Using an expansive array of sources—textual, material, and agricultural—Weaving Histories places the history of South India’s handloom industry within the wider frames of global and economic history. Looking at changes in the growing, cleaning, spinning, and weaving of cotton, the book provides an insightful and illuminating look at the interplay of regional, national, and global influences and their effects on the lives of ordinary weavers.
Prasannan Parthasarathi (History, Boston University) and Maxine Berg (History, University of Warwick) will be joining the conversation as discussants.
This event was organized by Doug Haynes with support from the Bodas Family Academic Programming Fund and the Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages Program at Dartmouth College.
Join us on Tuesday, April 6 from 4–5:15 pm EDT for the final event in our series this year to hear Durba Mitra (Carol K. Pforzheimer Assistant Professor at the Radcliffe Institute | Assistant Professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Harvard University) discuss her latest book, Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought (Princeton University Press, 2020).
Mitra’s work examines how so-called “deviant female sexuality” became foundational to the colonial knowledge-production project and identifies the concept of the “prostitute” as a key site for British and elite Indian men’s attempts to “know” India. Prachi Deshpande has praised the book for being “a valuable contribution to the global history of sexuality” and Omnia El Shakry calls it “an indispensable book for all scholars of gender and sexuality.”
Mingwei Huang (Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Dartmouth College) and Jacqueline Wernimont (Digital Humanities and Social Engagement, and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Dartmouth College) will be joining us as discussants, and Elizabeth Lhost(History, Society of Fellows, Dartmouth College) will moderate the discussion.
Support for the Conversations on South Asia series is provided by the Dartmouth Society of Fellows, the Bodas Family Academic Programming Fund, the Department of History, and the Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages Program.
This month, we’ll be discussing Chatterjee’s most recently published book, Negotiating Mughal Law: A Family of Landlords Across Three Indian Empires, which was published by Cambridge University Press in 2020 and is freely available as an open access book through Cambridge Open.
In the book, Chatterjee explores the textures, nuances, conflicts, and complications of Mughal law using an archive of legal documents and materials that she reconstructed from multiple sites and repositories in and beyond South Asia.
Dominic Vendell (History, Exeter University) and Samira Sheikh (History, Vanderbilt University) will join us for this conversation.
Elizabeth Lhost (History Department, Society of Fellows, Dartmouth College) will moderate.
Support for the Conversations on South Asia Series comes from the the Bodas Family Academic Programming Fund, the Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages Program, the Department of History, and the Society of Fellows at Dartmouth.
Using the idea of the “crowd,” Chowdhury examines the paradoxes, problems, and possibilities of democratic politics in Bangladesh—one of the world’s most crowded places. What are crowd politics? Who belongs to “the people”? And what can we learn from studying mass mobilizations?
Chelsey Kivland (Anthropology, Dartmouth College) and Rituparna Mitra (Liberal Arts, Emerson College) will join Chowdhury to explore these questions and offer some possible answers.
Elizabeth Lhost (Society of Fellows, Dartmouth College) will moderate the discussion.
Support for the Conversations on South Asia Series comes from the the Bodas Family Academic Programming Fund, the Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages Program, the Department of History, and the Society of Fellows at Dartmouth.
The book, which came out with Harvard University Press in 2019, is an in-depth study of India’s premier engineering colleges: the IITs. Tracing the history and politics of these institutions, Subramanian explores how family background and caste status shape educational access and achievement. To interrogate the concept of “merit,” Subramanian weaves together extensive empirical evidence with an insightful analysis of privilege and prestige in higher ed.
Maitreya Shah, a lawyer and disability rights advocate and researcher in India, and Teja Chatty, a PhD student at Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering with experience in diversity and equity work at Dartmouth will be joining the conversation.
Support for the Conversations on South Asia series comes from the Bodas Family Academic Programming Fund, the Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages Program, the Department of History, and the Society of Fellows at Dartmouth College.
Join us Thursday, Dec. 3 (11 am EST / 9:30 pm IST) for the next Conversation on South Asia.
