Learning a Different Language: Reading Shubhangi Swarup’s ‘The Latitudes of Longing’ and Aimee Liu’s ‘Glorious Boy’ in the Context of Anthropological Documentation and the Consolidation of the Indian Nation State

Lecture by Arunima Bhattacharya, visiting research fellow at IASH, as part of the Netias lecture series "Borders".

The 1940’s was an exceptional decade in Indian sub-continental politics. It is during this decade that the Anthropological Survey of India evolved into a stand-alone body in 1945. Anthropology was used as a tool to ‘scientifically’ document and interpret the Indian subcontinent. Such institutional inquiry and knowledge assimilation were extended into classifying the local environment and relations between human settlements and the ecologies that sustained or confronted them. It was an institution dedicated to document the People of India by assimilating the country’s diversity within categories that broadly contributed to the idea of a consolidated Indian nation state.

Focusing on the Andaman Islands, this lecture examines how the island communities speak to mainland India through an archipelago politics of existence and seclusion in contrast of the connectedness of mainland mobility networks

No registration needed.
More information and Zoom link : https://events.ceu.edu/2020-11-19/learning-different-language-reading-shubhangi-swarups-latitudes-longing-and-aimee-lius