Centre For Inter-Asian Research

🏛Indian Ocean and Beyond | Friday, 2 May 2025 | 6 pm IST | Zoom

📷Speaker: Prof. Andrew J. Eisenberg
NYU Abu Dhabi

📌Register: https://forms.gle/sQfH2HuE9f2QTcwb9 (link in bio)

Abstract: Sounds of Other Shores takes an ethnographic ear to the history of transoceanic stylistic appropriation in the Swahili taarab music of the Kenyan coast. Swahili taarab, a form of sung
poetry that emerged as East Africa’s first mass-mediated popular music in the 1930s, is a famously cosmopolitan form, rich in audible influences from across the Indian Ocean. But the variants of the genre that emerged in the Kenyan coastal city of Mombasa during the twentieth century feature particularly dramatic, even flamboyant, appropriations of Indian and Arab sonic gestures and styles.
Combining oral history, interpretive ethnography, and musical analysis, Sounds of Other Shores explores how Swahili-speaking Muslims in twentieth-century Mombasa derived pleasure and meaning from acts of transoceanic musical appropriation, arguing that these acts served as ways of reflecting on and mediating the complexities and contradictions associated with being
“Swahili” in colonial and postcolonial Kenya.
The result is a musical anthropology of Kenyan Swahili subjectivity that reframes longstanding questions about Swahili identity while contributing to broader discussions about identity and citizenship in Africa and the Indian Ocean world.

🏛Indian Ocean and Beyond | Friday, 28 March 2025 | 6 pm IST | Zoom

📷Speaker: Prof. Sundar Vadlamudi
American University of Sharjah

📌Register: https://forms.gle/sQfH2HuE9f2QTcwb9

Abstract: In 1786, Captain Francis Light established an English East India Company (EIC) settlement in Penang, a largely uninhabited island that belonged to the Sultan of Kedah and located in the northern passage of the Straits of Melaka. The Company acquired the island from Kedah’s ruler for the twin purposes of serving as a naval base and for procuring goods for the Company’s trade with China. While Penang did not live up to its promise as a naval base and dockyard, it emerged as a regional entrepôt and attracted migrants from India, China, and the neighboring Malay states.

This talk focuses on Tamil-speaking Muslims, who were one of the earliest migrants to Penang. Several differences existed among this broad category of migrants. Some came from South India, whereas others came from Malay states in Penang’s neighborhood where they had already settled. Some Tamil Muslims came to Penang for trade and returned to their homeports, whereas others settled in Penang and became part of a diverse society of migrant communities from other regions in the Indian Ocean world. In discussing this migrant community, I will focus on the impact of Penang’s status as an island entrepôt on the pattern of migration of Tamil Muslims to Penang.

🏛Indian Ocean and Beyond | Friday, 31 January 2025 | 6 pm IST | Zoom

📷Speaker: Dr Philip Gooding, McGill University

📌Register: https://forms.gle/sQfH2HuE9f2QTcwb9

Abstract: This talk draws from historical sources and methods to refine reconstructions of rainfall variability in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century equatorial eastern Africa, especially in present-day west-central Tanzania and southern Uganda. In the absence of in-region tree ring and other natural science research that can suggest rainfall conditions on seasonal or annual scales, Philip considers archival documents, oral traditions, and other qualitative sources as integral to the reconstruction of its historical climates. This scholarly effort is important for two core reasons. First, the creation of a ‘climate archive’ represents one of the essential contexts on which environmental histories of equatorial eastern Africa can be analysed and written. Second, it provides in-region data that can be integrated into climate models that project how global warming will affect regional rainfall variability in the future. This, moreover, may help to facilitate a deeper understanding of how the Indian Ocean monsoon system, on which rainfall in equatorial eastern Africa is reliant, has evolved and will evolve over time.

🏛Indian Ocean and Beyond | Friday, 29 November 2024 | 6 pm IST | Zoom

📷Speaker: Shireen Hamza, Northwestern University

📌Register: https://forms.gle/kfp1za4QSDA2Abw7A (link in bio)

Abstract: How did Muslim scholars of the religious sciences (ulema) help support the health of their communities, in and beyond the city? The history of public health in the Islamic world has often focused on cities in the Near East, drawing on plague treatises, market inspection manuals, and legal disputes over substances like to***co. But across the Indian Ocean world, from the Tihama of Yemen to western India, their texts on medicine took different forms. In this talk, I will focus on the medical writings of ulema in Yemen in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, bringing new historical actors into the history of public health and attending to regional variation. These ulema attempted to intervene in communal health by adapting medicine to their local contexts and urging peers to compose, study and use medical texts. Intergenerational relationships between male scholars became one site of public health in this region. The accessible texts they wrote on medicine eventually made their way into libraries in South Asia, including the Hazrat Pir Mohammad Shah Dargah Library of Ahmedabad.

🏛Centre for Inter- Asian Research (CIAR) is pleased to invite you to the eighth session of the webinar series: 'Perceptions of Risk in the Himalayas’.

📌Jenny Bentley, Member SEG Interface Engaged Anthropology Commission; Affiliated researcher, ISEK, Universität Zürich
and
Minket Lepcha, Storyteller, Filmmaker and PhD Student, University of Manitoba

📎Please register via the provided link: https://forms.gle/EbnhKuhqqsaAEwjFA or see link in bio to receive the Zoom credentials.