The second event in this year’s series will feature Dinyar Patel. His book, Naoroji: Pioneer of Indian Nationalism, followsthe life and career of Dadabhai Naoroji (1825–1917), one of the most significant Indian nationalist leaders before Gandhi. It came out with Harvard University Press earlier this year.
Dinyar Patel received his PhD in History from Harvard University and is currently Assistant Professor of History at the S.P. Jain Institute of Management and Research (SPJIMR) in Mumbai. His writings have appeared in BBC News, The New York Times online, The Hindu, Indian Express, and scroll.in.
Douglas E. Haynes, Professor of History at Dartmouth College and Stefan J. Link, Associate Professor of History at Dartmouth College, will serve as discussants.
Support for the Conversations on South Asia series comes from the Bodas Family Academic Programming Fund, the Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages Program, the Department of History, and the Society of Fellows at Dartmouth College.
“An 1858 photograph by Felice Beato of a mosque in Meerut where some of the rebel soldiers may have prayed” (Wikimedia Commons)
The following participant’s report was submitted by Sri Sathvik Rayala, a ’24 at Dartmouth College, interested in South Asian History, Politics, and Economics.
On September 29, 2020, the South Asia Studies Collective at Dartmouth College hosted its first event in the new “Conversations on South Asia Series,” featuring Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst, Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Vermont, discussing her book Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion: Religion, Rebels, and Jihad (I. B. Tauris & Company, 2017). Following the theoretical frameworks presented in the book, the conversation centered on the racialization and minoritization of Muslims in the Indian subcontinent, particularly following the 1857 Rebellion against the British East India Company. During the event, which was moderated by the series coordinator, Elizabeth Lhost, Morgenstein Fuerst discussed several points related to her argument about the racialization and minoritization of South Asian Muslims and its implications for the study of race and religion today—drawing from and extending the central arguments of her recent book.
The event began with a brief presentation by Morgenstein Fuerst outlining her argument that the Rebellion of 1857 marked a shift in how people, particularly the British colonial officials, talked about and saw Muslims and their religion. In particular, Morgenstein Fuerst suggested that the 1857 Rebellion caused British colonial officials to question the loyalty of Muslims, who they believed were religiously obligated to conduct “jihad” against the Crown’s rule. As Morgenstein Fuerst explained during her presentation (and elaborates in the book), one British official, Sir William Wilson Hunter, went so far as to claim that “Muslims are a problem to be solved” for the Crown, a remark that inherently and quite explicitly placed Muslims squarely in the camp of traitors to the Crown. Indeed, throughout Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion, Morgenstein Fuerst examines how Hunter framed this “problem” in his assertions that “it is hopeless to look for anything like enthusiastic loyalty from our Muhammadan subjects” (59). Simply put, Morgenstein Fuerst argues that the British saw South Asian Muslims, particularly those in North India, as inherently violent, disloyal, and untrustworthy—despite the evident loyalty of figures like Syed Ahmed Khan, another figure whose writings and reflections on 1857 feature in Morgenstein Fuerst’s work.
To provide evidence of this view, Morgenstein Fuerst opened her talk with a photograph of a mosque in Meerut taken by Felice Beato (see inset above), an Italian-British photographer, in 1858. The caption of this photograph, taken just a year after the 1857 Rebellion, read “a mosque in Meerut where some of the rebel soldiers may have prayed.” Analyzing this photo and its caption, Morgenstein Fuerst pointed out that there was no evidence to support the caption’s claim and that its glib reference to “rebel soldiers” perfectly encapsulates how British views framed Muslims of North India as disloyal and people prone to rebel due to their supposed religious commandments. Extending the photo’s implications, Morgenstein Fuerst suggested that instead of viewing this mosque as just a mosque, Beato made an unfounded interpolation to consider it a site that in some fashion aided rebellion, clearly indicating an implicit view that Muslims are supposedly commanded by Islam to conduct “jihad” against their British rulers. It is worth noting that Morgenstein Fuerst acknowledges that stereotyping of Muslims occurred before 1857 too, but that in the aftermath of 1857, two processes emerged that have immense ramifications today: minoritization and racialization.
