Asian Studies Centre: Recent Episodes
Oxford University
The Asian Studies Centre was founded in 1982 at St Antony's College and is primarily a co-ordinating organisation which exists to bring together specialists from a wide variety of different disciplines. Geographically, the Centre predominantly covers South, Southeast and East Asia. The Asian Studies Centre works closely with scholars in the Oriental Institute, the Oxford China Centre, the Contemporary South Asian Studies Programme and the Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies (in premises at St Antony's). The Asian Studies Centre is host to the Taiwan Studies Programme, Modern Burmese Studies Programme, the South Asian History Seminar Series and the Southeast Asian Studies Seminar Series.
This interview discusses Joe's interest and approach in studying and curating coins, as well as the research being undertaken on the British Museum's South Asian coin collection. In this interview Joe talks about his interest in Asian numismatics and his initial work at the British Museum. He discusses the idea and curation of the British Museum's HSBC Money gallery. We discuss his collaboration projects with scholars from South Asia and the access that different audiences have to these collections.
Book talk with Ashis Ray The Indian National Army (INA) trials of 1945–46 have generally been given short shrift by historians in their cataloguing of the Indian freedom movement. This book examines to what extent the trials had an impact on the final phase of India’s quest for independence. In so doing, it unveils that, while the Indian National Congress’s extended odyssey to win independence was essentially about a passive push-back, at a critical juncture of its campaign to extinguish British colonialism in India, it applauded and capitalised on the INA’s use of force. The central, explosive narrative is about Britain holding a court martial of three officers of the INA – Shah Nawaz Khan, Prem Sahgal and Gurbaksh Dhillon – convicting them, before a dramatic turn in events.The material unearthed by the book throws new light on a decisive juncture leading to the transfer of power in India. It will be indispensable for researchers interested in South Asia, especially the Indian freedom movement. It will be invaluable for students of history, colonialism, military studies, politics in pre-Partition India and law.Ashis Ray has been a foreign correspondent since 1977, broadcasting on BBC, CNN and ITN and writing for Ananda Bazar Group, The Times of India, The Tribune, The Hindu, Hindustan Times, The Guardian, The Observer, The Times, Financial Times and Nikkei Asia, among other publications. He was CNN’s founding South Asia bureau chief before becoming the network’s editor-at-large. He has been elected president of Indian Journalists’ Association (Europe) for several terms. In 1982, the Commonwealth Institute selected him among 10 ‘eminent Indians’ in Britain. In 1995, he was conferred a National Press Award in India. He was made an academic visitor by St Antony’s College, Oxford for 2021–22. He intends to continue in academia. The Trial that Shook Britain is his fourth book.
Shreya Gupta interviews Dr Shailendra Bhandare, Curator of South Asian and Far-eastern Coins and Paper Money at the Ashmolean Museum
Shreya Gupta interviews Indian coin expert Jan Lingen on his collection. In this interview Jan Lingen recounts his story of coming to India in his architectural role and developing an interest in Indian coins and studying Indian languages. He talks about the people he met with and worked with on his coin collecting journey and his continuing work with Indian coins in the Netherlands.
This interview discusses the afterlives of coin collections from South Asia held in UK museums today. In this interview, Robert Bracey speaks about his past and ongoing work at the British Museum as the current Curator of Asian Numismatics. He talks about some of the research being conducted on the museum’s South Asian coins, particularly on the Kushan coin collection. The speakers discuss the services provided for visitors and scholars to the British Museum including the Study Room and Collections Online, and attempt to understand the lives of these coins inside the British Museum after they have made their journey from South Asia to the UK.
This interview discusses Paul Steven’s journey of collecting and researching Indian coins In this interview Dr Paul Stevens recounts his story of getting interested in collecting Indian coins and his journey of building his collection. He talks about the books he has authored, 'The Coins of the English East India Company: Presidency Series - A Catalogue and Pricelist' (Spink, 2017), and with Randy Weir, 'The Uniform Coinage of India 1835 to 1947: A Catalogue and Pricelist' (Spink, 2012). Finally, he discusses his idea and motivation and current work in building an online database of Indian coins, http://psindiancoins.com
Pervez Hoodbhoy seminar given as part of the Modern South Asian Seminar series in October 2023 What had been a relatively small gap in 1947 between Pakistan and India is turning into an ever widening chasm. Given the common origins of these two countries what essential differences led to the present situation? Or were the trajectories predetermined? After discussing historical similarities and differences, I will explore whether Pakistan can now choose a different future for itself.Pervez Hoodbhoy taught physics at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad (1973–2021) as well as other Pakistani universities for nearly five decades. He was visiting professor at MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Maryland, and a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Washington. His book “Islam and Science – Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle for Rationality” was translated into 8 languages.
Ajay Skaria - University of Minnesota, speaks at the Oxford South Asian Intellectual History Seminar on 1 May 2023. The figures of the neighbor and friend are ubiquitous in Gandhi’s writings. While he himself assumes he is only reaffirming old figures, something truly radical happens in his writings (as in those of his sharpest critic, Ambedkar). Both write at a time when a modern commandment, so to speak, exemplified in the categorical imperative, is displacing the Biblical and other analogous commandments. It is in order to criticize this new commandment that both affirm instead old commandments around neighbor and friend. But in their very questioning, they also borrow from the new commandment a key element—the injunction to equality. By doing so, they inaugurate a new politics—a politics that could be described as democratic neighborliness or political friendship. This talk will trace the conceptual prehistory of this new politics. Ajay Skaria is Professor in the Department of History and Institute for Global Studies at the University of Minnesota. Since the 2000s, his research interests have included twentieth century Indian intellectual history, modern caste politics, and postcolonial theory. In addition to articles in these fields, he is the author of Hybrid Histories: Forests, Frontiers and Wildness in Western India (1999) and Unconditional Equality: Gandhi’s Religion of Resistance (2016). He was a member of the Subaltern Studies editorial collective, and coedited Subaltern Studies Vol XII: Muslims, Dalits and the Fabrications of History (2005).
Miftah Ismail Pakistan’s former Minister of Finance gives a lecture Many Pakistani colonial institutions such has the bureaucracy, the judiciary and especially the army have evolved into self-perpetuating elite institutions that resist change and seek to maintain the status quo. And over the years they have co-opted politicians, religious leaders, the landed gentry and also large industrial conglomerates and together they have neither pursued inclusive economic growth nor a liberal, tolerant society. Resultantly Pakistan is falling behind all its peer nations in South Asia in income and human development. The economic and political crises today, the worst in Pakistan’s history, offer an opportunity to build a new ruling coalition that will sue for growth, inclusivity and human development. The alternative is a secular decline towards a failed state. Miftah Ismail is Pakistan’s former Minister of Finance. He holds a PhD in Public Finance and Political Economy from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
Zaib un Nisa Aziz (University of South Florida, Tampa) speaks at the Oxford South Asian Intellectual History Seminar on 13 March 2023. For queries, please contact seminar convenor at saih@history.ox.ac.uk At the turn of the twentieth century, the global imperial order was in peril. In cities across the world, revolutionary factions emerged where nationalists deliberated radical, even violent paths to a post- imperial world. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin belonged to and wrote of this world – a world primarily defined by the crisis of the imperial order and the looming question of the future of national communities. As Lenin along with his compatriots seized power in Moscow in October 1917, he announced the dawn of a new era where the empires of the world would eventually fall in the throes of the impending world revolution. My talk, based on my first book project, shows how that his call resonated with all sorts of imperial decriers who saw, in his victory, the possibility of a new world. From Rio Grande to River Ganges, anti-colonialists turned to Moscow to help realize their own political visions. Encouraged by the triumph of Lenin and his party, anti-colonialists tied the end of imperialism to the revolutionary end of global socioeconomic hierarchies. This historical narrative responds to recent scholarly provocations to study decolonization in connected rather than discrete terms and to employ the methodological tools of global history to write new historical accounts, which attend to the ends of empire as a global phenomenon. One of my key intellectual objectives is to think of Asian, African, and Caribbean anti-colonialists not only as itinerant revolutionaries and campaigners but as intellectuals, thinkers, and writers. I demonstrate the many ways in which anti-colonialists interpreted, built on, modified, and otherwise responded to Lenin’s critique of imperialism. For many, anti-imperialism now not only meant opposition to foreign rule but also a wholesale rejection of the prevalent global economic order. Hence, inequality and development became an inextricable part of visions of a postcolonial global order. Moreover, this presentation highlights how the inter-war period marks a decisive shift in the intellectual history of decolonization.Zaib un Nisa Aziz is a historian of global and imperial history, with a focus on the British Empire and Modern South Asia. She is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of South Florida, Tampa. In her past and present research, she seeks to push the geographic, temporal and thematic boundaries of the historical study of the end of empire and its aftermath, and is particularly interested in histories of decolonisation, labour and internationalism. Her current book project, tentatively titled ‘Nations Ascendant: The Global Struggle Against Empire and The Making of our World’, traces the origins and politics of an international community of colonial activists, thinkers and campaigners, and shows how they came to share ideas about universal decolonisation and the end of empires.
Vikram Visana (University of Leicester) speaks at the Oxford South Asian Intellectual History Seminar on 7 March 2023. Uncivil Liberalism studies how ideas of liberty from the colonized South claimed universality in the North. Recovering the political thought of Dadabhai Naoroji, India’s pre-eminent liberal, this book focusses on the Grand Old Man’s pre-occupation with social interdependence and civil peace in an age of growing cultural diversity and economic inequality. It shows how Naoroji used political economy to critique British liberalism’s incapacity for civil peace by linking periods of communal rioting in colonial Bombay with the Parsi minority’s economic decline. Innovating an Indian liberalism characterized by labour rights, economic republicanism and social interdependence, Naoroji seeded ‘Western’ thinkers with his ideas as well as influencing numerous ideologies in colonial and post-colonial India. In doing so, the book reframes so-called Indian ‘nationalists’ as global thinkers.Dr Vikram Visana is Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of Leicester. He was awarded his PhD in the history of Indian Political Thought under the supervision of Chris Bayly at the University of Cambridge in 2016. He has taught at the University of Cambridge, University of Edinburgh, and the University of Huddersfield, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Global History, Freie Universität Berlin.Dr. Visana’s research focuses on Indian political thought from the nineteenth century to the present. His book, Uncivil Liberalism: Labour, Capital and Commercial Society in Dadabhai Naoroji’s Political Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2022), is an original and radical reinterpretation of the political thought of Dadabhai Naoroji, and studies how ideas of liberty from the colonised South claimed universality in the North. Dr. Visana has also published on Indian iterations of liberalism, republicanism, sovereignty, peoplehood, populism, and political economy. Ongoing research has articles in preparation for leading political theory journals and edited volumes. These new publications consider contemporary Indian political theory from the mid-20th century to the present with a particular focus on authority, multicultural justice, and majoritarianism in Indian conservative political philosophy and Hindutva.Please note that there were some minor technical errors in the PowerPoint Presentation, with some text omissions due to issues with screen-sharing, where some text boxes would not load. For queries, please contact seminar convenor at saih@history.ox.ac.uk
Sarah Ansari (Royal Holloway, University of London) speaks at the Oxford South Asian Intellectual History Seminar on 31 Oct 2022 South Asia’s transition from colonialism to independence in 1947 was undoubtedly one of the most momentous events of the twentieth century. Not surprisingly perhaps, its early postcolonial years have come to exercise a great pull for a range of scholars, who explore this key period, on the one hand, to ask questions about colonial-era legacies or continuities, and, on the other, to identify developments that help to explain what is happening there in the twenty-first century. This paper accordingly explores how - during those early postcolonial years - ideas about, and forms of, citizenship were created or forged by contingent processes of interaction between the ‘state’ – its representatives and institutions at different levels – and ‘society’ – its citizens in-the-making. Very often, as this paper will highlight, it was the day-to-day realities of the time that directly shaped the broader context in which Pakistanis and Indians engaged with what it seemed to mean, in practice, to be a citizen in post-1947 South Asia.Sarah Ansari is a historian of modern and contemporary South Asia, based at Royal Holloway, University of London. Much of her research has focused on issues linked with religion, identity, migration, citizenship, gender, and the province of Sindh, both before and since 1947. Her latest monograph—co-written with William Gould and entitled Boundaries of Belonging (Cambridge University Press, 2019)—explores the intersections between localities, citizenship and rights as these played out in India (UP) and Pakistan (Sindh) during the decade following Independence. Sarah is also currently President of the Royal Asiatic Society, the first woman to hold this role in the institution's 200-year existence.
Luna Sabastian (Northeastern University- London) speaks at the Oxford South Asian Intellectual History Seminar on 7 Nov 2022. Luna Sabastian is Assistant Professor in History at Northeastern University - London. Prior to assuming this position, she held a postdoc at Cambridge University, from where she also received her PhD in 2020. Her work focuses on modern Indian political thought. She is writing a book titled ‘Indian Fascism?’. Among its highlights is an exploration of Savarkar's Hindutva, gendered violence, and race. Much of the talk will be taken from this chapter. The book further explores a meaningful connection between Indian thought and Nazi ideas of "caste"; the idea and geography of the Hindu Crown; and seismic shifts in the political thought of Hindutva after Savarkar. One of her ongoing side projects focuses on British Indian legal history.
Book Launch with Yasser Kureshi Book Launch - Seeking Supremacy: The Pursuit of Judicial Power in PakistanIn this talk, Kureshi will launch his recently-published book that maps out the evolution of the relationship between the judiciary and military in Pakistan, explaining why Pakistan's high courts shifted from loyal deference to the military to open competition, and confrontation, with military and civilian institutions. In the book Kureshi demonstrates that a shift in the audiences shaping judicial preferences explains the emergence of the judiciary as an assertive power center. As the judiciary gradually embraced less deferential institutional preferences, a shift in judicial preferences took place and the judiciary sought to play a more expansive and authoritative political role. Using this audience-based approach, Kureshi roots the judiciary in its political, social and institutional context, and develops a generalizable framework that can explain variation and change in judicial-military relations around the world.
Freedom Between Order and Chaos: Reading a Political Satire From India Jyotirmaya Sharma (University of Hyderabad) speaks at the Oxford South Asian Intellectual History Seminar on 16 May 2022. For queries, please contact seminar convenors at saih@history Hasyarnava or The Ocean of Mirth, a medieval Sanskrit political satire, delineates two compelling themes that require serious consideration. First, the Indic traditions underline the centrality of order in a polity. This preoccupation is underlined by the supremacy of the Rajadharma-dandaniti framework. A great deal of violence and cruelty inheres within this framework. Second, if the order is the site for violence and force, it follows that a glimpse of freedom, unshackled from the conventional implications of the purusharthas can only be had in upholding the desirability of disorder.
In 2019, the Indian government unilaterally revoked the autonomy of the disputed region of Kashmir amidst one of the harshest and longest military blockades and communications blackouts in history of the region In 2019, the Indian government unilaterally revoked the autonomy of the disputed region of Kashmir amidst one of the harshest and longest military blockades and communications blackouts in history of the region. While the move was primarily justified as a national security imperative that would also bring economic prosperity to Kashmir, one of the tertiary arguments that was put forth in support of the move was a celebration of the revocation of autonomy as a victory for LGBTQ+ rights.
How did a right-wing Hindu nationalist government, which had - less than a decade ago - vociferously opposed LGBTQ+ rights, suddenly adopt such progressive rhetoric? Was there any truth to the government's claims or was it yet another form of "pinkwashing" intended for an international audience? And what does the adoption of LGBTQ+ rights language by the Indian government in Kashmir mean for the broader future of LGBTQ+ rights in India?
Anish Gawande is a writer and a translator. He is the Director of the Dara Shikoh Fellowship in India and the Curator of Pink List India, the country's first archive of politicians supporting LGBTQIA+ rights. Anish Gawande is currently a Rhodes Scholar finishing his MPP degree in Intellectual History at Oxford.
Talk by Cemil Aydin from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Cemil Aydin (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) speaks at the Oxford South Asian Intellectual History Seminar on 6 June 2022. For queries, please contact seminar convenors at saih@history.ox.ac.uk.
Steve Swerdlow, Neil Clarke, Syinat Sultanalieva discuss human rights violations in Tajikistan, chaired by Faisal Devji
Alicia Decker (Penn State) as part of the Conference - Expulsion: Uganda’s Asians and the Remaking of Nationality Between October 2 and December 31, 1982, nearly 80,000 Banyarwanda – most of whom were citizens of Uganda – were violently expelled from their homes by state operatives in Mbarara and Bushenyi Districts. Approximately half fled to neighboring Rwanda, while the rest crowded into existing refugee settlements in the southwest or found themselves stranded on the Ugandan side of the border at Merema Hill. Unlike the Asian expulsion of 1972, the Banyarwanda were not given ninety days to prepare. Instead, they were attacked in their homes and forced to flee without a moment’s notice. Most of the displaced lost everything they owned – their homes, their valuables, and their cattle. International observers also reported multiple instances of rape and suicide. I do not wish to suggest that the Asian expulsion was any less violent or traumatic. On the contrary, I argue that it provided a dangerous template that was later used by those in power to justify and carry out the next brutal eviction. Indeed, as this presentation reveals, expulsion functioned as a militarized form of statecraft that bolstered, and then later undermined, the integrity of the postcolonial state. Alicia C. Decker is an associate professor and department head of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the Pennsylvania State University, with courtesy appointments in the African Studies Program and the Department of History. She also co-directs the African Feminist Initiative with Gabeba Baderoon and Maha Marouan. She is the author of In Idi Amin’s Shadow: Women, Gender, and Militarism in Uganda (Ohio UP, 2014), and co-author with Andrea L. Arrington-Sirois of Africanizing Democracies: 1980-Present (Oxford UP, 2015). She is the co-editor of “African Feminisms: Cartographies for the 21st Century,” a special issue of Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism (2018) and “African Feminist Subjectivities,” a special issue of Feminist Formations(forthcoming 2024). With Giacomo Macola, she co-edits a book series on War and Militarism in African History (Ohio University Press) and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of African Military History. Her scholarly articles have appeared in the International Journal of African Historical Studies, Women’s History Review, Journal of Eastern African Studies, History Teacher, Afriche e Orienti, Feminist Studies, Journal of African Military History, and Meridians, as well as various edited book collections. Decker is currenting working on a new book that explores the gendered legacies of militarism in Uganda after the collapse of Amin’s military state.
Anneeth Kaur Hundle (UC Irvine) as part of the Conference - Expulsion: Uganda’s Asians and the Remaking of Nationality In this short talk, I offer a synopsis of my forthcoming book and its core interventions. Namely, I recenter contemporary Uganda within scholarly discussion on the 1972 Asian expulsion. I assess the exceptional ways in which the 1972 Asian expulsion is understood within global knowledge formations, arguing that expulsion is a “critical event” with lingering effects and affects in territorial Uganda and its diasporas, which I situate as the “insecurities of expulsion." Despite the historic expulsion of Ugandan Asians, South Asian-ness continues to define the very constitution of the Ugandan nation and the normative construction of (racially nativist) Ugandan national identity. Ugandan postcolonial governments have shifted from policies and practices of Asian racial expulsion to maintaining racial exclusion while incorporating Ugandan Asian returnees and South Asian subjects as racial non-citizens and economic subjects. I utilize the post-liberal democratic analytic of “non-citizenship” to explore gradations in substantive privileges, rights and entitlements and exclusions across Ugandan Asian returnee and new South Asian migrant communities across old and new imperial and sub-imperial formations, orienting us to the study of Afro-Asian entanglements and the broader decolonization of political community in both national and transregional scope. Ultimately, I am proposing an “anthropology of Afro-Asian entanglements”-an arena of study that is concerned with the ways in which indigenous Africans and South Asians are bound together in relations of interdependency, hierarchy, intimacy and estrangement both within territorial Uganda and its transregional geographies across the Indian Ocean and North Atlantic. Anneeth Kaur Hundle is assistant professor of anthropology and Dhan Kaur Sahota Presidential Chair of Sikh Studies in the Department of Anthropology at University of California, Irvine (UCI). Prior to UCI, she was Visiting Professor at the Center for African Studies at UC Berkeley, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UC Merced, and Research Associate at the Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR) at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. She is completing a book manuscript entitled, Insecurities of Expulsion: Race, Violence, Citizenship and Afro-Asian Relationalities in Transregional Uganda and beginning work on two new projects on Sikh feminisms and the intersections of Sikh Studies and university studies. She is also involved in new research clusters on Global Africa/Global Blackness, Interrogating South Asia/diasporas and Decolonizing Universities in Global Perspective with her colleagues at UCI.
Shobana Shanker (Stonybrook) as part of the Conference - Expulsion: Uganda’s Asians and the Remaking of Nationality Most accounts of Idi Amin’s expulsion of Asians from Uganda in 1972 assume that African leaders and the Organization of African Unity were largely silent or unmoved to action. This interpretation assumes that Africans understood the Asian expulsion as a political problem—by contrast, I argue that Africans understood the question of Indian settlers as a fundamental problem of the postcolonial condition, connected to the very definition of African selfhood. I explore the significance of the Indian question around the African continent to the formation of intersecting movements of anticolonialism, antiracism, nationalism, Pan-Africanism (which was a critical antidote to nationalism), and Afrocentrism. Contrary to simplistic renderings of African responses to Idi Amin’s anti-Asian racialism, African reckoning with African-Indian entanglements garnered dynamic and long-lasting African cultural responses—even where Indian settlers were few—that produced new African-Indian negotiations on the continent and among African migrants in India.
Shobana Shankar is Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies at Stony Brook University, in New York. Her research focuses on cultural encounters and politics in West Africa and Africa-India networks, especially in religion, intellectual history, health, and education. Her most recent book, An Uneasy Embrace: Africa, India and the Spectre of Race (Hurst, 2021), grew out of her meeting with Muslim Indian missionaries in Nigeria, during the course of her research for her first book Who Shall Enter Paradise? Christian Origins in Muslim Northern Nigeria, c.1890-1975 (Ohio University Press). She has also co-edited two collections of essays on religion and globalization. Her recent articles focus on Ghanaian Hinduism, reformism in Nigeria, and Senegal’s Afro-Dravidian movement.
Ammar Ali Jan (Haqooq-e-Khalq Movement) speaks at the Oxford South Asian Intellectual History Seminar on 17 January 2022. For queries, please contact the seminar convenor at saih@history.ox.ac.uk. This talk will discuss salient features of authoritarian rule in Pakistan. First, the permanent state of emergency that shapes political life in the country fuels arbitrary and whimsical forms of governance. The perpetual violation of the constitution by the ruling classes tells us that rather than viewing the Pakistani state as theocratic, it might be better to suggest that the country's crisis results from the fact that it lacks any political theology or sacred document. Second, the case of missing persons is emblematic of the nature of power in the country as it is the invisible ink through which sovereign power simultaneously reveals and veils itself. Such disavowed forms of violence show that "erasure" remains a central, yet under examined aspect of the exercise of modern power. Finally, the controlled nature of democracy in Pakistan results in a tense dynamic between the form and content of authoritarian rule. For historical reasons, democracy is the necessary form through which authoritarian rule is justified in the country, a contradiction that also opens up important space for oppositional politics. Carefully considering these themes makes it possible to intervene in debates on the global itinerary of democracy and resistance in the time of global authoritarianism.
Dr Ammar Ali Jan is an academic and left-wing political activist based in Lahore, Pakistan. Dr Jan has a Doctorate in History from the University of Cambridge, where he worked on the encounter between anti-colonial thought and Marxism in colonial India. His book, Rule by Fear: Eight Theses on Authoritarianism in Pakistan (Folio Books, 2021), explains the political, economic and social roots of authoritarianism in the country, focusing on the structural features propelling the rising militarisation of society. He is a regular contributor to a number of leading publications, including The News International, Al-Jazeera, EPW and The Jacobin. At present, Dr. Jan is a member of the Haqooq-e-Khalq (People’s Rights) Movement, an anti-capitalist organisation that is working among workers, farmers, students and women to build an alternative political project. He is also a Cabinet Member of the Progressive International and does a weekly show on Naya Daur. Dr Jan was recently fired from his teaching post and charged with sedition as part of a crackdown against dissenting voices.
Sudipta Sen (University of California, Davis) speaks at the Oxford South Asian Intellectual History Seminar on 26 April 2021.
Sundar Sarukkai (Centre for Society and Policy, IISc) speaks at the Oxford South Asian Intellectual History Seminar on 10 May 2021. For more information on the event, see here. For queries, please contact the seminar convenor at saih@history.ox.ac.uk. Please note that there were some unavoidable technical difficulties during this talk, which have impacted the quality of the recording.
Sumathi Ramaswamy (Duke University) speaks at the Oxford South Asian Intellectual History Seminar on 31 May 2021.
Durba Ghosh (Cornell University) speaks at the Oxford South Asian Intellectual History Seminar on 7 June 2021.
Saili Palande-Datar gives the fourth and final presentation on the second day of the Maharashtra Studies Conference.
Bina Sengar gives the third presentation on the second day of the Maharashtra Studies Conference.
Sachin Ketkar gives the second presentation on the second day of the Maharashtra Studies Conference.
Anjali Nerlekar gives the first talk on the second day of the Maharashtra Studies Conference.
Rahul Sarwate gives the fourth presentation on the first day of the Maharashtra Studies Conference.
Shraddha Kumbhojkar gives the third presentation for the first day of the Maharashtra Studies Conference.
Dominic Vendell gives the second presentation for the first day of the Maharashtra Studies Conference.
Roy Fischel gives the first presentation for the first day of the Maharashtra Studies Conference.
This talk examines the emotional and intimate logics of occupation, citizenship, and state-making in Gilgit-Baltistan, a contested borderland between India and Pakistan that forms part of the Kashmir dispute.
Sarah Ansari (Royal Holloway) gives a talk for the Asian Studies Centre seminar series. This talk explores connections between ‘development’ and the politics of agrarian reform in Sindh (Pakistan) during the period of transition straddling Independence. On the one hand, it highlights the place of development thinking in contemporary debates and policy making there before and after 1947; on the other, it acknowledges the role of the local hari movement in pushing for tenancy changes in the Sindhi countryside. Sarah Ansari conducts research primarily (but not exclusively) on the nineteenth and twentieth-century history of Sindh. Her publications have focused on a range of topics, including local religious elites (pirs) under British rule, the impact of Partition in both the short and longer term, and women’s lives in Pakistan’s early years. Her latest book Boundaries of Belonging; localities, citizenship and rights in India and Pakistan (co-authored with William Gould) was published in late 2019.
Cynthia Talbot (Texas at Austin) gives a talk for the Asian Studies Centre seminar series on Mughal India and the Rajput. What did loyalty mean to warriors in the rapidly changing political landscape of early modern North India? I look at three case studies from the late sixteenth century in which elite warriors had to make hard choices about their competing loyalties to family members and to their imperial overlord. The Rajputs of Bikaner, Bundi, and Udaipur all faced situations in which brothers and sons disagreed about submitting to Mughal authority and could be forced to fight each other as a consequence. The demands of new political allegiances thus came into conflict with older Rajput values derived from the heavily kin-based polities of the past, in an age before patriotism. This is part of a larger project that studies the martial sentiments found in Rajput narratives, as a foray into the history of emotions.
