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'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.

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