South Asian Literature Festival

SALF is an online hub for South Asian literature presented by the Festival, with contributions from a team of passionate bloggers and writers.Our primary goal is to make news and information related to South Asian writing highly accessible to the public through news, book and event reviews, features and interviews.The site will also act and develop into a forum for discussion between people and groups that are interested in literature connected to the region.

http://southasianlitfest.com/

SAALG Summer Conference 2012 - 6th/7th July - Cambridge

We are very pleased to announce the next SAALG conference which will take place in Cambridge on Friday 6^th and Saturday 7^th July at the Ancient India and Iran Trust. 

Copyright - Ancient India and Iran Trust

The conference will explore crossovers in South Asia and Southeast Asian Studies and this year we are delighted to be joined by our colleagues from SEALG, so it will be an excellent opportunity to network and make new connections.

Friday 6^th includes several fascinating talks, as well as the SAALG business meeting, for those who wish to attend:

10.45 - 11.00        Arrival, networking and refreshments

11.15 - 12.00        Dr Sue Sutton (Archivist, Henry Martyn Centre, Cambridge) 'Operation Nip-Off'. 

Some aspects of the repatriation of Japanese troops from Southeast Asia at the end of the Second World War in the Far East.  

12.00 - 12.35        Dr Sujit Sivasundaram (University Lecturer in World and Imperial History since 1500, University of Cambridge) 'The British invasion of Ceylon in the conflicting cultures of palm-leaf texts.'

12.35 - 13.05       Mrs Ursula Sims-Williams (Librarian, Ancient India and Iran Trust and Curator of Iranian Collections, British Library) 'An introduction to Southeast Asian collections in the AIIT'

                             Mr Edward Proctor (Librarian for South and Southeast Asia at Duke University & South Asian Studies Librarian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA) 'Recent Developments in South Asian Collections in the United States'        

13.05 - 14.15       Lunch and networking

14.15 - 14.55       Dr Annabel Gallop (Curator for Indonesian and Malay collections, British Library) ‘Islam, trade and politics across the Indian Ocean: investigating Ottoman links with Southeast Asia’

14.55 - 15.15       Dr Sud Chonchirdsin (Curator of Vietnamese collections, British Library) ‘Cartoons and propaganda from North Vietnam during the early stage of the Vietnam War’

15.15 - 15.55       Dr Mark Elliott (Curatorial Research Fellow, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge) ‘The Eyes of the Ancestor: Returning photographs to an Indian village’

15.55 - 16.15       Refreshments

16.20 - 17.00       SAALG Business Meeting

For the evening of Friday 6th we have booked a table at St. Johns Chophouse for a conference dinner http://www.stjohnschophouse.co.uk/ 

On Saturday 7^th there is an opportunity for a guided tour of the newly refurbished University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology by Mark Elliot (Curatorial Research Fellow, MAA) and Jocelyne Dudding (Curator, Photographic collections, MAA).

Places for our main conference day on Friday at the AIIT are limited to 35 so if you would like to attend we recommend early booking, as places will be allocated on a first come first serve basis. For a confirmation form and accommodation options please contact our Secretary, Helen Porter hp@royalasiaticsociety.org Bookings will close on Friday 29th June.

To attend our Friday programme the fee is £20.00 payable on the day and to attend the Saturday programme it is an additional £10.00. Attendance on Saturday only, is also possible and we encourage you to bring guests, family or friends, there is no limit to numbers for our Saturday programme. The price of the meal at the restaurant is not included in the conference price and again family and friends are welcome.

If you have any questions or need any further information please don’t hesitate to get in touch with Helen or Rachel Rowe our Chair rmr29@cam.ac.uk

Please spread the word to colleagues/students or friends who might be interested in attending.

Asians in Britain - new online resources available

A multimedia timeline and Asians in Britain website are now available on the British Library's website. They celebrate the often overlooked, long history of the South Asian presence in Britain and tell the stories of some key individuals including:

Dadabhai Naoroji- elected Liberal MP in North London in 1892 and the first Indian to be elected to parliament in Britain
Image courtesy of British Library Board [14119.f.37]

Sophia Duleep Singh -Indian princess and Suffragette who marched alongside Emmeline Pankhurst to parliament in 1910, and was a major campaigner for women's rights. The image is from Suffragette 1913. Courtesy of the British Library Board.

The website and interactive timeline have been created as part of Beyond the Frame: Indian British Connections Based on extensive archival research deriving from the 3-year project Making Britain: South Asian Visions of Home and Abroad, 1870-1950 (funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council between 2007-10), this exciting follow-on is led by the Open University and directed by Professor Susheila Nasta in collaboration with Penny Brook of the British Library.