Nayanika Mathur (Oxford) and Rosalind O'Hanlon (Oxford) give a talk for the Modern South Asian Studies seminars on the Black Lives Matter movement. In this opening session of the Modern South Asian Studies seminars, we put the disciplines of history and anthropology into conversation with one another to consider how the academic study of race and caste has changed over time. We are interested in collectively thinking about future directions the study of race and caste might take and what happens if we centre the long-standing literature from India in our globalised discussions of hierarchy. We take as our starting point the debates generated by Isobel Wilkerson in her recent and widely read book, Caste: The Origin of Our Discontents. Wilkerson has argued that many forms of discriminatory social hierarchy, such as race in the USA and anti-Semitism in Europe, are best understood as forms of ‘caste’. She suggests that India’s deeply entrenched caste system offers a local example of what is actually a long-standing global phenomenon. Long-standing ideas about racial and bodily difference – some very ancient, as in the history of Indian caste or medieval traditions of anti-Semitism, others shaped during the era of the Atlantic slave trade and its long shadow in the history of the Americas, others again by European colonial experience – are all best understood as forms of ‘caste’. In this era of heightened consciousness of histories of discrimination, and of global conversations between Black Lives Matter in the USA, renewed critiques of the material legacies of colonialism in Europe, and of Dalit politics in India, what fresh insights does generalising ‘caste’ in this way offer to us, and are there disadvantages in doing so?
Unlike ever before in India’s history, domestic political calculations and audience costs dictate the shaping of the country’s foreign and security policy. Under the Bharatiya Janata Party government, key foreign and security policy pursuits are often not undertaken for their own sake, but to cater to domestic electoral outcomes and spin convenient political narratives. The events that followed the 2019 Pulwama terror attack in Kashmir showed how the BJP-led government adopted an aggressive posture towards Pakistan in tandem with a carefully choreographed domestic political narrative to suit its forthcoming election campaign. However, the recent Sino-Indian military standoff on the LAC tells a completely different story. The BJP-led government refused to acknowledge the extent of incursions made by the Chinese army on the Sino-Indian border given how such an acknowledgement would have been politically costly for the ruling party. The talk will highlight how the party leveraged populism, social media, post-truth politics and narratives on nationalism and patriotism in order to legitimise its use of foreign policy outcomes for domestic political gains. The talk will also discuss how the BJP has managed to avoid domestic audience costs while making risky foreign policy decisions.
Conjunctures and crises reveal the fault lines of a society. Covid 19 and the resultant lockdown in India have brought back memories of the devastation wrought by the flu epidemic of 1918 and the political crackdown by the colonial government. There has been a great abandonment of labour and the poor by the present government as much as an emerging compact between state and capital to restructure industrial relations to kickstart production once the lockdown is over. This moment gives us an occasion to reflect on the hardening contours of politics and society.
Alenka Zupancic's lecture on 'Love thy neighbour as theyself' from 6 November 2018 Reference to Christianity and to Christian tradition is one of the key ingredients of the expanding right-wing identity politics in Europe (and more largely, in the West), including its more or less explicit nationalism and racism. The commandment to love your Neighbour as yourself obviously presents this politics with a problem and necessitates a (re)interpretation of its meaning. This lecture looks into some examples of this interpretational work, and into how it affects the figure of the Neighbour. At the same time, it will interrogate reasons for which Freud has found this commandment to be at the very core of what he called "discontent" (Unbehagen) in our "civilisation" (Kultur). What is this aggressiveness that tends to emerge together with the figure of the Neighbour, as inseparable from it? To answer this question, the lecture takes recourse to the (Lacanian) psychoanalysis – not in order to steer away from the political dimension of the question, but on the contrary to help us work our way back to its political dimension.
Ryan Wolfson-Ford speaks at the 'Interrogating Buddhism and Nationalism' workshop 28 January 2018.
Thahir Jamal Kiliyamannil and Manasi Mohanan Sushama speak at the 'Interrogating Buddhism and Nationalism' workshop 28 January 2018.
Pradeep Sangapala and Nihal Perera speak at the 'Interrogating Buddhism and Nationalism' workshop 28 January 2018.
Partha Mitter and Mallica Kumbera Landrus speak at the Art of Independence Conference on 12 October 2018.
Sudarshan Shetty and Vyjayanthi Rao speak at the Art of Independence Conference on 13 October 2018.
Saleem Arif Quadri and Sarah Wilson speak at the Art of Independence Conference on 13 October 2018.
Amar Kanwar and Rattanamol Johal speak at theArt of Independence Conference on 13 October 2018.
Shahzia Sikander and Faisal Devji speak at the Art of Independence Conference on 13 October 2018.
Abhay Sardesai's introductory remarks at the second day of the Artof Independence Conference on 13 October 2018.
Deborah Swallow opens the second day of the Art of Independence Conference on 13 October 2018.
Chris Pinney gives the Dasturzada Dr Jal Pavry Memorial Lecture at the Art of Independence Conference on 12 October 2018.
Faisal Devji's introductory remarks at the Art of Independence Conference on 12 October 2018.
Benedict Rogers, Martin Smith, Richard Dolan and Justine Chambers speak at 'The Karen in 2017: Resilience, Aspirations and Politics' workshop on 15 June 2017.
Indrė Balčaitė speaks at the 'The Karen in 2017: Resilience, Aspirations and Politics' workshop on 15 June 2017.
Michael Vinai Boonlue speaks at the 'The Karen in 2017: Resilience, Aspirations and Politics' workshop on 15 June 2017.
David Brenner speaks at the 'The Karen in 2017: Resilience, Aspirations and Politics' workshop on 15 June 2017.
Alexander Horstmann speaks at the 'The Karen in 2017: Resilience, Aspirations and Politics' workshop on 15 June 2017.
Greg Cathcart speaks at the 'The Karen in 2017: Resilience, Aspirations and Politics' workshop on 15 June 2017.
Justine Chambers speaks at the 'The Karen in 2017: Resilience, Aspirations and Politics' workshop on 15 June 2017.
Tim Schroeder speaks at the 'The Karen in 2017: Resilience, Aspirations and Politics' workshop on 15 June 2017.
Gerard McCarthy speaks at the 'The Karen in 2017: Resilience, Aspirations and Politics' workshop on 15 June 2017.
Gracia Fellmeth speaks at the 'The Karen in 2017: Resilience, Aspirations and Politics' workshop on 15 June 2017.
Bob Anderson speaks at the 'The Karen in 2017: Resilience, Aspirations and Politics' workshop on 15 June 2017.
Pia Jolliffe speaks at the 'The Karen in 2017: Resilience, Aspirations and Politics' workshop on 15 June 2017.
Naw Wah Ku Shee speaks at the 'Gender, Rights and Justice in a Transitioning Myanmar' conference on 13 November 2017.
May Win Myint speaks at the 'Gender, Rights and Justice in a Transitioning Myanmar' conference on 13 November 2017.
Mai Hla Aye speaks at the 'Gender, Rights and Justice in a Transitioning Myanmar' conference on 13 November 2017.
Janet Jackson speaks at the 'Gender, Rights and Justice in a Transitioning Myanmar' conference on 13 November 2017.
Htar Htar speaks at the 'Gender, Rights and Justice in a Transitioning Myanmar' conference on 13 November 2017.
Elizabeth Maber speaks at the 'Gender, Rights and Justice in a Transitioning Myanmar' conference on 13 November 2017.
Aye Aye Chit speaks at the 'Gender, Rights and Justice in a Transitioning Myanmar' conference on 13 November 2017.
Aye Aye Chit speaks at the 'Gender, Rights and Justice in a Transitioning Myanmar' conference on 13 November 2017.
Aalene Mahum Aneeq speaks at the "New Directions in Studies of Pakistan: Politics, Culture, & History" workshop on 20 April 2018.
Adeel Khan speaks at the "New Directions in Studies of Pakistan: Politics, Culture, & History" workshop on 20 April 2018.
Arif Naveed speaks at the "New Directions in Studies of Pakistan: Politics, Culture, & History" workshop on 20 April 2018.
Saadia Gardezi speaks at the "New Directions in Studies of Pakistan: Politics, Culture, & History" workshop on 20 April 2018.
Sara Kazmi speaks at the "New Directions in Studies of Pakistan: Politics, Culture, & History" workshop on 20 April 2018.
Hadiqa Khan speaks at the "New Directions in Studies of Pakistan: Politics, Culture, & History" workshop on 20 April 2018.
Sharon Wesoky speaks at the "Interrogating Buddhism and Nationalism" Workshop on 28 January 2018
Jack Meng-Tat Chia speaks at the "Interrogating Buddhism and Nationalism" Workshop on 27 January 2018
Levi McLaughlin speaks at the 'Interrogating Buddhism and Nationalism' workshop 28 January 2018.
Neal Apel speaks at the 'Interrogating Buddhism and Nationalism' Workshop on 27 January 2018.
Dipyaman Chakrabarti speaks at the 'Interrogating Buddhism and Nationalism' Workshop on 27 January 2018.
John Smith speaks at the 'Interrogating Buddhism and Nationalism' Workshop on 27 January 2018.
Farouk Yahya speaks at the Southeast Asia Seminar on 17 January 2018 The naga is a deified serpent that is a major part of the belief system of many South and Southeast Asian cultures. It is a chthonic creature, and is very strongly associated with rain and water. In Southeast Asia it plays an important role in divinatory practices for activities such as house-building, travelling and marriage. This seminar will explore the variety of texts and images relating to the naga as found in Malay divination manuscripts from the late 18th - early 20th century.
Farewell lecture for the Aung San Suu Kyi Senior Research Fellow in Modern Burmese Studies, Matthew J. Walton The field of Burma Studies has expanded rapidly in the past decade. Part of this growth has been fuelled by changes in Myanmar’s political conditions, as research opportunities have opened up on topics and in regions where the military government previously restricted access. Additionally, the historical divide between scholars and activists is gradually fading, with much innovative academic work being informed by scholars’ experience with rights groups or civil society organisations. Another welcome development has been an increase in scholars from Myanmar who are more represented in academic venues.
At the same time, this window of openness threatens to be brief, particularly given the understandable pall cast over academic engagement with Myanmar due to the current Rohingya crisis. It is not just the unacceptable violence in Rakhine State that compels critical reflection on scholarly activities, but also the persistence of violence and political repression across the country. This violence has both increased international attention on Myanmar and decreased the productivity of discussions on the country, as it has entrenched polarised debate.
This talk will consider dynamics within the field of Burma Studies and how recent events have affected scholarly work. Reflecting on the past five years of activities of the Programme on Modern Burmese Studies as well as the work of other scholars, I will put forward a case for principled, critical engagement. Such engagement must acknowledge and embrace the inevitable political positioning of any scholarship on Myanmar but simultaneously insist on taking seriously concerns related to intersectionality, collaboration, spaces for collective discussion, the uses of our scholarship, and persistent limitations on whose voices are included in the field of Burma Studies.
Salman Khurshid speaks at St Antony's College on 28 February 2018 Speaker: Salman Khurshid Former Minister of External Affairs, Former Minister of Law and Justice, Republic of India
Respondent: Shruti Kapila Fellow and Director of Studies in History, Corpus Christi College; Lecturer in History, University of Cambridge
Convened by Faisal Devji and jointly organized by the Asian Studies Centre of St Antony’s College and the Oxford India Society.
Muhammad Samrez Salik speaks at St Antony's College on 8th March 2018 Can the China Pakistan Economic Corrridor (CPEC) affect regional stability and the prospect for peace? Will Russia, Iran, and China be part of a new regional order at this crossroads of empire? This event will feature and interactive discussion of the One Belt One Road (OBOR) Initiative and its impact on geopolitics.
Jane Duckett gives the 2018 Chun-tu Hsueh Distinguished Lecture This lecture examines 21st-century social policies and what they tell us about Chinese politics. At the same time it makes the case for more rigorous qualitative policy research, and it argues that international influences show it is time to reconceptualise Chinese policy processes.
Pavin Chachavalpongpun speaks at the Southeast Asia Seminar on 8 November 2017. Thai foreign policy is traditionally shaped by the changing international environment. The coup of 2014 has exacerbated the political conflict and powerfully prescribed the way in which the country pursued its relations with the outside world. This talk argues that changing international circumstances have allowed the military regime to entrench itself in the political realm and to exploit the latest global trend to achieve self-legitimization. In this new trend, China has emerged to shift the regional balance of power and contest the hegemony of the US, now with President Donald Trump at a wobbly helm. Elsewhere, democracy and regionalism is being seriously challenged, as seen in Europe and Asia. Riding on such trend, the Thai military government is steering the country closer towards not-so-democratic states in the region while moving its foreign policy away from its traditional allies in the West. The military government is taking advantage from the growing anti-democratic tendency as a way to fulfil its legitimacy on the global stage.
David Baulk, Mandy Sadan and Kai Htang Lashi speak at St Antony's College on 2 November 2017 As the world watches the Myanmar military decimate the country's Rohingya Muslim population, in northern Myanmar the military is fighting a war by other means. Across Kachin and northern Shan state, an estimated 120,000 people displaced by conflict are lacking food, shelter, and healthcare. As the conflict has intensified, the Government of Myanmar has tightened restrictions on groups working to defend human rights and provide aid to internally displaced persons in conflict-affected areas. Access to these areas is now more limited than at any point since the conflict in northern Myanmar resumed in 2011. The Myanmar military has called for aid to displaced persons in areas controlled by ethnic armed organizations to be stopped entirely.
In this talk, David Baulk, Myanmar human rights specialist with Fortify Rights, discusses his research in conflict-affected areas of Kachin and northern Shan states, considers the implications of restrictions on humanitarian and human rights groups in Myanmar, and discusses what the international community can do to ensure the Government of Myanmar meets its obligations under international human rights and humanitarian law.
Syahrul Hidayat and Kevin W. Fogg speak at the Southeast Asia Seminar on 25 October 2017
Alessandra Mezzadri speaks at the South Asia Seminar on 7 November 2017 Drawing from Marxian and feminist insights, this presentation, based on a recently completed book, theorizes the garment sweatshop in India as a complex 'regime' of exploitation and oppression, jointly crafted by global, regional and local actors, and working across productive and reproductive realms. The analysis shows the tight correspondence between the physical and social materiality of garment production in India; it illustrates the great social differentiation and complex patterns of labour unfreedom at work in the industry; and it depicts the sweatshop as a complex joint enterprise against the labouring body, which is systematically and inexorably depleted and consumed by garment work, even in the absence of major industrial disasters, like Rana Plaza. By placing labour at the very centre of the analysis of processes of development, the book critically engages with key debates on industrial modernity, modern slavery, and ethical consumerism.
