October, November, December 2020

Dear Readers,

Political Partitions: Human Stories—were Bengal and Punjab the only two regions to be deeply affected by the Partitions of 1947 and '71? We bring you an exciting digital series exploring narratives of the partitions that continue to remain in the shadow, with historians, artists and writers.

Voices of Dissent: An Essay by Romila Thapar—a timely, pertinent title by Seagull Books, releasing this month.

The last six months have seen a drastic withdrawal from the public sphere to the private, or, a morphing to the digital for those of us with the privilege of access—a particularly stark contrast to the preceding months when thousands across India poured out on the streets, claiming public spaces and voicing their protest against the NRC, CAA and NPR.

ccccBarely a day after the Indian Prime Minister announced a 'janta curfew', Delhi Police cleared the Shaheen Bagh protest site—a space that symbolically had become one of the primary faces of the anti NRC CAA NPR movement. In the six months that have passed since, much has happened. Numerous anti-fascist rights activists stand arrested, bail petitions of political prisoners arrested without trial have been rejected, legislations detrimental to farmers hurriedly passed, the Question Hour in the Parliament's monsoon session dismissed. So what exactly has stilled in this spate of lockdowns? What is a citizen minus the access to the polis? Can state accountability in crisis-management only come at the cost of people's democratic rights?

ccccA direct consequence of pursuing these questions, we bring you a carefully researched resource that traces a short history of epidemics and governance, from cholera in 19th century India to Covid-19 today. Replete with arts-based activities designed to encourage critical thinking, this resource comes in two parts for your convenience: a module for the teacher's application, and research documents for the interested reader, whether teacher or student.

Turning the clock back a few decades, we bring you a module that takes a look at what farmers and tea garden workers were fiercely opposing in Bengal in the 30s - 50s. What made them mobilize, how did these movements play out, what repercussions would they go on to have on the discourse of labour rights in our country? Explore these and other critical avenues through our resource, based on artist and communist Somnath Hore's extraordinary documentation of the Tebhaga Movement and the Tea Garden workers' movement. Drawing on Hore's acute observations of both in art and text, this module presents a novel way to bring to life 'terms and definitions' from Indian history syllabi and make them relevant to the present.

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It took 1984 to make me understand how ever-present partition was in our lives too, to recognise that it could not be so easily put away inside the covers of history books. I could no longer pretend that this was a history that belonged to another time, to someone else.

ccccPolitical Partitions: Human Stories will look at Hyderabad, Kargil/Baltistan, the Chittagong Hill Tracts, Punjab and Bengal through the works of scholars and writers. We also hope to develop classroom teaching material stemming from these lectures and conversations.

We began the series with 'Faiz Ahmed Faiz: Life and Times', an enriching conversation between Salima Hashmi—artist, activist and Faiz's daughter—and Kavita Panjabi, a University teacher who has shared her love of Faiz with her Comparative Literature students for many years. Recitations of Faiz in Urdu, a daughter's recollections of her father, Faiz's experiences of the partitions of 1947 and '71, readings from rare personal letters, the role of the poet in Faiz's words— there's something for everybody here:

ccccProfessor Rajmohan Gandhi will be responding to pre-submitted questions from social science school educators based on his talk delivered as part of the Karwaan Distinguished Lecture Series (available here https://bit.ly/3cplAss) and his book, Punjab: A History from Aurangzeb to Mountbatten (Aleph Book Company, 2015).

MEETING DETAILS >

Link: https://bit.ly/3nhc9R5

River of Fire is to Urdu fiction what One Hundred Years of Solitude is to Hispanic literature.

- Aamer Hussein, The Times Literary Supplement

Qurratulain Hyder (1927-2007) was one of the foremost writers of Urdu literature—a novelist and short story writer, journalist and educationist. Her works were among the first to give radical direction to a burgeoning feminist voice in the subcontinent. Mere Bhi Sanam Khane was one of her early works, in which she explored the causes of Hindu Muslim violence leading upto Partition through the lives of young citizens. She is best remembered for her work Aag ka darya (The River of Fire) that emerged out of the deep anguish felt in the Partition of India. As a writer she places particular emphasis on weaving historical reality into the fictive lives of her characters. Other notable works include Safina- e-Gham-e Dil, Pathjhar ki awaz, Raushni ki Raftar among others. Her writing has spanned both Partitions of the subcontinent, that of 1947 and that of 1971.

