Human Sciences Research Group (HSRG) launched a Wednesday seminar series on 6 October on Zoom. The inaugural talk was on Salt Technologies in India by Prof. Tanuja Kothiyal, Ambedkar University, New Delhi and Prof. Miles Taylor, Humboldt University, Berlin. Their work involves the identification of around 170 sites of salt production in colonial India (c. 1856-1939) with verified map references. They are now working towards converting this information into an interactive Salt Map of India describing the changing technologies of salt production, the lives of salt-workers, the dynamics of trade, transport and consumption, the impact of salt manufacture on the environment, and the current state of the salt industry in India. They aim to transform the database into an open-source listing of various salt sites in India which would also work as a platform for crowd-sourcing and collecting further archival, printed, and visual information, as well as oral testimony, about each place.
Tanuja Kothiyal is Professor of History in the School of Liberal Studies at Ambedkar University, Delhi, India. She is the author of Nomadic Narratives: A History of Mobility and Identity in the Great Indian Desert (Cambridge University Press, 2016)
Miles Taylor is Professor of Modern History at the University of York, UK. His most recent books are Empress: Queen Victoria and India (Yale, 2018), and (co-ed), The Utopian Universities: A Global History of the New Campuses of the 1960s (Bloomsbury, 2020).