Yasser Arafath speaks at the South Asia Seminar on 10 October 2017 As the entry of the Portuguese opened up a turbulent time in the Indian Ocean, Muslim scribal elites across the region presented them within the image of idolatrous infidels. Writing in Arabic, the scribes from Malabar categorised this period as the Age of Fasad (social disorder) and advocated for ‘valour’ as the counter strategy. However, by transliterating sufis and prophets, vernacular scribes in Malabar insisted on the emotion of ‘piety’ for recreating the glory of the bygone Islamic past, as the fasad situation continued. This paper examines this textual/ lyrical transition- from Arabic valour texts to Arabi-Malayalam pietistic poetry- when a large number of Muslims began moving away from maritime towns to settle down in agrarian hinterland.
Jason Keith Fernandes speaks at the South Asia Seminar on 6 June 2017 Exploring the emotional terrain of the citizenship experiences of groups in Goa this paper argues that through the linguistic choices made by the government of Goa it is not merely caste that is at the centre of citizenship experiences but in fact untouchability itself. Given that languages are not abstract forms but actively embodied practices, and that their linguistic forms and cultural productions are marked as impure and hence untouchable in the caste-Hindu centric Goan polity it is the lower-caste Catholic that is at the bottom of the pile. What obtains in Goa is not different from many other parts in India, allowing the suggestion that India is marked not an egalitarian, but a casteist polity.
Jon Wilson speaks at the South Asia Seminar on 16 May 2017 Histories of the British empire in India often present it as a stable and effective form of state power and a coherent ideology. Drawing on the argument of his recent book, India Conquered. Britain’s Raj and the Chaos of Empire, Jon Wilson argues in contrast that the British never built a stable state in India. Their power was fractious and anxious, limited in scope but prone to unreasonable violence. Focusing on the late C19th and C20th in his paper, Dr Wilson will argue that we need to see the shift from imperial power to a nation state as a far more radical break than historians currently tend to suggest.
Teena Purohit speaks at the South Asia Seminar on 30 May 2017 This talk examined the writings of Jamal al-din al-Afghani (1838-1897) with particular attention to his polemical piece against Syed Ahmad Khan (1817-1898), entitled “The Refutation of the Materialists” (1881). Scholars have assumed that al-Afghani was anti-imperial and wrote this diatribe because Syed Ahmad Khan was pro-British. It is the speaker’s intention to show that al-Afghani was not consistently anti-imperial, and in fact shared with Syed Ahmad Khan many similar views on the role of science, education, and progress. Teena Purohit reads “The Refutation” and ancillary treatises to show how al-Afghani invokes the idiom of heresy for his arguments about reform: on the one hand, al-Afghani mounts an accusation of heresy against Syed Ahmad Khan and his followers, and on the other hand, he deploys “heretical” concepts to rationalize and legitimize his aspiration to serve as a redemptive leader for all Muslims.
Akeel Bilgrami (Columbia), Shruti Kapila (Cambridge) and Saeed Naqvi (Foreign Correspondent and Author) speak in Oxford on 2 June 2017
Hayden J. Bellenoit speaks at the South Asia Seminar on 23 May 2017 The transition to colonialism in South Asian history has been a vibrant and hotly contested part of India’s history. The role of scribes as historical actors of change in India’s history has only recently been explored. This talk will examine how the formation of early agrarian revenue settlements exacerbated late Mughal patterns in taxation, and how the colonial state was shaped by this extant paper-oriented revenue culture and its scribes. It proceeds to examine how the service and cultural histories of various Hindu scribal communities fit within broader changes in political administration, taxation and patterns of governance, arguing that British power after the late eighteenth century came as much through bureaucratic mastery, paper and taxes as it did through military force and commercial ruthlessness. In particular, this paper explores the cultural and service experiences of various Kayastha scribes and how they fit within the transitional period of the mid-late 18th century between late Mughal and early colonial rule.
Pankaj Mishra, Shruti Kapila and David Priestland speak at St Antony's College on 3 May 2017 Shruti Kapila lectures at the Faculty of History and is a Fellow and Director of Studies in History at Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge. Her publications include a co-edited special issue ‘Bhagavad Gita and Modern Thought,’ Modern Intellectual History (2010), and, as editor, An Intellectual History for India (2010).
Pankaj Mishra’s From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia became the first book by a non-Western writer to win Germany’s prestigious Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding. Mishra regular contributes literary and political essays to the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, The Guardian, the New Yorker, London Review of Books and Bloomberg View.
David Priestland is Professor of Modern History at St Edmund Hall. His landmark overview of world communism, The Red Flag: Communism and the Making of the Modern World, was published in 2010. His following book, Merchant, Soldier, Sage: A New History of Power (2012), discussed the rise of market cultures in global history. He is now working on the history of market liberalism with special reference to the former communist world.
Dilip M. Menon speaks at the South Asia Seminar on 25 April 2017 Gandhi’s lauded text Hind Swaraj is born of and located within the 19th century crisis of liberal democracy and its resolutions of an intimate animosity towards the masses. Gandhi shares considerable terrain with Indian liberals writing in the late 19th and early 20th century; the text can be seen as articulating a certain kind of conservatism that attempts to think with “recovering liberties” that Christopher Bayly charts in all its nuances of a global historicism, statistical liberalism and a benign sociology. While Gandhi draws upon this burgeoning corpus of liberal thought in India, his work is characterized by its typical impatience with ideas, and a method that combines random observation with apodictic statements. The Hind Swaraj resisted many of the impulses of Indian liberalism, even when thinking from within it, in its attempt to forge a politics of indigeneity.
Tarak Barkawi speaks at the South Asia Seminar on 7 March 2017 The shock of repeated defeats, massive expansion, and the pressures of operations on multiple fronts transformed the Indian Army in World War II. It had to commission ever greater numbers of Indians as officers. Recruitment of other ranks reached beyond the favoured Martial Races. In the field, officers bent and then broke the rigid ethnic rules around which the army was organized, in small and large ways. The right rations, the right type of recruit, the officer knowledgeable in specific languages or religions, were not always available. Nonetheless, the army managed to recover, reform, and go on to victory. Colonial knowledge and the official Orientalism so evident in the ethnic structuring of the army was less relevant to managing the army at war. In large measure, Indian soldiers fought the Japanese led by a combination of emergency-commissioned nationalists (the new Indian officers) and British officers who were new to India and did not speak their soldiers’ language. The reasons why the Indian Army fought effectively for their colonial rulers were not to be found in stereotypes of Martial Races or South Asian warrior values.
Christopher Hughes speaks at the China Centre on 3 March 2017 This presentation discusses how militarism was used to subordinate the modern idea of citizenship to social and political hierarchy in the transition from late Qing to early Republican China. The role of Japanese militarism in this process is analysed and evidence is drawn from a combination of elite politics and education policy and materials from China and Japan. The implications of this process for Chinese politics today are also explored.
Shashi Tharoor speaks at St Antony's College on 1 March 2017 Notable both as a politician and a writer, Shashi Tharoor is currently serving his second term as Lok Sabha MP and as the Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs. Over the years he has held multiple roles including serving as Under-Secretary General of the United Nations under Kofi Annan’s leadership.
Ian Talbot speaks at the South Asia Seminar on 21 November 2017 The paper examines the roles of three influential heads of the British High Commission in Pakistan’s early post-independence history, Sir Gilbert Laithwaite (1951-4), Sir Alexander Symon (1954-61) and Sir Morrice James (1961-5). In particular it reveals the ways in which they undertook the important tasks of political reporting, mediating in the Indo-Pakistan conflict and protecting British interests at times of civil and regional conflict.
Kunal Sen speaks at the South Asia Seminar on 28 November 2017 India has historically performed badly in the World Bank’s Doing Business Indicators and a key objective of the current Indian government is about improving de jure rules around investment decisions so as to facilitate economic growth. Using a novel methodology, I show that de facto deals rather than de jure rules characterise the business-state relationship in Indian states and more deal making is prevalent in states with weak capacity. I argue that reforms initiatives to increase the ease of doing business in India is unlikely to succeed when deals rather than rules characterise investment decisions and when state capacity is weak and prone to capture by the business sector.
Avinash Paliwal speaks at the South Asia Seminar on 20 February 2018. The archetype of 'my enemy’s enemy is my friend', India's political and economic presence in Afghanistan is often viewed as a Machiavellian ploy aimed against Pakistan. The first of its kind, this book interrogates that simplistic yet powerful geopolitical narrative and asks what truly drives India's Afghanistan policy. Based on an extensive repertoire of hitherto untapped primary sources including official memoranda, diplomatic correspondence, and a series of interviews with key political actors, My Enemy’s Enemy provides a comprehensive analysis of India’s strategy debates and foreign policymaking processes vis-a-vis Afghanistan, from the embers of the Cold War to the 1990s Afghan civil war and the more recent U.S.-led war on terror. It demonstrates that Indian presence in Afghanistan has been guided primarily by an enduring vision for the region that requires a stable balance of power across the Durand Line.
Sejuti Das Gupta speaks at the South Asia Seminar on 6 March 2018. With cultural nationalism and symbolic politics holding the media attention, the significant transformation of India’s political economy and its contribution to victory of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 2014 national elections alongside the changing nature of Indian state has not been adequately written on. The period since liberalisation cannot be regarded as a continuous period as far as its political economy of agrarian policies is concerned. Through an assessment of the political settlement operating in three states, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat and Karnataka during the decade after 2000, the relevance of proprietary classes in shaping these policies and consolidating their position are established.
Romila Thapar, Faisal Devji, Gautham Shiralagi and Adam Roberts speak at St Antony's College on 16 October 2017 An event held under the auspices of St Antony’s College and the Oxford University Research Project on Civil Resistance and Power Politics, to mark 70 years of Indian independence. Chair: Timothy Garton Ash
Parul Bhandari speaks at the South Asia Seminar on 27 February 2018 Parul Bhandari is currently a Visiting Scholar at St Edmund’s College and the Centre for South Asian Studies (CSAS), University of Cambridge, UK. She is also a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Centre of Social Sciences and Humanities (CSH), New Delhi, the South Asia research unit for the French National Centre for Research (CNRS). She has held Guest Faculty positions at the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, and the Indian Institute of Technology, (IIT) Delhi. Dr Bhandari completed her PhD in Sociology from the University of Cambridge in 2014. Her main research interests are in the field of social class, gender, marriage, and family. Her doctoral thesis explained the makings of middle class identities through the processes of spouse-selection. For her post-doctoral research she has shifted attention to the study of elites, particularly the rich housewives of Delhi, focusing on their relationship with money and exploring the themes of honour and humiliation in their everyday lives. Dr Bhandari has written widely on gender, family and marriage, including book chapters, journal articles, and in newspapers and magazines. Her forthcoming books include Money, Culture, Class: Elite Women as Modern Subjects, (Routledge, London, 2018) and a co-edited volume, Exploring Indian Modernities: Ideas and Practices (Springer, 2018).
Matthew J Walton, Ma Khin Mar Mar Kyi and Aye Thein speak at the Southeast Asia Seminar on 14 February 2018. Myanmar's formal religious authority, the State Sangha Maha Nayaka Committee (Ma Ha Na), was formed in the 1980s, as part of the military government's efforts to centralise religious control. Popular opinion sees Ma Ha Na as the tool of previous military governments. The contemporary 'Buddhist nationalist' movement is led by the Buddha Dhamma Parahita Foundation (formerly known as Ma Ba Tha), a group that has had an increasingly contentious relationship with Myanmar's formal political and religious authorities.
Often portrayed simply as a xenophobic, anti-Muslim movement, we argue that Ma Ba Tha can instead be understood as a group that many of its members and leading voices see as a vehicle to challenge the formal religious hierarchy, viewed by many monks as undemocratic and rigid. This struggle over spiritual authority is usually missed in analyses of pro-Buddhist 'nationalist' activism in Myanmar. Yet, this perspective can help explain the group’s persistent and widespread popularity and also portends a more divisive conflict brewing in the country, between formal religious authorities and a growing alternative centre of spiritual influence.
Matthew J Walton, Ma Khin Mar Mar Kyi and Aye Thein are all members of the research team for the ESRC-funded project 'Understanding 'Buddhist Nationalism' in Myanmar: Religion, Gender, Identity, and Conflict in a Political Transition.' This two year research project seeks to critically assess and disaggregate the category of 'Buddhist nationalism' in Myanmar by focusing on the creation, deployment, and critical response of differently positioned groups and individuals in Myanmar to various 'Buddhist' and 'nationalist' narratives, with particular regard to ethnic, geographic and gendered identities.
Zoltan Biedermann and Alan Strathern speak at the South Asia Seminar on 6 February 2018. The presenters reflect on their proposal to draw Sri Lanka into the paradigm of global history through the recently published edited collection Sri Lanka at the Crossroads of History (UCL, 2017 - the full volume can be downloaded free of charge at tinyurl.com/SLCrossroads).
Raphael Susewind speaks at the South Asia Seminar on 13 February 2018 How can we understand 'tension', the experience of rigidity that often underpins systemic structures of domination, epistemic violence as well as physical aggression in South Asia? Following Zygmunt Bauman, I want to suggest that 'tension' is the outcome of an overzealous pursuit of moral and categorical clarity which alienates us from the ambiguity of lived experience. At some point, alienation becomes so gross and the aspiration for clarity thus so untenable that it breaks down into ambivalence, and then violence. Deviating from Bauman and others, I however propose a heuristic vocabulary that distinguishes more clearly between ambivalence and ambiguity, building on ethnography of religion, gender and aggression in North India.
William Gould speaks at the South Asia Seminar on 21 February 2017 There are two broad trends in historical scholarship on partition: On the one hand, older work traced high politics, and the ‘end-game’ of Empire. On the other, more recent and extensive histories recover partition experiences, refugee politics and everyday violence. Uttar Pradesh and its urban centres were not in partition’s immediate hinterland but were pivotal, this paper argues, at an alternative scale of political mobilisation around volunteer movements. Taking P.D. Tandon’s Hind Rakshak Dal as its central case study, it argues that early 1940s militaristic and drilling organisations were ideologically pivotal to the meaning of ‘Pakistan’ in UP. The paper draws some new conclusions about the significance of these movements’ ideologies of violence to India’s long partition.
