December 1, One Day Conference: Trajectories of Indian Independence: 1857, 1947, 2007…
Dear HumanDHS network friends
Please find below details of a one-day conference on December 1st.
Kind regards
Brian Ward
Trajectories of Indian Independence: 1857, 1947, 2007…
One-day conference
December 1, 2007
Sunderland University
Organized by the Northern Association of Postcolonial Studies
2007 marks the 150th anniversary of Indian ‘mutiny,’ and the 60th anniversary of Indian independence and partition. Anniversaries are customs to memorise history, to signpost events, and to sustain legacies. They are means to resurrect history amidst the ruins of the present and now which enables one to reassess and recuperate history as everyday narrative and visual/literary representation. Through such anniversaries, in other words, history ceases to be authoritative. This one-day conference, coinciding with such anniversaries of Indian history, attempts a similar critical resurrection of history in the contemporary climate of widespread and popular Indophilia. The temporal trajectory suggested in the title is a starting point for such rereadings of Indian history. Whether we see it as a linear chronology or not, whether we see them as discontinuous episodes in a longer durée, these events defined the contours of colonial and postcolonial India. How could we revisit such events now? Could we productively return to the ‘mutiny’/’war of independence’ debate now? Could we reopen the traumatic experience of the partition of India that witnessed one of the largest exoduses of people and one of the worst genocides in human history? How could one talk about the present moment of history vis-à-vis such historical events?
Registration and lunch are free.
Please contact Neelam Srivastava neelam.srivastava[@]ncl.ac.uk if you wish to attend.
PROGRAMME OF THE DAY
9-10 : Registration
10 – 11
Dr Alex Tickell, (University of Portsmouth):
“Cawnpore and Colonial Charivari: Memorial and Counterinsurgency in Anglo-Indian Popular Culture”.
11:00-11:30 coffee break
11:30- 12:30
Dr Ananya Jahanara Kabir (Leeds University):
“Shared anniversaries, separate histories? Post-1947 trajectories of Indian and Pakistani visual art.”
12:30-2 — lunch
2-3
Professor Javed Majeed (Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London):
“1947 and secularism’s opportunity”
3-3:30 – tea break
3:30-4:30
Roundtable with all the speakers and audience
4:30-6:30
Screening of Junoon (1978), dir. Shyam Benegal
Following the establishment of the East India Company in 1857, some Mughals, led by Sarfaraz Khan, decided to rebel against their British masters, killing many, and forcing others to flee. Three women from the Labadoor family, Grandma, Mariam, and Ruth, seek shelter with a local money-lender, Lala Ramjimal, who would like to recover his money from the Labadoors and has a vented interest in their survival. But he is unable to keep their presence secret, and Javed Khan and his men storm into his home, and take the three women to Javed’s house. Under normal circumstances, these three would have been beheaded and Ramjimal and his family severely punished, but Javed would like to make Ruth his second wife. Mariam and Javed’s wife, Firdaus, strongly oppose this move, but Javed is clearly obsessed by Ruth’s beauty and nothing will deter him from marrying her. Then things gets really complicated when Ruth starts having feelings for Javed, and the British seek retribution for those killed by the Mughals.