Indian Ocean Print Cultures launch

Africa v. 81, no. 1, 2011

The International African Institute (IAI) and Cambridge University Press (CUP) have invited members of the South Asia Archive and Library Group to celebrate the launch of a special issue of AFRICA 'Print Cultures, Nationalisms and Publics of the Indian Ocean'.  The issue, edited by Isabel Hofmeyr and Preben Kaarsholm, will be the first to be published by CUP in partnership with IAI.  

The launch party will take place on Monday 28 February, Brunei Gallery, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), from 6pm. RSVP to Stephanie Kitchen.  All are welcome - please pass this notice on to anyone who may be interested.

Hidden voices of Muslim women

A talk given by Dr Pippa Virdee of De Montfort University entitled 'Hidden Women: uncovering the veil of silence during the partition of Punjab, India 1947' is now available as a podcast from the National Archives.

Using first-hand accounts, Dr Virdee reveals how women, often sheltered from private and public spaces, created their own space during this complex and traumatising time.

(Image courtesy of National Archives)

See: http://nationalarchives.gov.uk/podcasts/hidden-women.htm

Take a look at this

The National Library of Scotland’s web feature The Medical History of British India has been updated with a further 130 medical reports from the India Papers collection. These rare and exciting documents cover c.1850-1950 and are available online free of charge. They include reports on epidemics, public and army health, drugs and medicines, plus the workings of medical colleges, laboratories and lock hospitals.

Users can search and browse by keyword or by facets such as people, places, year and subject. Users can also choose to confine searches to individual chapters or expand to volume or collection level. The option of searching book content can find names of people or more obscure diseases. Transcriptions of pages are available, together with jpegs and pdfs which can be downloaded. Users can share and bookmark pages via Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon and Delicious.

Detailed maps, charts and extensive tables show regional histories of disease and the role of government as well as providing an insight into the development of western medicine in a colonial context. During the last decade there has been a lively interest in colonial medicine; this online resource is aimed at medical, social, military and colonial historians, historians of South Asia and also genealogists.

I’m thrilled to say that this is not the end, as in the coming years we’ll be adding British Raj reports concerning Veterinary medicine, Vaccination and Lunatic Asylums.

I’d like to thank many of my National Library of Scotland colleagues, particularly the Digital Library staff, for making this possible. We are also most grateful to the Wellcome Trust for their generous funding.

You can also find the digitised India Papers in the National Library of Scotland's Digital Archive.

(photo credit: Wellcome Images)

Nepal Study Day 2011

 

With support from the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) and the Centre of South Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge, the Britain-Nepal Academic Council (BNAC) will hold its 9th Nepal Study Day at the University of Cambridge from Wednesday, 20 April 2011 to Thursday, 21 April 2011.  It will be an opportunity to share research findings and discuss ongoing projects that focus on Nepal or the Nepali cultural world.

Location: CRASSH, 17 Mill Lane, Cambridge, CB2 1RX

To register, please email Dr Mark Turin.

For further details, see: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/1580/

The Manau Festival and photography of Burma

Participants at SAALG's 84th conference, Borderlands, hosted by the Royal Asiatic Society, were yesterday introduced to the Burmese collections of Colonel J.H. Green (1893-1975), now held in Brighton Museum, by Dr Mandy Sadan, Lecturer in the History of Southeast Asia, at SOAS.  Green had been in the Kachin and Shan states in Burma in the 1920s and 30s to recruit members of the hill tribes into the army, and had collected textiles, photographs (about 2000), artefacts and written records.  His collection includes extremely rare photographs of the Manau Festival taken in 1922.  We were able to compare these with photographs Dr Sadan took in 2001.

In 2008-2009, supported by an ESRC grant, Dr Sadan returned to Burma to work on a knowledge transfer and digitisation project, resulting in 35,000 digital images.  These included the archives of the Kachin Independence army and other armed groups.

For more information about the Manau Festival, see:  http://www.kachinland.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=48&Itemid=79

You can view several videos of the 2011 Manau Festival on YouTube
One example, uploaded by Pmaligaya on 18 January 2011, follows.
For more information about the Green Collection at Brighton Museum, see:
http://rammworldculturesonline.org.uk/Research/The-Burma-Collection/About/

Hedley Sutton's lecture postponed

Unfortunately, Hedley Sutton's talk on crime and punishment in early 19C India has had to be postponed.  It was to have taken place at the Senate House on 15 January 2011.

'Sentence - to be shot to death with musquetry'

A date for your diary:

Saturday, 15 January 2011 at 14.00:   Hedley Sutton (British Library) will present a paper to the Central London Branch of the Historical Association entitled " 'Sentence - to be shot to death with musquetry': crime and punishment in early nineteenth century India". 

