Our Winter Conference

Date for your diaries: Please keep Friday 19th February 2010 free for our SAALG winter conference, to be hosted by the Library and Museum of Freemasonry, Freemasons' Hall, Great Queen Street, London, WC2B 5AZ. The conference will include a tour of the Freemasons' Hall, a talk on Freemasonry in India by Archivist and Record Manager, Susan Snell, and an opportunity to view and discuss artefacts, photographs, and correspondence in their permanent collection with their museum curator and librarian.

Forthcoming publication

Martin Moir, former Head of the India Office Records, has written a novel entitled Not Exactly Shangri-la, which is due to be published by Rupa & Co. (New Delhi) in December.

Timothy, a diffident young British academic, and Huma, a feisty young woman from India, are two ‘foreign experts’ invited to Kalapur, a remote and apparently peaceful Himalayan country, to advise on the preservation and editing of an important monastic chronicle. But far from being a harmless academic project, they soon discover that the publication of the chronicle is being used by the authoritarian regime in Kalapur to suppress knowledge of a past that threatens its own legitimacy. Moreover, far from being peaceful, Kalapur turns out to be riven by a secret resistance movement led by guerrilla fighters known as the migos, named after the yetis or wildmen still believed to survive in the remoter parts of the country. Encouraged in their historical quest by a sympathetic but enigmatic local abbot, Huma and Timothy face some terrifying experiences before finally discovering what really happened in the recent past, and in the process deepening their own relationship.
At once adventure story, orientalist romance, psychological study and serious enquiry into different views of the past, Not exactly Shangri-la explores a fictional world that is deeply strange but strangely familiar, sinister yet funny.

NACIRA conference

"Expect the unexpected : hidden resources [on Asia] in the UK" - NACIRA's 2009 conference will take place at the Royal Asiatic Society on Tuesday 8th December 2009, with an excellent panel of speakers from the National Maritime Musuem, Victoria & Albert Museum, National Archives, and London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Hidden histories of exploration

A major new exhibition at the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) which offers a new perspective on the Society's Collections, highlighting the role of local inhabitants and intermediaries in the history of exploration.

http://hiddenhistories.rgs.org/


Exhibition Open: 10:00 - 17:00
Monday - Friday
15 October - 10 December 2009
Free Admission
Location: Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), Exhibition Road, London