UBC South Asia Colloquium: Mrinalini Sinha

The UBC South Asia Research Colloquium offers a forum for specialists in South Asia to share their research in front of an interdisciplinary audience. This seminar features speaker Dr. Mrinalini Sinha (University of Michigan).

“Complete Political Independence: The Curious Genealogy of a Nationalist Indian Demand”
The Indian National Congress, the mainstream old anti-colonial political institution in British India, passed a resolution in 1929 in which it officially demanded complete political independence for India from the British empire. The question of political independence – against other modes of exit from the existing colonial situation – had been in the air for at least a few decades before the Congress signed on to it. Although immortalized immediately afterwards in the famous Gandhi-led Salt Satyagraha against the British in 1930, the historical conditions that had necessitated the resolution in the first place have remained obscure. This talk will attempt to defamiliarize the history of this political demand. It does so by locating the question of the future of India alongside the future of Indians in the British empire. Its aim is to intervene in both a long-standing scholarship that had  naturalized the transition from empires to nations and in the recent academic fascination with political forms that offered an alternative to, or by-passed, the nation-state.

Date & Time:
Friday, March 1, 2024 | 2:00 – 4:00pm

Location:
UBC Asian Centre, Auditorium, 1871 West Mall, Vancouver

Hosted by the Department of Asian Studies, University of British Columbia, this event is open to the public.
Registration is required.