Asian Studies Centre

Zaib un Nisa Aziz (University of South Florida, Tampa) speaks at the Oxford South Asian Intellectual History Seminar on 13 March 2023. For queries, please contact seminar convenor at [email protected] At the turn of the twentieth century, the global imperial order was in peril. In cities across the world, revolutionary factions emerged where nationalists deliberated radical, even violent paths to a post- imperial world. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin belonged to and wrote of this world – a world primarily defined by the crisis of the imperial order and the looming question of the future of national communities. As Lenin along with his compatriots seized power in Moscow in October 1917, he announced the dawn of a new era where the empires of the world would eventually fall in the throes of the impending world revolution. My talk, based on my first book project, shows how that his call resonated with all sorts of imperial decriers who saw, in his victory, the possibility of a new world. From Rio Grande to River Ganges, anti-colonialists turned to Moscow to help realize their own political visions. Encouraged by the triumph of Lenin and his party, anti-colonialists tied the end of imperialism to the revolutionary end of global socioeconomic hierarchies. This historical narrative responds to recent scholarly provocations to study decolonization in connected rather than discrete terms and to employ the methodological tools of global history to write new historical accounts, which attend to the ends of empire as a global phenomenon. One of my key intellectual objectives is to think of Asian, African, and Caribbean anti-colonialists not only as itinerant revolutionaries and campaigners but as intellectuals, thinkers, and writers. I demonstrate the many ways in which anti-colonialists interpreted, built on, modified, and otherwise responded to Lenin’s critique of imperialism. For many, anti-imperialism now not only meant opposition to foreign rule but also a wholesale rejection of the prevalent global economic order. Hence, inequality and development became an inextricable part of visions of a postcolonial global order. Moreover, this presentation highlights how the inter-war period marks a decisive shift in the intellectual history of decolonization. Zaib un Nisa Aziz is a historian of global and imperial history, with a focus on the British Empire and Modern South Asia. She is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of South Florida, Tampa. In her past and present research, she seeks to push the geographic, temporal and thematic boundaries of the historical study of the end of empire and its aftermath, and is particularly interested in histories of decolonisation, labour and internationalism. Her current book project, tentatively titled ‘Nations Ascendant: The Global Struggle Against Empire and The Making of our World’, traces the origins and politics of an international community of colonial activists, thinkers and campaigners, and shows how they came to share ideas about universal decolonisation and the end of empires.

Vikram Visana (University of Leicester) speaks at the Oxford South Asian Intellectual History Seminar on 7 March 2023. Uncivil Liberalism studies how ideas of liberty from the colonized South claimed universality in the North. Recovering the political thought of Dadabhai Naoroji, India’s pre-eminent liberal, this book focusses on the Grand Old Man’s pre-occupation with social interdependence and civil peace in an age of growing cultural diversity and economic inequality. It shows how Naoroji used political economy to critique British liberalism’s incapacity for civil peace by linking periods of communal rioting in colonial Bombay with the Parsi minority’s economic decline. Innovating an Indian liberalism characterized by labour rights, economic republicanism and social interdependence, Naoroji seeded ‘Western’ thinkers with his ideas as well as influencing numerous ideologies in colonial and post-colonial India. In doing so, the book reframes so-called Indian ‘nationalists’ as global thinkers. Dr Vikram Visana is Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of Leicester. He was awarded his PhD in the history of Indian Political Thought under the supervision of Chris Bayly at the University of Cambridge in 2016. He has taught at the University of Cambridge, University of Edinburgh, and the University of Huddersfield, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Global History, Freie Universität Berlin. Dr. Visana’s research focuses on Indian political thought from the nineteenth century to the present. His book, Uncivil Liberalism: Labour, Capital and Commercial Society in Dadabhai Naoroji’s Political Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2022), is an original and radical reinterpretation of the political thought of Dadabhai Naoroji, and studies how ideas of liberty from the colonised South claimed universality in the North. Dr. Visana has also published on Indian iterations of liberalism, republicanism, sovereignty, peoplehood, populism, and political economy. Ongoing research has articles in preparation for leading political theory journals and edited volumes. These new publications consider contemporary Indian political theory from the mid-20th century to the present with a particular focus on authority, multicultural justice, and majoritarianism in Indian conservative political philosophy and Hindutva. Please note that there were some minor technical errors in the PowerPoint Presentation, with some text omissions due to issues with screen-sharing, where some text boxes would not load. For queries, please contact seminar convenor at [email protected]

Sarah Ansari (Royal Holloway, University of London) speaks at the Oxford South Asian Intellectual History Seminar on 31 Oct 2022 South Asia’s transition from colonialism to independence in 1947 was undoubtedly one of the most momentous events of the twentieth century. Not surprisingly perhaps, its early postcolonial years have come to exercise a great pull for a range of scholars, who explore this key period, on the one hand, to ask questions about colonial-era legacies or continuities, and, on the other, to identify developments that help to explain what is happening there in the twenty-first century. This paper accordingly explores how - during those early postcolonial years - ideas about, and forms of, citizenship were created or forged by contingent processes of interaction between the ‘state’ – its representatives and institutions at different levels – and ‘society’ – its citizens in-the-making. Very often, as this paper will highlight, it was the day-to-day realities of the time that directly shaped the broader context in which Pakistanis and Indians engaged with what it seemed to mean, in practice, to be a citizen in post-1947 South Asia. Sarah Ansari is a historian of modern and contemporary South Asia, based at Royal Holloway, University of London. Much of her research has focused on issues linked with religion, identity, migration, citizenship, gender, and the province of Sindh, both before and since 1947. Her latest monograph—co-written with William Gould and entitled Boundaries of Belonging (Cambridge University Press, 2019)—explores the intersections between localities, citizenship and rights as these played out in India (UP) and Pakistan (Sindh) during the decade following Independence. Sarah is also currently President of the Royal Asiatic Society, the first woman to hold this role in the institution's 200-year existence.

