56 – Knowledge Production and Global Ties: Diverse Places, Different Contexts in Colonial and Postcolonial India

October 2, 2025
2:00 pm
UGX61
This proposal proposes a double panel to explore questions of knowledge production and international ties in colonial and postcolonial India by bringing together eight scholars across US, UK, and India. Its goal is to unravel the complicated processes of knowledge constitution and underscore connections in diverse spaces and contexts. Drawing on Nehru’s letters from prisons, Banerjee highlights Nehru's use of world history to educate Indira and the burgeoning youth in late colonial India. Topdar examines letters among nuns in India and Australia to unveil how global Catholic networks shaped female education. De Sarkar focuses on Presidency College of Kolkata to explore the relations between the world and students during and between the two World Wars. Nair delves into the California textbook controversies where the portrayal of ancient India led to distortions in representations of caste and ethnic minority groups in India. Kannan focuses on multiple Christian evangelical groups and their racialized and hierarchical constructions of childhood, differentiated by age and gender. Chatterjee addresses the process of collecting Indian folklores by British and native experts and the multifaceted ramifications of Victorian domesticity in construction of feminine ideals in children’s literature. Kumar explores the construction of mathematical sciences through an examination of peasant indebtedness, money-lending manuals, and indigenous and colonial government schools. Sen contextualizes the transcontinental European ties of Bengali trade unionists in Germany, Italy, and France for (re)constructing a global intellectual history of decolonial socialist networking.

Convenor

Banerjee Swapna

Presentations

Save India’s Children : Missionary Periodicals and Colonial Childhoods
Kannan Divya - Department of History and Archaeology, Shiv Nadar University, Delhi-NCR, India
Exhibiting localized Christianity: Missionary exhibitions and knowledge production in colonial India (1880-1950)
Dinesh Nainika - University of Pennsylvania, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, United States
Catholic Nuns, Convent Schools, and Global Knowledge Exchanges in Late Colonial India
Topdar Sudipa - Illinois State University, Illinois State University, Normal, United States
Bridging the Global and the Local: Knowledge Production in Children’s Literature through the stereotypes of Good and Bad Women in Late Colonial India
Chatterjee Pramiti - University of Massachusetts, Lowell, United States
The “Father” at Home and the “Chacha” of the Nation: Jawaharlal Nehru and his Global Vision of Education
Banerjee Swapna - Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, United States
A World Devouring Thirst for Knowledge: The ‘Global’ in the Presidency College Student Magazine
De Sarkar Titas - South Asian Languages and Civilizations, The University of Chicago, Chicago, United States
Mapping Transcontinental Socialism and Intellectual Networking in Trade Union Movement of Late Colonial Bengal (1920- 1947)
Sen Manaswini - SRM-AP University, Amravati, SRM-AP University, Amravati, Andhra Pradesh, India, Guntur, India
History Education and redefining of Indian identity in the United States
Nair Deepa - Carnegie Mellon University, Carnegie Mellon Univeristy, Pittsburgh, United States