Talk by P. Sainath (Founding Editor, People’s Archive of Rural India)

The 2022 celebrations around the 75th year of India’s Independence seemed devoid of any recall of who and what it was the Indian people fought against to win Freedom and Independence. Official websites dedicated to the subject tell young readers nothing about it. Nor was there any debate on who won India its Independence. A bunch of returning Oxbridge elites? Or, as Gandhi observed, ‘the people themselves’? India’s official website commemorating 75 years of Independence (Azadi ki Amrut Mahotsav) has many thousands of entries on what the government considers vital around that period. It has no single story on, by, or about, nor even a single photo or video of a living freedom fighter – and there are still some, as my book The Last Heroes (Penguin November 2022) would show you. No less importantly, the official site has nothing on the British Raj and its impact on Indians. Two vital questions, then, remain unanswered: what did British colonialism actually do to Indians? And secondly – the question my recent book deals with – who, really, were our freedom fighters? The book records the life stories of 15 very ordinary Indians – representative of tens of millions of others – and how they took on the British Raj. Farmers, labourers, cooks, couriers, homemakers, artisans, students, and others played astonishingly courageous roles without personal gain. They came from a diverse social spectrum: Dalits, Adivasis, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, OBCs, Brahmins, atheists… What motivated these freedom fighters? Why do they tell us that freedom and independence are two different things?

Magsaysay Prize -winner P. Sainath is an Indian journalist focusing on social and economic inequality, deprivation, and poverty, particularly in rural India. Despite receiving over 60 national and global awards for journalism, Sainath has also declined several – including the Padma Bhushan, as he believes “journalists should never accept prizes and rewards from the governments they cover and critique.” Sainath was McGraw Professor of Writing at Princeton University in the Fall of 2012 and has been conferred doctorates by three other Universities. In India, he has taught journalism for 37 years. His first book, Everybody Loves A Good Drought, was declared a Penguin Classic in 2013 and is in its 61st printing. His latest book, The Last Heroes: Foot Soldiers of Indian Freedom, is already in its 5th edition. A journalist since 1980, Sainath became a full-time rural reporter in 1993 and has since then spent, on average, around 270 days a year in India’s poorest regions, writing from there for India’s largest newspapers, including The Times of India and for The Hindu (of which he was Rural Editor for a decade). More recently, his path-breaking reporting placed India’s ongoing agrarian crisis and farmers’ suicides – over 400,000 in two decades since 1995 – on the national agenda. In 2014, Sainath launched the People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI), a unique online project on rural India, with its 833 million people speaking 780 living languages and a bewildering array of stories, occupations, arts, music, culture, and a lot more. In less than ten years, PARI has won 70 journalism awards, including every single major prize in that field in India.

Talk by Elora Shehabuddin (University of California, Berkeley )

Founded in 1984 with the goal of preparing for the third UN Women’s Conference in Nairobi the following year, DAWN (Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era) was the first “South-South” feminist network to challenge the racial and economic privilege inherent in hegemonic “Second Wave” white, western, middle-class feminism. It did so by drawing on the histories and lived experiences of women in the Global South and impoverished women and women of color in the Global North. This paper draws on interviews with and memoirs by some of the South Asian (and other) founding members of the group to offer a history of late-twentieth-century Global South feminist organizations that centers personal experience, political solidarity, and friendship across differences.

Elora Shehabuddin is Professor of Gender & Women's Studies and Global Studies, Director of Global Studies, and Director of the Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies at UC Berkeley. She received her AB in Social Studies from Harvard University and PhD in Politics from Princeton University. Her doctoral dissertation received the American Political Science Association’s 2002 Aaron Wildavsky Dissertation Award for best dissertation in Religion and Politics. She is the author of Sisters in the Mirror: A History of Muslim Women and the Global Politics of Feminism (University of California Press, 2021), Reshaping the Holy: Democracy, Development, and Muslim Women in Bangladesh (Columbia University Press, 2008), and Empowering Rural Women: The Impact of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh (Grameen Bank, 1992). She co-edited, with Ebru Kongar and Jennifer Olmsted, Gender, and Economics in Muslim Communities: Critical Feminist and Postcolonial Analyses (Routledge, 2018). She is associate editor of the Journal of Bangladesh Studies and the Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures and serves on the editorial board of a new Cambridge University Press book series titled “Muslim South Asia.” Her book Sisters in the Mirror was selected as a 2022 Choice Outstanding Academic Title by the American Library Association and awarded the 2023 Coomaraswamy Book Prize by the Association for Asian Studies.

Talk by Ayesha Matthan (History of Art, Cornell University)

This talk looks at a photographic construction of the working classes in Bombay/Mumbai/Bambai between the 1970s and 1990s by a specific range of photographers. It will situate these images at a time when the city was witness to the steady decline of the Communist stronghold among the working classes after the death of the Communist Party of India (CPI) leader Krishna Desai in Bombay, moving to embrace the Shiv Sena Party with its anti-migrant rhetoric, and liberalization and deindustrialization after the Great Textile Mill Strike of 1982.