Luna Sabastian (Northeastern University- London) speaks at the Oxford South Asian Intellectual History Seminar on 7 Nov 2022. Luna Sabastian is Assistant Professor in History at Northeastern University - London. Prior to assuming this position, she held a postdoc at Cambridge University, from where she also received her PhD in 2020. Her work focuses on modern Indian political thought. She is writing a book titled ‘Indian Fascism?’. Among its highlights is an exploration of Savarkar's Hindutva, gendered violence, and race. Much of the talk will be taken from this chapter. The book further explores a meaningful connection between Indian thought and Nazi ideas of "caste"; the idea and geography of the Hindu Crown; and seismic shifts in the political thought of Hindutva after Savarkar. One of her ongoing side projects focuses on British Indian legal history.

Book Launch with Yasser Kureshi Book Launch - Seeking Supremacy: The Pursuit of Judicial Power in Pakistan In this talk, Kureshi will launch his recently-published book that maps out the evolution of the relationship between the judiciary and military in Pakistan, explaining why Pakistan's high courts shifted from loyal deference to the military to open competition, and confrontation, with military and civilian institutions. In the book Kureshi demonstrates that a shift in the audiences shaping judicial preferences explains the emergence of the judiciary as an assertive power center. As the judiciary gradually embraced less deferential institutional preferences, a shift in judicial preferences took place and the judiciary sought to play a more expansive and authoritative political role. Using this audience-based approach, Kureshi roots the judiciary in its political, social and institutional context, and develops a generalizable framework that can explain variation and change in judicial-military relations around the world.

Talk by Cemil Aydin from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Cemil Aydin (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) speaks at the Oxford South Asian Intellectual History Seminar on 6 June 2022. For queries, please contact seminar convenors at [email protected].

Steve Swerdlow, Neil Clarke, Syinat Sultanalieva discuss human rights violations in Tajikistan, chaired by Faisal Devji

Taushif Kara (Cambridge) as part of the Conference - Expulsion: Uganda’s Asians and the Remaking of Nationality The partition of the subcontinent in 1947 presented a unique problem for its diaspora. Trading communities in places like Gwadar often found themselves forced to choose between Indian and Pakistani citizenship but desiring neither, while in colonial Tanganyika many sought British nationality. But attached to the persistent problem of nationality there was also the question of naming, as the once porous category of Indian was now linked to a specific post-colonial state. These communities were often described for the first time as “Asian” as a way to elide this problem. This paper explores the unique genealogy and debates over this novel term amongst the communities in Uganda who considered it for themselves. I focus, however, on the groups that ultimately rejected it and instead decided to claim the name “African” instead, showing that it was at precisely this moment that they were expelled. Taushif Kara is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Centre of Islamic Studies and Jesus College, Cambridge. He obtained his PhD from the Faculty of History at Cambridge in 2021 with a thesis on the Khoja diaspora around the Indian Ocean world. Kara previously studied Islamic history and philosophy at the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London and served as a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Religions and Philosophies at SOAS.

Derek Peterson (Michigan) as part of the Conference - Expulsion: Uganda’s Asians and the Remaking of Nationality This essay is about the management of economic liberation in Idi Amin’s Uganda. The Economic War transformed petty questions about the conduct of business into thrilling matters of racial liberation. There were a great many scapegoats: first the Asian community, latterly Africans who would not, or could not, follow the official rules. The punishments were draconian: economic crimes were, after 1975, punishable by death. For people in power, the Economic War was a means of making austerity, inhumanity and brutality seem essential, a crucial aspect of their heroic leadership. Derek Peterson is Ali Mazrui Professor of History & African Studies at the University of Michigan. He’s the author, most recently, of _The Unseen Archive of Idi Amin: Photographs from the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation_ (Prestel, 2021) (with R. Vokes). Peterson is presently engaged in several curatorial projects focused on the recovery and digitization of endangered film and paper archives in Uganda. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2017.

Shobana Shanker (Stonybrook) as part of the Conference - Expulsion: Uganda’s Asians and the Remaking of Nationality Most accounts of Idi Amin’s expulsion of Asians from Uganda in 1972 assume that African leaders and the Organization of African Unity were largely silent or unmoved to action. This interpretation assumes that Africans understood the Asian expulsion as a political problem—by contrast, I argue that Africans understood the question of Indian settlers as a fundamental problem of the postcolonial condition, connected to the very definition of African selfhood. I explore the significance of the Indian question around the African continent to the formation of intersecting movements of anticolonialism, antiracism, nationalism, Pan-Africanism (which was a critical antidote to nationalism), and Afrocentrism. Contrary to simplistic renderings of African responses to Idi Amin’s anti-Asian racialism, African reckoning with African-Indian entanglements garnered dynamic and long-lasting African cultural responses—even where Indian settlers were few—that produced new African-Indian negotiations on the continent and among African migrants in India. Shobana Shankar is Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies at Stony Brook University, in New York. Her research focuses on cultural encounters and politics in West Africa and Africa-India networks, especially in religion, intellectual history, health, and education. Her most recent book, An Uneasy Embrace: Africa, India and the Spectre of Race (Hurst, 2021), grew out of her meeting with Muslim Indian missionaries in Nigeria, during the course of her research for her first book Who Shall Enter Paradise? Christian Origins in Muslim Northern Nigeria, c.1890-1975 (Ohio University Press). She has also co-edited two collections of essays on religion and globalization. Her recent articles focus on Ghanaian Hinduism, reformism in Nigeria, and Senegal’s Afro-Dravidian movement.