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 

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/

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.