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Disobedient Students, Dubious Guardians A History of Hostels in Colonial Calcutta

Disobedient Students, Dubious Guardians A History of Hostels in Colonial Calcutta

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Disobedient Students, Dubious Guardians A History of Hostels in Colonial Calcutta
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<strong>Centre for Historical Studies School of Social Sciences</strong> a Lecture <strong>Disobedient Students, Dubious Guardians A History of Hostels in Colonial Calcutta</strong> <strong>Bodhisattva Kar</strong> Department of Historical Studies University of Cape Town, South Africa <strong>6th April 2016</strong> In the last few months, student hostels on several educational campuses in India have not only experienced coordinated police action but also drawn a great deal of flak from different quarters for being "dens" of sedition, sexual licentiousness and reckless lifestyle. On one level, through a small history of hostels in colonial Calcutta, this seminar offers a provisional genealogy of such cultures and techniques of discipline and moral censure. On another level, however, it also points at the remarkable (though largely unexamined) analytical fecundity of this specific site to reconsider a question that many scholars have found fundamental to colonial modernity: 'how to live together'. Readapting this Barthesian question for a very different historical assemblage, this seminar charts out some of the ways in which the hostels provide an interesting entry point to the complex and connected histories of changing logics of governance, rhythms of urbanization, architectural idioms, rites of sociality, affective codes and styles of organized politics. Bodhisattva Kar is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Historical Studies, University of Cape Town, South Africa. An alumnus of Centre for Historical Studies, JNU, Kar has previously taught and held fellowships at Amsterdam, Berlin, Calcutta, Mexico City, Oxford, and Paris. His research interests, primarily grounded in the northeastern frontier of British India, include histories of development and disciplines; primitivism; connected and comparative histories of frontiers; joint–stock companies; and global governmentality. He has co-edited, with Partha Chatterjee and Tapati Guha-Thakurta, New Cultural Histories of India: Materiality and Practices (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014).

A warm welcome to the modified and updated website of the Centre for East Asian Studies. The East Asian region has been at the forefront of several path-breaking changes since 1970s beginning with the redefining the development architecture with its State-led development model besides emerging as a major region in the global politics and a key hub of the sophisticated technologies. The Centre is one of the thirteen Centres of the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi that provides a holistic understanding of the region.

Initially, established as a Centre for Chinese and Japanese Studies, it subsequently grew to include Korean Studies as well. At present there are eight faculty members in the Centre. Several distinguished faculty who have now retired include the late Prof. Gargi Dutt, Prof. P.A.N. Murthy, Prof. G.P. Deshpande, Dr. Nranarayan Das, Prof. R.R. Krishnan and Prof. K.V. Kesavan. Besides, Dr. Madhu Bhalla served at the Centre in Chinese Studies Programme during 1994-2006. In addition, Ms. Kamlesh Jain and Dr. M. M. Kunju served the Centre as the Documentation Officers in Chinese and Japanese Studies respectively.

The academic curriculum covers both modern and contemporary facets of East Asia as each scholar specializes in an area of his/her interest in the region. The integrated course involves two semesters of classes at the M. Phil programme and a dissertation for the M. Phil and a thesis for Ph. D programme respectively. The central objective is to impart an interdisciplinary knowledge and understanding of history, foreign policy, government and politics, society and culture and political economy of the respective areas. Students can explore new and emerging themes such as East Asian regionalism, the evolving East Asian Community, the rise of China, resurgence of Japan and the prospects for reunification of the Korean peninsula. Additionally, the Centre lays great emphasis on the building of language skills. The background of scholars includes mostly from the social science disciplines; History, Political Science, Economics, Sociology, International Relations and language.

Several students of the centre have been recipients of prestigious research fellowships awarded by Japan Foundation, Mombusho (Ministry of Education, Government of Japan), Saburo Okita Memorial Fellowship, Nippon Foundation, Korea Foundation, Nehru Memorial Fellowship, and Fellowship from the Chinese and Taiwanese Governments. Besides, students from Japan receive fellowship from the Indian Council of Cultural Relations.