About the speaker: Mitra Sharafi is a legal historian of South Asia. She holds law degrees from Cambridge and Oxford (the UK equivalent of a JD and LLM) and a doctorate in history from Princeton. Sharafi’s book, Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia: Parsi Legal Culture, 1772-1947 (Cambridge University Press, 2014) won the Law and Society Association’s J. Willard Hurst Prize for socio-legal history in 2015. The book explores the legal culture of the Parsis or Zoroastrians of British India, an ethno-religious minority that was unusually invested in colonial law. Her research interests include South Asian legal history; the history of the legal profession; the history of colonialism; the history of contract law; law and society; law and religion; law and minorities; legal consciousness; legal pluralism; and the history of science and medicine. Sharafi is a regular contributor to the Legal History Blog. Since 2010, her South Asian Legal History Resources website has shared research guides and other tools for the historical study of law in South Asia. Follow her blogposts and follow her on Twitter @mjsharafi Read more.
DOWNLOAD PAPER: “Corruption and Forensic Experts in Colonial India” (573 KB)
In 1851, the young Tukoji Holkar, Maharaja of Indore, went missing under suspicious circumstances. Some said his regent wanted him out of the picture. Others speculated that he’d been kidnapped and taken to Calcutta by nefarious colonial agents. In truth, he’d skipped town to make a clandestine tour of of North India. After his return, Holkar did something that was doubly unprecedented for a Persian-speaking court of his time: he wrote a travelogue, and he wrote it in Urdu. Following his lead, other princes across the region began to write their own, increasingly elaborate travel accounts. By the end of the 19th century, writing about travel have become a well established expression of princely praxis. Focusing on two narratives in Urdu from 1851, this talk will argue that the decision to write a travel account – and to do so in Urdu – reflected Holkar’s, and the princely states’, desire to use travel literature to stabilize their legitimacy at a time when colonial predations had rendered it increasingly precarious.
Daniel Majchrowicz is an Assistant Professor of South Asian Literature and Culture at Northwestern University. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 2015. He is currently working on two manuscripts. The first is a study of Urdu travel writing from 1830-1950, tentatively titled “Travel and the Means to Victory: Travel and Travel Writing in Modern South Asia.” The second is a collaborative project aimed at producing a scholarly anthology of Muslim women’s travel writing from across the world, entitled “Veiled Voyagers.”
Supported by the UB Honors College and Asian Studies Program.
Please join us for our November Global to Local luncheon on Monday, November 7th from 12:30-1:30 in 684 Baldy Hall
The Bhutanese-Nepali Community of Buffalo and their History with presenter Shree Siwakoti, Vice President of the Bhutanese-Nepali Community of Buffalo, Inc.
Mr. Siwakoti will discuss: Reasons for fleeing Bhutan, challenges faced in refugee camps, third country resettlement, and information on the Bhutanese-Nepali Community of Buffalo, Inc.
Lunch will be provided. Contact: Shannon Linehan <sdlinha@buffalo.edu>
Historians have always been interested in describing the trajectories of empires. The metaphor used for political development has often been that of a human life, from birth through to adolescence, maturity, senescence, and finally death. The topic of this lecture is the senescent phase of empires, more specifically the outmoded but still surprisingly prevalent assumption on the part of historians that whatever other factors have caused an empire to decline, an aesthetic or intellectual failure must also be identified. The
supposed decline in the quality of a late empire’s literary output, or “decadence” to use the term most commonly applied, is however poorly theorized both by historians and literary scholars. There is often a circular logic in the academic division of labor: Historians use the decontextualized insights of literary scholars to argue that literature decreased in quality in an empire’s last phase while literary scholars use historians’ work to read societal decline into literary works. Ultimately this reflects more of our own preconceptions than the thought of the society being studied. This lecture will draw on two very different historiographical case studies, namely the Roman Empire and the Mughal Empire, which ruled much of the Indian subcontinent from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth century. Our understanding of the fall of Rome has become much more sophisticated in recent decades but in the case of India the colonial historiography (itself built upon some long-outdated ideas about the late Roman Empire) is still in need of being reconsidered.
The UB School of Social Work’s Global to Local Luncheon Series presents
“Conducting research on violence in the Global South: Stories from Bangladesh”
by Shaanta Murshid, PhD
Focusing on quantitative and qualitative findings from her research in Bangladesh, Nadine Shaanta Murshid will be speaking about conducting research on violence in a country, where political violence is omnipresent, while intimate partner violence remains a taboo.
Monday, September 12
12:30 – 1:30 PM
684 Baldy Hall, North Campus
~lunch provided~
Contact: Shannon Linehan, sdlineha@buffalo.edu
Workshop: Transforming Your Dissertation into a Book
Application deadline: July 1
Part of the Annual Conference on South Asia at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, this workshop aims to help a select number of recent PhDs to re-vision their doctoral dissertations as books.
To Apply: submit a SINGLE PDF FILE containing a current CV, the dissertation abstract, its table of contents, and its first chapter plus a draft book prospectus.
For more info and to apply, contact Susan Wadley: sswadley@syr.edu
Participants must arrange their own transport to Madison, Wisconsin for the Annual Conference on South Asia in October.
JULY 1 is the application deadline for the AIIS fellowship competition. Fellowships to India are available for scholars, PhD students, professionals, and creative & performing artists. More info: http://www.indiastudies.org/research-fellowship-programs/
More students at UB are pursuing interests in the language, culture and religion of India and other countries in South Asia.
Published May 23, 2016
– See more at: https://www.buffalo.edu/ubreporter/stories/2016/05/interest-in-india.html