Sanal Mohan speaks at the South Asia Seminar Missionary Christianity in Kerala, contrary to the received notions in social sciences, offered a new language of internal deliberations to Dalits and provided them agency different from their position in the traditional caste society. The exclusive congregations of Dalits in fact worked as a ‘subaltern counter publics’ offering them new ideas and social practices. It was in this context that ideas of salvation and liberation became significant categories of thought to engage with the caste society and structures of oppression. In the proposed paper the speaker wishes to explore the myriad ways in which Dalits productively engaged with Christianity and transformed themselves. This enables a critique of the instrumentalist interpretation of the Dalit Christianity offered by a dominant section of the historians and social anthropologists writing on Dalits and Christianity in Kerala and India.
Matthew J Walton (St Antony's) in discussion with Gustaaf Houtman (Mandalay) In Buddhism, Politics and Political Thought in Myanmar, the first book to provide a broad overview of the ways in which Buddhist ideas have influenced political thinking and politics in Myanmar, Matthew Walton draws extensively on Burmese-language sources from the last 150 years to describe the 'moral universe' of contemporary Theravada Buddhism that has anchored most political thought in Myanmar. In explaining multiple Burmese understandings of notions such as 'democracy' and 'political participation', the book provides a conceptual framework for understanding some of the key dynamics of Myanmar's ongoing political transition. Some of these ideas help to shed light on restrictive or exclusionary political impulses, such as anti-Muslim Buddhist nationalism or scepticism towards the ability of the masses to participate in politics.
William Gould speaks at the South Asia Seminar on 21 February 2017 There are two broad trends in historical scholarship on partition: On the one hand, older work traced high politics, and the ‘end-game’ of Empire. On the other, more recent and extensive histories recover partition experiences, refugee politics and everyday violence. Uttar Pradesh and its urban centres were not in partition’s immediate hinterland but were pivotal, this paper argues, at an alternative scale of political mobilisation around volunteer movements. Taking P.D. Tandon’s Hind Rakshak Dal as its central case study, it argues that early 1940s militaristic and drilling organisations were ideologically pivotal to the meaning of ‘Pakistan’ in UP. The paper draws some new conclusions about the significance of these movements’ ideologies of violence to India’s long partition.
Sufian Jusoh speaks at the Southeast Asia Seminar. Myanmar or Burma has had its first fully contested general election in 2016, leading the formation of a democratically elected government which has taken steps to reform the governance of the country. The reform of the investment policy received a much-needed boost when the United States of America agreed to uplift economic sanctions imposed on Myanmar. However, the enactment of a new Myanmar Investment Law is only one piece of the larger puzzle of how to make Myanmar a new attractive investment destination in the ASEAN region. Myanmar is located between China and India, but is also a member of ASEAN, a grouping of economically dynamic Southeast Asian countries with its own recent economic challenges. This paper will discuss steps that Myanmar needs to take to make it an attractive investment destination, taking into account the existence of two major economic neighbours and the formation of the ASEAN Economic Community in 2015. The paper will also discuss the constraints and challenges that Myanmar has to overcome in order to attract investments into the country.
Tony K Stewart (Vanderbilt) give the 2017 Majewski Lecture. In 1287 b.s. (=1879/80 c.e.) a short Bangla work was published in Calcutta under the title of Iblichnamar punthi by the highly productive scholar Garibulla, who had composed the text about a century earlier. This somewhat unusual text is a colloquy between the Prophet Muhammad and the fallen Iblich (Ar. Iblis), also called Saytan. The reader is offered humorous, often naughty descriptions of the depraved and licentious acts of Saytan's lackeys, parodies of the standard 'aḥadith literatures regarding proper conduct-everything a good practicing Muslim is not! This fictional inversion of all that is good and proper titillates the reader in its mad escape from the Bakhtinian monologic of theology, history, and law that governs the discourse of the conservative Sunni mainstream. It is the exaggerated negative image of the law as seen from the imagined squalid underbelly of Bengali society.
Rochelle Almeida speaks at the South Asia Seminar on 24 January 2017. Despite the fact that India's Anglo-Indians migrated en masse following Independence in 1947 and have spent almost 70 years as a settler-community, they remain relatively unknown in the United Kingdom and rarely counted among South Asia’s diaspora. This seminar will address their trajectory from immigrants who faced hostility and rejection in the Post-World War II era to a well-established and well-accepted ethnic minority in the multi-cultural environment of contemporary Britain. It will also analyse reasons for their 'invisibility' and the cultural erasure this assimilation has engendered.
A Panel Discussion with Professor Ruth Harris, Shrimati Kajal Sheth and Professor Sir Richard Sorabji. This event marks the UK-India Year of Culture, which will be celebrated in the Oxford Town Hall on 24 January with the award-winning Indian play, Yugpurush: Mahatma's Mahatma, on the relationship between Mahatma Gandhi and his mentor, Shrimad Rajchandra.
Omar Abdullah (Former Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir) speaks on 'Kashmir, India and the Future' at St Antony's College, Oxford
Alexandre Sheldon-Duplaix speaks at a Forum on Conflicts in the South China Sea, 19-20/10/17
Su Su (Mandalay Technological University) speaks on 'The Uniqueness of Downtown Yangon' at the Southeast Asia Seminar on 26 October 2016
Aditya Das and Huw Bowen speak at St Antony's for the launch of Defending British India Against Napoleon: The Foreign Policy of Governor-General Lord Minto, 1807-13
Robert Young speaks at St Antony's on 'Fanon transformed? The new writings' as part of the TORCH series Rethinking the Contemporary
Jesús Cháirez-Garza speaks at the South Asia Seminar Untouchability in India has been widely understood as the practice of excluding, from social or religious life, people who are believed to be permanently impure. Yet, this vision neglects the different emotions and feelings that untouchability produces in the subjects involved with it. This perspective also fails to grasp how untouchability is played through different bodies and diverse spaces at specific historical contexts. This type of understanding often results in an anachronistic portrayal of untouchability as a pan-Indian millenary phenomenon. To avoid this problematic, this paper analyses the complex nature of untouchability by examining its connections to concepts such as space, emotions and the body. In order to do so, this essay looks at the autobiographical notes of B.R. Ambedkar and his dealings with untouchability. It will be shown that Ambedkar’s remembrances of untouchability were linked through specific spaces, such as hotels or train stations, where people could not determine at first hand his place in the caste hierarchy. Such spatial and emotional indeterminacy, allowed Ambedkar to do three things. First, it allowed him to question how untouchables should feel or behave in spaces where they are not identified as an untouchable. Second, analysing the relationship between untouchability and the spaces associated with this practice, Ambedkar became aware that places like the village facilitated the observance of untouchability as bodies marked as touchable or untouchable. Finally, his dealings with untouchability facilitated Ambedkar’s view of untouchability not only as ritual or religious phenomenon but as a practice aimed at excluding untouchables from specific places associated with power.
Jesús Cháirez-Garza completed an MA in South Asian Studies at El Colegio de México, where he first became interested in the history of untouchability and Dalits in India. He then studied a PhD in History at the University of Cambridge, where his doctoral dissertation focused on the concept of untouchability as a political category and in the political thought of B.R. Ambedkar. Cháirez-Garza then joined the University of Leeds in September 2015 as a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Research Fellow.
Mara Malagodi and Luke McDonagh speak at the South Asia Seminar In this seminar Dr Malagodi and Dr McDonagh examine the Dominion Constitutions of Pakistan and Ireland from a comparative perspective. While the two countries could be described as being dramatically different from one another in some ways - e.g. in terms of geography, size of economy, population size - in fact as countries that gained independence in the 20th century from the British Empire via Dominion status they share some important and under-explored political and constitutional similarities, including: (i) in political terms, the legacy of the British 'Westminster' model of government and its emphasis on executive authority; (ii) in legal terms, the impact on the legal system of the subversion of the terms of the Dominion constitutions in each state, particularly with regard to the role of the judiciary and the status of constituent assemblies; and (iii) in relation to questions of religion and nationalism, the dramatic legacy of partition. By exploring these areas from a comparative perspective Dr Malagodi and Dr McDonagh shine a light on the legal and political challenges of the post-colonial experience in two key states that emerged from the British Empire.
Mara Malagodi is a Lecturer in Law at City University London. Mara joined the City Law School in September 2015. Mara is a comparative constitutional lawyer with a linguistically informed specialism in South Asian law and politics, human rights law, and legal history. She is the author of the monograph Constitutional Nationalism and Legal Exclusion in Nepal (OUP, 2013) and of several articles and book chapters on South Asian constitutional law and legal history. Before joining The City Law School, Mara was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Law at LSE (2012-2015) and a Senior Teaching Fellow at SOAS (2008-2012). She is a scholar of the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple, which awarded her the Blackstone Entrance Exhibition and the Quatercentenary Scholarship. She was called to the Bar of England and Wales in 2016. Mara has also worked as an external consultant for various UN agencies. Mara holds her Doctorate, MA in South Asia Area Studies, and BA (Hons) in Nepali & Politics from the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London); Bar Professional Training Course (BPTC) from The City Law School; Graduate Diploma in Law (GDL) from the then College of Law; and BA in International Relations and Diplomacy from the University of Trieste.
Luke McDonagh is a Lecturer in the Law School at The City Law School. He undertakes research primarily in the area of Intellectual Property Law and Constitutional Law. Luke holds a PhD from Queen Mary, University of London (2011), an LL.M from the London School of Economics (LSE) (2006-07) and a B.C.L. degree from NUI, Galway (2002-05). Prior to taking up his position at City in September 2015 he was a Lecturer in the Law School at Cardiff University from 2013-2015 and before that he was LSE Fellow in the Law Department at the London School of Economics (LSE) for 2011-2013. During 2014-15 Luke was a Visiting Scholar at Waseda University Law School, Tokyo, Japan. Luke has published widely in journals including The Modern Law Review, Civil Justice Quarterly and the Journal of Law and Society – and his work has had considerable impact, including being cited in 2014 in a UK House of Commons debate on patent litigation, a UK Law Commission report on patent law, and in an amicus curiae submission to the US Supreme Court in the patent case of Highmark v Allcare (2014).
Dominik M. Müller speaks at the Southeast Asia Seminar. In this talk, Dominik Mueller will present the conceptual framework of a newly established collaborative research project studying "The Bureaucratisation of Islam and its Socio-Legal Dimensions in Southeast Asia". It investigates contemporary dynamics of Islamic bureaucratisation with an analytic focus on the state's exercise of classificatory power and its workings on the micro-level. The project views the bureaucratisation of Islam in Southeast Asia not just as an empirical fact to be examined in singular national contexts, but aims at theorising its underlying patterns from a comparative perspective.
Dominik M. Mueller is Director of the Junior Research Group "The Bureaucratisation of Islam and its Socio-Legal Dimensions in Southeast Asia" at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, funded by the German Research Foundation’s prestigious Emmy Noether Programme. After obtaining his PhD at Goethe-University Frankfurt in 2012, he was a Post-Doctoral Fellow in Political and Legal Anthropology in Frankfurt (2012-2016) and held visiting positions at Stanford University (2013), the University of Brunei Darussalam (2014), St Antony's College, University of Oxford (2015), and the National University of Singapore (2016).
David Gilmartin speaks at the Intellectual History for Pakistan workshop on March 1st, 2016 This talk is licensed with Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 2.0
Phyu Phyu Thi and Matthew J. Walton speak at the Southeast Asia Seminar on 1 March 2017. Research and training conducted by the Myanmar Media and Society (M.MAS) project in 2015 encountered persistent expressions of fear and antagonism directed towards religious Others as well as articulated memories of solidarity and peace. People would often seek to reconcile the contradiction between these memories and contemporary narratives that demonize religious Others. Our research suggests that these attempts at reconciling contradiction can make important contributions to peace. This paper will draw on oral history research conducted throughout 2016 in six cities in Myanmar among populations of different faiths that seeks to uncover people’s memories of inter-religious peaceful co-existence.
Layli Uddin speaks at the Intellectual History for Pakistan workshop on March 1st, 2016
Akbar Zaidi speaks at the Intellectual History for Pakistan workshop on March 1st, 2016
Ali Usman Qasmi speaks at the Intellectual History for Pakistan workshop on March 1st, 2016
Chris Moffat speaks at the Intellectual History for Pakistan workshop on March 1st, 2016
Nauman Naqvi speaks at the Intellectual History for Pakistan workshop on March 1st, 2016
Dr Katherine Butler Schofield speaks at the South Asia Seminar on March 8th, 2016 How do we write histories of the ephemeral: of affective and sensory experience, of devotional states and journeys, of the live performance of music and dance--of the tangible yet transient texture of the experiential moment? More critically, how do we write such histories when the moment has long passed into silence? Can emotion, devotion, and the arts tell us critical things about the harder-edged worlds of political, economic and social history that we couldn’t otherwise access? What is the relationship between the aesthetic, the affective, the ethical, and the political in South Asian history? And how do we track and account for changes in the texture of ephemeral experience over time?
In this paper, Katherine Butler Schofield will be considering these questions in relation to music and listening in the late Mughal world, c.1748–1858. In 1691, the Mughal notable Sher Khan Lodi put the dilemma most succinctly: that "it is impossible to capture the essence of music in pen and ink on the surface of the page." All we have left, he wrote, are the "sibilant scratches of a broken pen." Nevertheless, he, and many others like him, tried their best over and over again to put down in words their own histories of the ephemeral as it pertained to musical experience. The speaker's recent European Research Council project has uncovered a vast and rich archive of writings on music in the late Mughal world, hitherto almost entirely unexplored. Through a series of short examples she will discuss some of the new genres of writing on music that emerged in Hindustan c.1748–1858 and explore their wider historical implications. In doing so, she will also evaluate the act of writing on music at this time: what it entailed for late Mughal and early colonial men and women; what they thought was important, or possible, to record in writing; and why.