Venue:  Wolfson Room, Institute of Historical Research at Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1 (nearest Tube: Euston Square). There will be a small admission charge for non-members of the H.A. 

 

Hedley Sutton

British Library

Royal Asiatic Society Library Temporary Closure

The RAS library will be open for the first week of January 2011 and then closed from 10th January for about 3 months while essential building work is done. This will necessitate the library collections being put into store and inaccessible for this period.

Other Society activities, including the SAALG Conference on 28th January 2011, are not affected.

For further information or an update on the progress of the building work, please contact the librarian Kathy Lazenbatt on kl@royalasiaticsociety.org or 020 7391 9424.

Royal Asiatic Society Lectures

The following lectures will be held in the New Year at the Royal Asiatic Society, 14 Stephenson Way, London NW1 2HD:





The Apu Trilogy: Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic

by Dr. Andrew Robinson (University of Cambridge)

Thursday 13 January 2011, 6pm.





Migrants, Slums and the Construction of Citizenship in Gandhi's Ahmedabad
by Tommaso Bobbio (Royal Holloway)


Wednesday 26 January 2011, 6.30pm

Please note that this is one of two RAS Student Series lectures that evening, the other being on a Japanese topic.



Lectures are free of charge and all are welcome.
RAS web site: www.royalasiaticsociety.org

Access to rare 20th century South Asian pamphlets

An inventory of the South Asian Pamphlets Collection at Duke University has been published online.  The majority of the pamphlets were published between 1950 and 2000, but a few date from the 1920s-1940s.   They were acquired through the Library of Congress South Asia Cooperative Acquisitions programme (SACAP). 

Arranged by country of publication, they number over 7,500, with the highest number (177 boxes) originating from India, 58 boxes from Pakistan, 15 boxes from Bangladesh and 8 boxes from Nepal.  Smaller collections are held for Afghanistan and Sri Lanka.

The majority of pamphlets were published by organizations or agencies and cover agriculture, the arts, economic development, education, industry and commerce, international relations, politics and government, religion and philosophy, rural development, tourism and women. 

The pamphlets may be scanned on request to service remote research requests. For further information, see: http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/rbmscl/southasianpams/inv/

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.

WWII elephant rescue : archive footage released

TV, radio and newspapers are today reporting the story of 'Elephant man' and tea planter, Gyles Mackrell, following the release on the University of Cambridge's YouTube channel of a short documentary film chronicling an epic rescue mission.

Amid the chaos of the British retreat from Burma early in 1942, Mackrell mounted an operation to save refugees trapped by flooded rivers at the border with India, using the only means available to get them across - elephants.  His story is recreated from his diary, papers and cinefilms held at the University's Centre of South Asian Studies in Cambridge.

For more information, please see the University's press release or contact the Centre's archivist, Dr Kevin Greenbank.

Liberté : a talk on Noor Inayat Khan GC (1914-1944)

Thursday 11th November 2010, 6:30 pm, Winstanley Lecture Theatre, Trinity College, Cambridge.

Liberté ; a talk on Noor Inayat Khan GC (1914-1944) by Shrabani Basu, author of Spy Princess: the life of Noor Inayat Khan.

Noor was an SOE agent in the Second World War. She was the first woman radio operator to be infiltrated into occupied France and helped the Resistance. She was betrayed, captured and executed in Dachau Concentration camp. Britain posthumously awarded her the George Cross.

Shrabani Basu published her biography of Noor Inayat Khan in 2006 and has since been campaigning for a personal memorial for Noor. Following an Early Day Motion in Parliament signed by 34 M.P.s and a signature campaign backed by Shami Chakrabarti and Gurinder Chadha, she got the go-ahead last month to install a bust of Noor Inayat Khan in Gordon Square, near the house where she lived. The permission was granted by the University of London, which owns Gordon Square. It will be the first memorial to an Asian woman in Britain.

Stigma: Narratives of families in HIV/AIDS care in Kerala

The Centre for South Asian Studies, Edinburgh University has a series of seminars for October, including a talk by George Palattiyil on
HIV/AIDS in Kerala

Royal Asiatic Society Lectures

The RAS in London is hosting the following two lectures:

Ghulam Ali Khan and the Delhi School of Painters, 1770-1857
by Yuthika Sharma (Columbia University, New York)
Wednesday 13 October 2010, 6.30 pm.

Colin Mackenzie's Adventures in India (1784-1821)
by Dr. Jennifer Howes (British Library)
Thursday 11 November 2010, 6pm.

All are welcome, free of charge, no need to book.
Each lecture will be followed by a reception.

Royal Asiatic Society
14 Stephenson Way
London NW1 2HD.
http://www.royalasiaticsociety.org/