cfp: Sikh Philosophy In 21st Century: Traditions and Modernity
Sri Guru Nanak Dev Khalsa College, University of Delhi is going to organize a National Seminar
On “The Sikh Philosophy In 21st Century: Traditions and Modernity” in the month of January 2015
Key Note Address: Dr. ManMohan Kaur, Principal, S.G.N.D.Khalsa College
The College invites abstracts from interdisciplinary scholars for the following sub-themes:
• Industrialisation
• Economic Development
• Education
• Migration
• Traditions of Martyrdom in the Sikh Culture
• Sikh Kingdom and its implications in contemporary times
• Relevance of teachings of Guru Granth Sahib in Contemporary times
Plenary Session:
Enlightenment, Rationality and Modernity Among the Sikhs in 21st Century
Speaker: Dr. Indrajeet Singh, Department of Political Science, S.G.N.D.Khalsa College, Dev Nagar, University of Delhi
You are requested to send the abstracts to adsbindra@gmail.com or indrajeet69@gmail.com latest by 6th November, 2014.
Convener: Dr. Amardeep Singh Bindra
ROAD TO MANDALAY – SIKHS IN BURMA by Swarn Singh Kahlon
Based on Travels of Swarn Singh Kahlon, December, 2011
Article appeared in The Sikh Review, Kolkata, February, 2014 issue.
THE ROMANCE OF BURMA
There are two romantic poems about Burma;
ONE by Rudyard Kipling (1889-90),
where he tries to relive on return to London his travels in Burma:
“By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin’ lazy at the sea,
There’s a Burma girl a-settin’, and I know she thinks o’ me;
For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the Temple-bells they say:
“Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay!”
AND THE SECOND
By the exiled Mughal King, Bahadur Shah Zafar who immortalised his death in Burma (1862) through the epitaph he wrote on the wall with a burnt stick:
“Kitna hai badnaseeb Zafar, dafan ke liye
do gaz zamin na mili ku e yaar mein”
This was also the period when Sikhs started to migrate to Burma; a country now renamed ‘Myanmar’. The Sikh migration to Burma was an important component of global Sikh migration and remained a popular destination for about six decades.
Many Sikhs have their relatives and friends who still talk about the Burma days even if they have returned permanently since long back. A visit was very tempting especially as my wife’s mother was born and grew up in that country. Whenever my mother-in-law and her sisters had some confidences to share they would shift to speaking Burmese even after their return three decades ago.
Read full article: Road to Mandalay
cfp: Immigration, Nation and Public History
- Migration history in school curricula
- Museums and migration (including exhibitions, public programmes, collections, and community engagement)
- Migrant memorials
- Forced migration (eg. convict transportation, slavery, child migration) and its representations
- Migration in the news media
- Public attitudes towards migration, how they are represented (eg. opinion polls and their use)
- Family history/genealogy, and the discovery of immigrant ancestors
- Links between migration and tourism
- Links between national histories and migration histories
- Representations of indigenous peoples in ‘immigrant nations’
- Asylum seekers and refugees: historical and contemporary representations
- Representations of migration/migrants/migrant communities in film and television
- Migrant communities and individual’s self-representations
- Changing representations of migration given the so-called ‘failure of multiculturalism’ in Britain and Europe
Parminder, a Cosmopolitan
Notes to accompany the film on Parminder: A Cosmopolitan
The film has resonated with people across the world and went on to twitter and many face book pages. It has been viral via university and other sites across Australia, Denmark, Sweden, Italy, and other transnational sites across the diaspora. It will used on courses at University of California campuses at Berkeley, Riverside, and also Santa Barbara in Ethnic and Diversity Studies, and also on Global Diasporas. This film’s impact much beyond the Clark University media class for which it was made is as much a surprise to Parminder, as it is to the film maker, for whom many opportunities have emerged to make other films, though with much longer time formats than 9 minute length of this film.
Jonathan Dana, the talented young film maker is 20 years old. He was awarded a prestigious Clinton Media Fellowship last year and worked in New York at the Clinton Foundation. His work was greatly admired by Hilary Clinton and it is now on her official site. He is the son of an eminent cinematographer.
Parminder was a fellow graduate student with me at the School of Oriental and African Studies in the late 70s. She received her Ph.D. in 1981 and has since authored four books, the latest of which is Dangerous Designs. Her current work is on diasporic creativity and innovation, a theme on which she is currently writing a book.
