Colonial Film: Moving Images of the British Empire

The completed Colonial Film catalogue brings together films from three collections - the British Film Institute (BFI), the Imperial War Museum (IWM), and the British Empire & Commonwealth Museum (BECM). The catalogue uses various tools to enhance the apparatus for researchers consulting these collections. Most important of these are two extra fields of context and analysis, which position and examine a selection of the films in relation to the history of the British Empire. There are approximately seventy-five countries within the Empire represented within this collection.

The BFI collection contains approximately 1,200 films relating to Colonial Africa. There are over 1,100 titles covering India, South East Asia and the Middle East, with approximately 500 of these titles relating to India. The earliest titles within this collection include 70 from the turn of the century concerning the Boer War, as well as footage from India – for example Panorama of Calcutta – from 1899. There are films from local production units - for example, the Malayan Film Unit, the Jamaican Film Unit, and the Gold Coast Film Unit – and from established British producers, such as the Colonial Film Unit, and British Instructional Film - which produced the Empire Series between 1925 and 1928. These films were exhibited and distributed in a variety of contexts. There are instructional films made for African audiences – for example, Anti-Plague Operations in Lagos (1937) and the three BEKE films made in the 1930s; films intended for prospective British immigrants – for example Southern Rhodesia: is this Your Country? (1948); sponsored films for British schools - for example From Cane to Cube (1950); fundraising films for missionary work – for example Salvation Army Work in India, Burma and Ceylon (1925); films for children’s cinema clubs – for example Basuto Boy (1947) and Trek to Mashomba (1950) as well a large number intended for cinemas and non-theatrical sites at home and abroad. The collection includes documentary films, amateur footage, newsreels, actualities, travelogues, and missionary films, as well as over 200 fiction films.

The Imperial War Museum collection contains footage relating to pivotal moments in colonial history; for example the Malayan Emergency - Proudly presenting Yong Peng (1955); Voices of Malaya (1948); The Knife (1955); the British mandate in Palestine - Jewish Colonies in Palestine (1917); Allenby meets Weizmann (1918); Palestine Police (1946); and most notably the experiences of colonial troops in two World Wars. This footage includes extensive material filmed by Army and RAF photographic units during the Second World War, particularly in India, Burma and the Far East, much of which is still to be catalogued. The collection also includes newsreels from the War – most notably 138 editions of Indian News Parade, which ran weekly from 1943 to 1946 – as well as fiction titles, documentaries and unique amateur collections.

The British Empire and Commonwealth’s Film Archive contains approximately 1,700 films dating from the 1920s onwards which were shot mainly by British people living and working within the Empire. In addition, the archive contains government produced information and travel films, commercial documentary and news films, and television material.

Other similar projects include the Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge, online archive http://www.s-asian.cam.ac.uk/films.html, and Images of Empire http://www.imagesofempire.com 

Annamaria Motrescu, Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge.

SAALG 85th Conference, Edinburgh, July 2011



© Edinburgh University Library

The next SAALG conference will take place at Edinburgh University Library on Friday 1st July (10.30-17.15). The theme will be Scottish connections and our speakers will explore various links between South Asia and Scotland. During the day there will also be an opportunity to take a tour of Edinburgh University Library and to view a selection of South Asian materials in the Centre for Research Collections.

In addition to our Friday programme we are also delighted to be able to offer a behind the scenes tour of the South Asian collections of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh with Dr Henry Noltie on Saturday morning 2nd July from 10.30-12.00.

Speakers for Friday 1st July include:



Ragamala (Hyderabad, c.1770), Or Ms 114,

© Edinburgh University Library

Professor David Finkelstein (Research Professor of Media and Print Culture, Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh) whose talk 'There and back: a book's voyage through colonial India' will use the circulation of an 1870s novel, originally published in Edinburgh, from Scotland to India and back again, to look at how nineteenth century texts were circulated, received and read in the South Asian colonial world.

Inbal Livne (University of Stirling) who will talk about the Tibetan collection of Lt. Colonel F.M. Bailey now held by the National Museums Scotland. Inbal will look at the nature of Bailey's collecting activities, his life as a Trade Agent for the British government in Tibet and his relationship with his home support network in Edinburgh.

Dr Avril Powell (Emeritus Reader, History Department, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London) whose talk 'Scottish Orientalists and India: a family case study' will examine the 'distinctiveness' of the Scottish participation Empire by focusing on two brothers from Kilmarnock who both became 'scholar-administrators' in India's North-West Provinces in the nineteenth century. 

