Reading Shahid Amin: Subaltern Histories for the People

Reading Shahid Amin: Subaltern Histories for the People is a gathering of admirers, students, and colleagues to celebrate the extensive contributions of the esteemed historian of modern India, Shahid Amin. He earned his D.Phil from Oxford University and had a notable career as a Professor of History at the University of Delhi until his retirement in 2015. Amin is the author of three groundbreaking scholarly monographs: Sugarcane and Sugar in Gorakhpur: An Inquiry into Peasant Production for Capitalist Enterprise (1984), the influential Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura 1922-1992 (1995), and the creative Conquest and Community: The Afterlife of Warrior Saint Ghazi Miyan (2015). Additionally, he has written numerous foundational essays on historical writing within the Subaltern Studies framework, a project for which he was one of the founding editors, including his remarkable essay, “Gandhi as the Mahatma” (1984).

Known for historiographic creativity, disciplinary innovation, and extraordinary prose, Amin’s work animates the archives of subaltern life and memory through innovations in storytelling, bringing together wide-ranging sources, weaving together ledgers, police reports, rumors, and oral testimonies recorded by colonial ethnographers and linguists with local folktales, ballads, and the material artifacts of shrines. To honor his extraordinary oeuvre, this gathering brings together a lucky group of scholars to read—carefully and thoughtfully read—Shahid Amin. This workshop will turn to the myriad methods and stories of this great historian and engage in, Shahid Amin’s passionate hermeneutics of belonging.

Speakers:

Welcoming Keynote Speaker: Sugata Bose, Gardiner Oceanic Professor of History, Harvard University

Convenor and Moderator: Ashutosh Kumar, Visiting Scholar, Weatherhead Research Cluster on Global History. Professor of History, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India.

Manan Ahmed, Associate Professor of History, Columbia University

Sana Aiyar, Associate Professor of History, MIT

Neilesh Bose, Associate Professor of History, University of Victoria

Pallavi Chakravarty, Assistant Professor, Ambedkar University Delhi

Rohit De, Associate Professor of History, Yale University

Dilip M. Menon, Professor of History and International Relations, University of Witwatersrand

Durba Mitra, Richard B. Wolf Associate Professor in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Harvard University

Ram Narayan Rawat, Associate Professor, Delaware University

Ahona Panda, Assistant Professor of History, Claremont McKenna College

Aarti Sethi, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, UC Berkeley

Teren Sevea, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Associate Professor of Islamic Studies, Harvard Divinity School

Kavita Sivaramkrishnan, Associate Professor of Sociomedical Sciences, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University