Katherine Butler Schofield is a historian of music in the Mughal empire and the colonial Indian Ocean. Through stories about ill-fated courtesans, overweening ustads, and captivated patrons, she writes on Mughal sovereignty and selfhood, friendship and desire, sympathy and loss, and power, worldly and strange. She has just finished a 1.2M Euro European Research Council grant (2011–15) on the ways in which music and dance were transformed c.1750–1900 in the transition to colonialism in India and the Malay world. Her first book, with Francesca Orsini, is Tellings and texts: music, literature, and performance in North India (Open Book, 2015).
Professor Chaudhuri speaks at the South Asia Seminar on a public meeting held in Calcutta, on December 15th, 1829. On December 15th , 1829, a large public meeting was held amidst much excitement at the Town Hall in Calcutta. The speakers, principally from the British mercantile community in Calcutta, but including, prominently, Dwarakanath Tagore and Rammohun Roy, spoke on behalf of a petition to be sent to the English Parliament arguing for what they called "The Colonization of India". The debate centred on the upcoming renewal of the Charter Act, and this community pressed for further abolishing remaining monopolies the East India Company held. I will show how the disputes generated on the subject played out in Calcutta at the time, and also, crucially, show how Rammohun’s involvement in the event and his later evidence before the Select Committee was misread by leading Marxist historians affiliated to the CSSSC in the 1970s.
Rosinka Chaudhuri is Professor of Cultural Studies and Dean (Academic Affairs) at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC). She has published: Gentlemen Poets in Colonial Bengal: Emergent Nationalism and the Orientalist Project (Seagull: 2002), Freedom and Beef-Steaks: Colonial Calcutta Culture (Orient Blackswan: 2012) and The Literary Thing: History, Poetry and the Making of a Modern Literary Culture (Oxford University Press: 2013, Peter Lang: 2014), and has edited: Derozio, Poet of India: A Definitive Edition (Oxford University Press, 2008), and, with Elleke Boehmer, The Indian Postcolonial (Routledge, 2010). Her most recent publication is A History of Indian Poetry in English, published by Cambridge University Press, New York, in March 2016. She has also translated and introduced the complete text of the letters Rabindranath Tagore wrote his niece Indira Debi as a young man, calling it Letters from a Young Poet (1887-94) (Penguin Modern Classics, 2014); this received an Honorable Mention in the category A.K. Ramanujan Prize for Translation (S. Asia) at the Association for Asian Studies Book Prizes 2016. Currently, she is editing and introducing An Acre of Green Grass: English Writings of Buddhadeva Bose for Oxford University Press, New Delhi. Her current research is tentatively titled Young Bengal and the Empire of the Middle Classes.
This seminar series is organised with the support of the History Faculty.
Professor Pradip Dutta speaks on Tagore at the South Asia Seminar Vishwabharati, the university that Tagore founded, was an early experiment in producing a global habitation. While many of the ideas that motivated this institution hold out resonances for the contemporary debate on cosmopolitanism, Tagore worked in the field of modern Indian thought. The tradition was strongly inflected by Vedantism. In its modern incarnation Vedantism produced a universalism that announced its location. The presentation will look at how Tagore extended the theology of neo-Vedantism, shifting it away from its metaphysical orientation to outline a theory of global survival of which Vishwabharati, established in the rural hinterlands of Bengal, was designed as the institutional beginnings.
Professor Pradip Datta has worked on communal relations in Bengal and in contemporary India. He is now exploring non-antagonistic modes of identity formations through his work on Vishwabharati , the global university founded by Tagore. His publications include Carving Blocs (1999), Khaki Shorts Saffron Flags (co-author, 1993), Heterogeneities (2008).
This seminar series is organised with the support of the History Faculty.
David Timberman speaks at the Southeast Asia seminar. Drawing primarily on his own research, interviews and observations, David Timberman will address three topics: 1) the May 9 elections and what they reveal about contemporary Philippine politics, 2) the Aquino administration’s accomplishments and likely legacy, and 3) the political and socio-economic challenges facing the next administration.
David Timberman is a political analyst and development practitioner with 30 years experience analyzing and addressing political and governance challenges, principally in Southeast and South Asia. For the last nine months he has been a Visiting Professor of Political Science at De La Salle University in Manila, where he has taught courses on Southeast Asian politics and policy reform in the Philippines. Currently he is producing an edited volume assessing the political economy of budget reform in the Philippines and also is working on a book on the political economy of democratic governance and development in the Philippines. He is also a Technical Director at Management Systems International, a US-based consulting firm that conducts assessments, studies and evaluations intended to inform US government development strategies and programs. He has served as a senior democracy and governance (DG) advisor in USAID Washington’s Asia Near East Bureau and in USAID Indonesia, where he was deeply involved in the design and implementation of elections, civil society, parliamentary strengthening and anti-corruption programs. Through positions with the National Democratic Institute and the Asia Foundation he has worked closely with political parties and NGOs across Asia. He has lived and worked in the Philippines, Indonesia and Singapore, including experiencing first-hand the democratic transitions in the Philippines (1986-1988) and Indonesia (1998-2001). He has written extensively on political and governance issues in the Philippines and has edited or co-edited multi-author volumes on the Philippines, Cambodia and economic policy reform in Southeast Asia. He holds a MA in International Affairs from Columbia University and a BA in political science (with honors) and history from Tufts University.
Dr Sanghamitra Choudhury speaks at the launch of her book on Women and Conflict in India The book launched at this talk analyses the impact that prolonged socio-political conflict in India has had on political and social spaces for women. Focusing in particular on Assam in the North East of India, it looks at how the conflict can be restricting, and yet can also have the potential to expand these spaces for women owing to the collapsing of boundaries of gender roles, thereby creating niche areas that may be leveraged for socio-political transformation.
Sanghamitra Choudhury is Assistant Professor in the Department of Peace and Conflict Studies at Sikkim University, India, and is currently a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford. Her research interests include Gender and Peace Building, Human Rights, Folklore and Identity Issues and Movements in India.
Uday Chandra speaks at the South Asia Seminar Two decades ago, the historical anthropologist K. Sivaramakrishnan noted with a sense of irony that "elites assuming the task of building a national culture and providing it with a liberatory/progressive history have turned to modes of knowledge and reconstruction produced in the colonial period". This paper builds on this ironic comment to understand and critique Subaltern Studies' rediscovery of the "primitive" tribal subject in the forests of Middle India. Seeking to turn away from colonial, nationalist, and Marxist historiographic traditions, Uday Chandra argues, the Subalternists' quest for the quintessential subaltern ended when it encountered an erstwhile favourite of colonial ethnology, namely, the tribal or aboriginal subject. Once merely an anthropological curiosity, this quintessential subaltern figure came to be reworked in the 1980s and 1990s as the anti-colonial rebel par excellence with his own impenetrable lifeworld and habits that stood in opposition to the modern state and capitalism. The old colonial tropes of irreducible cultural difference, underwritten by a paternalistic ideology of "primitivism," now re-emerged, most notably in the writings of Ranajit Guha, as the basis of a new historiographic and theoretical turn in postcolonial India. The rediscovered primitive of the radical historian’s imagination could do what the Subalternist demanded: revel, riot, and rebel. Much like Alexis de Tocqueville's reflections on the Kabyles of mid-nineteenth century Algeria or his British Indian counterparts’ concerns over vanishing tribes in a predominantly caste-based society, the radical postcolonial historian thus came to rely on the dramaturgy of tragedy to re-tell adivasi pasts.
To show what such Subalternist historiography leaves out and why, the author turns to Ranajit Guha's evocative description of the Santal Hul of 1855. For Guha, as for his colonial predecessors, the Hul represented the outburst of the irrational savage, entirely at odds with the workings of the modern world. Yet, as this paper will show, colonial records clearly document, on the one hand, the Santals’ well-established grievances against moneylenders, their petitions and appeals to the local state, and, on the other hand, the influence of Christian missionaries in the rebels' articulation of "millennarian" ideas.
Reflecting on the problems inherent in Guha’s historical methods and turning afresh to the same colonial archive, an altogether different view emerges of adivasi engagements with the modern state and economy in the mid-nineteenth century. This view of the past depicts the modern tribal subject within the logics of modern state-making and capitalism, not outside or prior to it. Such a reading points to the limits of neo-romantic representations of the exotic beyond “reason and evidence.” Acknowledging how state and tribe constitute each other in the margins of modern India is, Uday Chandra argues, a necessary step to undo the colonial legacies that inhere ironically yet not surprisingly in neo-romantic representations of adivasi pasts.
This seminar series is organised with the support of the History Faculty.
Dr Zambry Abdul Kadir (Menteri Besar - Chief Minister - of Perak, Malaysia) speaks at St Antony's College Dr Zambry Abdul Kadir was appointed as the 11th Chief Minister of Perak, a state in West Malaysia, in 2009. His academic background includes a PhD in Political Thought from Temple University, Pennsylvania and a Master's degree in Political Philosophy and Comparative Religion, also from Temple University.
He became active in Malaysian politics upon his return from the United States in 1995. Starting his political journey in the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) as the Pangkor (in Perak) UMNO branch chief, Dr Zambry rose to the position of the Perak UMNO Youth Chief. In the 2004 general election, he contested and won the Perak State Legislative Assembly seat for Pangkor and successfully defended the seat in the 2008 and 2013 general elections. Dr Zambry is currently the head of Perak UMNO. He has had his share of political bitterness when he was detained under Malaysia’s Internal Security Act in 1998.
Dr Zambry's academic specialisation includes political economy, political thought, Southeast Asian contemporary politics, Malaysian politics and Islamic political thought. In addition to his political duties and responsibilities, he also currently serves as an Adjunct Professor in the political science faculty at the International Islamic University, Malaysia.
Dr Ward Keeler speaks at the Southeast Asia Seminar. Traffic on city streets is the first of three scenes from everyday life Ward Keeler will use in this lecture to illustrate principles of hierarchy and power as they obtain in contemporary Burmese social life. The second is the public "Dhamma talks" or Buddhist sermons sponsored increasingly frequently at pagodas and neighbourhood festivals. The third is the interaction among customers and servers at tea shops, where hot and cold drinks and a variety of snacks can be had at most hours of the day. The very ordinariness of these phenomena shows how concerns for relative standing—hierarchical understandings—and the privileges and obligations they entail, pervade Burmese social interaction. At the same time, differences among these scenes makes it possible to illustrate how hierarchy inflects behaviour in diverse ways according to the nature of the situation at hand: when interaction is anonymous and therefore implicates only differences in power; when situations elicit enthusiastic displays of subordination; and when arrangements provide hints of what superior standing without implications of reciprocal obligation would feel like, which is to say, why the market economy exercises such seductive allure.
Ward Keeler is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his Ph. D from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, following undergraduate studies at Cornell University. During the first part of his career, he did research on the performing arts, language, and gender in Java and Bali (Indonesia). More recently he has conducted fieldwork in Mandalay (Burma). His published works include two books on the Javanese shadow play tradition, the annotated translation of a postmodernist Indonesian novel, a textbook for the Javanese language, three CDs of Burmese classical music, as well as a number of articles on both Indonesia and Burma. He and a collaborator, Allen Lyan, have prepared materials for foreign learners of Burmese, which they hope to publish in the near future. The lecture is based on the opening chapter of a book, The Traffic in Hierarchy: Masculinity and Its Others in Buddhist Burma, based on recent fieldwork in Mandalay, to be published by the University of Hawaii Press.
Dr Poh Soo Kai speaks at the Southeast Asia seminar on May 4th, 2016. Living in a Time of Deception is a study of Singapore history from the post-war period to 1965, which the author describes as a historical memoir. Part of Singapore’s agitation against colonial rule, Dr Poh Soo Kai remains one of the most respected former political prisoners in Singapore.
While the establishment’s account of Singapore’s history maintains that the battle was one between the communists and non-communists, Dr Poh firmly puts anti-colonialism, nationalism and socialism as the forces that drove the young men and women who were his contemporaries. He also delves into how being imprisoned without trial, potentially indefinitely without any recourse, leaves none of them unscathed.
The People’s Action Party, Singapore’s only ruling party to date, continues to justify the mass arrests and imprisonment of the most able left-wing leaders as security measures against communist subversion.
In this seminar, Dr Poh will discuss his book, his political career, and the lessons drawn from his long experience.
Dr Poh Soo Kai was the president of the University of Malaya Socialist Club in 1954-55 and its secretary general in 1955-56. He was a member of the eight-person editorial board of the Socialist Club newsletter, Fajar, who were charged by the colonial government in 1954 with sedition. He was a founding member of the People’s Action Party in 1954 and was later the Assistant Secretary-General of Barisan Socialis when it was established in 1961. In 1963, he was detained without trial under Operation Coldstore and was held for a total of 17 years. He has recently published his memoir, Living in a Time of Deception, which has just launched in Singapore and Malaysia.
Dr Pia Jolliffe speaks at the Southeast Asia Seminar Focusing on the Karen people from Burma/Myanmar in Thailand and in the United Kingdom, this talk analyses how global, regional and local developments affect patterns of learning. Based on Marcel Mauss' theory of the gift, the speaker will suggest considering "education" as a gift that establishes unequal relationships between those who give and those who receive education. Pia Jolliffe argues whether or not relations between educators and pupils remain unequal largely depends on the opportunities learners have to pass on their knowledge to younger generations, or to render it useful for their elders. But if such opportunities do not exist, for example within the constraints of refugee camps - an awkward situation is created in which the young remain unable to return the 'gift' they received from their elders. In hertalk Dr Jolliffe will illustrate this argument with ethnographic research conducted among Karen refugees from Eastern Myanmar who live in Thailand and as resettled refugees in the United Kingdom. Findings indicate the high value Karen people place on traditional and modern forms of learning including increasing aspirations for formal higher education. At the same time, the speaker's research evidences that, when the young receive education without being able to use their knowledge to access higher education or professional occupations, they feel disappointed and question the use of formal learning.