Dr Margaret Mackay (former Director of the School of Scottish Studies Archives, University of Edinburgh) will introduce us to the work and South Asian collections of John Levy (1910-1976) in the School of Scottish Studies Archives. Levy was an independent ethnomusicologist who made over 700 field recordings in Asia and gathered associated visual material in the 1950s and 1960s. Dr Mackay's talk will include extracts of some of the recordings he made in North and South India and also material from Sri Lanka and Bhutan.  

The price of the conference will be £20 payable on the day and this will include a buffet lunch. If you are interested in coming please contact Rachel Rowe or Helen Porter for the full programme or to book a place. If you need to book accommodation we can also provide a list of recommended places on request.

Rachel Rowe, SAALG Chair, Smuts Librarian for South Asian and Commonwealth Studies, University of Cambridge.

Email: rmr29@cam.ac.uk

Helen Porter, SAALG Secretary, Assistant Librarian, Royal Asiatic Society.

Email: hp@royalasiaticsociety.org Tel: 020 7391 9424

Colonial Film: Moving Images of the British Empire

This website holds detailed information on over 6000 films showing images of life in the British colonies. Over 150 films are available for viewing online. You can search or browse for films by country, date, topic, or keyword. Over 350 of the most important films in the catalogue are presented with extensive critical notes written by our academic research team.

The resource covers among others: India, Seychelles, Mauritius, Burma, Ceylon and The Maldives

Web link: http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/home

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.

Oxford Bibliographies online

SOAS Library now has access to online bibliographies for Hinduism including Buddhism and Islamic Studies. Combining a research level encyclopedia and the traditional bibliography. The bibliography includes selective lists of citations to useful print and online resources as well as narrative guides.

This can be accessed from the A-Z list of databases from the following page:

http://www.soas.ac.uk/library/resources/a-z/k-p/

For King and Country? South Asian Soldiers Fighting for Britain in Two World Wars

A curator’s talk by Dr Florian Stadtler of the Open University

Surrey History Centre, Woking

Saturday 14 May 2011, 2.00pm – 3.30pm

This talk explores the role of South Asian soldiers in both world wars as part of the world's largest volunteer armies ever raised. It highlights their contributions as soldiers, journalists and commentators to the cataclysmic ‘national’ and global events of the First and Second World War and how this shaped their perception of Britain. The talk will also raise interesting questions how the crucial role of these soldiers is only gradually being brought to wider public attention and how slowly the historical lens is being refocused to include these stories in national commemorations of the wars.

Tickets are FREE but booking is essential. Please contact Surrey History Centre,
130 Goldsworth Road, Woking, Surrey, GU21 6ND
01483-518737
shs@surreycc.gov.uk www.surreycc.gov.uk/surreyhistorycentre

Image: ‘Highlanders and Dogras in a trench with dugouts’ [Fauquissart, France]. Girdwood, H.D. Record of the Indian Army in Europe during the First World War. BL: Photo24/(294)

The British Library celebrates Rabindranath Tagore

The British Library celebrates Rabindranath Tagore, with two performances of his greatest stage play The Post Office, and a night of poetry in English and Bengali, set to subtle jazz improvisation by Zoe and Idris Rahman.

The Post Office By Rabindranath Tagore

Friday 13 May 18.30 – 20.30 and repeated on Saturday 14 May 14.30- 16.30
The British Library Conference Centre

Marking the 150th anniversary of the birth of the great Indian writer and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore. Written in 1912, The Post Office, rich in symbolism and allegory, is a play about man's passionate cry for spiritual freedom. Anita Desai called it 'as modest as a dew drop, as profound as the ocean.' Gandhi was spellbound by the play in Calcutta in 1917. Mixing simplicity with sophistication, its universal appeal has made it a world classic. Translated, and with a pre-performance talk by William Radice. Directed and produced by The Live Literature Company. www.liveliteraturecompany.co.uk

Tickets priced £7.50 (£5 Concessions) available at http://boxoffice.bl.uk/, by calling 01937 546546 (9am-5pm Mon-Fri) or in person at The British Library.


Flying Man (Pakshi-Manab): Poems for the 21st century by Rabindranath Tagore

Tuesday 17 May 18.30 – 20.00
The British Library Conference Centre

Translated and read in English by William Radice. The original Bengali read by Mukul Ahmed. With jazz improvisations by Zoe Rahman (piano) Idris Rahman (saxophone)

An opportunity to appreciate the poetry of the great Rabindranath Tagore, some of the most haunting and passionate in Indian and world literature. His ceaselessly inventive and remarkably modern verse may reflect on love and human yearning, on a universe both eternal and transient, or the simple joy of watching a grandchild play.

