The People without History | Indira Chowdhury - Sunday 2nd @ 18.30

RE-LOOK [35] : Lectures on Indian Art Curated by Pushpamala N.  The "People without History": Forms of Cultural Memory and the Post-Colonial Archive a lecture by Indira Chowdhury Scholar and Archivist, Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore On Sunday 2 July 2017 at 6.30 pm at 1.Shanthi Road Studio/ Gallery, First Floor, Shanthinagar, Bangalore 560027 About the Talk This presentation draws on my attempts over the last decade and a half to create archives of different institutions and organisations and the insights gained from these attempts into the practice of archiving. Echoing the title of Eric Wolf’s 1982 book, Europe and the People Without History (1983) and drawing on the conceptual framework of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1979), this presentation looks back at the colonial collections of archives and material culture in India and asks in what ways is it possible to put together an archive within a postcolonial context? If colonial discourse defined Indians as being steeped in backward traditions and lacking in history, what conceptual problems do we encounter when trying to assemble an archive of a formerly colonised people? Beginning with my visit to a settlement of snake charmers near Sheopur, Madhya Pradesh, who claimed they knew nothing about snakes, I go on to look at the collection of botanical paintings at Lalbagh, and the subsequent setting up of the institutional archives of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Indian Institute of Management, Kolkata,The Economic and Political Weekly and the Indian Museum. What does the process of archiving tell us about our relationship to the past? In what ways did institutions that originated in the colonial period reinvent their identities post-1947? How do the colonial foundations of academic disciplines shape the way our museums relate to the past? What roles do state interventions and notions of national identity play in the evolving sense of self? Do conceptualisations of education, development and progress erase forms of cultural memory and oral traditions and create reinvented identities? This presentation will attempt to show how we might re-understand the idea of collecting an archive and the critical ways in which we might interpret them.   ​                    About the Speaker ​  ​   Indira Chowdhury is Founder-Director of the Centre for Public History at the Srishti Institute of Art, Design, and Technology, Bengaluru. Formerly professor  ​ of English at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, she is also the founder of Archival Resources for Contemporary History (ARCH), Bengaluru, now known as ARCH@Srishti. She has a PhD in history from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London and her book, The Frail Hero and Virile History (Delhi, OUP, 1998) won the Tagore prize in 2001. In 2010 she published A Masterful Spirit: Homi Bhabha 1909-1966 (Delhi: Penguin, 2010). She was awarded the New India Fellowship to work on the manuscript of her recently published book titled Growing the Tree of Science: Homi Bhabha and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (OUP: 2016).  Indira Chowdhury has been keenly interested in setting up archival resources for research – particularly oral history archives. She began the Urban History Documentation Project at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata in 1993. She set up the Archives of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai (2002-2006) and curated several archival exhibitions at TIFR including Partners in Science: JRD Tata and TIFR in 2005 and Homi Bhabha: The Cambridge Connection in 2007. Through ARCH she has created several archival books - Citizens and Revolutionaries: An Oral History of IIM Calcutta (Delhi: Rupa: 2012), Looking Back, Looking Forward: An Oral History of IMSc (2016) and The Lives of Objects: Stories from the Indian Museum (forthcoming​)​ ​ Indira is a founding member of the Oral History Association of India. She was President of the Oral History Association of India (2013-2016) and President of th​e ​ ​ International Oral History Association (2014-2016).