̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Joya Chatterji

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

Six Cambridge academics elected to prestigious British Academy fellowship

sjr81 — Thu, 19 Jul 2018 23:57:17 +0000

They are among 76 distinguished scholars to be elected to the fellowship in recognition of their work in the fields of archaeology, history, law, politics and prison reform.

̽��ֱ��Cambridge academics made Fellows of the Academy this year are:

Christopher Evans (Department of Archaeology) is to be elected to the fellowship in recognition of his work on some of the most important archaeological field projects undertaken in this country since the growth of development-led archaeology
Professor Martin Jones (Department of Archaeology) is to be elected to the fellowship in recognition of his work in the field of in the field of archaeobotany
Professor Joya Chatterji (Faculty of History) is to be elected to the fellowship in recognition of her work on South Asian history, specifically the history of the India/Pakistan Partition of 1947
Professor Brian Cheffins (Faculty of Law) is to be elected to the fellowship in recognition of his work on the application of economic analysis to the area of company law
Professor David Runciman (Department of Politics and International Studies) is to be elected to the fellowship in recognition of his work on the history of political thought (from Hobbes through to late nineteenth and twentieth century political thought); theories of the state and political representation; and contemporary politics and political theory
Professor Alison Liebling (Director of the Prisons Research Centre) is to be elected to the fellowship in recognition of her work on studying prisons, specifically the internal social order of prisons.

They join the British Academy, a community of over 1400 of the leading minds that make up the UK’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences. Current Fellows include the classicist Dame Mary Beard, the historian Sir Simon Schama and philosopher Baroness Onora O’Neill, while previous Fellows include Sir Winston Churchill, C.S Lewis, Seamus Heaney and Beatrice Webb.

Christopher Evans said: “As having something of a renegade academic status, I am only delighted and honoured to be elected to the Academy.”

Professor Martin Jones said: “It is a real privilege to join the Academy at a time when the humanities and social sciences have more to offer society than ever before."

This year marks the largest ever cohort of new Fellows elected to the British Academy for their distinction in the humanities and social sciences.

As well as a fellowship, the British Academy is a funding body for research, nationally and internationally, and a forum for debate and engagement.

Professor Sir David Cannadine, President of the British Academy, said: “I am delighted to welcome this year’s exceptionally talented new Fellows to the Academy. Including historians and economists, neuroscientists and legal theorists, they bring a vast range of expertise, insights and experience to our most distinguished fellowship.

“ ̽��ֱ��election of the largest cohort of Fellows in our history means the British Academy is better placed than ever to help tackle the challenges we all face today. Whether it’s social integration or the ageing society, the future of democracy or climate change, Brexit or the rise of artificial intelligence, the insights of the humanities and social sciences are essential as we navigate our way through an uncertain present into what we hope will be an exciting future.

“I extend to all of our new Fellows my heartiest congratulations and I look forward to working closely with them to build on the Academy’s reputation and achievements.”

Six academics from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge have been made Fellows of the prestigious British Academy for the humanities and social sciences.

As having something of a renegade academic status, I am only delighted and honoured to be elected to the Academy.

Christopher Evans

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 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 – as here, 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

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

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

Cambridge and India

lw355 — Mon, 05 Oct 2015 10:34:45 +0000

India is the world’s largest democracy. By 2028, it will have overtaken China to become the world’s most populous nation. India currently has the fastest-growing economy among the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) countries. It combines ancient cultural and religious traditions with cutting-edge technological innovation and a commitment to scholarship and learning across all fields and disciplines. India is the major regional power in South Asia, and a rising power on the world stage. If the 21st century is the ‘Asian century’, it also looks set to be India’s century.

In short, India matters.

There has never been a better, nor a more compelling, time to engage with India – with its culture, its knowledge, science and technology, its world-view and, above all, the talents of its people. Indeed, we cannot hope to understand the contemporary world without understanding India. We cannot hope to address the major global challenges without an Indian perspective and Indian involvement.

For a university such as Cambridge, whose mission is ‘to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence’, engagement with India is not merely desirable, it is essential.

Enhancing engagement with India is a strategic priority for the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, building on broad, deep and enduring links. For over 150 years, Cambridge has enjoyed a particularly close relationship with India. 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 in turn the ̽��ֱ�� is now home to distinguished academics from India across all fields of the arts, humanities, social, physical, biological and medical sciences.

