Nepal's endangered languages on Radio 4

Dr Mark Turin will present a three-part series on BBC Radio 4 on themes of language diversity, endangerment and policy that starts next week. The first episode, recorded in Nepal over the summer, airs from 11:00-11:30am GMT on Monday, 3 December, 2012.

Alongside analogue and digital radio transmission in the UK, the programme will be streamed live online: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/

The series has its own set of web pages on the BBC site: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01p6zpl

Episodes two and three will cover the linguistic landscape of South Africa and New York City, and will be aired 11:00-11:30am on Monday 10 and Monday 17 December respectively. The programmes will be archived as podcasts by BBC Radio 4.

For more information on Dr Mark Turin, see:  http://markturin.commons.yale.edu/

NACIRA Conference 2012

 The 2012 conference and Annual General Meeting for the National Committee for Information Resources on Asia will be held on Tuesday 4th December, 10.30-16.30 at the Needham Research Institute in Cambridge.  The theme of this year's conference is Applied Materials: making oriental collections visible, and looks at ways of raising the profile of your collections.  It will include presentations on

• the British Library's Mughal exhibition
• the British Museum's shunga exhibition
• the Cambridge University Sanskrit manuscripts project
• the Cambridge University Genizah digitization project

There will also be a visit to a display of manuscripts from Cambridge University Library's collections.

The cost is £30, including lunch (£10 for students) and further information about the conference and registration can be found here. 

Atlas historique de l'Inde

I am pleased to announce that Arundhati Virmani's historical atlas of India will shortly be published.

Atlas Historique de l'Inde, (Paris, Autrement, 2012),  ISBN: 9782746715400, publication date: 13th November 2012, price: 19€

Arundhati writes: "Violent polemics in the last decades have made Indian national history a crucial field for debating political trajectories for future development. This Historical Atlas presents some of the major developments of this past: spatial organizations since the 6th century B.C. to the 21st century: commercial links from the Mediterranean world to China, the widespread circulation of religious and cultural movements, the development of a major pole in the Muslim world, the transformation of old territorial and social equilibriums under colonisation and the unification of a political and cultural territory after independence.

The maps combine a large perspective of the subcontinent with zooms into particular regions. The Atlas presents recent historical knowledge and research on these questions and treats this history from the perspective of space, territory and the long construction of a territory."

An exhibition presenting maps from this Atlas will be held in the Centre of South Asian Studies, University of  Cambridge, 5th-20th February 2013.  Entitled "Mapping Indian History", the maps will be displayed in the South Asian Studies Library, Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, Cambridge, CB3 9DT, U.K.

Arundhati Virmani is the author of "A National Flag for India. Rituals, Nationalism and the Politics of Sentiment" Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2008. 9788178242323. She teaches at the École des Hautes  Études en Sciences Sociales, Marseille.

Islam, Trade and Politics across the Indian Ocean: the exhibition

I am delighted to announce that the Ancient India and Iran Trust in Cambridge is hosting a travelling photographic exhibition to accompany the British Academy-funded research project 'Islam, Trade and Politics across the Indian Ocean' http://www.ottomansoutheastasia.org/.
An exhibition leaflet may be downloaded at: http://www.ottomansoutheastasia.org/exhibition.php

The exhibition runs from 7th-21st November 2012 and is open from 9-1, Monday-Thursday; 9.30-1.30 Friday. Afternoon visits by appointment only (please contact the Librarian on 01223 702095, or library@indiran.org to arrange).

Location: Ancient India & Iran Trust, 23 Brooklands Avenue, Cambridge CB2 8BG
Tel: +44 (0)1223 356841, Fax: +44 (0)1223 361125

Current exhibitions at the SADACC Trust

All three exhibitions run until 31st December 2012 at the Old Skating Rink Gallery, the SADACC Trust, Bethel Street, Norwich.

    The SADACC Trust
    The Old Skating Rink Gallery
    34-36 Bethel Street
    Norwich
    Norfolk
    NR2 1NR
    United Kingdom

Telephone: 01603 663890

E-mail: info@sadacc.co.uk

By road: Follow brown signs for 'The Forum'. We are 50m from the Forum Car Park entrance. Parking is available whilst visiting the gallery.

Admission is free.

Opening hours:

• 9.30am to 5.00pm Monday to Friday
• 9.30am to 5.30pm on Saturdays.

We are closed on Bank Holidays and Sundays.

Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Lecture 2012

This year's Nehru Memorial Lecture will be given by Professor Sunil Khilnani, Avantha Professor & Director of the King's India Institute, in the Great Hall of King's College London, at 6.30pm on Wednesday 21st November 2012. The lecture title is:-

        MAKING ASIA: INDIA,CHINA & THE STRUGGLE FOR AN IDEA

Those wishing to attend are asked to RSVP to <india-institute@kcl.ac.uk>

I should be very grateful if you would forward this post to any related blogs and mailing lists.

Dr Nigel Chancellor
Director, Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Trust

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