Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg


Centre for
Asian and
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Universität Heidelberg
South Asia Institute
Dept. of South Asian History
Voßstraße 2,
Gebäude 4130, 1. floor
69115 Heidelberg
Germany



Events

News

Disasters in the Making of Modern South Asia. Panel discussion on October 27, 16:00h CATS Hörsaal


Join us for a panel discussion that delves into the history of disasters and humanitarianism in modern South Asia and explores new ways of engaging with the history of wars, famines and earthquakes in colonial contexts. The three speakers, Dr Eleonor Marcussen, Dr Joanna Simonow and Dr Maria Framke, will share reflections and insights from their respective research on the history of disaster relief and humanitarianism in colonial South Asia in a panel discussion moderated by Dr Prabhat Kumar.

The event will take place on 27 October (Friday), 4-6 pm in the lecture hall of CATS and online via zoom.

Speakers:

Eleonor Marcussen is Research Fellow in History at the Department of Cultural Sciences, Linnaeus University, Sweden, and member of the Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies. Eleonor specializes in the history of disasters, environmental history and colonial history. She did her PhD in South Asian History at the South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University (2017) and as a member of the Excellence Cluster “Asia and Europe”. Her current research project (funded by the Swedish Research Council) focuses on social and ecological change in connection with the introduction of railways and construction of infrastructures in western and central India in the second half of the nineteenth century. You’ll find her recent monograph on the Bihar-Nepal Earthquake of 1935 here.

Maria Framke is a historian of modern South Asia and research fellow at the History Department of Erfurt University, Germany. Maria Framke has researched and published on the history of international organisations, imperial and nationalist politics, humanitarianism, and international relations and ideologies in the 20th century. She received her doctorate from Jacobs University Bremen in 2011 on Indian engagements with Italian Fascism and German National Socialism in the interwar period. Her postdoctoral /habilitation research has focused on ‘Humanitarian relief under colonial rule: Imperial loyalty, national self-assertion and anti-colonial emancipation in and beyond British India, 1914–1946’. Her new project investigates Indian women’s contributions to rural reconstruction programmes between the 1920s and 1960s.

Joanna Simonow is a historian of modern South Asia and assistant professor in the department of history at the South Asia Institute. She has published on the history of food aid, famine relief and development; her first monograph, Ending Famine in India, was published by Leiden University Press in June this year. In line with her long-standing interest in the history of anti-colonial movements, she is currently working on a book on the sexual history of Indian anti-colonial internationalism.

Prabhat Kumar is a research fellow at the Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-apocalyptic Studies (CAPAS) for the winter semester 2023/24. He was trained as a historian at University of Delhi, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg, Germany and is presently finishing a book manuscript on the local experiences of political and technological modernity and futuristic imaginations of global world order in South Asia during the Interwar years.

Thursday, October 19th 2023

A Sonic Approach to Anticolonialism in Interwar India has been funded by the DFG, with the project to begin in September 2023.

Durch die Anwendung von Methoden aus den Sound Studies wird eine multisensorische Geschichte des Antikolonialismus in Indien entwickelt, die schwerpunktmäßig auf der Bewegung des zivilen Ungehorsams in Indien (1930-1934) liegt. Das Projekt ist eine Erweiterung von Kama Macleans früheren Arbeit, die sich zur Erstellung von historischen Narrativen bereits umfänglich auf visuelle Archive stützte. Dies wird soll nun erweitert werden, indem angestrebt wird die Resonanz von Klang - insbesondere von vermittelter Sprache, Slogans und Liedern - in der antikolonialen Mobilisierung in der Zwischenkriegszeit nachzuzeichnen. Obwohl mündliche Überlieferung ein entscheidendes Element der politischen Kommunikation war, wurde diese - zum Teil aufgrund der Schwierigkeiten, das gesprochene Wort zu erfassen - noch nicht eingehend untersucht wurde.

Die Archive sind jedoch voll von Klängen. Durch die stark affektiven Qualitäten von Klang und die Entwicklung von verbundenen Technologien zu ihrer Verstärkung und Aufzeichnung in dem untersuchten Zeitraum machen dies zu einem ergiebigen Ansatz für das Verständnis antikolonialer Politik jenseits der Beschränkungen des kolonialen Archivs. Zu den Hauptzielen des Projekts zählt die Lokalisierung von Klangspuren im Archiv, wobei Tonaufnahmen, Texte, visuelle und mündliche Überlieferungen herangezogen werden, um ihre Auswirkungen zu erkennen. Dabei wird auch untersucht welchen Einfluss ein fortschreitendes Verständnis für die Wirksamkeit von Klängen bei der Schaffung von Gemeinschaften und der Übermittlung nationalistischer Botschaften unter Umgehung der Zensur hatte. Zuletzt werden auch die Auswirkungen früher Aufnahme- und Tonprojektionstechnologien auf die nationalistische Mobilisierung beleuchtet, um zu zeigen, wie diese Technologien die existierenden Klanglandschaften störten und politische Dynamiken veränderten.


‚Gandhi spricht zu den Behwohnern des Dorfes Aat’, from Walter Bosshard, Indien Kämpft! Stuttgart, 1931.



