The Abstracts for the Colloquium can be found down below:

Panel 1: Poetry, Poetics and Labour (2-3:15 PM)

Reading Azimabad: a Study of Urdu Literary Culture in Patna (c.1870-1930)

Ufaque Pariker

One would often come across connoisseurs of Urdu lamenting the ‘decline’ of the language. Decline in the number of newspapers, magazines and decrease in the number of subscribers gave the impression of dwindling status of Urdu in India.

The association of Urdu with Muslims and the communalization of the language also play a crucial role in exacerbating the fear of loss of the language and the subsequent loss of identity. However, a careful look at the ‘public culture’ of Urdu would reveal a different story. Public gatherings and online web portal managed by the Rekhta organization along with other similar websites and publications that publishes Urdu poetry and novels in Devnagri and Roman scripts suggest that an enthusiastic audience of Urdu literature still exists. It can be argued that the language has not disappeared but its medium and audience has changed.

The change in what has been conventionally and predominantly understood as ‘Urdu’ has evoked fear among a section who believes that this change is an insidious attempt to ultimately efface Urdu language and literature from the subcontinent. Some critics argue that the change in the name from ‘Urdu’ to ‘Hindustani’ to ‘Rekhta’, the script, the online medium and widening the reach of ‘Urdu’ fundamentally redefines ‘Urdu’ beyond recognition. The anxiety regarding the boundaries of language is not a new phenomenon. Urdu poets since the nineteenth century have claimed that it was an ‘urban’ and an aristocratic language and not the language of ‘lowly’ and ganwar (rural according to them) population.

The Juridicality of Labour in India 1947-80

Megha Sharma

Scholars of Indian history view the year 1947 as a watershed moment. Literature dealing with this year focuses on the formulation and functioning of the new national government. Along with the building of an independent government, the partition of the country was also studied extensively to understand the histories of migration, violence and movement of people across borders. Within these multiple narratives, an aspect that remains under-researched is the role of labour in the task of nation-building. With the end of the Second World War, there was an influx of soldiers creating problems of unemployment. There was also distress among the working-class due to the increased demands for production during the war years.

From 1947, the Indian economy underwent massive transformations to accommodate the needs for increased production. Economic expansion became the primary goal of early post-independence years. The goal of maintaining conditions of production, however, was weighed down by workers’ expectations of the newly formed independent government. With a national government, there was hope among the workers for improvement in their conditions of labour. Workers’ persistent resistance forced the government to deploy ways of avoiding strikes and sustaining production levels in the economy. The need to regulate labour relations became the government’s primary concern.

In this paper, I will deal with various experiments conducted to channel the collective energy of the workers towards increasing production. It will also address the absences in the existing scholarly literature on the aspect of labour relations in the post-independence years. There were attempts to define, fix and limit the role/participation of labour. One such experiment was the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947, which introduced industrial tribunals and labour courts for managing labour disputes. The IDA introduced adjudication by setting up permanent machinery for settling disputes which could curb increasing strikes among workers.

These courts set out to channel workers’ energy towards a predefined goal of peaceful industrial relations, to promote industrial peace and increase industrial production. A legislative intervention intended to facilitate a content and ‘happy labour force’, which it was hoped would result in healthy labour relations. With this hope, the government also introduced voluntary schemes to popularize the goals of the IDA among the workers. The government’s efforts from above were countered with workers’ aspirations, and resistance to the mechanisms proposed for conflict resolution. Mapping these developments will contribute to our understanding of how a ‘national’ labour policy was formed, and how the role of labour was conceptualized and implemented in the mission of industrialization.

I will bring out the tensions, breaks, continuities and challenges to policies, and measures aimed at establishing new mechanisms for conciliation of labour conflicts in post-independence decades. In my paper, I show how by moving beyond a teleological approach, we can know of heterogeneities in experiments within Indian labour relations.

Panel 2: Technology and Planning (3:45-5PM)

Currents of Change: A History of Electricity in India, circa.1900-1984

Siddharta C. Mukherjee

My thesis asks: when and how did electricity change every day life in India? I answer this by tracing the history of generation of electricity and its impact on lighting, transportation, industrialization and everyday appliances. The project began in 1900 as the major cities like Calcutta, Delhi, Bombay, and Bangalore started producing power on a large scale from the turn of the century. It proceeds by asking: Which were the first places to be electrified in India? What reactions did electric lights evoke? What were the expectation from and the objections to electric illumination? When did everyday electrical appliances begin to be used in India? When and how did factories begin to use electrical machineries? How did it impact production? When and why did electricity become the preferred energy in the field of illumination, industrialization and transportation? How and when did the transition from battery based power supply to large power stations take place? How did electrical infrastructure contribute to the process of urbanization? And finally, how did the breakdowns of electric infrastructure impact city lives in India? Navigating from colonial to postcolonial India with such questions, the thesis ends its enquiry by exploring the underground transportation systems in India.

