Events Archives › Spring 2016

Seen in some circles as a freedom fighter and an Indian anti-colonialist, and by British, Canadian, and U.S. authorities for much of his life, as a political radical, the life and times of Taraknath Das (1884-1958) occupies a mythic place in the historiography of Indian nationalism as well as a minor but burgeoning role in studies of twentieth century state surveillance and the security state complex. In this paper, I will discuss key aspects of Das’ biography as well as…

Hindustani art music in the metropolis of Bombay/Mumbai played a significant role in the fashioning of public space from the late 19th century to the 1960s. With the fall of Awadh in northern India in 1857 and the dispersal of the court that had inherited Hindustani music from the Mughal empire, the singers, instrumentalists and dancers began to migrate to the ‘native states’, big and small, seeking new patrons. Many of them also found a foothold in Bombay city, which had grown in importance through the 19th century…

Bombay cinema’s transition from black and white to colour in the 1960s produced an affective force field that impacted on the choice of locations, forms of mobility, the role of music and the cultural politics of stardom. The world of objects in interior spaces had to be organized for its capture on colour film stock, slowly changing the perceptual economy of the frame.  While in Hollywood the transition to colour was a gradual process, in India despite the existence of a…

This talk is based on a collaborative project to translate and introduce the autobiography of Dalit Communist, R. B Moré (1902-1972). The presentation will use Moré’s writing as a point of departure for considering questions of subaltern inhabitation, the heterogeneous history of Marxism in Bombay, and issues of caste and masculinity. A specific focus is the relationship between colonial capital, and the de-materialization of caste under conditions of colonial urbanity. Another is the question of how we might write connected histories…

Francis Cody Francis Cody’s research focuses on language and politics in southern India. He first brought these interests to bear on a study of literacy activism, citizenship and social movement politics in rural Tamilnadu, published as a book called The Light of Knowledge (Cornell 2013). This book won the Edward Sapir Book Prize from the Society for Linguistic Anthropology. Cody’s recent work is centered on news media, and it traces the emergence of populist politics through print-mediated publicity in Tamil…

How do you bring together theory, art and political practice in today’s cultural situation in India? One way to do this is to look at how “home” has been narrated – in literature, both fiction and non-fiction, as well as in real life. Githa Hariharan examines contemporary cultural politics in India to describe the transformation of home into a “disputed territory” – with increasing exclusions and attempts to reduce diverse cultural strands into one homogenous narrative.

Robert Millis's Indian Talking Machine is a book about the scratched world of India. About vinyl, grooves, dust, memory. India was one of the earliest non-Western outposts of the recording industry; 78rpms were first made there in 1902. Such recordings! Folk songs and ragas, animal imitations and laughing discs, plaints and comedy routines. Over time, these discs - often featuring exquisite label designs - were smelted and forgotten. But, as Millis argues, "Obscure companies, destroyed master copies, experimentation with regional markets, fragile objects,…