Exploring South Asian history using visual research methods

The Centre of South Asian Studies and CRASSH are organising the first international conference on 'Exploring modern South Asian history with visual research methods: theories and practices', 15-16 March 2013. The call for papers is now open, see http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/2066/

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.

Indian Emboidery exhibition and talk by Rosemary Crill

Copyright: SADACC Trust

The South Asian Decorative Arts & Crafts Collection Trust in association with the Sainsbury Institute for Art (University of East Anglia) will be hosting a talk by Rosemary Crill, Senior Curator for South Asia, at the Victoria and Albert Museum, on Tuesday 13th November 2012.

The talk 'From Mountain, Desert and Palace: a journey through Indian embroidery' will be held at the Old Skating Rink Gallery in Norwich and accompanied by an exhibition of embroideries from the Indian subcontinent. 

Location: Country and Eastern, The Old Skating Rink Gallery, 34-36 Bethel Street, Norwich, NR2 1NR
Time: 6 pm

As places are limited it is essential to reserve a place by Tuesday 6th November by emailing: info@sadacc.co.uk or phoning 01603 663890.

Mapping India

 
http://www.niyogibooks.com/mapping-india.html

Dr. Manosi Lahiri, founder of ML Infomap and author of the excellent new book Mapping India published by Niyogi Books, will be in London soon giving two lectures. On Monday October 15th she will address the Royal Geographical Society with a lecture entitled 'Five centuries of mapping India' (see http://www.rgs.org/whatson/london+lectures/monday+night+lectures.htm) and on Wednesday the 17th she speaks at the Nehru Centre (see http://www.nehrucentre.org.uk/events/details/article/an-audiovisual-presentation-on-the-book-mapping-india-dr-manosi-lahiri.html.).

Open access journal, Himalaya, has new editors

Himalaya, the journal of the Association of Nepal and Himalayan Studies, has new editors.  Sienna Craig is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Dartmouth College, with a research interest in social study of medicine across the Himalayan region.  Mark Turin is Program Director of the Yale Himalaya Initiative and directs the Digital Himalaya Project at Cambridge and Yale universities.

The new editors write: 'We are honored to be taking over the editorship from Arjun Guneratne, who has worked tirelessly over the last five years to develop an already strong publication into an internationally recognized peer-reviewed journal. Through an innovative partnership with the Macalester College library over the duration of his editorship, Arjun has built an open-access, online repository of the entire back archive of HIMALAYA that is freely available to all, with a rolling two-year window for recent issues to be uploaded and viewable. This makes our journal a leader in the 'open access movement', the practice of providing unrestricted access via the Internet to peer-reviewed scholarly work, a policy to which we - as the incoming editors - are deeply committed'.

Volume 31 was published last week. Volume 32, a special issue on Ladakh, is expected to be published by December 2012. Volume 33 will be the first issue produced through the Dartmouth-Yale partnership, and a themed issue on gender in the Himalaya is being explored.  The new editors are also keen to include papers presented at the Second ANHS Himalayan Studies Conference convened by Dr. Mahendra Lawoti at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in September 2012.

The editors invite readers to get in touch with them with any questions or proposals for future themed issues, and to visit their website for further information about ANHS Publications, http://www.anhs-himalaya.org/publications/

National Archives of India

Librarians, archivists and researchers unfamiliar with the blog 'Dissertation Reviews' may be interested in posts in their 'Fresh from the Archives' category.

In a recent post on 18th September 2012, Derek Elliott, PhD Candidate at the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge described what it was like to conduct research  in the National Archives of India, New Delhi.
See: http://dissertationreviews.org/archives/1673

His post explained how to reach the National Archives, what to expect on arrival, (security, registration etc.), searching for records, ordering material, how to get copies and even where to get lunch.  He summed up by suggesting that he had found the National Archives to be one of the most comfortable locations to conduct research in India.

For more information on the National Archives of India, go to their website at: http://nationalarchives.nic.in/WebContent.aspx?id=4&type=homemore

For more archive reviews, go to:  http://dissertationreviews.org/archives/category/fresh-from-the-archives

Dissertation review categories include: Asian Art, Islamic Studies, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Tibetan Himalayan.

A recent post in the South Asia and Asian Art categories by Robert E. Colvard of the Department of History at the University of Iowa, reviewed the 'The Visual Culture of Opium in British India', by Hope Marie Childers.  See: http://dissertationreviews.org/archives/1666

You can follow Dissertation Reviews on Facebook and Twitter.

Mental Health reports added to Medical History of British India website

Those of you who regularly read this blog will know that I have been working on the digitisation of lunatic asylum reports from British India for some while.

I am delighted to announce that they have been added to the Medical History of British India website as the 'Medicine - Mental health' collection.

The 20,000 pages cover the period of 1867 - 1948 and describe the patients, staff and conditions of asylums throughout colonial India. This free to access material provides extensive research on responses to mental illness when the asylum's role was changing. Detailed reports show how 'moral management' was used by British colonists to treat native and European patients. This material will be particularly valuable to genealogists and those interested in the history of psychiatry, Indian and colonial history.

Please do have a browse and remember that the reports are searchable; just click on 'include book content' when you search.

The material, from the National Library's India Papers collection, was microfilmed and digitised using a grant from the Wellcome Trust.

(Picture shows Block plan of Rangoon Lunatic Asylum from 1893, image number: http://digital.nls.uk/83977693)

ASHT events for September

The Anglo Sikh Heritage Trail has announced its

September events.