Aamer Hussein is a short story writer, novelist and essayist, holding writing fellowships and having judged prestigious literature awards including The Commonwealth Prize, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize among others. He writes in both English and Urdu. In his presentation he will be discussing aspects of exile following Partition as depicted in QH's novels and short fiction, particularly the collection The Sound of Falling Leaves.

MEETING DETAILS >

Link: https://bit.ly/2GIeX8P

We live in times when any form of dissent in India is marked as anti-Indian, suggesting that the very concept of dissent has been imported into India from the West. This is an argument made by those who visualize the Indian past as free of blemishes and therefore not requiring dissenting opinions. Seagull Books presents Voices of Dissent, a timely historical essay by Romila Thapar, exploring the long history of dissent in the subcontinent—from the Vedic times to Shaheen Bag, via Gandhi’s Satyagraha and much more. Releasing on 19 October.

What does it mean for a society to agree to collectively live by an edict? Seventy three years as a secular democratic republic, what are the oppressive shackles India has not been able to shed?

ccccProf. Apoorvanand opened our conference, The Idea of the Indian Constitution - chapter II in Pune, Feb 2020, with this talk.

 

ccccIn this conversation, Professor Thapar responded to pre-submitted questions from teachers across schools based on her talk, 'Conversations with India's Past' for Karwaan's Distinguished Lecture Series and on her work titled Talking History: Romila Thapar in conversation with Ramin Jahanbegloo with the participation of Neeladri Bhattacharya.

ccccOsman Ali Khan, the last Nizam, had wished to stay independent—the option given to princely states by the British. What transpired then? How and why did the annexation happen? Around the same period—1946-51—Telangana, which was part of the Hyderabad state then, also witnessed the Telangana Armed Struggle—a Communist Party of India-backed peasant rebellion against state-appointed landlords.

A transcript of this fascinating talk will be out soon—become a member on our website or follow our social media accounts to stay updated!

ccccThe first in our Mythmaking and History sessions held this August, historian Aloka Parasher Sen explores the question: What can be done to achieve a continual dialogue between modern history writing and what modernity understands as myth?

The school academic year as we know it, has gone for a toss.

Classes have of course continued online in full swing for many of us, with overworked teachers scuttling from one virtual classroom to the next, somewhere between workshops to catch up with the 'digital turn' and home chores. Students too have responded to this shift in medium in different ways—some finding it easier to participate, others preferring to engage more passively. While not entirely impossible, replicating the dynamic of a classroom is far from easy. On the upside, the digital realm brings its own fluid possibilities for different ways of teaching and learning.

ccccAmong the more heartening developments this pandemic is certainly the outpouring of carefully created classroom resources from the international community of educators. Here are some of our favourites:

The Learning Network with the New York Times has brought out an excellent clearly structured repository of resources for teachers and students. From the Civil Conversation Challenge that encourages teenagers to discuss issues at the heart of the current US election season, to textual and image prompts for documenting life in a pandemic—the resources are classified by discipline and waiting to be adapted to contexts closer home!

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Concerned the digital classroom is leaving your students feeling disengaged from learning? With primary sources, case studies and teaching modules on fascinating content such as 'Childhood and Transatlantic Slavery' and 'Orphans and Colonialism', Children and Youth in History may just be what the doctor ordered!

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Living through a pandemic has a way of re-ordering one's priorities and changing the questions that drive one's life. What at the end of the day do we want our children and youth to become? In a time when the need to understand ourselves beyond the 'individual', as a part of society is more relevant than ever, here's an activity from Facing History and Ourselves to get our young reflecting on the idea of 'common good'.

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'The new normal' has become a widely used phrase these last six months. Yet, the time preceding it saw a 'new normal' too: one where people from across the country and all walks of life, came together to voice their dissent against the NRC, CAA and NPR. What became of these movements? Returning to a thread that's drifted through this newsletter, what does a pandemic effectively do to democratic rights? Artist Shromona Sen's stunning comic The Summer of Maximum Learning (A BlueJackal Publication, September 2020) is a 'dark parody of the popular demand for myopic positivity in a time of grave crisis'—perfect to provoke critical responses from your students with.

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