Donnerstag, 06.07.2023


The BASAS Annual Lecture 2023 will be delivered by Professor Kama Maclean

Prof. Kama Maclean will deliver The BASAS Annual Lecture 2023, hosted by The Centre of South Asian Studies, Cambridge. The Lecture titled "'If you don’t stop that noise, I can’t talk to you’: Public Meetings and Mass Politics in Interwar India". presents Prof. Maclean's latest research on sound, nationalist leaders and mass mobilisation in interwar India. The talk will take place on Friday, May 12th, 2023 at 17:00 BST. More information:



Friday, April 28th 2023


Summer Semester Departmental Colloquium 2023. Interventions in Modern South Asian History

In the Summer Semester, we will circle around a series of timely interventions in Modern South Asian History, featuring talks from distinguished scholars. Topics will include Friendship, Emotions and the Global History of Pedagogy; Caste from an Intellectual History approach; Citizenship, Belonging, and Muslimness in Postcolonial Pakistan and the social Intellectual History of a Dalit Performance. All talks are in person, in Heidelberg. More information: https://www.sai.uni-heidelberg.de/history/kolloquium/kolloquium.php

Monday, April 17th 2023


"Beyond Failure: Implications of Revolutionary Politics in Interwar India". Prof. Kama Maclean's presentation at Satadru Sen Memorial Lecture 2021

Prof. Kama Maclean delivered the annual Satardu Sen Memorial Lecture titled "Beyond Failure: Implications of Revolutionaty Politics in Interwar India", organized by the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg and the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa. The talk took place last Saturday, October 2, 2021 at 5:00pm SAST. More information about this talk here.

A recording of this talk is available here.


Wednesday, October 6th 2021


Abraham Akhter Murad
Visiting DAAD Fellow at the History Department

Abraham Murad

The History Department is pleased to welcome Abraham Akhter Murad, who will be part of the South Asia Institute as a DAAD Fellow until November 2021. He is an academic researcher in the social history of North India and Pakistan in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is a core member of the Centre for Governance and Policy, Lahore, Pakistan where he co-founded and helps arrange Pakistan's largest academic literary festival, Afkar-e-Taza ThinkFest . He is also a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Governance and Global Studies, Information Technology University, Lahore, Pakistan. As a DAAD Fellow at the South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University, Mr. Murad will be working on his research project 'Christianity in Colonial Punjab: Consolidation and Indianisation, 1910-1940.' He recently published a book roundtable on Pippa Virdee's "From the Ashes of 1947: Reimagining Punjab" for which he organised, edited, and wrote an introduction. It also has review articles by Uttara Shahani (University of Oxford), Emily Keightley (Loughborough University), Manav Kapur (Princeton University), Ilyas Chattha (LUMS), and a response essay from Pippa Virdee (De Montfort University).

Thursday, September 9th 2021


Kama Maclean, "A Revolutionary History of Interwar India: Violence, Image, Voice and Text" (Oxford UP, 2015)
New books in South Asian Studies

Kama Maclean's book A Revolutionary History of Interwar India: Violence, Image, Voice and Text (Oxford University Press, 2015) draws on new evidence to deliver a fresh perspective on the ambitions, ideologies and practices of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association or Army (HSRA), the revolutionary party formed by Chandrashekhar Azad and Bhagat Singh, inspired by transnational anti-imperial dissent. The book offers an account of the activities of the north Indian revolutionaries who advocated the use of political violence against the British; and considers the impact of their actions on the mainstream nationalism of the Indian National Congress. The book contends that the presence of these revolutionaries on the political landscape during this crucial interwar period pressured Congress politics and tested the policy of non-violence. The book makes methodological contributions, analyzing images, memoirs, oral history accounts and rumours alongside colonial archives and recently declassified government files, to elaborate on the complex relationships between the Congress and the HSRA, which are far less antagonistic than is frequently imagined.

Dr. Kama Maclean is Professor of South Asian History in the South Asia Institute (SAI) at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. Samee Siddiqui is a former journalist who is currently a PhD Candidate at the Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His dissertation explores discussions relating to religion, race, and empire between South Asian and Japanese figures in Tokyo from 1905 until 1945. You can find him on Twitter as @ssiddiqui83.

May 28th 2021


Kama Maclean in Conversation with the Podcast "Constitution of India.net"

‘90 years ago, in 1931, the Fundamental Rights Resolution was passed placing socio-economic rights at the center of India's constitutional goals. The Constitution Of India.net Podcast spoke to Kama Maclean about the political context of the Resolution.

April 6th 2021


Kama Maclean in Conversation with the Podcast of the SikhArchive

SikhArchive recently published a podcast with Prof. Dr. Kama Maclean on "A Revolutionary History of Interwar India with Professor Kama Maclean." The podcast episode is available here.

October 29th 2021

Podcast Episodes

ConstitutionOfIndia.net | Podcast 6 Apr 2021 | The Karachi Resolution 1931 with Prof. Kama Maclean

SikhArchive • Episode 4 | Podcast 15 Oct 2020 | A Revolutionary History of Interwar India with Prof. Kama Maclean



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