Thomas Babington Macaulay, member of the Governor-General's council of India in 1835, famously said that all the literature of India and Arabia were not worth one single shelf of English literature. Given the extent, scale, and all-pervasiveness of colonialism in South Asia’s past, by European powers including the British, Dutch, and Portuguese, it is easy to think that all modern culture in South Asia owes itself to colonialism, with little alternative. Yet, as theorists like Michel Foucault have established, power, including colonial power, takes the form of knowledge. It creates a system in which although several other opinions and perspectives exist – and they do exist – one is louder and more visible, because it is more powerful. Colonial interactions with ‘local’ populations were two-way, whether in the form of language, politics, employment, or marriage, making the colonial ‘local,’ and the local ‘colonial,’ in more complex ways than simply a one-to-one exchange. Homi Bhabha has theorised that culture is created in the ‘third space,’ between one more dominant, powerful culture and one oppressed one. Being as deep a part of the Empire as Indians and South Asians were – in their civil services, their armies, their plantations and their homes – the ‘third space’ was where the ‘colonial’ and ‘local’ were both defined. 
 
As we explore cultural history in South Asia, we want to begin by asking the difficult question: what is ‘colonial,’ what is ‘local’? Can those two clearly be defined? What are various forms of resistance, interaction, and knowledge exchange, and today, how can we look back on a more complex history than we have been given to understand? 
 

This is the first session of Cultural Encounters: South Asian History in the 'Third Space,' this year's edition of our annual summer learning series, taking place virtually over June and July. Over four sessions and with panels of experts, we will explore the ways in which cultural similarities, hybridity, and interaction have shaped South Asia. The programmes focus on the colonial vs. local; food histories; religious histories; and histories of freedom. For more, visit this link. 

SPEAKERS 

Gauri Viswanathan is Class of 1933 Professor in the Humanities and former Director of the South Asia Institute (2000-2003; 2017-2020) at Columbia University. She has published widely on education, religion, and culture; nineteenth-century British and colonial cultural studies; and the history of modern disciplines. She is the author of Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (Columbia, 1989; Oxford, 1998; 25th anniversary edition, with a new preface, Columbia, 2014) and Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton, 1998), which won the Harry Levin Prize awarded by the American Comparative Literature Association, the James Russell Lowell Prize awarded by the Modern Language Association of America, and the Ananda K. Coomaraswamy Prize awarded by the Association for Asian Studies. She also edited Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said (Vintage, 2001). Prof. Viswanathan is coeditor of the prize-winning book series South Asia Across the Disciplines, originally published jointly by the university presses of Columbia, Chicago, and California under a Mellon grant. She held numerous visiting chairs, among them the Beckman Professorship at Berkeley, and she was an Affiliated Fellow at the American Academy in Rome and a Visiting Mellon Scholar at the University of Cape Town. She received Guggenheim, NEH, and Mellon fellowships. She was a network partner in the international research project "Enchanted Modernities: Theosophy, Modernism, and the Arts" funded by the Leverhulme Trust in the UK. A book catalogue of the project’s art exhibition, Enchanted Modernities: Theosophy, the Arts and the American West, appeared in 2019. Among her recent publications are “In Search of Madame Blavatsky: Reading the Exoteric, Retrieving the Esoteric,” published in Representations, and “Conversion and the Idea of the Secret,” published in Nineteenth-Century Literature. Prof. Viswanathan was honored with the Mark Van Doren Award for Teaching in 2017-2018. In 2020 she received a grant from Columbia’s Humanities War and Peace Initiative for a research project on Aldous Huxley and pacifism. She is currently editing a Norton Critical Edition of Huxley’s Brave New World. Prof. Viswanathan was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2024.

Professor Dina M. Siddiqi is a cultural anthropologist by training. Her research -- grounded in the study of Bangladesh -- joins critical development studies, transnational feminist theory, and the anthropology of labor and Islam.  She has published extensively on the global garment industry and supply chains, non-state gender justice systems, and the cultural politics of Islam, feminism, and nationalism.  She is currently engaged in a project on discourses of national development and the travels of civilizational feminism.  Her publications are available at the Research Gate site.
 

Professor Siddiqi sits on the editorial boards of Contemporary South Asia, Dialectical Anthropology, and the Journal of Bangladesh Studies. She serves on the Executive Committee of the American Institute of Bangladesh Studies (AIBS), and is on the Editorial Board of Routledge’s Women in Asia Publication Series. She is also on the Executive Board of Sakhi for South Asian Women.

She is affiliated with the Law, Ethics, History, and Religion (LEHR) and the Global Cultures concentrations.

Dr Zehra Jumabhoy is a Lecturer in the History of Art at the University of Bristol. She is an art historian, curator and writer specialising in modern and contemporary South Asian art and its diasporas. She was the Steven and Elena Heinz Scholar at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, where she completed her doctorate and lectured on undergraduate and postgraduate art history courses (2016-2020). She has been a visiting lecturer at various academic institutions in the UK and Asia, including teaching on MA programmes dedicated to Asian art at the Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London, and Lasalle College of the Arts, Singapore. In 2018, she co-curated (with the late Tan Boon Hui) the landmark exhibition, The Progressive Revolution: A Modern Art for a New India, at New York’s Asia Society Museum. In 2020, she curated a site-specific immersive installation by British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare, titled Justice for All, at the Arts House Museum in Singapore. She is Guest Curator for the US travelling show, Raqib Shaw: Ballads of East and West, which tours to four major institutions between 2023-2025, including the Frist Art Museum, Nashville, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in LA. She is currently the Curatorial Research Fellow at Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea, a position funded by the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art, to facilitate programming related to the museum’s decolonizing agenda, including co-curating the major exhibition Tigers and Dragons: India and Wales in Britain, scheduled for May 2025. See: https://www.zehrajumabhoy.com/curating/ 

Ipshita Nath's research is located on the intersections of Literature and History, focusing primarily on diseases, carceral health, medical bureaucracy, and gender, in the context of the British Empire in India. She has strong side interests in various literatures of the nineteenth and twentieth century, including women's personal writings and colonial medical literature. She is the author of Memsahibs: British Women in Colonial India (2022), and has written a book of short stories, The Rickshaw Reveries(2020). Her postdoctoral studies in Medical Humanities at
the University of Saskatchewan, Canada, and LIAS Visiting Fellowship at University of Leicester, UK, led her work on various infectious diseases in the Indian subcontinent, during the nineteenth and twentieth century. Her forthcoming book, In Sickness and in Death: Deadly Diseases in Colonial India, will be published by HarperCollins.

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