A database of research resources for the history of Asians in Britain, hosted by the Open University, is also available online.

Prahlad Bubbar: Exhibition: Recent Acquisitions of Indian Paintings and Photography, from 19 April to 18 May 2012 - London

Prahlad Bubbar, Asian Art

5 Aldford Street, Mayfair
London
W1K 2AF

Prahlad Bubbar is delighted to announce his forthcoming exhibition,

Recent Acquisitions of Indian
Paintings and Photography, on view at his gallery in Mayfair from 19 April to 18 May 2012.

A highlight of the exhibition is a collection of previously unseen portraits by the nineteenth-century Indian photographer, Raja Deen Dayal. Widely considered to be the one of the most talented and influential photographers of his time, Deen Dayal’s work provides a fascinating window into the
lives of India’s elites at the dawn of the modern age.

The exhibition features works that date from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. It showcases the great variety of styles and themes found in the history of Indian works on paper, from the early cosmic diagrams of the Jains to the arrival of photography. In particular, it celebrates the diversity and ubiquity of the Indian portrait, whether in the form of the ash-smeared, Hindu god Shiva or the bejewelled Rajput princes of Rajasthan.

Prahlad Bubbar is a dealer and consultant of Indian art. He is a specialist in Indian miniature paintings from 1400-1900 and widely respected in the field for his knowledge.

All works are for sale. Opening hours: Mon-Sat 11am-6pm, Sunday by appointment.

Government release of 'migrated archives'

The Foreign Office will be making available to the public a large collection of files from former British territories, sometimes known as the "migrated archives". The files will be made available between April 2012 and November 2013.

The Foreign Secretary made a Written Ministerial Statement to Parliament on 5 May 2011 about these colonial administration files held by the FCO and subsequently informed Parliament on 30 June that he had appointed Professor Badger from Cambridge University as the Independent Reviewer.

Professor Badger has approved a timetable for the transfer of the migrated archive files to The National Archives (TNA). Foreign Office Minister David Lidington announced on 26 March that the first batch of files will be available at TNA on 18 April 2012.

The files are being transferred in alphabetical order of the colonial territory concerned with the exception of prioritised release for Kenya, Cyprus, British India Ocean Territories (BIOT) and Malaya files where there has been particular interest.

Files for Ceylon will be transferred July 2012 - April 2013
Files for Malaya on 18 April 2012
Files for Sarawak/Brunei 18 April 2012
Files for Singapore April 2013 - September 2013
Files for Mauritius during April 2013
Files for Seychelles 18 April 2012

For more information, see:
 http://www.fco.gov.uk/en/publications-and-documents/colonial-administration

Royal Asiatic Society Lecture: Reel Histories

Royal Asiatic Society Lecture Series 2011-2012

Reel Histories: The Film and Oral History Collections of the Centre of South Asian Studies, Cambridge

Dr Kevin Greenbank

(University of Cambridge)

Thursday 12^th April 6pm

Free and all are welcome

Royal Asiatic Society

14 Stephenson Way

London

NW1 2HD

Nearest Tube: Euston, Euston Sq, Warren Street

info@royalasiaticsociety.org Tel: 020 7388 4539

Out of the Ordinary: an introduction to SADACC

Archives at peril

Dinyar Patel is following up on his India Ink series with another series of blog posts - see: http://yazdgerd.net/
 
In these he plans to post some descriptive guides to archives and libraries in India, including the National Archives of India and the Maharashtra State Archives.

Followers of the SAALG blog are encouraged to submit posts relating to their own experiences of using Indian archives and libraries.

India's Rotting History

Do read Dinyar Patel's reports on the sorrowful state of many Indian archives and libraries.

Links to his four-part series on the New York Times' "India Ink" site can be found below. The series looks at the woeful state of many Indian archives and libraries, and what is being done to improve the situation.

http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/20/in-india-history-literally-rots-away/ 

http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/21/repairing-the-damage-at-indias-national-archives/

http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/22/indias-archives-how-did-things-get-this-bad/

http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/23/the-parsis-once-indias-curators-now-shrug-as-history-rots/

Dinyar Patel is a Ph.D. Candidate in Modern South Asia in the Department of History at Harvard University.

World Tuberculosis Day 24th March 2012

World TB Day, falling on March 24th each year, is designed to build public awareness that tuberculosis today remains an epidemic in much of the world, causing the deaths of several million people each year, mostly in developing countries. It commemorates the day in 1882 when Dr Robert Koch astounded the scientific community by announcing that he had discovered the cause of tuberculosis, the TB bacillus. At the time of Koch’s announcement in Berlin, TB was raging through Europe and the Americas, causing the death of one out of every seven people. Koch’s discovery opened the way towards diagnosing and curing TB. (text from stopTB.org)

For those researching tuberculosis in the past, there are plenty of statistics about TB in British India in our Medical History of British India collection. Many soldiers and inmates of jails and asylums died from it and much epidemiological data can be downloaded from the website from the htm files.

