Roundtable at the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) Annual Meeting on THURSDAY 22 March 2007 from 7.00 to 9.00 p.m.

Salon E, 4th Floor, Boston Marriott Copley Place, 110 Huntington Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts 02116

Labour Space and Politics:
Rajnarayan Chandavarkar and the History of Modern South Asia

Rajnarayan Chandavarkar was one of the foremost scholars of urban and working class history writing on South Asia. His sudden death in April 2006 has been an inestimable loss to the academic community. The empirical depth of Chandavarkar’s scholarship stood out amongst his contemporaries. The impact of his work on the field remains to be assessed.

This roundtable will focus on several areas where Chandavarkar’s contributions remain significant and offer new directions for future scholarship. His challenge to universalising narratives of world capitalism opened up new ways of understanding the social spaces, political choices and organising strategies of urban working classes. Larger formations such as class and nationalist politics articulated with everyday relations amongst women, migrants and the urban poor. The earlier importance given to the workplace as the primary site of class mobilisation gave way to a wider understanding of how the spaces of the neighbourhood and countryside enabled workers to engage in urban politics. His attention to social organisation emphasised the shifting nature of class and community identities in the context of mass action, challenging functionalist conceptions of social structure and political agency.

This roundtable will situate Chandavarkar’s wide-ranging contributions to the historiography of modern South Asia, addressing critiques of his work as well as areas where his interpretations have gained acceptance. This roundtable also points to new directions which his work and mentorship have helped shape amongst his peers and colleagues. The participants include senior historians, younger scholars, and Chandavarkar’s former students from the U.S., U.K. and India.

Chair

Frank F. Conlon, Department of History, University of Washington, Seattle, WA

Participants

Douglas Haynes, Department of History, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire
Subho Basu, Department of History, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York
Lisa Trivedi, Department of History, Hamilton College, Clinton, New York
Nikhil Rao, Department of History, Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts
Shekhar Krishnan, Program in History and Anthropology of Science & Technology, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts

MAIN TEXTS

Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, “From Neighbourhood to Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Left in Bombay’s Girangaon in the 20th Century”, introductory essay from Meena Menon and Neera Adarkar, One Hundred Years, One Hundred Voices: The Mill Workers of Girangaon: An Oral History (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2004).

Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, “Workers’ Politics and the Mill Districts in Bombay Between the Wars” from Imperial Power and Popular Politics: Class, Resistance and the State in India, 1850-1950, pp.100-142

Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, “Police and Public Order in Bombay, 1880-1947″ from Imperial Power and Popular Politics: Class, Resistance and the State in India, 1850-1950, pp.180-233

Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, “Plague Panic and Epidemic Politics in India, 1896-1914″ from Imperial Power and Popular Politics: Class, Resistance and the State in India, 1850-1950, pp.234-265

Douglas Haynes and Subho Basu, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajnarayan_Chandavarkar