Talking India Series

10th February

Palagummi Sainath: The agrarian crisis and farmer suicides in India

Date: Friday, 10th February 2012
Time: 12:30 PM
Where: UTS Building 10 (235 Jones St, Ultimo), Level 5, Room 425 (China Research Centre Meeting Room)

RSVP: Lola.Davidson@uts.edu.au

About the paper: Over a quarter of a million Indian farmers have taken their lives between 1995 and 2010 according to the National Crime Records Bureau, a part of the country’s Union Home Ministry. This is the largest single wave of suicides within an occupational group ever recorded. Millions have also quit agriculture altogether. The reports of the National Commission of Farmers on the issue lie untouched and undiscussed in Parliament. Yet, India’s agrarian crisis is poilcy-driven  -  and set to get worse.

About The Speaker: Palagummi Sainath, or P. Sainath as he is popularly known, is India’s most highly-awarded journalist with over 40 international and national awards for his investigative and social sector reporting. He is the Rural Affairs Editor of The Hindu – a 133-year-old daily with a circulation of over 1.6 million. Sainath was the first Indian  journalist in 25 years to win the Ramon Magsaysay Prize in 2007 for his “passionate commitment as a journalist to restore the rural poor to India’s national consciousness.” He won the United Nations Food & Agriculture Organization’s Boerma Prize in 2001 and was the first reporter in the world to win Amnesty International’s Global Human Rights Journalism Award. Sainath’s book Everybody Loves a Good Drought, now in its 33rd printing, has remained a Penguin non-fiction best-seller for years.

3 November

Radhika Mohanram:

Gender and the Indian Partition

DATE: 3 November
TIME: 12.30 – 2: 00 PM
WHERE: UTS Building 10 (235 Jones St, Ultimo), Level 5, Room 425

RSVP: Cornelia.Betzler@uts.edu.au

Abstract: This paper firstly explores the relationship between trauma theory and postcolonial theory.  Then, it maps the contours of the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent. It pays particular importance to the reconstruction of gender during partition and considers the role of women caught up in partition violence within the trauma framework.

Radhika Mohanram teaches postcolonial cultural studies at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory in Cardiff University. She is the author of Black Body (Allen and Unwin and Minnesota), Imperial White (Minnesota) and Imperialism as Diaspora (forthcoming, LUP).  She is currently running a pilot project on collecting memories of the South Asian partitions of 1947 and 1971 in South Wales.

IOSARN ANNUAL LECTURE

Thursday, 27th October 2011

Clare Anderson, University of Leicester, UK

South Asian networks of convict transportation in the Indian Ocean

DATE: 27th October 2011

TIME: 12:30 to 2:30 PM

VENUE: UTS Building 10 (235 Jones St, Ultimo), Level 14, Room 201

RSVP: Cornelia.Betzler@uts.edu.au

Abstract
In this paper I will explore South Asian networks of convict transportation in the British colonial Indian Ocean. From the end of the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, over 100,000 Indian convicts were shipped overseas, to penal settlements and colonies across Southeast Asia, Mauritius and Aden. These convicts came from all over South Asia; most were men, and most were transported for life. Colonial convict flows worked in other directions too. The Indian mainland received convicts from Malaya and Burma. And, during the first half of the nineteenth century, Mauritius transported African slaves and ex-slaves – and Indian settlers and indentured labourers – to the Australian penal colonies.

Transportation had enormous symbolic appeal to the Indian authorities, for they believed that ‘Hindus’ greatly feared the prospect of a voyage across the kala pani, or black water. It was a boon to the Indian treasury as well, for it emptied jails. But most significant of all was the relationship between penal transportation and the political economy of colonial expansion. Colonial officials saw great public advantage in the use of a near continuous supply of convict labour to build roads, bridges, and basic infrastructure. And, in the Australian colonies, convict work practices became racialised in interesting ways.

My paper will open with a presentation of some of my ethnographic work with convict descendants in the Andaman Islands. I will use it as a way into an exploration of some of the economic, social and cultural features of Indian convict transportation. I will argue that penal settlements and colonies were part of a broader colonial repertoire that in South Asia included repressive practices of confinement, prison work, forced labour, indentured migration, and indigenous reservation and resettlement. I will explore the circulation of people, knowledge and practices around the Indian Ocean. I will show that South Asia and Australia were networked in significant ways. And, finally, I will square up to the many silences that pervade the historiography of Indian convict labour; considering how it is that such an extensive system of forced labour stemming from South Asia is almost entirely absent from larger imperial, world and global histories.