Meanwhile, in our stacks here in the Library, reports from the Public Health Commissioner (shelfmark IP/QA.7) explore the prevalence of TB in India under British rule. In 1933 it was estimated that there were over two million cases of TB in India, being particularly serious in Bengal, Madras and the Punjab.

Now in 2012, people of different ages and living in different countries could have these hopes for stopping TB in their lifetimes:

•Zero deaths from TB
•Faster treatment
•A quick, cheap, low-tech test
•An effective vaccine
•A world free of TB.

Locating Dutch manuscript sources

For the past decade (as part of the Mutual Cultural Heritage programme of the Netherlands National Archives), I have been compiling a series of archival guides to Dutch manuscript materials on India and Ceylon from the years c. 1600-1825 (titled "Dutch Sources on South Asia, c. 1600-1825", so far two volumes, published by Manohar, New Delhi).

I am now working on the third volume, covering Dutch materials of this kind that are kept outside the Netherlands. My question is therefore: do you keep or know of any manuscripts (both texts, drawings, and maps) produced by (order of) Dutchmen that somehow concern South Asia (mainly India and Ceylon) and date from the period c. 1600-1825?

I may be contacted at l.p.j.bes@hum.leidenuniv.nl. Thank you, Lennart Bes

Untold lives: officers of the Bengal Army

I recommend readers of the SAALG blog look at Hedley Sutton's post of 19th March 2012 on the British Library's Untold Lives blog -  http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/untoldlives/
Entitled 'British Army officers - names, nationalities, fatalities and a phantom', it looks at the appendices to Lives of the officers of the Bengal Army, 1758 - 1834 by Major V.C.P. Hodson (OIR355.332) and makes very entertaining reading.

Fascinating and Fragile: A contemporary approach to making manuscripts accessible

Saturday 24 March, 10.30 – 16.15

Free (includes lunch)

The V&A- London

Discover the story of JAINpedia, an ambitious project led by the Institute of Jainology to digitise UK collections of rare and remarkable Jain manuscripts from India. Playing a prominent role in the history of Indian art and preserved for centuries in temple libraries, the manuscripts contain a treasure trove of ancient wisdom, illustrated with beautiful paintings.Learn how the manuscripts were selected, conserved, digitised and catalogued for this ground-breaking website. JAINpedia makes these manuscripts accessible for the first time to an international audience and provides a wealth of interpretative and contextual information.

Supported by the V&A Jain Art Fund

Book online or call 020 7942 2211

India's Best Kept Secret?: the Saraswati Mahal Library

Illustrated talk by Pradeep Chakravarthy

at the Nehru Centre, 8 South Audley Street, London W1K 1HF

on Tuesday 27th March at 7pm.



The core of this library in Thanjavur, South India, dates from the 16th century and much of the collection it houses is rare. Philosophy, music, dance, drama, literature and religion share the racks with manuscripts on water divining, food, medicine, veterinary science, astrology and astronomy. The lecture will go into the rarer texts, interspersed with slides and song!


The speaker, Pradeep Chakravarthy, is a native of Tamil Nadu who studied in Madras, Delhi and London (LSE) and currently works as an executive coach in a well known IT company. A writer on heritage for more than a decade, he has recently published Thanjavur - A Cultural History.

If you would like to attend this event, register with your name and e-mail address on the Nehru Centre web site at http://www.nehrucentre.org.uk/events/details/article/illustrated-talk-indias-best-kept-secret-the-sarasvati-mahal-library-pradeep-chakravarthy.html

SOAS Seminar- Topographical Photography, the Colonial Sublime, and the Authorities of Presence: Robert Gill in Nineteenth-Century India

Nathaniel Stein (Brown University)

29 February 2012 5:00 PM

School of Oriental and African Studies- (SOAS) Brunei Gallery Room: B111

South and Southeast Asian Art & Archaeology Research Seminar

This paper explores the ways in which photographic representation of architectural sites became a way to mediate and give meaning to the image-maker's position at an intersection of local and imperial knowledges and affinities. In particular, it examines the photography of Robert Gill (1804-1879), a London-born military officer who came to play an important role in the systematic visual inventory of Indian topography -- most notably at Ajanta, but also at other sites in the region of present-day Maharashtra. More broadly, the paper raises questions about the ways in which we think about colonial archives, photographic authority, and modes of identity-formation available to British colonial subjects.


Free, open to the public