Prof. Dr. Ravi Ahuja Head of the Research Group ‘Modern Indian History’, Centre for Modern Indian Studies of Georg-August-University Göttingen

Ravi Ahuja has worked on various aspects of India’s social history from 18th to 20th century including urban history, the history of infrastructure and the social history of war. His research interests have increasingly moved towards contemporary history. Current research projects examine the social history of South Asian seafarers and the emergence of a labour-centred social policy in mid-twentieth century India. After teaching at the South Asia Institute in Heidelberg and conducting research at the Centre for Modern Oriental Studies in Berlin he was appointed Professor of Modern South Asian History at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. He joined CeMIS as its founding director in 2009.

Keynote Topic: Labour as a Political Category: Twentieth-Century Trajectories in South Asia
In his lecture Prof. Ahuja will outline his most recent research, where he focuses on the centrality in the middle decades of the twentieth-century of “labour“ as a politically usable category, i.e.as a central category of political discourse, identification, and mobilization as well as a focus area of legislation, institutionalization, cultural production, and of academic study. Starting from the interwar period, the lecture will lay special emphasis on the transitional period from the late colonial era through the Second World War into the first decades after Indian independence. The examination ends in the mid-1970s when the political usability of labour as a political category declined. While the focus is on India, the talk will also show, how this history of labour as a political category in India was intrinsically linked to developments beyond the national frame and will raise questions, to be examined in future research, about the divergent trajectories in India and Pakistan after 1947.

Venue: Aman CED, MCS-3, IBA Main Campus

Time: 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM