspective,” he adds. Some depict courtly scenes, while others appear to be sets of costumed characters or Indian pastimes and trades.

̽��ֱ��collection has 69 mica paintings. Their vibrant images are remarkably intact despite the fragility of mica – a transparent mineral – which may have been used by the painters in order to imitate the European trend for painting on glass. There are also six paintings on pipal leaves.

Today, they are held in the archives of the Centre for South Asian Studies, which houses a unique collection of letters, diaries, photographs and films belonging to ordinary British people who documented their lives in India and South Asia.

“What I especially like about the mica paintings is they accompany a pair of diaries written by a sailor who bought them when he stopped in India on his was from Liverpool to India on the Brig Medina.”

Unlike many diaries that have become a source of historical information, Whitehouse’s are a deeply personal and highly idiosyncratic account – so much so that they were often written as if there was no-one else on board.

Entitled ̽��ֱ��Sea-Pie, the diaries are inscribed to his mother, and come with a caveat scrawled across the front “Here it comes something hot from the oven. Mind your eye or it may burn your fingers.”

Alongside his self-portrait, seascapes, a map of his route and a smattering of voyage details – “Potato cakes for tea” – Whitehouse begins to dwell on his lost sweetheart back home, stolen away, he says, by another man: “Hanging, drawing and quartering would be really too good for such an intruder.”

As the Brig continues to be becalmed, the pages fill with plaintive poetry “Love in a woman neer sinketh deep, Into the bosom she lets him creep… Love in a man is a far different thing, Forms more than roses it doth then bring.”

Eventually, many pages later, the sad sailor rallies, bringing his melancholic meanderings to an end with: “So I’ve blued and blued and bored and bored you until I work myself back into my usual good humour. Apres les pluit, les bonne temps. ̽��ֱ��storm is over and I feel much refreshed… after moping for a good half an hour I went below for a cigar.”

̽��ֱ��Centre of South Asian Studies archive comprises a unique collection of photos, papers, films and oral histories covering many aspects of life in South Asia.

www.s-asian.cam.ac.uk/archive/archome.html

Inset images: paintings on mica (Centre of South Asian Studies Archive); Charles Augustus Whitehouse's self-portrait (Centre of South Asian Studies Archive).

̽��ֱ��idiosyncratic diaries of one man’s voyage from Liverpool to India, and the exquisite painted souvenirs he bought there, are among the treasures to be found in the archives at the Centre of South Asian Studies.

Here it comes something hot from the oven. Mind your eye or it may burn your fingers

Charles Augustus Whitehouse

̽��ֱ��sad sailor and ̽��ֱ��Sea-Pie

Centre of South Asian Studies Archive

Charles Augustus Whitehouse's diary and souvenirs

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

A world of science

lw355 — Thu, 08 Oct 2015 09:20:44 +0000

̽��ֱ��year was 1789; the place Bengal. Isaac Newton’s masterpiece Principia Mathematica was being translated for only the third time in its already 100-year-old history; this time, into Arabic.

̽��ֱ��author of this remarkable feat of scholarship was Tafazzul Husain Khan. According to a member of the ruling East India Company: “Khan… by translating the works of the immortal Newton, has conducted those imbued with Arabick literature to the fountain of all physical and astronomical knowledge.”

For Professor Simon Schaffer, who has researched the story of Tafazzul’s achievements, the complex work of translation is deeply significant. Tafazzul worked with scholars in English, Persian, Arabic and Sanskrit language communities in his efforts to connect Newtonian theories with the Indo-Persian intellectual tradition. For Tafazzul was, as Schaffer describes, “a go-between”.

“ ̽��ֱ��‘go-betweens’ are the individuals who, across the centuries, have been the cogs that have kept science moving,” he explains. “They are the knowledge brokers and translators, networkers and messengers – the original ‘knowledge transfer facilitators’. Their role may have disappeared from mainstream histories of science, but their tradecraft has been indispensable to the globalisation of science.”

Schaffer and Dr Sujit Sivasundaram are historians of science with an interest in understanding how the seeds of scientific knowledge have spread and grown. They believe that the global history of science is really the history of shifts and reinventions of a variety of ways of doing science across the world.

They, and others, have called for a retelling of science’s past, not only to be more “culturally symmetric” but also because the issue has enormous contemporary relevance.

“A standard tale is that modern science spread around the world from Western Europe, starting about 500 years ago based on the work of those such as Newton, Copernicus and Galileo, and then Darwin, Einstein, and so on,” explains Schaffer. “But this narrative about the globalisation of science just doesn’t work at all. It ignores a remarkable process of knowledge exchange that happened between the East and West for centuries.”