Inaugural meeting of South Asian Arts Group

Anonymous watercolour and ink painting in Mithila style
 (Bihar) depicting Radha and Krishna,  from Crafts Museum, New Delhi;
2007, private collection.  http://sifa.uea.ac.uk/home

A date for your diaries...the inaugural meeting of the South Asian Arts Group (SAAG) will be hosted in Norwich by the Sainsbury Institute for Art (SIfA) on Tuesday November 13th 2012.  

The South Asian Arts Group (SAAG) is an informal network of academics, curators, artists and arts professionals, who share an interest in the arts and visual/material cultures of South Asia and the diaspora. SAAG provides a space for interaction, conversation and exchange for people interested in South Asian arts in the UK. 

Through an annual gathering – held at a different location in the UK each year – participants of SAAG will foster contacts, partnerships and friendships with a view to building interactions across different disciplines and approaches to South Asian arts.

The event is being organised by Daniel Rycroft (University of East Anglia) and Sarah Turner (University of York).  It is free and places will be filled on a ‘first come, first served' basis.  To download a registration form, go to: http://sifa.uea.ac.uk/home

Islam, Trade and Politics across the Indian Ocean

On Friday 6 July the Ancient India and Iran Trust (AIIT) in Cambridge was a most convivial venue for the joint annual meeting of SAALG and SEALG (Southeast Asia Library Group), where I spoke on the British Academy-funded research project 'Islam, Trade and Politics across the Indian Ocean', investigating Ottoman links with Southeast Asia: http://www.ottomansoutheastasia.org/.   These links date back to the sixteenth century, when the sultanate of Aceh in north Sumatra contacted the Ottoman emperor to ask for help against the Portuguese who were disrupting the Indian Ocean pepper trade.

The project set out to study all forms of interaction between these two regions, from political, religious, literary and commercial exchanges to mutual influence in material culture.  A nice example of these interactions was evident among the exhibits that the AIIT's Honorary Librarian, Ursula Sims-Williams, had put out on display for the meeting: some rare 19th-century Malay lithographed poems from Singapore, which bore on the back cover the name of the publisher, Haji Muhammad Amin, modelled on the Ottoman tughra or calligraphic royal emblem.

Syair Sinar Alam, Singapore, 1914

AIIT A14E40(1)

Dr Annabel Teh Gallop, Lead Curator for Southeast Asian Studies, and curator of Indonesian and Malay collections, the British Library.

Dalai Lama visit to National Library of Scotland

On Friday 22nd June, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet visited the National Library of Scotland here in Edinburgh.

He had requested a private viewing of some of our collections, including archives of Isabella Bird Bishop and also some Medical History of British India items.
On this page from His Holiness’s website Jan Usher, Head of Official Publications and one of the founders of the project, shows His Holiness a photograph from 1894 of Indian mendicants in the Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission.

Ecole Francaise d'Extreme-Orient

 

We were delighted to welcome Maïté Hurel, Librarian for South Asia, École Française d'Extrême-Orient in Paris, to our recent SAALG conference in Cambridge.

Readers unfamiliar with the work and resources of l'École Française d'Extrême-Orient, are recommended to visit their website at: http://www.efeo.fr/index.php?l=EN
Managed as a blog, the website has an English-language version, for those of us more linguistically challenged than Maïté!  It is superbly organised and contains links to their centres across south and south-east Asia, links to library catalogues under Documentary resources, contact details for academic staff under Research/Geographical areas and details of new publications.

New open access journal and blog

The University of Edinburgh is about to release a new online open-access publication called 'The South Asianist' - see:  http://journals.ed.ac.uk/southasianist/index

 
An interdisciplinary academic journal, it aims to encourage critical debate on social, environmental, cultural, linguistic, religious, political and economic aspects of South Asia, with provocative, peer-reviewed essays and reviews, complimented by video vignettes, including interviews and mini-documentaries.

It is also publishing a new blog, edited by Kristin Bouldin, http://thesouthasianistblog.co.uk/ to 'encourage people to openly express their impressions, discoveries, and thoughts in relation to research in South Asia'.

MATERIAL LIFE IN SOUTH ASIA, 1500-1900 - call for papers

A one-day New Researchers' Workshop is to be held at the University of
Cambridge on Thursday 27th September 2012.  The Workshop is for current
graduate students, post-doctoral and early career researchers whose work
examines aspects of material life.  This could concern issues ranging from
production, consumption, trade and living standards, to taste, food and
drink, work, everyday life and ritual.  Scholars whose work examines
regions at the 'fringes' of the colonial heartlands (e.g. Burma, Kashmir,
Tibet, Punjab, Sri Lanka, Assam, Bhutan, Nepal, Rajasthan), and which uses
non-textual/artefactual as well as textual sources, would be extremely
welcome. 

Proposals of 500 words and a brief CV should be emailed to
Jagjeet Lally (jl621@cam.ac.uk) by 31st August 2012.

The Workshop will be followed by a one-day conference in April 2013.

Amateur Cinema Studies Network launched

The University of Cambridge Press Office has recently published a press release about the Amateur Cinema Studies Network, a project launched in May this year.  The announcement also includes a reference to one of the newly digitised film collections by the Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge.

Dr Annamaria Motrescu, Research Associate and Affiliated Lecturer, Centre of South Asian Studies