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Date
Time
5:00 pm to 6:30 pm
Venue
Main building, SOAS University of London
Room
Khalili Lecture Theatre (KLT)
Event type
Film screening

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This event will feature a 52-minute film screening of 'Those 4 Years' followed by a Q&A session with Dr Joe Thomas Karackattu, the creator and director of the film.

About the film

The Nilgiris have gained the distinction of being a geographic indication for tea, today. Somewhere behind the present glory is a remote connection with the Chinese which remains forgotten. 

"Those 4 Years" is an amazing journey into the lives of those Chinese who came to India around the middle of the 19th century… speaking a language unknown to their neighbours when they first arrived. The film journeys across three countries and reams of colonial office records to retrace the places those people came from, the means and mode of their arrival, and how many of them ended up making India their home. 

It is a history of people, plants and places - as it catalogues their contributions to plantations, locates places and sites associated with their earliest arrival and stay and, more remarkably, manages to locate some of the descendants of those Chinese who arrived in India over 150 years ago.

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Dr Joe Thomas Karackattu is an Associate Professor with the Humanities and Social Sciences Department at IIT Madras. He was Fox Fellow (2008–2009) at Yale University and was also the inaugural Centenary Visiting Fellow (nominated award) at SOAS, University of London in 2013. Most recently he was a CISLI Fellow with the India-China Institute at the New School, New York (2017-19). Joe studied Economics at St. Stephen's College (Delhi) and Chinese studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University (Delhi). 

He was awarded the "Srimathi Marti Annapurna Gurunath Award for Excellence in Teaching" 2024 from IIT Madras, and was previously recipient of the "Young Faculty Recognition Award" 2020 at IIT Madras. He has made two non-fiction films on the subject of diplomatic history (research focus on India and China), which have been screened at invitational events in the United States (Duke University, NYU, Penn State University, University of Pittsburgh, New School, Yale University & SUNY Binghamton), Singapore, Qatar, UAE, Denmark, France, and across India and China.

Chair: Dr Xiaoning Lu, School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics, SOAS University of London.

Registration

This event is free to attend, but registration is required. Please note that seating is on a first-come, first-served basis. 

This event is taking place on campus and will not be recorded or live-streamed.

Organisers

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