Asian Studies Centre

Dilip M. Menon speaks at the South Asia Seminar on 25 April 2017 Gandhi’s lauded text Hind Swaraj is born of and located within the 19th century crisis of liberal democracy and its resolutions of an intimate animosity towards the masses. Gandhi shares considerable terrain with Indian liberals writing in the late 19th and early 20th century; the text can be seen as articulating a certain kind of co...

Tarak Barkawi speaks at the South Asia Seminar on 7 March 2017 The shock of repeated defeats, massive expansion, and the pressures of operations on multiple fronts transformed the Indian Army in World War II. It had to commission ever greater numbers of Indians as officers. Recruitment of other ranks reached beyond the favoured Martial Races. In the field, officers bent and then broke the rigid et...

Christopher Hughes speaks at the China Centre on 3 March 2017 This presentation discusses how militarism was used to subordinate the modern idea of citizenship to social and political hierarchy in the transition from late Qing to early Republican China. The role of Japanese militarism in this process is analysed and evidence is drawn from a combination of elite politics and education policy and ma...

Shashi Tharoor speaks at St Antony's College on 1 March 2017 Notable both as a politician and a writer, Shashi Tharoor is currently serving his second term as Lok Sabha MP and as the Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs. Over the years he has held multiple roles including serving as Under-Secretary General of the United Nations under Kofi Annan’s leadership.

Ian Talbot speaks at the South Asia Seminar on 21 November 2017 The paper examines the roles of three influential heads of the British High Commission in Pakistan’s early post-independence history, Sir Gilbert Laithwaite (1951-4), Sir Alexander Symon (1954-61) and Sir Morrice James (1961-5). In particular it reveals the ways in which they undertook the important tasks of political reporting, media...

Kunal Sen speaks at the South Asia Seminar on 28 November 2017 India has historically performed badly in the World Bank’s Doing Business Indicators and a key objective of the current Indian government is about improving de jure rules around investment decisions so as to facilitate economic growth. Using a novel methodology, I show that de facto deals rather than de jure rules characterise the busi...

Avinash Paliwal speaks at the South Asia Seminar on 20 February 2018. The archetype of 'my enemy’s enemy is my friend', India's political and economic presence in Afghanistan is often viewed as a Machiavellian ploy aimed against Pakistan. The first of its kind, this book interrogates that simplistic yet powerful geopolitical narrative and asks what truly drives India's Afghanistan policy. Based on...

Sejuti Das Gupta speaks at the South Asia Seminar on 6 March 2018. With cultural nationalism and symbolic politics holding the media attention, the significant transformation of India’s political economy and its contribution to victory of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 2014 national elections alongside the changing nature of Indian state has not been adequately written on. The period since li...

Romila Thapar, Faisal Devji, Gautham Shiralagi and Adam Roberts speak at St Antony's College on 16 October 2017 An event held under the auspices of St Antony’s College and the Oxford University Research Project on Civil Resistance and Power Politics, to mark 70 years of Indian independence. Chair: Timothy Garton Ash

Parul Bhandari speaks at the South Asia Seminar on 27 February 2018 Parul Bhandari is currently a Visiting Scholar at St Edmund’s College and the Centre for South Asian Studies (CSAS), University of Cambridge, UK. She is also a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Centre of Social Sciences and Humanities (CSH), New Delhi, the South Asia research unit for the French National Centre for Research (CNRS). She...

Matthew J Walton, Ma Khin Mar Mar Kyi and Aye Thein speak at the Southeast Asia Seminar on 14 February 2018. Myanmar's formal religious authority, the State Sangha Maha Nayaka Committee (Ma Ha Na), was formed in the 1980s, as part of the military government's efforts to centralise religious control. Popular opinion sees Ma Ha Na as the tool of previous military governments. The contemporary 'Buddh...

Zoltan Biedermann and Alan Strathern speak at the South Asia Seminar on 6 February 2018. The presenters reflect on their proposal to draw Sri Lanka into the paradigm of global history through the recently published edited collection Sri Lanka at the Crossroads of History (UCL, 2017 - the full volume can be downloaded free of charge at tinyurl.com/SLCrossroads).

Raphael Susewind speaks at the South Asia Seminar on 13 February 2018 How can we understand 'tension', the experience of rigidity that often underpins systemic structures of domination, epistemic violence as well as physical aggression in South Asia? Following Zygmunt Bauman, I want to suggest that 'tension' is the outcome of an overzealous pursuit of moral and categorical clarity which alienates...

William Gould speaks at the South Asia Seminar on 21 February 2017 There are two broad trends in historical scholarship on partition: On the one hand, older work traced high politics, and the ‘end-game’ of Empire. On the other, more recent and extensive histories recover partition experiences, refugee politics and everyday violence. Uttar Pradesh and its urban centres were not in partition’s immed...

Sanal Mohan speaks at the South Asia Seminar Missionary Christianity in Kerala, contrary to the received notions in social sciences, offered a new language of internal deliberations to Dalits and provided them agency different from their position in the traditional caste society. The exclusive congregations of Dalits in fact worked as a ‘subaltern counter publics’ offering them new ideas and socia...

Matthew J Walton (St Antony's) in discussion with Gustaaf Houtman (Mandalay) In Buddhism, Politics and Political Thought in Myanmar, the first book to provide a broad overview of the ways in which Buddhist ideas have influenced political thinking and politics in Myanmar, Matthew Walton draws extensively on Burmese-language sources from the last 150 years to describe the 'moral universe' of contemp...

Sufian Jusoh speaks at the Southeast Asia Seminar. Myanmar or Burma has had its first fully contested general election in 2016, leading the formation of a democratically elected government which has taken steps to reform the governance of the country. The reform of the investment policy received a much-needed boost when the United States of America agreed to uplift economic sanctions imposed on My...

Tony K Stewart (Vanderbilt) give the 2017 Majewski Lecture. In 1287 b.s. (=1879/80 c.e.) a short Bangla work was published in Calcutta under the title of Iblichnamar punthi by the highly productive scholar Garibulla, who had composed the text about a century earlier. This somewhat unusual text is a colloquy between the Prophet Muhammad and the fallen Iblich (Ar. Iblis), also called Saytan. The rea...

Rochelle Almeida speaks at the South Asia Seminar on 24 January 2017. Despite the fact that India's Anglo-Indians migrated en masse following Independence in 1947 and have spent almost 70 years as a settler-community, they remain relatively unknown in the United Kingdom and rarely counted among South Asia’s diaspora. This seminar will address their trajectory from immigrants who faced hostility an...

A Panel Discussion with Professor Ruth Harris, Shrimati Kajal Sheth and Professor Sir Richard Sorabji. This event marks the UK-India Year of Culture, which will be celebrated in the Oxford Town Hall on 24 January with the award-winning Indian play, Yugpurush: Mahatma's Mahatma, on the relationship between Mahatma Gandhi and his mentor, Shrimad Rajchandra.

Yongjin Zhang speaks at St Antony's College on 8 November 2016

Salma Siddique speaks at the South Asia Seminar on 15 November 2016

Tarunabh Khaitan speaks at the South Asia Seminar on 17 January 2017

Myat The Thitsar speaks at the Southeast Asia Seminar on 9 November, 2016

Omar Abdullah (Former Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir) speaks on 'Kashmir, India and the Future' at St Antony's College, Oxford