The final years of the Sri Lankan civil war were transformed by a significant development in the technics of photography. In the mid-2000s, increasingly accessible compact digital cameras and mobile phones in the hands of an eager public rapidly supplanted film photography. Unrestrained by finite exposures or time-consuming and costly processing, hundreds of images could be immediately generated, viewed, modified, stored or transmitted globally by a single device.

The twentieth century was a period which saw debates on ecology, cytology, genetics and eugenics in the West develop in new and interesting ways both positive and negative to understand the position of humans within the natural world and ultimately leading to a non-racist science. This paper explores the history of these debates in the context of Britain and India, the scientific networks that emerged and the contribution of neglected colonial scientists an important new field in the history of science, one which has gone unexplored in the context of these discussions.

Suryakant Waghmore and Hugo Gorringe will discuss their recent edited volume on civility in India. Democracy and its success can very often be reduced to political institutions and procedures, but democracy has socio-cultural meanings and has always carried with it the possibility that the majority might tyrannize minorities. The vote for Brexit in Britain and the presidential election of Donald Trump in the USA arguably signify growing solidarity on racial and ethnic lines in these western democracies.

The years that immediately followed their partition offer many interesting insights into the shaping of the India- Pakistan dynamic. Although both countries went to war over Kashmir within a few months of their independence, there were also parallel processes of collaborative dialogue based on the requirements of state consolidation.

The decolonial turn in the academy is recent but pervasive. Scholarly manifestoes in many academic disciplines, ranging from ethnography to geology, have urged on the need to explore, and contest the impacts of colonialism in their respective fields. But what possibilities and challenges are revealed when decolonising insights are applied to rethink specific categories in animal history? In this talk, I address this question by focussing on mosquitoes in British India. In the process, I will elucidate three distinct historical processes: ‘invisible labour’, ‘dissent’ and ‘re-colonisation’.

Saturated with tropes of honour, nation and gender, military deaths are political instances that attach meaning to private grief to produce a public politics of service and sacrifice for the nation-state.

This talk explores the ambiguities surrounding Indian citizenship in Assam, Northeast India. The stigmatised category of the “suspected Bangladeshi”, a product of competing histories of land loss and migration, has emerged more recently from shifts in immigration regimes and electoral politics. Based on participant observation in two Foreigners Tribunals, I show how the police and the judiciary make suspicion, rather than legal certainty fundamental to the manufacturing of Indian citizenship.

This talk will discuss how a small-town Newspaper used lithographic technology to cast a significant slice of Urdu journalism conversation as distinctively Muslim. Discussing a chapter of the recently published book Print and the Urdu Public: Muslims, Newspapers, and Urban Life in Colonial India, the talk will discuss the development of the newspaper Madinah as an extension of networks of correspondence and kinship in North Indian qasbahs.

As Mughal imperial authority weakened by the late 1600s and the British colonial economy became paramount by the 1830s, new patrons and mobile professionals reshaped urban cultures and artistic genres across early modern India. In iterating exuberant and ephemeral atmospheres of their city of lakes, painters from Udaipur viewed the moods of places as open to adaptation, admiration, and assimilation.

This paper examines how the encounter of radical activism and peasant militancy reshaped economic and political relations—indeed, the forms and functions of informal and state institutions—in northwestern Pakistan. The 1970s Frontier peasant movement achieved lasting de facto land and tenancy reforms that were ultimately regularized by state intervention. I argue that both the de facto land reforms and the state intervention itself were consequences of the rising organizational (and armed) power of tenants and landless labourers under the radical Mazdoor Kisan Party.