New translations over the last three decades have revealed this modernity. Our choice of poems for this programme will draw on William Radice's Selected Poems of Tagore (1985), his translation of Tagore's collected brief poems (2000) and his new translation for Penguin India of Tagore's most famous book, Gitanjali. Jazz improvisations by Zoe Rahman (piano) and Idris Rahman (saxophone) will connect the Tagore of 1912 with the Tagore of 2011 and the years to come.

Tickets priced £7.50 (£5 Concessions) available at http://boxoffice.bl.uk, by calling 01937 546546 (9am-5pm Mon-Fri) or in person at The British Library.

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. 

Lumbini: preserving and protecting a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Nepal

Professor Robin Coningham (University of Durham) will be giving a lecture at the Ancient India and Iran Trust, 23 Brooklands Avenue, Cambridge on Tuesday 19th April 2011 at 5.30 pm.  Admission is free and the lecture will be followed by a reception.

The lecture is being held in association with the Britain-Nepal Academic Council (BNAC), the Centre of South Asian Studies (CSAS) and the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) Nepal Study Day http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/1580/

Times of India 1838-2002

Times of India 15 August 1947 (Credit: Prabhvir, Flickr, creative commons)

Cambridge University Library and the Centre of South Asian Studies in Cambridge are delighted to announce the purchase of the The Times of India historical database covering the period 1838-2002.  The newspaper provides a huge resource for modern Asian studies, economics, development studies and politics generally, since the newspaper covers Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and all the countries of South-east Asia, quite apart from relations between India, a growing world power, the USSR (Russia), Britain and the USA.

The ProQuest database incorporates the Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce (1839-1859) and Bombay Times and Standard (1860-1861), as well as the Times of India (1861-current).  The Times of India is often reported to be "the world's most widely circulated English daily newspaper", and the database is certainly wide-ranging in its subject base as well as its geographical content.  Researchers studying topics as diverse as comparative religion, the Indian film industry,  the rise of Pakistan as a nuclear power, or the creation of Bangladesh will find rich resources, as will family historians or lovers of cricket.

The database allows users to browse complete issues of newspapers from cover to cover or to cross-search 164 years of newspapers.  Searches can be restricted to different parts of the newspaper, and limited by author, topic, date or date range. It is possible to view photographs, cartoons, obituaries, marriage announcements and advertisements as well as editorials and articles.  Relevant articles can then be printed, emailed or downloaded in pdf format and citations stored in a number of styles.  The 'My Research' feature allows users to track searches, save articles, create bibliographies and web pages.  The database can also be searched simultaneously with the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post historical databases, resulting in some fascinating comparative reportage.

The database may be located from the Centre of South Asian Studies website - http://www.s-asian.cam.ac.uk/links.html#Newspapers
and from the University Library's Electronic Resources directory under newspapers, ejournals or databases, http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/electronicresources/fulllist.php?search_term=T
Select Times of India from the list, then select News - The Historical Times of India from the drop-down list of databases.

Royal Asiatic Society Lectures Spring 2011

The following lectures will be held at the RAS in London:

Wall Paintings in a Special Room of the Sikh Prince Kharak Singh’s Haveli

by Nadhra Khan (Lahore University of Management Sciences and Charles Wallace Fellow 2010-11, SOAS)

Monday 4th April 2011, 6 pm

Naga Material Culture: mid 19th to Early 21st Century

by Lesley Pullen (SOAS)

Thursday 14th April 2011, 6 pm

Megasthenes and Mauryan-Seleucid Relations: Fact or Fiction?
by Sushma Jansari (University College London)
Wednesday 20th April 2011, 6.30 pm.
N.B. This is one of two lectures that evening in the RAS Student Lecture Series.

All lectures at the Royal Asiatic Society, 14 Stephenson Way, London NW1 2HD.
No charge, everyone welcome. Lectures will be followed by a drinks reception.

India Office family history records to be digitised

The British Library and family history website findmypast.co.uk are to digitise a treasure trove of family history resources held by the Library, making them available online and fully searchable for the first time. The project will involve the scanning of UK electoral registers covering the century that followed the Reform Act of 1832, along with records of baptisms, marriages and burials drawn from the archives of the India Office.