Biography
Clare Anderson is Professor of History in the School of Historical Studies, University of Leicester, UK. Her research focuses on the histories and legacies of penal transportation, with her published work including: Convicts in the Indian Ocean (Macmillan, 2000); Legible Bodies (Berg, 2004); The Indian Uprising of 1857-8 (Anthem, 2007); and Subaltern Lives (CUP, 2012). She has held personal research fellowships from the ESRC and National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, and is currently principal investigator of the interdisciplinary ESRC funded UK/ India collaboration ‘integrated histories of the Andaman Islands.’ She has served on the executive committee of the British Association of South Asian Studies, and was recently elected to the British Academy South Asia panel. In January 2011, she was appointed editor of the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History.

http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/historical/people/canderson/profile

Talking India Series

29 September

Vijay Mishra (Murdoch University)

Postcolonial Dialogues: The Texts of  Salman Rushdie

Thursday, 29 September
1:00 – 2:00 PM
UTS Building 10 (235 Jones St, Ultimo), Level 5, Room 580

RSVP essential: Cornelia.Betzler@uts.edu.au

This paper is part of  a  much larger project,  the aim of which   is to  critically annotate (with extended commentaries where necessary) any reference in Rushdie which may not be readily accessible to   a reasonably well-read common reader. The paper presents a number of examples of the kinds of annotations which inform the larger project. At the theoretical level the paper is  about the craft of annotation and, more specifically, about the relationship between authorial annotation and editorial annotation.  After a survey of the historical status of annotation – from its rejection by writers who felt that annotations dismembered or fragmented the text (Alexander Pope’s footnotes, via the fictitious persona of Martinus Scriblerus,  to The Dunciad Variorum is the classic example here) to its acceptance as a key formation of textual scholarship –  I  take up  two ideas which  constitute  the crux of my presentation. The first is the degree to which critical theorists annotate the works of others or   like Derrida  write  extended footnotes to key works which function as departure points for their own thinking. The second idea which I pursue with reference to my principal, primitive text, the Rushdie corpus,  involves  (after Traugott Lawler)  the relationship between  the impulse to say (which leads to self-annotation) and the ‘impulse to leave  unsaid’  (which requires the work of an annotator).  With Rushdie we find that   on the one hand he   constructs his text as self-annotation, and on the other fills it with unexplained allusions.  The paper examines these issues through  extensive citations from  Rushdie’s works

Vijay Mishra, PhD (ANU), DPhil (Oxford), FAHA, is Professor of English Literature and Australian Research Council  Professorial Fellow  at Murdoch University.  Author of books on the Gothic, Australian literature, devotional poetics, postcolonial and diaspora theory,  and Bollywood cinema,  his most recent book  What Was Multiculturalism?  is due out with  Melbourne University Press in  February 2012.

8 September

George Eby Mathew

India: The potential of a billion people with an innovation mindset

Thursday, 8 September
12:30 – 1:30 PM
UTS Building 10 (235 Jones St, Ultimo), Level 5, Room 273 (enter through room 219)

RSVP essential: Cornelia.Betzler@uts.edu.au

Abstract
For a country with visible dichotomies, the art and science of innovation as a mechanism for problem solving has seldom been applied for resolving India’s deep rooted developmental challenges. Innovation is not about new technology and products alone, as often understood, but it is also about social, incremental and inclusive innovation. Akin to democracy, Innovation has the potential to become the exclusive platform for grassroots development. George takes the view that gaps in employment, healthcare, education and infrastructure are themselves areas that innovation can resolve while leading to sources of wealth particularly in rural India. When millions of micro innovators and entrepreneurs align themselves towards development and growth, you have an innovation super power in the making. George makes a remarkable recommendation that presumptive prescriptions from wood panelled offices, luxury hotel conference rooms and political rallies, be replaced by providing people with platforms for innovation to solve their own problems and create wealth. India’s young people,  50 per cent of India’s population are under the age of 25, holds the key to unlocking this true potential.

About George Eby Mathew
George Eby Mathew is currently a Sr. Principal Business Consultant & Media Practice Leader with Infosys Australia & New Zealand based in Sydney. George is the Author of “India’s Innovation Blueprint: How the world’s largest democracy is becoming an Innovation Super Power (Woodhead Chandos (UK 2010),” a book that draws on his ongoing research and work on “national innovation systems”, started during his tenure as a researcher at Infosys’ Labs. George is also a former journalist with Indian Express who reported on India’s new economy in the 1990s.  Since then he has written extensively on technology, globalisation and innovation as a journalist, analyst and researcher. Prior, he was Head of IT management Research at Infosys’ Labs and an analyst for Gartner.

Free event. All welcome. Please circulate through your networks.

News: Forging New Academic Links between Australia and India

The Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) and UTS will establish the Rajiv Gandhi Visiting Chair of Contemporary Indian Studies, ICCR’s first chair in Australia. Read more.

Events:

2 August 2011

Professor David Hardiman (University of Warwick):

‘On writing a global history of nonviolent resistance’

Tuesday, 2 August

12:30 – 2:00 PM

UTS Building 10 (235 Jones St), Level 14, Room 201

RSVP is essential: Cornelia.Betzler@uts.edu.au

Click here for an abstract

15/16 August 2011

Conference

Other Cosmopolitanisms

Registration is free: ccs@uts.edu.au

Conveners:
Devleena Ghosh, Indian Ocean and South Asia Research Network: devleena.ghosh@uts.edu.au
James Goodman, Cosmopolitan Civil societies Research Centre: james.goodman@uts.edu.au

Please click here for more information.

