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Historians Adda – Panel discussion

The  Human Sciences Research Group (HSRG) talk series for the Spring 2024 semester began with high spirits on 3 January. The first event was Historians Adda – a panel discussion on Physical and Human Geographies and Histories of South Asian Regions with Prachi Deshpande, Associate Professor of History at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences Calcutta and Tanuja Kothiyal, Professor of History at Ambedkar University Delhi. The panel was moderated by Dr. Aniket Alam.

The Region in South Asia has figured in diverse ways across historiographies and scholarship in the social sciences. The panellists provided their inputs to the discussion based on their own experiences having worked on different regions in the subcontinent, ranging from Maharashtra through Malwa and Rajasthan to the western Himalayas, from the mediaeval, early modern, to the colonial and contemporary periods. They have also approached the histories of these regions in separate ways.

Together, they highlighted various aspects and methods of their research in developing and representing these regions, ranging from physical features and social formations to archives, histories, languages, and cultural practices. They brought to light the fact that historians often overlooked mobility-defined states giving higher preference to agrarian state histories, which could be disadvantageous as regions could be either social or geographical. The panellists also discussed the different ways in which regional groups imagined and expressed their identities across time and space while wondering how each region finds a vocabulary and creates a narrative to correspond to the larger national historical picture.

January 2024