Past Events

“History in Thirty Seconds: Emotions and time-sense during the 1935 earthquake in Quetta, India” at IN 243. Dan is an environmental historian of South Asia, focusing mostly on India and Pakistan. He did a PhD and postdoc in RHUL’s History Department between 2007 and 2014, and now works at UCL’s Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction. Dan is writing a book about the 1935 earthquake at Quetta, Balochistan (present-day Pakistan). He previously wrote about the Indus River system – exploring the process of damming it (his first book, Building the Empire, Building the Nation) and sharing its waters between India and Pakistan (his second book, Rivers Divided). He recently finished a two-year secondment to the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.

A comparative investigation of nation-state formation following partitions in Asia, by using the mechanics and processes of exhibitions of Asia – of all kinds, and anywhere in the world. For the details of the programme click on the link above.

Check out the innovative and impressive exhibition that our cohort of ten international Curatorial Fellows co-curated, ‘Rethinking Asia: Tea and Tigers’, created in partnership with The Heritage Lab. Fellows were from Royal Holloway (UK), National College of Arts (Pakistan), Kyushu University (Japan), National University of the Arts (Taiwan), and Delhi University (India). Click on the link above.

Comparing the experiences of urbanisation and ethnic displacement in South Asia, the Balkans and the Eastern Mediterranean. Co-organised by the Hellenic Institute and the Centre for Global South Asia at the Department of History – School of Humanities, RHUL; and the “HomeAcross” ERC Starting Grant project, Athens. All are welcome to attend. Click on the title for the programme.

Paper followed by a roundtable with Prof Ramaswamy, joined by RHUL colleagues Prof Sarah Ansari, Dr. Markus Daechsel and Dr. Antara Datta, moderated by Dr. Mrinalini Venkateswaran (Leverhulme ECF). Sumathi Ramaswamy is James B. Duke Professor of History at Duke University, USA. She is a cultural historian of South Asia and the British Empire with a current research focus on visual studies, the history of cartography, and gender. Her recent publications in this area include The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India (Duke University Press, 2010); and two edited volumes, Barefoot Across the Nation: Maqbool Fida Husain and the Idea of India (Routledge, 2010), and Empires of Vision (co-edited with Martin Jay, Duke University Press, 2014). Her pictorial monograph titled Husain’s Raj: Visions of Empire and Nation was published in 2016 by Marg, Mumbai. Her work in popular visual history led her in 2006 to co-establish Tasveerghar: A Digital Network of South Asian Popular Visual Culture.   More recently, she has started a major project on Gandhi and visual culture funded by the Humboldt Foundation. In 2020, she published Gandhi in the Gallery: The Art of Disobedience, and a digital project titled B is for Bapu: Gandhi in the Art of the Child in Modern India .

Abstract: This talk draws across the various chapters of the book to discuss an important aspect of property making in many of cities of global south-rent. Rent is conceptually defined as extraction that is possible owing to exclusive ownership of a resource. In the context of property making in cities, communal ownership of a resource like land, allows for a very different architecture of extraction that thrives on notions of kinship and belonging. Making use of the conception of Bhaichara– a mode of land revenue system popular in the northwest part of India in colonial times, this talk would show the ways in which this mutates into modern property form for an agrarian community in Delhi and what that may mean for urban politics today. It navigates through family units and kin groups to see how these collectives participate in accumulation and by extension city making.

Bio Note: Sushmita Pati is currently Assistant Professor at National Law School of India University, Bangalore. She finished her PhD from Centre for Political Studies, JNU. She is also author of Properties of Rent: Community, Capital and Politics in Globalising Delhi (Cambridge University Press,2022).

Abstract: The conference seeks to bring together academics across disciplines who study discourses around citizenship, belonging and migration both before and after 1947 in South Asia, beyond the lens of Partition. In the aftermath of the Partition of 1947 and the process of decolonisation in South Asia, the mass migration of people across the borders of South Asia resulted in a reconsideration of the link between territoriality and belonging. With the emergence of new states in South Asia, first in 1947/48 and then subsequently in 1971, these questions around belonging and citizenship continued to resonate for several decades after Partition. The existing literature on migration, mobility and citizenship in this period focusses largely on the events of Partition and the migration between India and Pakistan. This conference would like to move away from Partition based histories and analyses of this period to consider other mobilities and migrations in the aftermath of decolonisation, and to uncover the evolution of citizenship in the subcontinent and beyond that goes beyond the narrow lens of Partition.

