Within British imperial thought, the transfer of sovereign power to India and subsequently other former colonies was not perceived as the final end of British imperialism, but simply its latest, evolved iteration in the form of the Commonwealth of Nations, which absorbed the sources of and arguments for British imperial power, both real and imagined, in the postwar decades. This talk explores the relationships between British imperial thought and British nationality after 1947.

‘I have some Garos as my tenants. Though otherwise very obedient and docile, they refused to tell me their dreams.’ Tarun Chandra Sinha, ‘Dreams of the Garos’

‘When you have cut down all the trees and mined all the mountains, when you have analysed all your dreams, there will be nothing left for you to break. The Earth then will be a rubbish dump, a vast trans body dismembered and devoured. The bodies of the colonists and your bodies, esteemed psychoanalysts, will be buried with the trans organs you have taken from us.’ Paul Preciado, ‘Can the Monster Speak’

Rohit De is an Associate Professor of History at Yale University and an Associate Research Scholar at Yale Law School. A lawyer and a historian of South Asia and the common law world, he is the author of A People’s Constitution: Law and Everyday Life in the Indian Republic (Princeton University Press, 2018). He is currently working on two book projects.

This lecture returns to themes in the history of British imperial finance via approaches from the new interdisciplinary history of capitalism. Informed by attention to historical processes of economization as well as to theorizing contemporary modes of financial profit and their social imaginaries, recent approaches have begun to examine infrastructures—legal, governmental, digital, material—of securitization and speculation, arguably the dominant mode of financial capitalism today.

The churning that was happening in Indian historiography in the 1980s-90s came from multiple directions, including a new and reinvigorated feminist historiography. The latter’s ambition was never just to draw attention to women and gender, but what this attention did to the field as a whole: raising new questions and reframing existing ones. Looking back at several decades of feminist historiographical interventions, I believe their results have been mixed. My talk will attempt to take stock of this trajectory with special attention to histories of politics and the political.

The rise of Hindu nationalism – or Hindutva – is often regarded as the apotheosis of religious ethno-nationalism in India. Adherents of Hindutva insist that theirs is a secular ideology but this seemingly paradoxical claim is poorly understood beyond a crude majoritarian calculus. In focussing on the architect of Hindutva, V. D. Savarkar, this paper reconstructs his political thought to show that secular ideas of glory and humiliation were foundational to his understanding of how and why Hindu-ness ought to be actualised as a sovereign political category.

Accomplished populists are researched from distant quarters, long after they turned populists. Yet, populism—the attempt to represent the people through being the people—is not an overnight decision; it results from a gradual self-fashioning welded to the political trajectory of their bearer. This contribution proposes to explore populism diachronically as a political career. It builds on a 7-year ethnography of Indian student activism gravitating around the figure of Govind, a secular left student leader turned politician in North India during the 2019 parliamentary elections.

Dipesh Chakrabarty is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor in History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College, at University of Chicago. He is also the Faculty Director, University of Chicago Center in Delhi (2018-2021), a faculty fellow of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory (2004-present), an associate of the Department of English, and by courtesy, a faculty member in the Law School.

This talk focuses on colonial statues in the British empire that were replicas. Through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, replicas worked to represent art, antiquities, and history for those who might not travel to see the putatively "real" statue. From the Lincoln statue in Parliament Square to the statue of John Lawrence on Waterloo Place, doubles helped to mark the empire's reach in Britain and abroad.

In this talk, I will offer some reflections on what it has meant for me as a professional academic trained in the putative secular discipline of history to write over the past couple decades about a series of modern goddesses of modern India who have succeeded in capturing my imagination, in disturbing the terms of my engagement with official documentary archives, in troubling the text-saturated categories of my analysis, and in redirecting my work along new paths permeated by the power of the image.