When available online, these collections will enable historians, genealogists and family history researchers to make connections and track down details of ancestors and others at the click of a mouse – work that would previously have necessitated visits to the Library’s Reading Rooms and many hours of laborious manual searching. The British Library holds the national collection of electoral registers covering the whole of the United Kingdom. The registers contain a vast range of names, addresses and other genealogical information.

The other holdings included in the large-scale digitisation are drawn from the archives of the East India Company and the India Office. These records relate to Britons living and working in the Indian sub-continent during the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, up to Independence in 1948. They include over 1,000 volumes of ecclesiastical returns of births, marriages and burials, together with applications for civil and military service, and details of pension payments to individuals.

Antonia Moon, curator of post-1858 India Office Records said, “These records are an outstanding resource for researchers whose ancestors had connections with British India, whether as servants of the administration or as private inhabitants.”

The partnership between the British Library and findmypast.co.uk followed a competitive tender process and will see five million pages of UK electoral registers and India Office records digitised over the next year. The resources will become available via findmypast.co.uk and in the British Library’s Reading Rooms from early 2012; online access will be available to findmypast.co.uk subscribers and pay-as-you-go customers – access to users in the British Library Reading Rooms will be free.

Simon Bell, the British Library’s Head of Licensing and Product Development, said: “We are delighted to announce this exciting new partnership between the British Library and findmypast.co.uk , which will deliver an online and fully searchable resource that will prove immensely valuable to family history researchers in unlocking a treasure trove of content that up to now has only been available either on microfilm or within the pages of bound volumes. The Library will receive copies of the digitised images created for this project, so as well as transforming access for current researchers, we will also retain digital versions of these collections in perpetuity, for the benefit of future researchers.”

Elaine Collins, Commercial Director at findmypast.co.uk, said: “We’re very excited to be involved with this fascinating project. The electoral rolls are the great missing link for family historians: after censuses and civil registration indexes, they provide the widest coverage of the whole population. To have Irish and Scottish records alongside England and Wales is also a huge advantage. These records will join the 1911 Census, Chelsea Pensioner Service Records and many more datasets available online at findmypast.co.uk, which enable people to make fantastic discoveries day after day.”

British photography in Tibet

Tibetan musician     (Cambridge University Library, Y3039A/55)

I recently discovered an amazing resource for the study of Tibet.  The Tibet Album : British photography in Central Tibet, 1920-1950 provides online access to over 6000 digital images of Tibet, together with biographical information on the photographers, maps and access to the collection by date and place.
The original photographs are held in the Pitt Rivers Museum (Oxford) and the British Museum (London) and digitisation project was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
See: http://tibet.prm.ox.ac.uk/

The Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at Cambridge University holds the Frederick Williamson Collection.  Frederick Williamson was a British Political Officer stationed in Sikkim, Bhutan, and Tibet in the 1930s. He was also an ardent photographer. Between December 1930-August 1935, he and his wife, Margaret Williamson, shot approximately 1700 photographs throughout the Himalayan region. As well as documenting the Williamsons' personal travels, the photos provide an unusually well-preserved and well-catalogued insight into social life in Sikkim, Bhutan, and Tibet during the 1930s.   Williamson also shot 23 reels of 16mm cine film while in Sikkim, Bhutan and Tibet. These have now been digitised and can be viewed online.

Also in Cambridge, the Centre of South Asian Studies holds three 16 mm films by Arthur John  Hopkinson, Political Officer in Sikkim, 1945-48.  One of these was taken on an extended tour of Tibet in 1947-48.  The Centre also holds transparencies and negatives taken in Tibet in 1934 by H.B. Hudson.  Colonel H. B. Hudson served in the Indian Army from the 1930s until Independence.  He travelled widely and spent one year in Tibet and made three survey journeys for the Himalaya Route Books. The Centre of South Asian Studies holds his memoir, A backward glance.

Group at Giagong on the Tibetan Frontier (Cambridge University Library, Y302592A/17)

The Royal Commonwealth Society collections in Cambridge University Library hold a report by Colman Patrick Louis Macaulay (1848-1890), Secretary to the Government of Bengal, Report on a Mission to Sikkim and the Tibetan Frontier, with a Memorandum on our relations with Tibet, 1885, including 22 images. (ref. Y302592A) Macaulay undertook his mission in October-November 1885, and reported enthusiastically on the value of extending British relations with Tibet, but though he was chosen to lead a subsequent mission to promote this, an Anglo-Chinese treaty led to its abandonment.

For more information on the opening photograph of a Tibetan musician by Benjamin Simpson, see:  http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/1192

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.