Bio Note: Dr Antara Datta, Dr Kalathmika Natarajan, Dr Haimanti Roy, Dr Sahana Ghosh, Dr Ketaki Pant, Dr Jayita Sarkar and Dr Uditi Sen are a group of academics based in the UK, US, and Singapore who work on migration, mobility, and decolonisation in South Asia beyond the lens of Partition.

In his keynote lecture Professor Ian Talbot explores the after effects of the Partition of India in 1947 on two iconic cities – Lahore the capital of Punjab and its long-time ‘twin’, Amritsar, spiritual centre of Sikhism. Situated only about 30 miles apart, the two cities were once strongly interconnected and offered a home to people of Hindu, Muslim and Sikh backgrounds alike. After 1947, they became religiously ‘cleansed’ spaces separated by a new international border between India and Pakistan. Their urban development was shaped by these events until the present day.

Refugee resettlement and urban development in twentieth-century Greece

Renée Hirschon reflects on a lifetime’s work that took her from an international urban planning office in downtown Athens to a refugee settlement in early 1970s Piraeus. Drawing from her personal experiences on the field, she discusses the place of memory and the memory of place in the lives of three generations of Greek refugees from Asia Minor as they navigated the dramatically transformed built environment of pre- and post-war Athens.

Violent Youths: Student Mobilization Against Minorities in Interwar Izmir

The presentation treats a case of youth mobilization against minorities in an eastern Mediterranean port city. The mobilization of middle-upper class students and lower class youths is explored through the intersection of age, class, gender, and ethnic identities. Performed through patriarchal practices and youth codes, youth mobilization offered opportunities for the performance of an aspirant adult masculinity and an aspirant political subjectivity among recently displaced Balkan Muslims.

Alexandros Lamprou (PhD in Turkish History, Leiden 2009) has taught modern Turkish history in Universities in Greece (Crete, Panteion) in Turkey (University of Ankara), and in Germany (Marburg, Gießen). He has done research on state–society relations, social engineering projects, and population displacement. He has published a book with I.B. Tauris on the reception of the interwar reforms in Turkey and an edited volume in Greek on population displacement from Greece to the Middle East during the Second World War. His work has also appeared in academic journals (Middle Eastern Studies, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Turkish Studies, and Turkish Historical Review).

Whose Heritage? Colonial Heritage in Post-Colonial Cities

Heritage preservation has emerged as a strongly politicised field in certain sections of Pakistani society. Still struggling with what precisely constitutes its ‘history’, Pakistan as a post-colonial nation suffers from something of a memory crisis. Karachi, is the biggest and most populated city and the economic hub of the country with a very multicultural population, which is continuously growing. As the city grows, its landscape is constantly changing and evolving to accommodate the growing demands of its population, which is divided ethnically, socio-politically, and economically. These divides are not limited to the population but are also visible in the city’s landscapes and have formed urban frontiers across the city. Furthermore, many areas and heritage sites in the city have invisible ethnic or economic barriers, which gives rise to the notion of Whose Heritage.

Hareem Mirza is a PhD student in the history department at Royal Holloway, University of London. She holds a BA in History and an MSc in International Relations. Her PhD focuses on the Politics of Heritage Preservation in Pakistan with a particular focus on built colonial heritage in urban centres of Karachi and Lahore. Her project aims to look at the politics and the narrative of conservation/preservation work (both state led and private) of colonial architecture in a post-colonial nation to assess how different groups of people relate and react to the built heritage around them and whether this heritage shapes the national identity of these urban citizens.

Spatial Experiences of Refugee Resettlement: The Case of Kaisariani in Athens

Following the devastating end of the Greco-Turkish war and the compulsory Population Exchange, the hundreds of thousands of Greek Orthodox refugees who arrived in Athens between 1922-1924 settled in a diverse typology of spaces and structures. Ranging from tents to makeshift huts, from state-provisioned prefabricated wooden structures to one-floor rooms made of brick, from two-floor stone semi-detached buildings to three-floor modernist mass housing later in the 1930s, these structures formed the landscape of temporary or permanent refugee accommodation. They were reshaped to various extents by their inhabitants, and drastically transformed the urban fabric of Athens and Piraeus for decades to come. This study explores the significant range of spatial experiences of resettlement by looking at specific case studies in Kaisariani, one of the first and best-known refugee neighbourhoods of Athens.

This research is part of the ERC-funded project HOMEACROSS and is the result of joint work by Valia Gialia, Alexandra Mourgou, and Kalliopi Amygdalou.

Kalliopi Amygdalou (PhD in History and Theory of Architecture, UCL 2014) is an architectural historian and Senior Researcher at ELIAMEP, where she leads the ERC StG HOMEACROSS ‘Space, Memory and the legacy of the 1923 Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey’. She has held a lecturer position at the Izmir Institute of Technology (2015-2017). She has published her work in academic journals (International Journal of Islamic Architecture, Bulletin de Correspondence Hellénique, Historica) and has edited the volume ‘The Future as a Project; Doxiadis in Skopje’ (EIA 2018).

