The talk will go through some of the pivotal moments in Prem Poddar's book just released from Cambridge University Press. Through the India-China Border: Kalimpong in the Himalayas mobilizes rarely used documentary material from British, Chinese and Indian archives to shed new light on our understanding of the "Tibet Question" in China-India relations. Focused on the Himalayan border town of Kalimpong from the 1920s to 1962, it unearths a history of espionage and political intrigue that challenges the way that remote peripheries are seen from the 'centres' of nations. The use of postcolonial and transcultural theory demonstrates how a multidisciplinary framework augments our reading of imperial histories, postwar politics and frontier cultures. Kalimpong emerges from this analysis as a key node in Himalayan history and in the mid-century fashioning of India-China relations.
Prem Poddar is currently Senior Fellow at Erfurt University, Senior Research Associate at the Centre for World Environmental History at University of Sussex and Honorary Senior Fellow at the University of Manchester in U.K.
He is the author of many articles and books including Invented Futures: Fin de Siècle Fantasies (2016) which has recently been revised and updated in Chinese and published as Cengjing de weilai 曾经的未来 (Imaged Futures) (2023). He has also edited numerous books like Translating Nations (2000), Empire and After: Englishness in Postcolonial Perspective (2007/2010) and Gorkhas Imagined (2009).
His latest monograph China in India: Himalayan Kalimpong from Cambridge University Press was published last year and investigates India-China relations through the optic of borders in the eastern Himalayas. His continuing interest in "state" and "nation" as conceptual contexts for analysing cultural representation forms the centre of his forthcoming work on the Politics of the Passport.
Join on site or online: https://univienna.zoom.us/j/68795832353?pwd=DP9ns49pjIMXDaceLFL5d5Qu6ezbRP.1 (Meeting-ID: 687 9583 2353, Code: 738676)
