Engagements
Mughal Illuminants: Nocturnal Temporality, Labour and Material Practices in Early Modern India
The talk by Dr Amrita Chattopadhyay focuses on Mughal illumination as a spatial-temporal category where technology, labour and material procedures coalesced in early modern India. The Mughal empire at the helm of its political rule in India edified a well-organised workshop (kārkhānah) system of manufacturing objects catering to the functions of the royal court and the household. Furnishing the imperial realm, objects such as a variety of illuminants and fireworks facilitated a range of temporal practices, especially calibrating the night-time and demarcating darkness from light. The nocturnal character of the polity was primarily configured by the labour employed for the lighting, provisioning, carriage and maintenance of illuminants. The sensorial materiality of the illuminants along with the associated labour-groups charted a social-time which in attunement with the natural-time constituted the temporal order of the Indo-Islamicate polity. It enabled varied economic enterprises, travel and military undertakings, observation of festivals, rituals and occasions of sociability and conviviality as well as produced anxieties around fire-breakout, physical-burns, loss and damage. Bringing these into focus, the talk explores a textual corpus of translated and un-translated Mughal chronicles, Indo-Persian household manual, archival documents in corroboration with visual sources from this period. In doing so, it contests the temporal marginalisation of nocturnal time in the historical works on early modern India by foregrounding the entangled narratives of Mughal light and the night.
“Take notice, this paper will witness against thee another day:” Intermediality in the Eighteenth-Century Hymnbook Trade.
Dominic Bridge will talk about how Hymn and psalm books stood alongside popular collections of country dances as the core repertoire of the eighteenth-century music publisher. Catalogues of “divine music” show that the size of this market sustained an enormous volume of publishing activity. Members of the clergy rushed to print their versions of psalms and hymns and the market was large enough to sustain a wealth of publishers printing and selling sacred music alongside secular music as part of more diverse publishing practices. These individuals fought to distinguish their editions from the mass of hymn and psalm collections available by asserting their denominational identities, adopting promotional methods from the wider book trade, and developing distinct editorial and promotional methods. This paper will explore how publishers, musicians, and clerical figures shaped their hymnbooks to compete in the growing market for sacred print. Through an analysis of the graphic and textual elements of printed hymnbooks (from the British Library and Durham’s Pratt Green Collection) it will show how hymnbooks were not only used to carry the practice of sacred music beyond the audial and spatial confines of church and chapel but show that hymnbook producers attached a range of paratexts and images to their musical editions which served their spiritual and commercial interests.
The Indo-English relations in colonial South Africa: Mahatma Gandhi’s journey from train to fame
Dr Deepali Yadav discusses the iconic leadership of Mahatma Gandhi has always been a variable subject. He is explored for both being a quintessential Hindu figure and also as an ideal spokesperson for Muslim rights and equality in India, a major Hindu nation. At times he is hailed as the most stubborn Indian leader in South Africa who constantly broke laws against British racial injustices while in other instances he is cited for his compromise and failure to save Bhagat Singh by signing the Gandhi-Irwin Pact (1931). The question worth asking is: was Gandhi a born leader that is usually showcased in the popular reconstructions of Gandhi or is there a process behind his leadership skills that has its origin in his South African days? My talk will focus on two events from Gandhi’s life in colonial South Africa which are popularly cited for his transformation from a lawyer to a Mahatma (saint). By looking at Richard Attenborough’s film Gandhi (1982) which begins with the South African episode of Gandhi being thrown out of the train to being forced to carry fingerprinted identity cards, a regulation that was applicable only on Indians, popular culture creates a larger-than-life figure of Gandhi in South Africa. However, my talk argues that Gandhi was unknown to fame and popularity at this moment which is paradoxically generated in popular representations for showcasing the magnanimity of the hero to the audience right from the outset. To assert my point, I will discuss The Empire theatre speech of Gandhi which brings out the gap between real and represented relations between English colonizers and indentured Indians in nineteenth-century South Africa. Being biopic in nature the film glorifies Gandhi at the cost of British officers with whom Gandhi in reality had bitter-sweet relations.
‘Meek innocence’, ‘ancient divines’ and ‘talk of Demosthenes’: Elite schooling, Classics and young people’s enculturation in the Nineteenth Century – a case study of the Headlam family
This paper shares the outcomes of my time as a Barker Fellow at Durham investigating the place of Classics in nineteenth-century young people's lives