Dr Pia Jolliffe is a member of the Las Casas Institute as a research scholar of Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford. She is also Research Fellow at the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing. Her publications focus on life transitions and aspirations within a context of migration and international development, refugees as well as the role of prisons and forced labour during the colonization of Japan´s northern island Hokkaido.
Arshad Mohamed Ismail speaks on Islamic Finance at the Southeast Asia seminar Islamic finance is often seen as a segment that is experiencing exponential growth within the global financial arena. The industry is founded upon Islamic principles that prohibit charging of interest and engaging in speculative or gambling transactions, among others. Over the years, the industry has grown not just in terms of volume but also in terms of the breadth of products available to clients of varying degrees of sophistication. Islamic bankers used to be repackaged conventional bankers who taught themselves Islamic finance on-the-job whilst being guided by learned Sharia scholars. The current stream of Islamic bankers, however, often comprises professionals who have had some form of formal education in Islamic principles; it is no longer acceptable for front-line Islamic bankers to wholly delegate the responsibility of ensuring Sharia compliance to Sharia scholars.
Malaysia is often acknowledged as a leader in Islamic finance, and rightly so. The authorities have spent a lot of time and effort to establish a robust Islamic financial system that operates alongside the conventional interest-based financial system. The market share of Islamic banking products has been steadily growing since the establishment of the first Islamic bank in Malaysia in 1983. However, the journey has not been without challenges and issues. Some pertinent questions remain: Is Islamic finance a fad? Is it really different to conventional banking and finance? These are all issues that continue to be debated passionately by proponents on both sides of the divide.
Arshad Mohamed Ismail is currently the SC-OCIS Visiting Fellow in Islamic Finance at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies and an Executive Vice President and Head of Corporate and Investment Banking at Maybank Islamic, Malaysia. He oversees the corporate banking and investment banking businesses of Maybank Islamic within Malaysia and regionally. Arshad started his career as a lawyer in the mid 90s with a focus on Islamic finance and banking, corporate and commercial work. He subsequently joined CIMB Islamic in 2003 as one of its pioneer members and spent a significant amount of time originating, structuring and executing Sukuk transactions. Arshad then relocated to the United Arab Emirates to take on the role of Global Head of Sukuk at HSBC Amanah. During his time there, Arshad and his team successfully originated, structured and executed many Sukuk transactions in the GCC region and Asia. After HSBC Amanah, he had stints in Saudi Arabia and again in the United Arab Emirates where he focused on real estate fund management, corporate finance and investment banking before returning to Malaysia at the end of 2011.
Arshad holds a LLB from the International Islamic University, Malaysia and a MBA from the London Business School.
José Ramos-Horta, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and Former President of East Timor, speaks at St Antony's College. What the experience of Timor-Leste teaches us is that there are no short cuts to peace; peace is a journey that must be reached step by step, a foundation that has to be built block by block. In my country we had to heal the wounds of the body and the heart; we honoured the victims, we are caring for the survivors; and we decided not to be hostage of the past, not to succumb to anger and hatred. When we fight for freedom, human dignity and justice, we fight because of our convictions and our conscience; but we only succeed in these noble endeavours if we also use our brains, our intelligence and common sense in pursuing these noble ideals and goals; we would be doomed to fail if we do not evaluate each and every situation and each and every step. After 24 years of a tumultuous relationship, Indonesia and Timor-Leste parted ways; in 2002 Timor-Leste achieved independence. In spite of the tragic past of violence, even as almost every Timorese family were still mourning the loss of loved ones, the leaders of the two countries began a process of reconciliation and normalization of relations. An illustration of how far and deep Indonesia-Timor Leste's relationship has developed after the tumultuous years of occupation and resistance (1975-1999), is the fact that Timor-Leste's ASEAN membership application has been most passionately championed by Indonesia. While in our own region, some had reservations about Timor-Leste's readiness to join ASEAN and become an effective member, Timor-Leste is playing a constructive and pro-active role elsewhere in the world and gaining sympathy and respect.
Dr Hugo Meijer gives a talk at the International Political Economy of East Asia seminar. In light of the intertwining logics of military competition and economic interdependence at play in US-China relations, Trading with the Enemy examines how the United States has balanced its potentially conflicting national security and economic interests in its relationship with the People's Republic of China (PRC). To do so, Hugo Meijer investigates a strategically sensitive yet under-explored facet of US-China relations: the making of American export control policy on military-related technology transfers to China since 1979. Trading with the Enemy is the first monograph on this dimension of the US-China relationship in the post-Cold War. Based on 199 interviews, declassified documents, and diplomatic cables leaked by Wikileaks, two major findings emerge from this book. First, the US is no longer able to apply a strategy of military/technology containment of China in the same way it did with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. This is because of the erosion of its capacity to restrict the transfer of military-related technology to the PRC. Secondly, a growing number of actors in Washington have reassessed the nexus between national security and economic interests at stake in the US-China relationship -- by moving beyond the Cold War trade-off between the two -- in order to maintain American military preeminence vis-à-vis its strategic rivals. By focusing on how states manage the heterogeneous and potentially competing security and economic interests at stake in a bilateral relationship, this book seeks to shed light on the evolving character of interstate rivalry in a globalized economy, where rivals in the military realm are also economically interdependent.
Hugo Meijer is Lecturer in Defence Studies at King’s College London, UK. He is also Research Associate at the Center for International Studies (CERI), Sciences Po, France. Previously, he was postdoctoral research fellow at the Strategic Research Institute of the Military Academy (IRSEM), France, and Visiting Scholar at the Sigur Center for Asian Studies at George Washington University, USA. He received his PhD in Political Science and International Relations from Sciences Po. His current research focuses on US foreign and defense policy, US-China relations, transatlantic perspectives on China’s military modernization, the transformation of European armed forces, and the politics of international arms transfers. Recent and forthcoming publications: Trading with the Enemy: the Making of US Export Control Policy toward the People’s Republic of China (Oxford University Press, 2016); The Handbook of European Armed Forces, Oxford University Press, co-edited with Marco Wyss (forthcoming, 2016); Origins and Evolution of the US Rebalance toward Asia: Diplomatic, Military, and Economic Dimensions (ed) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); "Balancing Conflicting Security Interests: US Defense Exports to China in the Last Decade of the Cold War," Journal of Cold War Studies 17(1) 2015.
Dr S Y Quraishi gives the Oxford India lecture 2016. Guest of Honour: H.E. Mr Navtej Sarna, Indian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom This event is co-organised with the Oxford India Society.
Dr Reshmi Banerjee speaks at the South Asia seminar. Borders have always witnessed social and cultural interaction. They are dynamic trans-national zones/spaces which have seen both cooperation and conflict. They are treated as 'margins' of societies and economies and have hardly figured in the national consciousness and policies. The Indo-Myanmar border is a challenging area as it faces multiple issues of illegal migration, trafficking of drugs and people, armed conflicts, ecological devastation, movement of non-state actors and insurgent groups etc. The Mizos and the Chins who have shared common ancestral roots, religion, cultural and ethnic linkages etc are divided by a border which is creating differences. The presentation would aim to not only narrate a story of the history of these two communities but will also dwell into the current disputes that have arisen. Emotions have ranged from that of solidarity and toleration to hostility and animosity. The aim would be to give a glimpse of the region's 'contested' past and present in order to understand the intriguing power equations, complicated social relations and perennial xenophobia. Politics of exclusion and competition for livelihoods has interfered with the maintenance of durable peace. Understanding of these processes and giving a 'voice' to the voiceless is crucial for a better future in the region.
Dr Reshmi Banerjee is currently a visiting scholar in the Asian Studies Centre in St. Antony's College. She was previously a research associate in the Centre of Southeast Asian Studies (CSEAS) in SOAS, University of London where she worked on land conflicts in Myanmar and on the political economy of the Indo-Myanmar frontier. She has been a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of International Relations in the University of Indonesia (UI) and was a researcher in the Economic Research Center, Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) in Jakarta. Reshmi has worked as a fellow in the Rajiv Gandhi Institute for Contemporary Studies (RGICS, New Delhi), has been a Visiting Professor in the Centre for North East Studies and Policy Research (Jamia Millia Islamia University, New Delhi) and has taught in Delhi University and in the University of Indonesia. She is a political scientist with specialisation in food security and agricultural policies and has an MPhil and PhD in the subject from the Centre for Political Studies (CPS), Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her edited book Climate Change in the Eastern Himalaya: Impact on Livelihoods, Growth and Poverty was published in February 2015.
NB: The first minutes of the presentation were not recorded. Professor Danny Quah speaks at the International Politics of East Asia Seminar Many writers have noted how the international system might be on the cusp of a change, where the "America Century" will no longer describe world order. If, however, the challenge to the established international regime arises from East Asia in general, or from China in particular, the numbers are, at best, ambiguous. Moreover, the conventional narrative ascribes to the established system intangible attributes such as soft power that are difficult to dislodge.
This talk develops an alternative approach—of economics, demand and supply, and rationality—to analyse the rise of Asia and its potential disruption to the current world order.
Short reference: An Economic Perspective on the International System: Demand, Supply, and a Rational World Order, 16 December 2015 article by Professor Quah.
Longer reference, Ordering the World: Truth to Power (2016, incomplete book manuscript).
Professor Danny Quah is Professor of Economics and International Development at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Director of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre at LSE's Institute of Global Affairs. He had previously served as LSE's Head of Department for Economics, and Council Member on Malaysia's National Economic Advisory Council.
Quah is Tan Chin Tuan Visiting Professor at the National University of Singapore, and lectures regularly at Peking University. He studied at Princeton, Minnesota, and Harvard, and was Assistant Professor in the Economics Department at MIT before joining LSE.
Quah gave the third LSE-NUS lecture in 2013, TEDx talks in 2014 and 2012, and the Inaugural LSE Big Questions Lecture in 2011. His current research is on an economic approach to world order - global power shift and the rise of the east.
This seminar series has been organised in association with the China Centre.
Dr Dag Erik Berg speaks at the South Asian seminar. There has been a tendency in caste studies to explain the origins and existence of caste, relying on structural approaches to explain how it is produced and by whom. This paper seeks to step aside from such a focus in order to analyse enduring caste-based oppression of Dalits in India. To do so, I introduce the concept of mechanism of oppression, which means that upward social mobility is a trend that co-exists with atrocity. I suggest that the concept "mechanism of oppression" follows up common sense explanations among Dalit activists and that it represents one realist approach to address "the Dalit question" and caste exclusion. As an adequate starting point for analysing atrocities, this concept opens possibilities of understanding legal developments pertaining to the Scheduled Castes in India. The paper will refer to cases in Andhra Pradesh and lessons concerning dominance, atrocity and caste.
Dr Dag Erik Berg is a postdoctoral research fellow associated with the group on "Diversity and Inequality" at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies (CeMIS), University of Göttingen, Germany. Before joining CeMIS, he was Associate Professor in Intercultural Studies at NLA University College, Norway and has been previously affiliated with University of Bergen and SOAS, London. Berg has published articles on Dalit movements in Andhra Pradesh, law and governance in India as well as caste and race in intercultural perspective. His ongoing book project is concernDed with studying the Dalits in India and the relation between embedded social complexities of caste based oppression and the legal responses to redress social injustice. This presentation follows up his article in Asian Journal of Law and Society "Structural mechanism of oppression, law and the Dalit question in India" (2015).
This seminar series is organised with the support of the History Faculty.
Drs Matteo Dian and Silvia Menegazzi give a talk on the AIIB at the International Political Economy of East Asia Seminar This presentation will analyse the strategy that led China to establish the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and its likely consequences for the regional and global economic order. The creation of the AIIB embodies a considerable shift for the Chinese approach to regional and global governance, constituted by an increasing will to promote a transition from a 'Western-led governance' to a more inclusive 'East-West co -governance'. Is the AIIB initiative just an instrument created to sustain China’s economic prosperity and Xi Jinping’s call for a 'Chinese Dream'? Is it a consequence of China's growing frustration with the Bretton Woods' architecture? Or, is it rather a first stepping stone towards a new China-centered financial and economic order? Does this entail a relevant threat to the world's economic order and its institutions? Or is it more simply a symptom of the increasing normative and institutional plurality of the current international order? In this light, the seminar will scrutinize Beijing's new multilateral project taking into account China's growing regional role, and in particular, it’s renewed centrality in the East Asian region. In the course of the seminar, particular attention will be devoted to the analysis of the challenges and priorities as discussed by Chinese scholars, policy analysts and think tank experts.
Dr Amy King, Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, The Australian National University, gives a talk for the Asian Studies Centre. Conventional wisdom holds that the post-WWII international economic order was the product of a dominant Anglo-American power structure and the policy ideas of British and American officials. But this account overlooks the leading role played by Nationalist China at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference, and the People's Republic of China at the 1955 Bandung Conference. How did Chinese officials conceive of the changing relationship between the state, the nation and the global economy during this momentous decade? How did they define the relationship between the international economic order and China’s security interests? How did the international economic order intersect with evolving notions of Chinese nationalism? This paper outlines the conceptual framework underpinning a new project that seeks to sharpen our understanding of the connections between economics, security and nationalism, and to expand the empirical record on how non-Western states contributed to the international economic order at a critical juncture in its evolution.
Dr Yaqoob Khan Bangash gives a talk on Pakistan and it's constitutional sovereignty on 19th January 2016. The constitution of a country is its 'Supreme National Institution.' Hence, the creation of a constitution is a central process in institution making in a country, as the incentives and disincentives provided in the constitution are critical for the political, economic and social progress of the country, as clearly shown by Douglass North and others. Further, while the constitution is the rule-making framework, the 'grundnorm' is the consensus through which such a framework emerges. An assessment of both the grundnorm and the constitution of a country is therefore critical for an understanding of its trajectory of development, and can provide insight into the reasons behind the creation of weak and failing institutions.In the case of Pakistan, the first constitution took nine long years to formulate. The constitutional discussions clearly exhibited the contested nature of the state and the complications in creating strong institutions to support its development and growth. This paper analyses the concept of 'sovereignty' as presented in the Objectives Resolution of Pakistan presented to the Constituent Assembly in March 1949. The Objectives Resolution was the 'grundnorm' upon which all the constitutions of Pakistan (1956,1962 and 1973) have been based. An analysis of this concept will help us better understand the processes of institution making in Pakistan, the problems such an endeavour was fraught from since the inception, and the lasting effects it has had on the polity of Pakistan.