To support her central arguments further, Morgenstein Fuerst explained her decision to use minoritization and racialization as theoretical frameworks. Minoritization, as she explains it in Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion, “does not refer solely to the demographic realities of a particular location, but instead to the systematic process by which elites deny power or access to a group through the implementation of power, be that local, linguistic, economic, or political” (6). In brief, minoritization is the process by which elites from a dominant group deny marginalized or minority communities access to various resources, strip them of power, or make them even more powerless. This was the experience of Indian Muslims in the post-1857 period. The process of minoritization impacted both rich and poor Muslims alike. To the surprise of some in the audience, as Morgenstein Fuerst explained, even wealthier and well-connected Muslims experienced minoritization as they, too, lost access to resources and positions that provided them with a stable place in society.
Racialization—a process precipitated by the British that adversely affected Hindus and Muslims and the second core concept in Morgenstein Fuerst’s monograph—accompanied the process of minoritization. In Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion, Morgenstein Fuerst describes “racialization” as “the process through which a group is made or marked as a race; it is the process through which individuals are made manifest as both belonging to one cogent group as well as possessing those inherent, hereditary, and prognostic characteristics” (7). British colonial officials racialized Muslims as inherently violent, dangerous, traitorous, and untrustworthy. (They equally racialized Hindus but classed them as weak, subservient, and effeminate.) Racialization, which Morgenstein Fuerst suggested during the “Conversation” was developed in part to further divide and inflame communal relations between Hindus and Muslims, still has ramifications today, reverberating in modern American politics as Islamophobia, for instance. To use Morgenstein Fuerst’s words in Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion, “a lasting and evident aspect of contemporary discourse about Muslims directly evokes assumptions that became solidified, popularized, and primary as a result of the Great Rebellion of 1857” (158).
By drawing attention to the emergence of “minoritization” and “racialization” in photographic, administrative, and scholarly sources, Morgenstein Fuerst draws parallels between anti-Muslim rhetoric surrounding questions of loyalty and rebellion in British India and discourses that evoke similar concerns today. For scholars and students interested in the origins of racialized and minoritized conceptions of Muslim minorities, her book, Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion: Religion, Rebels, and Jihad, is a recommended read.
(Page numbers refer to the paperback edition of the book.)
The Conversations on South Asia Series returns on December 3, 2020 for the second event of the year, featuring Dinyar Patel’s Naoroji: Pioneer of Indian Nationalism (Harvard University Press, 2020).
To stay up to date with the series, follow us on twitter (@sasiaconverse) or subscribe to our email newsletter for updates about future events: https://tinyurl.com/y24fdrbx .
The Conversations on South Asia series is supported by the Bodas Family Academic Programming Fund | Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages Program | Department of History | and the Dartmouth College Society of Fellows.
Join us on Sept. 29 from 6:30–7:45 pm (EDT) to hear Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst discuss the history of Islam and Muslims in South Asia and its intersections with theories of religion, race, language, and imperialism. Morgenstein Fuerst’s book, Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion: Religion, Rebels, and Jihad, will be the focus of the discussion.
Morgenstein Fuerst is associate professor of religion and associate director of the Humanities Center at the University of Vermont. She earned her PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in religious studies, with a specialization in Islamic studies. She is the co-editor of Words of Experience: Translating Islam with Carl W. Ernst (Equinox, 2020) and is the co-host of a grant-funded podcast, Keeping it 101: a Killjoy’s Introduction to Religion.
She will be joined by Elizabeth Lhost, Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Dartmouth College.
This event is Sponsored by the Dartmouth College Society of Fellows, the Bodas Family Academic Programming Fund, the Asian Cultures, Languages, and Societies Program, and the Department of History at Dartmouth College.
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Using an expansive array of sources—textual, material, and agricultural—Weaving Histories places the history of South India’s handloom industry within the wider frames of global and economic history. Looking at changes in the growing, cleaning, spinning, and weaving of cotton, the book provides an insightful and illuminating look at the interplay of regional, national, and global influences and their effects on the lives of ordinary weavers.
The second event in this year’s series will feature Dinyar Patel. His book, 
