Friday, May 6, 2016

11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Young Research Library Main Conference Room
UCLA

Abstract: The indentured labor system, which had been put in place in the aftermath of Atlantic slavery to replace emancipated African slaves with indentured Indians on colonial plantations overseas, came under widespread attack by the early decades of the 20th century. M.K. Gandhi’s involvement in the movement for the abolition of indenture, or what following the abolition of Atlantic slavery has been called the “second abolition,” helped launch his political career in India. Yet the campiagn against indenture occupies an obscure and undigested role in the scholarship on Gandhi and on modern India. What might it mean to restore abolitionism to its role in the advent of Gandhi’s career in India? What might abolitionism tell us about Gandhi’s signature concepts of swaraj and satyagraha? This talk will shed light on the abolition movement in India and explore its implications for understanding Gandhi’s politics.

 

Mrinalini Sinha, the Alice Freeman Palmer Professor of History at the University of Michigan, is a historian of Modern South Asia and of the British Empire. She has written on various aspects of the political history of colonial India, with a focus on anti-colonialism, gender, and transnational approaches. She has recently become interested in the different forms of political imaginings, beyond the nation-state, that animated anti-colonial thought in India at least until the interwar period. She received her Master’s degree from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India and a Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, United States. She is the current president of the Association for Asian Studies. She is the author of Colonial Masculinity: The Manly Englishman and the Effeminate Bengali (Manchester Univ. Press, 1995), and Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire (Duke Univ. Press, 2006).