Bertil Lintner (Independent Journalist and Author) speaks at the Southeast Asia Seminar on 20th January 2016. The United States and the West did not change their policy of isolating Burma because of their concerns were primarily with the lack of democracy and human rights. It was "the China factor". Burma was becoming a vassal of China, which was seen as a threat to the status quo and regional stability. At the same time, Burma's military was also concerned about China's growing influence and realised that it has to reach out to the West to avoid being absorbed by Chinese political, economic and strategic interests. But in order to "woo the West" they also realised that they had to liberalise the country's rigid political system - but not in a way that would jeopardise their hold on power.
Sheila Smith (Council on Foreign Relations) gives a talk for the Asian Studies Centre on 24th November 2015. No country feels China's rise more deeply than Japan. CFR Senior Fellow Sheila A. Smith will discuss her new book, Intimate Rivals: Japanese Domestic Politics and a Rising China. Smith explores the policy issues testing the Japanese government as it tries to navigate its relationship with an advancing China through intricate case studies of visits by politicians to the Yasukuni Shrine, conflicts at the East China Sea boundary, concerns about food safety, and strategies of island defense. Sheila A. Smith, an expert on Japanese politics and foreign policy, is senior fellow for Japan studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). She joined CFR from the East-West Center in 2007, where she directed a multinational research team in a cross-national study of the domestic politics of the U.S. military presence in Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines. Smith was on the faculty of the department of international relations at Boston University (1994–2000), and on the staff of the Social Science Research Council (1992–1993). She has been a visiting researcher at two leading Japanese foreign and security policy think tanks, the Japan Institute of International Affairs and the Research Institute for Peace and Security, and at the University of Tokyo and the University of the Ryukyus. Smith teaches as an adjunct professor at the Asian Studies Department of Georgetown University and serves on the board of its Journal of Asian Affairs. She earned her PhD degree from the department of political science at Columbia University.
Pingtjin Thum (Research Associate, Centre for Global History; Coordinator, Project Southeast Asia) speaks at the Southeast Asia seminar on 21st October 2015. The outcome of the recent general elections in Singapore was a shock to observers, who had predicted a far tighter outcome. The unprecedented six seats (out of 87, plus a seventh seat won in a by-election in 2013) won by the Workers’ Party in 2011 had led many to herald a "new normal" in Singapore, one which would see greater opposition participation in Parliament to act as a check and balance on the ruling People's Action Party (PAP). During the 2015 election period, the opposition was greeted by rapturous crowds and the ruling party often seemed on the verge of panic. Yet the PAP won decisively, holding on to all their seats, gaining back a seat from the Workers’ Party, and increasing their overall vote share by nearly 10%. Pingtjin Thum (Green Templeton College), who covered the election with The Online Citizen, Singapore's leading independent news website, will reflect on his experience and discuss the reasons for this outcome, by putting it in the overall context of Singapore politics and history.
Dr Lorraine Paterson gives a talk at the Southeast Asia Seminar on June 10th, 2015. Under French colonialism in Indochina, approximately ten thousand prisoners from Vietnam and Cambodia were deported to penal or exile sites within the wider French colonial world. From Gabon in Africa to French Guiana, these prisoners were transported for sentences ranging from five years to a lifetime. Many of these prisoners had committed common-law crimes but others were anti-colonial nationalists who occupied a grey area between political crimes and those considered to be piracy or banditry.
Out of this group there was one prisoner who was exiled for longer and further than any other prisoner from any background. Indeed, given that he suffered his first exile at the age of twelve, and was only at liberty for another eleven months thereafter, he was the longest political prisoner in French colonial history. Born Nguyen Van Cam in the north of Vietnam, by the age of eight his prodigious powers of fortune telling and poetry writing had become renowned throughout northern Vietnam. At the age of twelve, he became the figurehead of an anti-French uprising in the town of Nam Dinh which led to a life of forced exile spanning the French colonial empire from Algeria to French Polynesia.
This talk will explore how such an extraordinary personal life story can provide a lens through which to examine larger colonial and exilic contexts. As well as examine the possibilities and constraints of a new form of historical biography.
Lorraine Paterson is a cultural historian whose work focuses on the lives of exiles from Indochina, and their cultural production throughout the wider French empire. She has a Ph.D. in History from Yale University and an M.A. in Asian Studies from Cornell University. Her forthcoming book, Exiles from Indochina in the Transcolonial World (Oxford University Press) will examine political exiles from French Indochina in various global geographic contexts throughout the French empire. She has also written various articles on Southeast Asian history including, a chapter, "Prisoners from Indochina in the Nineteenth Century French Colonial World," in a forthcoming volume Exile in Colonial Asia: Kings, Convicts, Commemoration edited by Ronit Ricci and published by University of Hawaii Press.
She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Centre for Life Writing completing the biography of the Vietnamese political prisoner, Nguyen Van Cam.
Southeast Asia Seminar Trinity Term 2015 In early July 2014, Myanmar's second largest city became the site of anti-Muslim riots, extending a pattern of violence that has developed in the shadow of a much-heralded transition away from military rule. State authorities responded by blocking access to Facebook, locating the riot’s cause in rumours circulating on social media. This explanation for the violence -- riots as the result of rumours and new technology -- has been echoed in journalistic and academic treatments of the issue. This emphasis on technology is understandable. The dissolution of authoritarian ordering of everyday life has been strikingly abrupt, felt daily in the relaxation of censorship and the arrival of telecommunications infrastructure. Mobile phones, Internet, and media technologies previously inaccessible to all but less than 10% of the population are becoming commonplace, and contemporary Myanmar cannot be understood without accounting for their significance. Yet any project to understand events such as the July riots that prefigures the centrality of these technologies risks replicating the deterministic or apolitical explanations offered by state authorities. Accordingly, this talk will argue for attentiveness to those sedimented histories of embodied practice through which cultural and political mobilization is enacted: How are the discourses and affective fields that constitute the mobilization of mass violence such as the July riots being produced, circulated, and received? And how are these cultural and political processes mutating to incorporate new technological infrastructure? This talk will consider these questions, drawing on long-term participant observation in Myanmar and initial findings from the Myanmar Media and Society Research Project, under the Programme in Modern Burmese Studies at St Antony's College.
Matt Schissler has lived and worked in Myanmar and Thailand since 2007. He is based in Yangon, where he manages the Myanmar Media and Society Research Project for St Antony's College, Oxford University. From 2012-2014 he was the Advisor to Paung Ku, a local organization that provides mentoring, financial, and technical assistance to strengthen civil society across Myanmar. Prior to joining Paung Ku in early 2012, Mr Schissler spent nearly five years working with ethnic human rights and media organizations, where he focused on strengthening local capacities to document human rights violations, advocate for human rights, and work as independent journalists in Myanmar. He holds an MSt in International Human Rights Law from Oxford (New College), and earned distinction for a dissertation on the relationship between responses to forced labour demands in villages across eastern Myanmar and transnational efforts to enforce the ILO Forced Labour Convention. He graduated magna cum laude from Whitman College (USA), where he earned BAs in Politics and in Rhetoric/Film Studies. He speaks Burmese.
A talk as part of the Southeast Asia Seminar Series Since the collapse of the authoritarian New Order regime in 1998, hundreds of Islamic laws have been adopted across Indonesia. Over the past years, scholars have examined both the causes and the consequences of these shari'a laws. Yet, existing research has yet to explain why and how these shari'a laws have actually spread across the country. For instance, why have some shari'a laws been adopted in many provinces and districts, while other shari'a laws can be found in a small number of provinces and districts only. Why is the diffusion of certain shari'a laws triggered by national political dynamics while other shari'a laws diffuse through local channels? Who are the political players that facilitate the spread of Islamic law from one locality to another? Based on several years of fieldwork in Indonesia, Michael Buehler's talk will examine the concrete mechanisms through which Islamic law has spread across the largest Muslim country in the world and draw parallels to other countries, including the diffusion of morality policies across the United States in recent decades.
Zhiyuan Cui (Tsinghua University) gives the Chun-tu Hsueh Distinguished Lecture 2014. This is an annual lecture held in St Antony's College, the topic of which involves some aspect of Modern China.
Dr Burak Akcapar talks on his book 'People's Mission: Dr. Ansari and the Indian Medical Mission to the Ottoman Empire, 1912-13' published by Oxford University Press. The talk was given in Michaelmas term 2014 as part of the South Asia Seminar Series. Dr. Burak Akcapar, Author of 'People's Mission: Dr. Ansari and the Indian Medical Mission to the Ottoman Empire, 1912-13' (Oxford University Press).
As Burma (Myanmar) opens up to the world during a period of rapid change, Matthew J Walton, St Antony’s College, University of Oxford, explores the effects on Buddhist identities. Matthew Walton examines how Buddhists in the country are defining and redefining themselves, with reference to other religious groups, their own histories and a global Buddhist community, and how these identities are disseminated and contested through new communication technologies, new religious practices, and reimagined notions of what it means to be 'Buddhist' in Burma. The above gallery talk takes place in he British Museum, alongside an exhibition entitled "Pilgrims, healers and wizards Buddhism and religious practices in Burma and Thailand."
The first talk given as part of the Southeast Asia Seminar, St Antony's College during MT14 In 1999 Timor-Leste was given the opportunity to vote on a self-determination referendum that put an end to centuries of Portuguese colonial and Indonesian neo-colonial rule. Two and a half year later, Timor-Leste proclaimed its Independence, and set off on a road to create a modern, democratic state. Fifteen years have elapsed, and today most observers consider that Timor-Leste has been successful in upholding its own democracy and the rule of law. However, the road along which the country has travelled is full of hurdles and several challenges were met with varying degrees of success. In this talk, I shall start by assessing the odds faced by Timor-Leste in its endeavour to create a democratic state, and will then consider four areas of political relevance: the process of constitution-making; the role of elections and the behaviour of the electoral administration; the choice of the government system; and finally the much protracted decentralization reform. I will conclude with some notes on the challenges to democracy in the near future
A talk given as part of the Southeast Asia Seminar Series The session will be focussing on Thai politics following the 2006 coup and how the protesters, the care taking government, the courts and military establishment and different classes in Thai society are currently dealing with the political struggles while relying on some form of legal arguments. The current political battle is not fought by mere physical power like in the past, but rather some form of legitimacy power claimed by all sides, each interpreting the constitution differently. As the struggles push closer to the critical point, the dynamic of power politics in an emerging Democracy such as Thailand is being illustrated clearer than before.
Public lecture and discussion organised by the Middle East and Asian Studies Centres, St Antony's College, in collaboration with Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies and the Sultan Omar 'Ali Saifuddien Centre for Islamic Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam
A co-sponsored event from the Asian Studies Centre, the Dahrendorf programme for the Study of Freedom, the Middle East Centre and North American Studies Programme from the world renowned from the author of the award-winning book a Secular Age
Roundtable Discussion on the future of Burma Burma is at a very sensitive moment in its transition. The peace process with ethnic armed groups is in a delicate phase, the divisive constitution is being debated in parliament, Buddhist nationalism pervades sectors of society, and elections in late 2015 could be the first relatively free polls in a generation. As Burma and its captive audience look to the future, this roundtable addresses the question of what lies in store. Drawing on different areas of expertise, participants will discuss: To what extent is 2015 likely to live up to expectations as a turning point in Burmese history? How will elite-level politics be affected by issues from below? And just how radically will the political landscape be transformed afterwards? Discussions will be informal and opened to the floor.
An Informal Rountable Discussion on Burma Matthew Walton will discuss ethnicity and differential experiences of suffering more broadly as well as the ways in which geography plays a role in mediating the effects of government/military repression. Dan Hkung will consider the Kachin struggle, a case of particular importance at present as the intensification of conflict in Kachin state has occurred alongside the widely praised "democratic" reforms of the new Burmese government. Paing Soe Hlaing will relate his own experiences of the challenges of negotiating mixed Mon-Burman heritage, whilst Karen Hargrave will share the perspectives of Mon friends and colleagues working to advance human rights for this ethnic population.
This talk examines Land Politicis in Burma Kevin Woods has been engaged in research and activism on land politics in Burma for over a decade. His initial research focused on the Burma-China timber trade, but since then has expanded to include research on the country's emerging agribusiness sector as the frontline of land grabs and conflict. Most of his work has focused on examining Chinese agribusiness in northern Burma as part of China's opium substitution programme, and its entanglements with drug militias, counterinsurgency and land grabs. Most recently Kevin has conducted participatory action research on farmers' resistances to land grabs during the current reform period under the new military-backed government. Kevin's land reform research at the national scale, supported by specific cases studies in contested ethnic resource-rich territories, allows him to go beyond the veneer of 'the new Myanmar' to understand how Burma's infamous military institution and crony capitalism begin to merge with neoliberal development, this time backed by western development aid and finance institutions.
This talk examines the recent rise of violence perpetrated by Buddhist nationalists on Muslim and Christian residents in Sri Lanka and Myanmar. The recent emergence of Buddhist nationalist movements in Myanmar and Sri Lank--represented most prominently by the 969 Movement and Bodu Bala Sena, respectively--has resulted in violence directed against Muslims and Christians as well as a renewed attention to questions of religious tolerance and state-religion relations in the two countries. This talk will examine historical and contemporary connections between these two Theravada Buddhist countries and consider their different trajectories of monastic involvement in politics. Why have such similar movements emerged, given the countries' quite different socio-political positions, Myanmar in the midst of an uncertain transition out of poverty and military rule, and Sri Lanka coming off the brutal conclusion of a civil war in which the state emerged the victor? Of particular interest here are the ideologies and arguments deployed by Buddhist actors in both countries to justify their attitudes and actions towards non-Buddhists. Talk given by Dr Matthew J Walton, Aung San Suu Kyi Senior Research Fellow in Modern Burmese Studies, St Antony’s College, University of Oxford