Talk by Devika Singh Shekhewat

'Axom Deshor Bagisare Sowali' attempts to trace the history and memory of the migration of tea plantation workers in Assam through music. The session would focus on Folk songs and music of plantation communities of Assam and engage with Jhumur songs as oral histories of various communities and tribes brought to Assam by the colonial project of growing tea. The talk engages with the memory of indenture among tea plantation workers and places the workers' role in shaping the history and culture seen in folk songs and music. The history of plantations in Assam has often been told through the colonial archives; the talk attempts to shift the conversation by exploring how memory, history, and identity are kept alive through Jhumur music, songs, and oral histories, which live as testimonies of the lives of tea plantation workers of Assam. The talk also traces the gendered, cultural, social, and economic politics in the migration history, which produced the fractured positionality of women tea plantation workers in Assam. Jhumur songs hold an important place in history as an oral tradition that tells the story of a community that has been long forgotten and sidelined.

Devika Singh Shekhawat is a writer, educator, and researcher from India. Her research interests lie at the intersection of gender and labor studies, public health, migration studies, and developmental issues. She is currently a joint Visiting Fulbright Fellow at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations and the South Asia Program at Cornell University. Her research explores how health and labor operate in the tea plantations of Assam. Her work engages with the nature of work, the production process that affects the health of the worker, and the conditions for ailments and diseases created for the worker within the plantation economy. She has written on the history and memory of indenture in tea plantations in Assam and published her work on the Ecological Crisis of Shrimp Aquaculture and discourses of migration and infiltration in Coastal Odisha. Devika has been a part of multiple projects that study the rural public healthcare infrastructure, ecological conservation, and labor relations in northeast India. She completed her Masters in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and her undergraduate studies in History and Political Science from St. Stephens College, University of Delhi. Devika is a current PhD research scholar at Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University, New Delhi.

The Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies funds international graduate student research!

Research travel grants provide international travel support for graduate and professional students to conduct short-term research or fieldwork outside the United States. Global PhD Research Awards fund fieldwork for 9 to 12 months of dissertation research.

Contact einaudi_center@einaudi.cornell.edu for more information.

Register for the information session.

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The Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies hosts info sessions for graduate and for undergraduate students to learn more about funding opportunities, international travel, research, and internships. View the full calendar of fall semester sessions.

Two of Latin America’s most forceful dissident voices will explore the power and limits of fiction and other forms of creative expression in a public online conversation organized by Ithaca City of Asylum and co-hosted by the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program (LACS).

Sergio Ramírez Mercado (born 1942) is Nicaragua’s best-known living writer. He has produced novels, short stories, and journalism and has won many international awards, including the Cervantes Prize, the highest honor in the world of Spanish literature. He was also a key figure in the 1979 revolution that toppled the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza Debayle. He served as vice president under the Sandinista government from 1985 to 1990 before splitting with the group and becoming a leading voice of opposition from the left. He was forced into exile in 2021 and was stripped of his citizenship in February 2023. He will be joining from Spain, where he now lives.

Ramírez will be joined in conversation by Pedro X. Molina, an internationally acclaimed political cartoonist who fled Nicaragua in 2018 and settled in Ithaca with the help of Ithaca City of Asylum. Molina has won a host of prestigious awards for his cartooning and his promotion of human rights, including the 2023 Vaclav Havel Award for Creative Dissent. He continues to contribute six cartoons and one strip per week to the online Nicaraguan news outlet Confidencial, and his work is published regularly in the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and many other publications. He was an Artist Protection Fund fellow in residence at LACS.

Philip Lorenz, an associate professor of literature at Cornell, will moderate. The event is made possible by funds from the Statewide Community Regrants program from the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of the office of the Governor and NYS Legislature, and from Tompkins County, administered by the Community Arts Partnership of Tompkins County.