Abstract: Drawing on nearly two decades of engaging with ancient Mutanchi (Lepcha) stories and on anthropological fieldwork respectively, Minket Lepcha and Jenny Bentley take a closer look at the Teesta River and concepts of risk, nurture, and interaction with other-than-humans among the Mutanchi of Sikkim, Darjeeling and Kalimpong Hills. Minket will share the ancestral narrative on how the creation of the River Teesta is associated with love and floods – its origin initiating intimate reciprocal relations between people, the river, and other-than-humans. Jenny then will embed the narrative within the wider ritual practice of risk assessment and disaster mitigation derived from Mutanchi world view. To conclude they will tie these perceptions of risk to a current discourse on river ecologies, livelihoods, infrastructure as well as the October 2024 glacier lake outburst flood and its aftermath – including Minket’s recent findings and reflections on after-flood stories of people and landscape.

🏛Centre for Inter- Asian Research (CIAR), is pleased to invite you to the sixth session of the webinar series: 'Perceptions of Risk in the Himalayas’.

📌 Radhika Govindrajan, Associate Professor of Anthropology and International Studies, University of Washington- August 06, 2024, Tuesday | 5 pm IST via ZOOM

📎Please register via the provided link: https://forms.gle/EbnhKuhqqsaAEwjFA or see link in bio to receive the Zoom credentials.

Abstract: This talk explores how migration to mountain villages in Uttarakhand - both historic and recent - feeds a growing moral panic about how the distinctive cultural and social identity of mountain people (paharis) is at risk. I draw on ethnographic research to illuminate how discourses of demographic threat surface and shape everyday intimate life.

🏛 Centre for Inter-Asian Research (CIAR) is hosting the network members of 'Medical Humanities in Inter-Asia' for a two-day workshop at Ahmedabad University.

Our research network focuses on the constitutive presence of medical modernity in Asia through various perspectives, both historical and contemporary. The inter-disciplinary projects led by our members are informed by the tenets of anthropology, psychology, psychoanalysis, history, literary studies, and food studies

Indian Ocean and Beyond | Friday, 31 May 2024 | 6 pm – 7:30 pm IST | Zoom

Speaker: Subah Dayal, New York University

Register: https://forms.gle/8XGX9EyZQHFhDe7JA

📌CIAR, Ahmedabad University is pleased to invite you to the fifth session of the webinar series 'South Asia in South China Sea’.

Prof. Sunil Amrith, Yale University, May 23, 2024, 6 pm IST via ZOOM

Please register via the provided link: https://forms.gle/8XGX9EyZQHFhDe7JA to receive the Zoom credentials.

CIAR, Ahmedabad University is pleased to invite you to the fourth session of the webinar series 'South Asia in South China Sea’, co-hosted by The Chinese University of Hong Kong 香港中文大學 - CUHK and The University of Hong Kong.

Speaker: Prof. Tansen Sen, May 09, 2024, 6 pm IST via Zoom

Register: https://bit.ly/3TlZzlx
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🏛Centre for Inter- Asian Research (CIAR), Ahmedabad University is pleased to invite you to the fifth session of the webinar series: 'Perceptions of Risk in the Himalayas’.

Sayantani Mukherjee, Assistant Professor, Ashoka University, Department of History and Ashoka Centre for China Studies- May 07, 2024, 5 pm IST via Zoom

Register: https://bit.ly/41m6QnL

Abstract: This talk analyzes the emergence of imperial border-making as a form of risk management by chronicling the British Indian state’s attempt, and eventual failure, to break the Chinese monopoly on trading tea in Tibet at the very time Britain replaced Qing China as the largest exporter of tea on the global stage. The competition between Chinese and Indian tea has been richly documented as a narrative of ascendancy and industrial modernisation that rapidly reshaped global imperial hierarchies as well as local socio-cultural relationships (including those of labour accumulation). By contrast, the British failure in Tibet that this talk focuses on, highlights how militarised frontier-making alone advanced market capitalism throughout the trans-Himalayan theatre. The talk thus demonstrates how the exigencies of war propaganda and imperial frontier-making shaped not only the spatial and cultural frames of tea consumption in Tibet, but the territorial entities of the Himalayas as “borderlands”, and indeed, “Tibet” itself.

🏛Indian Ocean and Beyond | Friday, 26 April 2024 | 6 pm –7:30 pm IST | Zoom

📷Speaker: Lakshmi Pradeep, Leiden University Universiteit Leiden / Leiden University

📌Register: https://forms.gle/sQfH2HuE9f2QTcwb9

Abstract: Based on ethnographic stories from the Lakshadweep Islands of India, the speaker will explore how to take account of the “coral multiple” (Pawulsessen & Veschoor 2017). The coral rock formations gave protection from invaders, acted as protective belts from cyclones, became the walls of wonder, and sometimes of fear. Through the myth of the Beekunji rock and other caves, and a set of lexical concepts in the island language, the speaker will discuss how the corals are integrally connected to social life in the Lakshadweep archipelago. The talk contributes to the emerging discussions on human and non-human relations in Asian archipelagos during the climate crisis.