‘Crops of Our Fathers’: Refugee Spirituality and The Urban Frontier

Academic literature on the Partition of the Indian subcontinent, consequent religious violence and resulting refugee flows has recently shifted focus to the intricacies of rehabilitation policy and its differentiable effects on various social groups among the refugees. This has led to increasingly complex understandings of the many outcomes of refugee flows, differentiated by region and by caste. The nature of specific refugee settlements and their effects on local social and political milieu is also beginning to come into sharper focus with progressively micro-level studies. This paper focuses on the Namasudra community of refugees displaced from erstwhile East Pakistan or present day Bangladesh. This community was a ritually excluded but politically powerful group in pre-partition Bengal. They retained their ancestral lands till the catastrophic sharpening of religious and linguistic divides and the massive upheaval caused by the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971. Majority of the community has since migrated into India and has been seeking stable, legal citizenship in the country for half a century. The proposed paper focuses on a village, Netajipally, settled by Namasudra refugees at the edge of Kolkata in the late 1980s. The paper describes how spiritual practices and networks reproduce agricultural lifescapes in order to anchor community life in changed circumstances. The felt-incompleteness of the reproduction and malleability of its spiritual and political functions demonstrate how memories and performances of the “rural” play a significant role in the making of the urban frontier in contemporary Kolkata.

Himadri Chatterjee is a teacher and researcher interested in the interplay between citizenship, migration, local economies, caste and electoral politics. His doctoral thesis explored the connections between urban development, refugee rehabilitation and citizenship struggles led by Dalit activists in periurban Kolkata. His doctoral field work was done between 2011 and 2016. He seeks to work between the archive and the field in order to generate ethnographic understanding that is anchored in long term historical trends. Very often he finds his archive on the field, in unnumbered files and undated photographs.

Art by Shawon Akand (Dhaka)

Shawon Akand (1976, Bangladesh), is an artist, researcher, curator and entrepreneur based in Dhaka. Trained at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Dhaka University, Akand currently serves as a Director at Jothashilpa, working for the enhancement of arts practices with a sustainable approach towards community engagement and development. As an artist, Akand’s body of work questions cultural norms with a critical perspective on social and political structures through painting, printmaking, installation, photography and video. His artworks have been showcased at home and abroad. He has been contributing to the Art Asia Pacific Almanac since 2012, and his major publications include: An Outline of Bangladesh Folk Art, Textile Traditions of Bangladesh, Cinema Banner Painting in Bangladesh, The Tendency of Modern Art in Bangladesh.

Roundtable discussion on Frontier Urbanism with Shubhra Gururani (York University, Toronto) and Rajarshi Dasgupta (JNU, New Delhi)

Shubhra Gururani is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at York University. She has served as the Chair and Program Director of the Department of Anthropology, Associate Director of York Center for Asian Research, Interim Director of the CITY Institute, and the Coordinator of the South Asian Studies Program. Her areas of research and teaching lie at the intersection of critical political ecologies, space and place, urban transformation, especially in the Global South, agrarian change, postcolonial development, and histories of science and nature. Her early research was based on ethnographic fieldwork in the Indian Himalayas, looking at the long and complex histories of scientific forestry and colonialism. Her current research focuses on the processes and politics of agrarian-urban changes in the peripheries of metropolitan centres in India. 

Rajarshi Dasgupta teaches at the Centre for Political Studies, JNU. Formerly a Fellow at the CSSSC, Rajarshi did BA from Presidency College, MA and M. Phil from JNU, and D. Phil from Oxford University. He mainly teaches Marxism, Biopolitics and political theory. His research and publications address the history of the Indian Left, the relations of culture and politics, refugee histories, and urbanization in South Asia. His publications include “Rhyming Revolution: Marxism and Culture in Colonial Bengal” in Studies in History, 2005, and “The Ascetic Modality: A Critique of Communist Self-fashioning” in Menon, Nigam and Palshikar eds., Critical Studies in Politics, 2014. His recent publications are “Frontier Urbanism: Urbanisation beyond Cities in South Asia” in Economic & Political Weekly, 2018, “On the Edge of Dhaka: The Agrarian Urbanization of South Asia” in Anvesak, 2020, and “The Borrowed Geographies of Neoliberal Neighbourhoods: Populist Governance in India” in P. Chakravarty ed., Populism and Its Limits: After Articulation, New Delhi: Bloomsbury, 2021.