I have already established the chronology of electric lights, fans, refrigerators and air-conditioners in India- a timeline that is missing from the global historiography of technology. In so doing, I have explored the expectations from and the opposition to the above electrical appliances in their early days. For example, the colonial engineers and bureaucrats expected that electric lights would help to establish the superiority of British rule. But the technology was also feared because apparently the glow from the lights could lead to freckles on the skin. The chapter on transport shows why there was a need to electrify certain transportation systems in the first place. What I have shown is how technology and transport became sites through which the state asserted its power bypassing the engineers. Often, infrastructures create conditions which lie outside the imagination of their designers. Such conditions are explored in the chapter on lighting, transport and industries where I deal with infrastructure breakdowns.

The chapter on power generation explores how in the nineteenth century batteries remained the prime source of electrical energy in India. It goes on to show how the rivers and coal mines were surveyed, mapped and then used for producing electricity in the twentieth century. In doing so it reveals how electrical networks remained vulnerable to breakdowns due to natural (storm, rainfall), human (theft) and animal (wires disrupted by birds and dogs) interventions. The history of electricity in India is an extremely under-researched area. There are works that deal with electrification of Calcutta and Delhi. How the technology developed on an all India basis still remains unexplored. My project will fill this gap. My doctoral research has taken me to the National Archives of India and the state archives in Chennai, Chandigarh, Bangalore, Mysore, Calcutta, and Bombay. It has helped me to look at different cities in a comparative perspective thereby helping me to draw the outlines of a pan-Indian history of electrical energy. I wish to develop this and contribute to the growing body of scholarship in South Asian energy history.

The State and New Cinema in Contemporary India, 1975-97

Sudha Tiwari

In this colloquium, I will present a broad view of my PhD thesis, which was submitted in December 2019. My thesis looked at the relationship between state formative practices in the way that they articulate themselves as cultural policy. It looked at the question of how culture is policy and policy is culture. The thesis undertook an institutional history of the Film Finance Corporation (FFC) and the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC), and their patronage of the New Cinema in India, from the 1960s to the 1990s. It drew majorly from Justin Lewis and Toby Miller’s work on the Critical Cultural Policy (2003), and tried to situate the FFC/NFDC and New Cinema movement within similar lines.

The primary aim was to analyse the government policies, mainly from 1975 to 1997, to understand the shaping of the twoCorporations and New Cinema. While it cannot be established with certainty that the NewCinema movement was an indirect consequence of the state's financing of the FFC/NFDC, it certainly was not an accident. The filmmakers and the urban audience desired a change. It gets clear from this study that the two Corporations were instrumental in giving untried directors and actors a chance, and remained the chief patron of New Indian Cinema till the mid-1990s. The Corporation’s (both FFC/NFDC) role has remained undocumented so far in published works on Indian film history and New Indian Cinema. The New Indian Cinema itself has not been studied well. My work has tried to bring into focus an extraordinary but neglected cultural moment in Indian film history and in the history of contemporary India. It has established that a history of FFC/NFDC, as a department under the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting (MIB), Government of India, is an important aspect of the history of the Indian state.

Panel 3: Colonialism and Circulation (2-3:15 PM)

The Composition and Circulation of Afgan Narratives in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Rajoshree Ghosh

Any attempt at reconstructing the history of Afghan rule in medieval India is hindered by a unique limitation- the absence of contemporary sources, official or otherwise. Therefore our first impression of the Afghans remains solely dependent on texts written by those who had harboured strong prejudices against them, the Turks and the early Mughals. While the former noted them to be culturally repulsive and feared their strange physical appearance, Babur was shocked at their ignorance of basic court etiquettes, and the Akbar-nama made every possible effort to delegitimize Sher Shah’s success against Humayun. Assuming that those who began to write on the rise and rule of the Lodis and Surs, in the last quarter of the sixteenth century did not have access to any alternate narratives either, the possibility of them completely overlooking such strong representations remains difficult. They were thus confronted with the challenge to address these pre-existing concerns, and turn them in favour of the Afghans.

This paper focuses on two texts- the Waqiat-i Mushtaqi and the Tarikh-i Sher Shahi, to understand the strategies they were employed to redefine the Afghan identity. With the former focusing on the Lodis and the later on Sher Shah, each of the texts undertook the task of addressing a different set of prejudices, one stemming from the idea of equating power with a specific set of cultural practices and the other from the Mughal effort to cover up their failure against Sher Shah. The narratives thus ushered in a new Afghan identity, that empowered them to rival their Turkish and Mughal counterparts, and carve a place for themselves in the political landscape of medieval India.

A Sleight of Hand: Counterfeiting Money in Colonial India

Sukhalata Sen

This thesis is a study of counterfeiting of the Indian rupee in India and abroad between 1835 and 1931. Counterfeiting is usually seen as a criminal offence and remains a

historiographical blind spot in the studies on Indian currency. My thesis locates counterfeiting as a bridge between legal and economic histories. It views counterfeiting as more than an aberrant behaviour. Counterfeiting had to be framed as a ‘crime’ by the colonial state as it threatened the grandiose plans of an Empire. Broadly, this thesis locates the counterfeiting between the universal and the particular. At one level there was a fantasy of universality of money and at another level, this fantasy was disrupted by the particularity of the colonial situation. This thesis plucks out these moments of tension to analyse the ramifications of a counterfeiting act on the monetary governance of colonial India.

For counterfeit money was just another object which produced a market of its own, had buyers who paid genuine money in exchange for these ‘duds’ and suppliers who fetched the goods from the makers and took them to the sellers. The focus in this thesis turns to the material history of money-- its transition from the coin to the paper note and the regulation of monetary habits of the people as a deterrent to counterfeiting. It locates those brief moments in the life of the rupee, as the colonial state was forced to look hard at the object under circulation and reappraise the thing passed off as money. Consequently, the elusive figure of the counterfeiter becomes the centrepiece of this thesis. It is at these moments of encounter with the colonial state that the silhouette of my protagonists finds form. They are wrenched from their ordinary, invisible lives and made to stand before the reprimanding eye of the colonial state.

Panel 4: Population, Animal, Policy (3:45-5 PM)

Animal ‘Welfare’, State Regulations and Question of Cruelty, c.1900 – 1940s

Heeral Chhabra

This research project seeks to explore animal-human relationships in colonial (urban) India of the 19th and 20th century through the prism of law. With focus on domesticated and working animals encountered in everyday lives, the attempt is to investigate how their legal, social, economic identities got reconfigured through the emerging ‘animal welfare’ discourse in colonial India. In order to do so, two sets of legislative measures have been explored. First set includes those which were promulgated for animal ‘welfare’ and protection from ‘cruelty’; and second pertains to measures which sought to regulate animal presence, labour, and their use (and abuse). This paper lays emphasis on the street dogs in colonial India to delineate the complexities involved in regulating their very presence.

Given the background of ‘rabies scare’, rising concerns of hygiene and exclusive urban sensibilities in the 19th and 20th centuries, the very presence of street dogs was projected as a ‘nuisance’ and a source of danger in Britain. These opinions (and related methods of control) eventually found extension into the colonies as well, and were most clearly reflected in the orders for muzzling and destruction of stray dogs.

I aim to analyse related official discussions and implementation to delineate its implication for the street dogs in colonial India. Through such an enquiry I aim to highlight – the importance of animals as a legal category (which is still evolving); the need to dissect the implication of ‘humane’ attitude towards animals ; to question colonial epistemic constructs pertaining to animals in order to unveil their inherent violence; and lastly, to view animals as active members of colonial global networks. The broader aim of this research is not merely to highlight the importance of animals in history but to view them as significant historical beings in the making of the past.

Family Planning Policy of India

Saurabh Vatsa

A Social History. The idea that India is an over populated country seems to be commonplace to us now. From the environmental degradation to the problem of gruelling poverty manifested in myriad ways to the current spectre of unemployment; population has been held to be the culprit behind everything that seems to be holding the country back. In a poignant way several members of the ruling party have recently, pointed to the necessity of a population control bill to bring back a system of incentives and disincentives that would control the rate of population growth. However this perspective of blaming the population for crises-imagined and real has an old history. In fact there is a construction of the population problem that happens over a five decade period in the beginning of the 20th century. This construction assumes a naturalised matter of fact place in the 1950s as a newly independent state grapples with the challenges of becoming a modern nation. India became the first country in the world to launch a Family Planning Program in 1951. From a modest budget and humble beginnings, the program went on to become the most notorious government sponsored population limitation program during the emergency. That a program which started with the trappings of social welfare degenerated in a matter of two decades into one of naked coercion with penal consequences for those who did not follow the official policy of two child norm is indeed a fascinating development.

The emergency period saw the men of north India being rounded up in dingy medical centres where they were sterilised under the stick of force or the carrots of radio transistors and petty cash. There were deaths and untold agony as a result of the policy of forced sterilisations. Emergency is often seen as an isolated incident on an otherwise benign program of social welfare. However in the decades before the emergency coercion was gradually built into the family planning program. This is manifested in how the family planning program gradually eroded the choices of contraceptives available to couples who were willing to plan their families. By focussing on sterilisation which continues to have a disproportionate share in the ambit of services provided in a context of penalising the people who fail to have a certain number of children makes it compulsory for couples to undergo sterilisation.

The presentation will seek to address some of these themes and the various actors- international birth control advocates, the institutions and governments led by the United States and the Congress government in India- which gave a peculiar character to the Family Planning Program in India. It is an attempt to humanise a program that is focussed too much on the numbing insensitivity of data.