*Title taken from Namdeo Dhasal’s eponymously titled poem (trans. Dilip Chitre from the Marathi)

Ayesha Matthan is a PhD candidate in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Studies at Cornell University. She has degrees in Literature in English, Journalism, and Visual Studies from St Stephen’s College, Delhi; Asian College of Journalism in Chennai; and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, respectively. She has worked with The Hindu as an arts journalist, The Alkazi Foundation for the Arts as a research scholar, and India Foundation for the Arts as a communications editor. Her PhD dissertation is tentatively titled “Looking for Bombay/Mumbai/Bambai: Photography, Identity, and the City, 1970s-1990s.” She also works now and then at the Johnson Museum as a Curatorial Assistant to preserve her sanity from the PhD madness.

Image: Sooni Taraporevala, “Streetside Services, Palmist”, Bombay 1977

Talk by Priyamvada Gopal (English, University of Cambridge )

Partially in light of its recent currency for Hindu majoritarianism and the rhetoric of Hindutva, this talk will raise questions about the project of ‘decolonization’ in India through the work of Bhimrao Ambedkar. His famous polemic, What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables, written on the cusp of independence, raises questions relevant to our understanding of that period and present-day concerns. Ambedkar argues that the primary vehicle of anticolonialism, its ‘imagined community’ of the Indian nation, was, from the outset, compromised by a stratified and deep-rooted bedrock of exploitation, marginalization, and exclusion. What implications do the reality Ambedkar outlines have for how we think about decolonization in and of India? This paper argues that Ambedkar’s thought about what he saw as the ‘Hindu Raj’ following the British Raj is a vital contribution and corrective to regnant theories of decolonization not just because it offered a necessary challenge to caste Hindu anticolonialism but as an examination in itself, of what liberation is and what an actual end to colonialism might look like beyond a transfer of power. A strong engagement with Ambedkar’s critique has the potential to change our understanding of decolonization very profoundly.

Priyamvada Gopal was born in New Delhi, India, Schooling in Colombo, Sri Lanka; Thimpu, Bhutan; Delhi, India; and Vienna, Austria. Gopal’s subsequent education was at Delhi University, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Purdue University (USA), and Cornell University (USA, PhD 2000). Currently, Gopal is a professor of postcolonial studies at the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, and a professorial fellow at Churchill College. Her interests are in the literature, politics, and cultures of empire, colonialism, and decolonization. Some of her related interests are in the novel, South Asian literature, and postcolonial cultures. Gopal’s published work includes Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence (Routledge, 2005), After Iraq: Reframing Postcolonial Studies (Special issue of New Formations co-edited with Neil Lazarus), The Indian English Novel: Nation, History and Narration (Oxford University Press, 2009) and, most recently, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent (Verso, 2019) which was shortlisted for the British Academy Prize for Global Cultural Understanding and the Bread and Roses Prize. My writing has also appeared in The Hindu, Outlook India, India Today, The Independent, Prospect Magazine, The New Statesman, The Guardian, Al-Jazeera English (AJE) and The Nation (USA). I’ve contributed occasionally to the BBC’s Start the Week and Newsnight and programs on NDTV-India, Al-Jazeera, National Public Radio, and Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Talk by Zehra Hashmi (History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania )

This talk examines how and why Pakistan’s national biometric-based identification regime came to use an individual’s blood relations to construct and track uniquely identified individuals. Through the concept of datafied kinship, it proposes that the uses of kin networks in Pakistan’s identity database, as information, can reconfigure our understanding of contemporary identification practices at large: individual identity is generated and tracked through relatedness, not unique bodily characteristics, or biometrics alone. To demonstrate this, it first examines how the database design works to construct identity through kin, and specifically how it excludes individuals on the basis of their kin through technological categories such as that of the “family intruder.” Second, it shows how this mode of individual identification differs and departs from the longstanding classificatory schemas that were so foundational to taxonomizing identity along the lines of caste, tribe, and religion in South Asia. It traces this diverging logic—between classification and individuation—to the emergence of individuating technologies in 1970s Pakistan, in the aftermath of the civil war between East Pakistan and West Pakistan, and during the escalating Cold War in the region. In so doing, it illustrates how the political stakes of Pakistan’s identification regime lie not only in its new possibilities for surveillance, a function of its individuating and tracking technology, or its classificatory refusal, but their interconnections.

Zehra Hashmi is an assistant professor in the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. She is an anthropologist and historian who works on identification technologies in South Asia. Her research explores the everyday workings of securitization and surveillance in Pakistan through the intersection of identification, migration, kinship, and postcolonial and colonial governance. She received her PhD from the Interdepartmental Program in Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan.

A free public lecture presented by Dr. Saurabh Mehta, Cornell’s Janet and Gordon Lankton Professor, Nutritional Sciences

In this fascinating public talk, Dr.Mehta will compare and contrast "one-size-fits-all” approaches for optimizing population nutrition and health with a newer concept: precision nutrition. He’ll also discuss research gaps and needs for implementing precision nutrition-based approaches with a focus on technology and artificial intelligence.

Warren Hall is located on the Ag Quad near Mann Library. The physical address is 137 Reservoir Ave.

Free parking on campus after 5 p.m.