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About Tana Trivedi
About Tana Trivedi
Dr. Tana Trivedi is a lecturer at the Amrut Mody School of Management and currently at the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) at the University of Edinburgh as a CSMCH-IASH. Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow in Modern and Contemporary History. The six-month postdoctoral fellowship (August 2022-February 2023) will facilitate her ongoing research on the Princely States of Kathiawad to engage in an active archival interpretation that will construct a narrative of the post-colonial Indian nation-state from the perspective of the Princely States.
She is also an Academic Advisor for the Pattani Archives, an ongoing project in archiving, digitizing, and preserving the family archives of the erstwhile diwan of Bhavnagar State. As a part of the project, her research includes studying monthly journals from the region and chronicling the administrative and political reforms in the princely states, especially in the early twentieth century. This project contributes significantly to the existing knowledge on regional identity politics and formation of a nation around the time of Indian independence.
About Research:
About Research:
Project Title: The Counterfactual Republic: Towards revisiting the “Deshi Rajyas” of Kathiawad
This project seeks to revisit the existing historical Gujarati journals and look anew at the series of negotiations that took place within the princely nation-states of Kathiawad-Saurashtra, a politically, socially, and culturally significant region of the Indian subcontinent. The early twentieth century offered multiple possibilities of imagining a post-colonial India, and all the Princely States of India were evidently concerned about their own future within a larger republic.
"The objective of my research project is to examine the existing archives of the princely states of Kathiawad/Saurashtra from the early 20th century, especially focussing on the political discussions chronicled in the vernacular journal, “Deshi Rajya”.
A project on cultural and social decolonization involves a radical dismantling of the prevailing euro-centric historical discourses, to make way for inclusive and diverse voices from different corners of the world. These voices must be revived from their secondary status and be examined as crucial testimonies of historical debates that shaped the ethos of the region. The endeavour, therefore, is not a literal translation of the Gujarati vernacular journals such as the “Deshi Rajya” into English rather, it is to facilitate a reading that stems from a personal response to the non-inclusivity of Gujarati historical accounts in the larger story of a nation. An attempt at creatively interpreting bi-lingual historiography, offers a window to a new world of nation building exercises that are not included in conventional colonial discourses.
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