“Successful science is seen to be universal in its applicability,” adds Sivasundaram. “Yet, accounts of scientific discovery, heroism and priority have been part and parcel of a political narrative of competitive ownership by empires, nations and civilisations. To tease this story apart, we focus on the exchanges and ‘silencings’ across political configurations that are central to the rise of science on the global stage.”

Over the past two years, with funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, he and Schaffer have undertaken a programme of debates to ask whether a transregional rather than a Eurocentric history of science could now be told.

To do so, they teamed up with researchers in India and Africa, including Professor Irfan Habib from Delhi’s National ̽��ֱ�� of Educational Planning and Administration and Professor Dhruv Raina of Jawarhalal Nehru ̽��ֱ��, and in December 2014 held an international workshop at the Nehru Memorial Library in New Delhi. “And now our debate is also being carried forward by a new generation of early-career researchers who came to the workshop,” adds Sivasundaram.

One conundrum the researchers debated was how global narratives of science could have been missed by scholars for so long. It largely stems from the use of source materials says Schaffer: “It’s an archival problem: as far as the production and preservation of sources is concerned, those connected with Europe far outweigh those from other parts of the world.”

“If we are to de-centre from Europe, we need to use radically new kinds of sources – monuments, sailing charts, courtly narratives, and so on,” explains Sivasundaram. He gives an example of Sri Lankan palm-leaf manuscripts: “ ̽��ֱ��Mahavamsais a Buddhist chronicle of the history of Sri Lanka spanning 25 centuries. Among the deeds of the last kings of Kandy, I noticed seemingly inconsequential references to temple gardens. This led me back to the colonial archive documenting the creation of a botanic garden in 1821, and I realised that the British had ‘recycled’ a Kandyan tradition of gardening, by building their colonial garden on the site of a temple garden.”

Moreover, says Sivasundaram, the mechanisms of knowledge assimilation are often overlooked. Europeans often accumulated knowledge in India by engaging with pandits, or learned men. “ ̽��ֱ��Europeans did not have a monopoly over the combination of science and empire – the pioneering work of Chris Bayly [see panel] shows how they fought to take over information networks and scientific patronage systems that were already in place. For Europeans to practice astronomy in India, for instance, it meant translating Sanskrit texts and engaging with pandits.”

“Very often, scientific achievement is used as a standard to measure a country’s progress because science and technology can intervene in problems of hunger, disease and development,” adds Sivasundaram. “If a biased history of science is told, then the past can become what Irfan Habib has called a ‘battlefield’, instead of a ‘springboard’ for future research or indeed for conversation across cultures.”

This is why, says Schaffer, it becomes so important to provide a better account of the worldly interaction between the kinds of knowledge communicated, the agents of communication – like Tafazzul Husain Khan – and the paths they travelled.

̽��ֱ��history of science has been centred for too long on the West, say Simon Schaffer and Sujit Sivasundaram. It’s time to think global.

̽��ֱ��‘go-betweens’ have been the cogs that have kept science moving ... their tradecraft has been indispensable to the globalisation of science

Simon Schaffer

Private collection/Bridgeman Images

̽��ֱ��European in India, 1813 by Charles D'Oyly (1781-1845)

̽��ֱ��art of listening in

Knowledge networks were as important to the building of British political intelligence in north India in the 18th and 19th centuries as they were to the diffusion of science.

No discussion of Indian history, or of the communication and the movement of knowledge, would be complete without reference to the work of the late Professor Sir Christopher Bayly (1945–2015).

Bayly saw the role of Indian spies, runners and knowledgeable secretaries as crucial to the British in helping to keep information and gossip flowing in the 1780s and 1860s. His ground-breaking research uncovered the social and intellectual origins of these informants, and showed how networks of ‘go-betweens’ helped the British understand India’s politics, economic activities and culture.

“One overriding reason why the East India Company was able to conquer India… was that the British had learnt the art of listening in on the internal communications of Indian polity and society,” he explained in his seminal work Empire and Information (1996).

Ultimately, however, India’s complex systems of debate and communication challenged the political and intellectual dominance of the British; it was their misunderstanding of the subtleties of Indian politics and values, he argues, that contributed to the British failure to anticipate the 1857 Mutiny–Rebellion.

World-renowned for his enormous contributions to his subject, Bayly was the Director of Cambridge’s Centre of South Asian Studies until his retirement in 2014, as well as President of St Catharine’s College, and the Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History in the Faculty of History.

He completely transformed people’s understanding of India in the 18th and 19th centuries, explains Professor Joya Chatterji, the Centre’s current Director: “Chris has been one of the most influential figures in the field of modern Indian history. Every one of his monographs broke new ground, whether in political, social and economic, or latterly intellectual history.”

His work was increasingly drawn towards ‘world historical’ comparisons and connections; his ̽��ֱ��Birth of the Modern World (2004) transformed the understanding of the history of modernity itself, drawing attention to its richly complex, overlapping global roots.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes