Visual rhetoric and modern South Asian history

Dr Annamaria Motrescu-Mayes, affiliated lecturer and research associate at the Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge, is teaching a new seminar series on 'Visual rhetoric and modern South Asian history'.

Time and Location: Michaelmas Term, every Tuesday between 16:00-17:00 in S2 Seminar Room, Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, Cambridge, CB3 9DP.

All welcome.

For full details see http://karachi.s-asian.cam.ac.uk/visual.html and the poster below.

Sri Lankan photographic archive published online

The Ancient India and Iran Trust is delighted to announce that the Sri Lankan Photographic Archive of Professor Howard Wilson is now live on the Trust’s website.  The archive has been kindly donated to the Trust and digitised by Mrs Marti Wilson and can be accessed by  following the links from the Home page at www.indiran.org to the  ‘Photo Archives’ page and the ‘Howard Wilson Collection’, or clicking on the link below.

http://www.indiran.org/HW/

Citation Index on Sri Lanka

www.srilankaresearch.org is a comprehensive website devoted to providing access to scholarly articles and information about Sri Lanka. This resource enables researchers to locate hard to find information resources not accessible via other bibliographic databases and sources.

The web site includes a searchable index to journal articles published in Sri Lanka from 1845 - to date. At present, the database contains over 10,000 citations from scholarly journals in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Agriculture and the Sciences.

Key features include:

• Database of citations from over 50 periodicals
• Very simple and easy search interface
• Links to full text when available
• Links to online resources

The Sri Lanka Research website also provides links to major universities, libraries and research organizations facilitating access to major holdings and resource persons.

This database of scholarly resources was supported by a research grant from the Librarians’ Association of University of California.

Cricket, Imperialism and History in South Asia

 Making a hockey ball
 © A. Barrington-Brown,
Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge

Cricket fans may like to attend a panel discussion presented by SOAS Cricket team as part of their Beyond Borders tour to Sri Lanka?  

It will take place at 6.30pm on Thursday 28 April 2011 in G2, the Main Building, School of Oriental and African Studies, Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1H 0XG, and forms part of a series of events relating to the culture and history of Sri Lanka and South Asia. 

The panel will feature:

Prashant Kidambi on the Rise of Cricket in the Subcontinent.  From the University of Leicester, he is currently working on the history of colonial cricket tours in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Paru Raman on Cricket, Nationalism and Diaspora supporters.  From SOAS, she is currently working on the South Asian diaspora, cricketing loyalties and the politics of belonging.

Anthony Bateman on Cricket Writing and Colonial India.  From De Montfort University, he is author of Cricket, Literature and Culture: Symbolising the Nation, Destabilising Empire and co-editor (with Jeffrey Hill) of The Cambridge Companion to Cricket.

Boria Majumdar via video link.  He is a scholar, media commentator and author of Cricket and Beyond – Essays on a Sport at a Crossroads, and Twenty-Two Yards to Freedom: A Social History of Indian Cricket.

The discussion will be chaired by Shabnum Tejani (SOAS).
 

Sri Lanka at the cross-roads of history

A major conference on the historiography of Sri Lanka will be held in Cambridge from Friday, 3 June 2011 to Saturday, 4 June 2011.  The full programme and online registration form are available at: 
http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/1403/programme/

Sri Lanka lies at the centre of the Indian Ocean, where it has served as a node between Indian ocean trades: to the west, to West Asia and Africa, and to the east, to the Bay of Bengal and South-east Asia. Its location at the southern tip of India has ensured that it has received waves of conquerors, settlers, traders, dynasties and holy men. 

Sri Lanka has also been a major participant in the Theravada Buddhist ecumene extending to Southeast Asia. And its strategic location was partly why it was colonized by three successive imperial regimes: the Portuguese, the Dutch and the British. Yet Sri Lanka's history has remained marginal to debates in world and imperial history. The island provides a good opportunity to reconsider questions of locality and generality, connection and comparison, from a specific place.

One objective of the conference is to help to re-energize research into the history of Sri Lanka in the UK by bringing researchers whose work has touched on the island into contact with one another and with leading international scholars. However, speakers will be invited to move beyond national history by locating their work within broader and more imaginative conceptions of space, and wider debates in world history. Some speakers will be approaching their subject through 'connected history', by considering the island's place in extensive webs of empire, trade, and travel, the transnational flows of ideas, styles and goods. Others will use the island in a more strictly comparative vein too. 

Borderlands: the SAALG Winter Conference

Kandyan chief
(Royal Asiatic Society)

Kandyan chief & wife
(Royal Asiatic Society)

Mudaliyar
(Royal Asiatic Society)

A date for your diary!  This winter's South Asia Archive and Library Group conference will be hosted by the Royal Asiatic Society on Friday 28th January 2011.  On the theme of Borderlands we have presentations on early photography at the Raj's margins (Burma and Sri Lanka) from Andrew Jarvis (University of Cambridge), 19th century travellers' tales from the Himalayas from Dr Richard Axelby (SOAS), and a personal account of working in local Burmese archives from Dr Mandy Sadan (SOAS).  There will also be an opportunity to view treasures from the Royal Asiatic Society's own collections, and hear a presentation from Burzine Waghmar (SOAS) on his linguistic research.

For further information and to book your place, please email Helen Porter at the Royal Asiatic Society.

Cambridge Conference on Sri Lanka

Recent research on the cultural history of Sri Lanka will be explored in an all day conference at the Ancient India and Iran Trust in Cambridge on Saturday 15th May 2010.

Please refer to the poster for more details.