SOAS’s Brunei Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition by Pragya Dhital of DIY and decolonial print and the simple duplication technology used to produce it, with focus on the ‘Gestetner’ stencil duplicator. Stencil duplicating involves copies being made from a cut-out, patterned or lettered sheet (a stencil), through which paint or ink is applied onto paper. Originally intended for bureaucratic purposes, it was one of a series of Victorian-era inventions including the typewriter, the telephone, and the electric light, which made up the key elements of the modern office.  But its poten ..read more

The Father and the Assassin – written by Anupama Chandrashekhar directed by Indhu Rubasingham and acted by Shubham Saraf with others including Ayesha Dharkar opened on the massive revolving stage of the Olivier at the National Theatre to rave reviews from across the press spectrum from  The Guardian  to Time Out .  Presented as an investigation into the life of Gandhi’s assassin, the play falls short of an empathetic psychological portrait.  I must admit that with my Gandhian sympathies, I was afraid to see the play, fearing to endorse the rousing Hindutva support for Godse ..read more

Written and Photographed by Nazes Afroz Since 1979, with the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, the Afghans had formed the third-largest displaced people in the world, behind the Syrians and Venezuelans in the last four decades. There are still 2.2 million Afghan refugees living in neighbouring countries. With the fall of the Taliban after the US-led war in 2001, many Afghans returned, hoping to rebuild their nation. In June 2002, I flew from Dubai to Kabul, when the first Loya Jirga or the Grand Council (mass national gathering of representatives from the various ethnic, religious ..read more

By Rabia Latif Khan The Taliban takeover of Afghanistan culminated with the capture of Kabul on the 15th of August 2021. The Taliban now control more territory than when they ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. Their takeover has reignited fears among the country’s Hazara community about a return to the brutalities of the 1990s.   The Hazaras’ history in Afghanistan has been tumultuous. They were formerly autonomous in central Afghanistan, an area also known as Hazarajat. However, this drastically changed in the late 1800s when the King (Emir) at the time, Abdur Rahman Khan, declared a j ..read more

by Sanjukta Ghosh SSAI Sanglaap’s webinar A Game of Power: West Bengal Assembly Elections, was held with eight speakers in two related panel discussions before the result was declared this week. The Indian State of Bengal located in the vulnerable ‘borderland’ region of South Asia, is a hotspot for communal tensions and violence following the legacy of Partition and Decolonisation. Violence was building up ahead of the high-octane eight-phase West Bengal Assembly polls — a target state for the ruling majority BJP that has steadily progressed in Eastern India.  South Asia’s national electi ..read more

by Magdalen Gorringe Gorringe writes the account covering Manch UK’s Meet the Artist digital series held during the critical period of the pandemic lockdown. South Asian Dance in the Pre-Digital Era Looking at a timeline within the last forty years, it is possible to evoke a different world of South Asian dance experience in the UK that could be disparate, lonesome, and left to unforeseen circumstances. Magdalen Gorringe reflects on five migrating women artists of Manch UK — Sujata Banerjee, Nilima Devi, Sanjeevini Dutta, Piali Ray and Bisakha Sarker, who together have bee ..read more

by Vidya Venkat As I reminisce the Ph.D. fieldwork trip to New Delhi, the earliest memory that comes to mind is social activist Aruna Roy telling me about how she and her colleagues were described as “urban Naxals” by a right-wing Hindi language publication in Rajasthan. That term was originally used by the filmmaker Vivek Agnihotri in his 2018 book, which became wildly popular as a label for any left-leaning intellectual or activist who was critical of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The publication also cast an accusatory net over the users of India’s Right to Information Act, descr ..read more

by Dr Debojyoti Das Amid Covid-19 pandemic, Professor Richard Grove left us too early. Grove was a trailblazer and maverick who worked across archives in the British Empire to develop a fresh understanding of imperial science and environmentalism that developed out of colonial foot soldiers exploring natural phenomena in the colonies. The science of El Nino and environmentalism he argued, developed at the edge of empires and not in metropolitan quarters of continental Europe. His doctoral thesis from Cambridge published under the intellectually original and thought-provokin ..read more

by Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi Had heard that every cloud has a silver lining! Aligarh Muslim University, and especially its Faculties of Arts and Social Sciences, had never been technologically savvy. Most of its Faculty, as well as its students, have always been very conservative and laid back not only in their approach to life but also at adapting to the ways of the modern world. We have always been quite proud of our “traditions” and simple ways. “Smart Classrooms” to us generally meant a room equipped with a projector placed on a table facing a screen. Even where a piece of full equipment  ..read more

Manch UK launches Meet the Artist Compiled by Payal Ramchandani (Kuchipudi dancer) with editorial comments by Dr Sanjukta Ghosh (SOAS South Asia Institute) During the lockdown, many artists are keen to share their personal stories on social media as the language of art could be empowering and enable one to connect with the inner world of emotions. It has been particularly difficult for dancers who are used to practising in groups and use space creatively in their dance moves. Lockdown not only constrained the daily routine, but the shackled physical space limited the scope of bodily communicat ..read more