Director's Lecture Series: The Partition of India: after 75 years who owns the narrative?

Speakers: Mr Salil Tripathi and Dr Aditi Kumar

Last year marked 75 years since the Partition of India. As writer and author Salil Tripathi reflected in Foreign Policy, when Jawaharlal Nehru addressed the nation in August 1947 with his “tryst with destiny” speech it was remarkable for its awareness of the task that lay ahead for his nation. Yet in contrast today, under Modi’s leadership, the narrative is undergoing a shift and India’s secular, liberal founders such as Nehru are increasingly lost from view.

As a new generation emerges, the stories, experience and intergenerational memories are arguably evolving. In this next SOAS Director’s Lecture Series we ask - how is this period of history remembered 75 years later – and who owns the narrative?

Salil Tripathi, author of The Colonel Who Would Not Repent: The Bangladesh War and its Unquiet Legacy, long-listed for the non-fiction award at the Tata Literature Live Festival in Mumbai in 2016, joins the art historian and cultural practitioner Dr Aditi Kumar, who has worked with the Kashmir diaspora in the UK to redefine the intellectual scope of art history as a discipline, to discuss the Partition of India with a focus on memory, new perspectives and the changing narratives.

The SOAS Director’s Lecture Series focuses on the planetary questions of our time and how to enable a collective human response. In this historical moment, all of our big challenges – pandemics, climate change, inequality, social and political polarisation – are transnational in character and require a cohering of the human community.

Speaker biographies

Mr Salil Tripathi is the author of The Colonel Who Would Not Repent: The Bangladesh War and its Unquiet Legacy (Yale, 2016) which was long-listed for the non-fiction award at the Tata Literature Live Festival in Mumbai in 2016. He has also written a collection of travel writing , Detours: Songs of the Open Road (Tranquebar, 2015), and a book on threats to freedom of expression from Hindu nationalism, Offence: The Hindu Case (Seagull, 2009). His next book is about the Gujaratis. He has also co-edited For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit, (Context, 2022) with the artist Shilpa Gupta, about imprisoned poets through centuries.

His journalism has won awards in Asia and the United States and he has been published widely in the UK, the US, India, and elsewhere. He has written academic papers on business and human rights at peer-reviewed journals and contributed chapters in books on business and human rights. Born in Mumbai, he has lived in Singapore, Hong Kong, London, and is now based in New York. He was educated at Sydenham College in Mumbai and Tuck School for Business at Dartmouth College in the United States.

Dr Aditi Kumar is an Art historian and Cultural practitioner. Her scholarship interrogates the role of art and culture in the formation of postcolonial nation-states and national as well as regional identities of the Global South. In particular, she has worked to redefine the intellectual scope of art history as a discipline, with reference to the Caribbean, South Asia and diaspora communities in Europe specifically in the UK - particularly the Jammu and Kashmir diaspora living in the UK. Dr Kumar has also shown how scholarship may interact more creatively with global histories, museum and exhibition curation, cultural policy and the public understanding of art. Through public and academic engagement as an academic fellow at Warwick Interdisciplinary Research Centre for International Development (PAIS), she is in the process of materialising her research in a manuscript. Dr Kumar also teaches as a part-time lecturer in Humanities & Social Sciences at the University of Roehampton, London.