16 August

Public Lecture

Dipesh Chakrabarty

Misunderstanding and Cosmopolitanism

Can unintended or strategic misunderstanding enable cosmopolitan practices? This lecture will speculate on this question using some examples from colonial India.

5.30 for 6.00 PM (join us for drinks and finger food from 5.30 PM as well as after the lecture)
UTS Building 10, 235 Jones St, Level 7, Aerial Function Centre, Harris Room
RSVP is essential: Cornelia.Betzler@uts.edu.au

27 October 2011

ISOARN Annual Lecture

Clare Andersen (Warwick University, UK)

14 April

Carole Douglas

‘Threads of Traditions – the textile arts of Kachchh, Gujarat’

Click here to read more about the talk.

28 March 2011

Ravi Sundaram
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi

‘The secret and the transparent digital media and everyday life in India’

Click here to read more about this event.

17 March

Amit Dasgupta (Consul General of India)

‘Globalization, Migration and the Dilemma of Identity: Ramblings of an Indian by Choice’

Click here to read more about Mr Dasgupta’s talk.

10 February 

Workshop

Post-colonialism, Religion, Gender and Ethics: Rethinking paradigms and boundaries

Click here to read more about the workshop and the speakers.

2 November

Seminar

Dr Laura Zimmer-Tamakoshi (PNG National Research Institute)

‘Natural or Unnatural Partners? The effects of inequality on Gende society and their relations with mining companies’

Tuesday, 2 November, 12.30 – 2 pm, UTS Bldg 10, 235 Jones St, Level 5, Room 425 (China Centre Meeting Room)

RSVP: Cornelia.Betzler@uts.edu.au by Wednesday, 27 October

This is a Brown Bag Lunch Seminar, please feel free to bring your own lunch.

Dr Laura Zimmer-Tamakoshi has been working as an anthropologist with the Gende people of Madang Province in Papua New Guinea since the early 1980s. The Gende have long been affected by mining, and Laura’s work focuses on interactions with mining companies (see abstract and bio attached). Laura will be in Sydney on Tues 2 November and is available to talk about her work over lunch.

11 November

Talking India Series

Roanna Gonsalves

Curry Munchers, Cricket, and Crime : A writer’s response to the violence against Indian students in Australia

Thursday, 11 November, 12.30 – 2 pm, UTS Building 5 (235 Jones St), Level 5, Room 580

RSVP: Cornelia.Betzler@uts.edu.au

About the presentation: Who would have thought that curry crimes could be solved with cricket? Curry Munchers, Cricket, and Crime takes a look at the violence against Indian students in Australia, through IPL-tinted glasses. It also explores how the recent spate of attacks has thrown up some unusual bedfellows. It presents some artistic responses to the violence, and poses the question, Where does the racism really lie when it comes to international students in Australia?

About Roanna Gonsalves: Roanna Gonsalves is an Indian Australian writer who once came to Australia as an international student. Her work has been performed/published across various media including Screen, Indian Express, PACT Youth Theatre, Eureka Street, ABC Radio National etc. Most recently she worked with Melbourne Workers Theatre on a verbatim theatre show about the violence against Indian students, Yet To Ascertain The Nature of The Crime, which plays in Melbourne from Nov 3 to 14, 2010.

19/20 November

IOSARN and the India Research Centre at UTS present:

Indian Cinemas – Oceanic Assemblages

Click here for the full program [PDF].

RSVP by 8 November: Cornelia.Betzler@uts.edu.au

12 October

Seminar

Professor Nakamura Kazue
Meji University, Tokyo, Japan

‘Em-Butterflying Japanese: A Comparative Reflection on Australia’s Oriental Fantasies’

Tuesday, 12 October, 12.30 to 2 pm, UTS Bldg 10 (235 Jones St), Level 5, Room 580

RSVP: Cornelia.Betzler@uts.edu.au

Abstract
Stereotyped images of Asians is a popular trope in Australian cultural history. Discourses of the ‘Yellow Peril’ in Australia include notions of promiscuity, fertility and effeminacy, all of which make Asians the site both of desire and repulsion. Asians are ‘brown rabbits’ invading white Australia with their fecundity and huge population numbers but they are also effeminate or ‘em-butterflied’. Interestingly, however, Japanese studies on the ‘Yellow Peril’ often underestimate, or even disregard, the role of Australia in this problematic. This seminar explores the tenacious fantasy of the ‘Asian’ other from a Japanese viewpoint, comparing them with indigenous images of the Japanese, and using amongst others, Charles H. Pearson’s famous National Life and Character (1893), Milca Eliade’s Maitreyi (1933) and Alison Tilson’s recent film Japanese Story (2003).

Profile
Nakamura Kazue specializes in the study of Postcolonial Literatures in English and comparative studies of literature and culture, with a special interest in ethnic and sexual minorities. She is the author of the collection of poetry Lazrus the Lizard as well as two collections of columns and essays. She has published short stories, translated Caribbean, Black British and other transcultural literatures in English. She is currently a visiting researcher at the Japanese Studies Centre at Monash University, Melbourne.