History of Science in South Asia

S. R. Sarma recently sent me an announcement for a new journal, History of Science in South Asia, which he describes as a publication "for the history of all forms of scientific thought and action, ancient and modern, in all regions of South Asia." The editorial board is seeking submissions, read the focus and scope and information for authors sections for more details.

Writing and the Inscription of Power in South Asia

Saturday, April 6
9:30am-5:30pm
229 Carr Bldg
Duke University

This workshop draws on a range of disciplines (history, anthropology and literature) to explore questions of how writing literally under-wrote projects of cultural dominance and resistance in this key region of the world.  Beyond the activity of mere inscription, our workshop focuses historically on the material and symbolic ways writing served to establish and maintain cultural forms of power.  We also seek to explore questions about how writing was a strategy for redefining and transforming the historical terrain on which people in South Asia constructed and organized their lives. Our various participants bring together a mixture of language varieties (classical and vernacular) in various scripts and genres to demonstrate how writing in different political and social constituencies impacted cultural life in South Asia, especially in regions beyond the Hindi heartland. The workshop thus has the overall goal of advancing a more general and comparative understanding of the relationship between language, culture and power in South Asia.

(Keynote by Nile Green — Friday, April 5)

Tamil Nadu State Archives

In a recent issue of Sagar: A South Asian Research Journal, Sundar Vadlamudi, Department of History, University of Texas at Austin, provides an informative overview of the Tamil Nadu State Archives.

Archive of Indian Music

Good news for musicologists and historians of sound comes to us via Abhijit Bhattacharya at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. The Archive of Indian Music (AIM) is now online. Curated by Vikram Sampath and colleagues, the online collection includes 600+ samples (taken largely from 78 RPM gramaphone shellacs) representing the work of about 180 artists. As I type this, I am listening (again) to Gandhiji read aloud his article "On God." Judging by the number of hits for that particular page, I am not the only one who went directly to that file. I selected Bina Chaudury's "Ek jhalak dekha kidkhi se" and now I might have a new favorite song and artist.

A caveat: the list of artists is alphabetized by first name, so if you are looking for a clip based on the last name, you may have difficulty finding it by browsing only. The ctrl-F search is your friend.

National Archives of India (Review)

Derek L. Elliott has reviewed the National Archives of India for the Dissertation Reviews website. I think he found the experience slightly more comfortable than I did, but I also think that gender matters at the NAI, regardless of what others would tell you. Then again, I made a lot of research progress there despite the obstacles, plus it really made me appreciate the archives in Bikaner and Bhopal. Elliott's review can be found at http://dissertationreviews.org/archives/1673.

Hal Gould's Corner

From the website:

"Since 1991, I have been a Visiting Professor of South Asian Studies in the Center for South Asian Studies at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Prior to this, from 1968 to 1991, I was Professor of Anthropology and South Asian Studies at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana; and for a time Director of Asian Studies at this institution. My career in South Asian Studies began as a Fulbright Student to Lucknow University in 1954-55 where, under the tutelage of Professor D N. Majumdar, I conducted anthropological field work in village communities in Faizabad district, not far from the holy city of Ayodhya. Following completion of my doctorate, at Washington University of St. Louis, in 1959, my research and my life have taken me to every corner of India. After a while, the focus of my scholarship shifted to the study of grass-roots political behavior plus commentary and analysis (see my list of publications) on macro-political trends in the South Asian region; in these capacities over the years I have crossed paths with a wide spectrum of Indian politicians and scholars at every level of South Asian society, including four Indian prime ministers. My wife, Ketayun, is a native-born Indian of Parsi-Zoroastrian descent, a research scholar in her own right, who has published widely in the Social Work field and has over the years held numerous positions in academia."

Visit Hal Gould's Corner: South Asia Past, Present and the World

National Archives of India

I've been meaning to come back and update my previous post on the National Archives of India. What I've decided to is pull some links out the discussion originally conducted on the H-Asia listserv since the H-Net search function can be tricky.

The previous post contained a link to Part Two of a four-part series by Dinyar Patel about the state of Indian archives and libraries. I recommend going back to Part One, "In India, History Literally Rots Away." Part Three is "India's Archives: How Did Things Get This Bad?" Part Four is "Parsis, Once India's Curators, Now Shrug as History Rots." Patel has also contributed an opinion piece along the same lines to The Hindu, called "Our Past Is Being Moth-Eaten."

Mushirul Hasan, Directory General of the NAI, features in Patel's assessment of the archive. You can find an interview with Mr. Hasan, "National Archives can't be run as a typical government office," in the The Times of India.

As you might guess, while Patel's descriptions of the current state of Indian archives were accurate, there was some dissension and discussion about his articles. Quite rightly, some scholars objected to Patel's approach: it's very easy to criticize, very difficult to remedy. Many recognize the problem, few provide workable solutions to to it. There's also a question of (Orientalist) exteriority--who has the right to speak for the Indian archive? Foreign scholars? Indian scholars? What is to be gained by this intense focus on everything that's wrong with or lamentable about India's archives?

Mr. David Lunn pointed out that in addition to the negative attention, perhaps we should recognize some of the successful digitisation projects coming out of India. He mentioned the Digital Library of India, which I use quite frequently to look at older material (right now, books from 1904-1910). I've mentioned the Archives of India Labour here; I've also noticed that the website for the National Film Archive of India seems to be updated regularly.

The application deadline has passed, but Dr. Rashmi Sawhney pointed out that the India Foundation for the Arts was already directing resources toward fixing some of the highlighted problems by funding Archival Fellowships. What I particularly liked about the call for applications was that the materials could be submitted in any Indian language (including English). I hope this will direct attention to the preservation/accessibility of resources in Indian languages.