Partnership between Cambridge and India is both relationship- and research-led, with a large number of individual collaborations. Cambridge researchers are working with colleagues in India’s leading research institutes and universities, corporations, government departments and civil society organisations, to solve challenges which face not just India, but the whole world in the 21st century.

In the biomedical sciences, collaborations are tackling the most pressing issues affecting global health, from antimicrobial-resistant tuberculosis to novel cancer therapies. With a growing middle class, India, like the West, faces an epidemic of non-communicable diseases such as diabetes; large-scale partnerships in public health between India and Cambridge offer the prospect of better interventions and treatments.

India has a strong tradition in the physical sciences and technology; recognising this complementary expertise, Cambridge researchers are working with colleagues in India to drive forward developments in solar energy, fuel cells and nanoscience. As an emerging economy, India has had to pioneer the art of frugal innovation, producing devices for a fraction of their cost in the West. As the UK and other advanced economies cope with austerity, India has much to teach the rest of the world about doing more with less. Here, the Centre for Indian and Global Business at the Cambridge Judge Business School leads the way in engaging with Indian companies and entrepreneurs, for mutual learning.

India faces significant environment and development challenges, for the provision of energy, water and food security to its people, and ensuring safe, sustainable and dignified livelihoods in the context of environmental and climatic changes. Research led by the Department of Geography, and in the ̽��ֱ��’s Strategic Research Initiatives on Biodiversity Conservation, Energy and Global Food Security, is providing insights into ways in which policies can be implemented across this difficult nexus, and is engaging with state and national level government agencies and research institutions in India to explore solutions.

̽��ֱ��British government has recently expressed its wish for the UK to be India’s ‘partner of choice’ in the 21st century, building on the shared history between the two nations. Partnerships in research and education are leading the way in forging this contemporary alliance.

To strengthen the established UK–India Education and Research Initiative (UKIERI), where Cambridge academics have had notable success, in 2014 the two governments launched the Newton–Bhabha Fund (named after two great scientists, one English, one Indian, both educated at Cambridge). Cambridge research teams are at the forefront of the collaborations being supported by this new scheme.

While science and technology dominate the inter-governmental research agenda, Cambridge has rich traditions of scholarship in the arts, humanities and social sciences, and wishes to deepen its partnership with India in these fields. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Centre of South Asian Studies; within the Centre and across the ̽��ֱ��, scholars are working on all aspects of Indian history, society and culture, from democracy and migration to religion and identity. Cambridge has an unrivalled opportunity, and a major responsibility, to work with Indian colleagues to demonstrate the importance of the humanities and social sciences at the heart of scholarly enquiry and of the ‘grand challenges’ agenda.

Looking to the future, the partnership between Cambridge and India is being progressively strengthened, by enhancing existing collaborations and launching new ones. There are exciting prospects for a major UK–India initiative in crop science, with Cambridge as a core partner through its Global Food Security Strategic Research Initiative; while the role of education in the development of India and the global South is the focus of a new centre for international education, based in the Faculty of Education.

New models, too, are being developed to strengthen the India–Cambridge partnership. ̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� has created five new postdoctoral fellowships, jointly funded by the Government of India’s Department of Biotechnology, which will enable early career researchers to work on collaborative research projects between Cambridge and partner institutions in India; each fellow will spend 60% of their time based in India. ̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� is establishing a wholly owned, not-for-profit subsidiary in India, which will make it easier for Indian businesses, institutional and individual funders to support the growing volume of joint activity in India.

Cambridge’s engagement with India has evolved from scholars working on India to scholars working with, and increasingly, in India – on shared priorities, to mutual advantage. For the ̽��ֱ��, the commitment ‘to contribute to society’ carries a global responsibility. Partnership with India – the rising power of the 21st century – is both a demonstration and affirmation of that commitment.

Professor Joya Chatterji is Director of the Centre of South Asian Studies; Dr Toby Wilkinson is Head of the International Strategy Office; Dr Bhaskar Vira is Director of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge Conservation Research Institute and a Reader in the Department of Geography

Cambridge’s engagement with India has evolved from scholars working on India to scholars working with, and increasingly, in India – on shared priorities, to mutual advantage. Joya Chatterji, Toby Wilkinson and Bhaskar Vira explain why this is, as we begin a month-long focus on some of our India-related research.

We cannot hope to address the major global challenges without an Indian perspective and Indian involvement

Joya Chatterji, Toby Wilkinson and Bhaskar Vira

Centre of South Asian Studies archive

Mid-19th-century map with a line linking Britain to India

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

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