I hope that some of you will watch the film. A number of us already know Parminder well, both from her time in the British academy, and since her migration to the USA in 1990, firstly to UCLA, and then to Clark University in Massachusetts. She held a prestigious Henry R. Luce Professorship in Cultural Identities and Global Processes for 9 years at Clark, before moving into the Sociology Department there in 2000, which has been her departmental home for the past 13 years.
It is a pleasure for me to see a member of the Punjab Research Group being celebrated across the world, especially as she is of the pioneering generation of British Asian, and indeed now Asian American intellectuals of the diaspora, whose academic work focuses on the Punjabi migrants and their multiple diasporas. She has been in the USA now for 24 years, which is longer than any other site in which she has been lived in the past.
I have included below a link to the film. As stated above, you can also watch it on You Tube on Jonathan Dana’s site, entitled Parminder: A Cosmopolitan.
Dr. Shinder S. Thandi, Coventry University, Founding Member of the Journal of Punjab Studies
Women and Partition by Pippa Virdee
A couple of new articles on women and partition:
Pippa Virdee, ‘Remembering partition: women, oral histories and the Partition of 1947.’ Oral History, Autumn 2013, Volume 41, No 3, pp. 49-62.
Abstract: This article explores key developments in the way Partition has been represented in the history of India and Pakistan. It more specifically examines how alternative silent voices have been become more visible in the past fifteen years in the historiography of Partition. This shift has been made possible with the use of oral testimonies to document accounts of ordinary people’s experiences of this event in the history of India and Pakistan. The article then goes on to reflect on the author’s experiences of working in South Asia and the use of oral history as a radical and empowering tool in understanding women’s history in Pakistan.
Follow link for details: http://www.oralhistory.org.uk/journal-search.php?parameter=issue&searchkey=86
Pippa Virdee, ‘The Heart Divided: Writing the Human Drama of Partition in India/Pakistan’
http://imowblog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/clio-talks-back-heart-divided-writing.html
Recording Punjab’s darkest hours for posterity
Recording Punjab’s darkest hours for posterity – article on the 1947 Partition Archive project which is recording narratives of Punjabis about their memories of being uprooted following the Partition of Punjab.
Link to the The Tribune, 25 September 2013
The Sikh Turban: Exploring An Icon Of A Migratory Peoples’ Identity
Research Consultation: Anthropological Collection on Sikh Turbans
The Horniman Museum, London
Kind assistance is requested with researching a collection displaying the dastar as part of Sikhs’ global migration. The collection has three aspirations; to firstly display the pagh’s physical variation as geographically dichotomous and freighting a regionally intrinsic identity trope for instance Makhan Singh as a kalasingha wearing a Kenyan kilemba. Secondly to consider the pagh and its contentious role in Sikh identity within the milieu of other head-coverings e.g. Mitres in Europe during The Middle Ages. Thirdly to reflect on the pagh in Sikh-Britain relationships e.g. Winterhalter’s 1854 portrait of Duleep Singh or turbaned Sikhs as stock British Armed Forces’ media images. Thoughts on the collection mode and process are especially welcomed. The Horniman Museum Collections can be explored at www.horniman.ac.uk, whilst the researchers can be reached on gorby.jandu@gmail.com and JZetterstrom-Sharp@horniman.ac.uk. The collection is due to gain exhibition in 2014 with displays finalised by end 2013.
Call for book proposals for a new series: Language, Migration and Identity
Peter Lang would like to announce the launch of a new scholarly book series:
Language, Migration and Identity
Series Editor: Professor Vera Regan, University College Dublin
This series fills a hitherto neglected but now growing area in the treatment of migration: the role of language and identity. This topic is central in a globalized world where the definition of community is constantly challenged by the increased mobility of individuals. Linked to this mobility is the issue of identity construction, in which language plays a key role. Language practices are indicators of the socialization process in bilingual and multilingual settings, and part of the strategies by which speakers assert membership within social groups. Migrant speakers are constantly engaged in identity construction in varying settings.
Language, Migration and Identity invites proposals for revised dissertations, monographs and edited volumes on language practices and language use by migrant speakers. A wide range of themes is envisaged, within the area of migration, but from a broadly linguistic perspective. The series welcomes studies of migrant communities and their language practices, studies of language practices in multilingual educational settings, and case studies of identity building among migrants through language use. Proposals might focus on topics such as second language acquisition in social context, variation in L2 speech, multilingualism, acquisition of sociolinguistic competence, hybridity and ‘crossing’ in relation to identity. A multiplicity of approaches in the treatment of this interdisciplinary area will be welcome, from quantitative to ethnographic to mixed methods.
The series welcomes established scholars as well as early career academics and recent PhD research.
For information on how to submit a book proposal, please contact Christabel Scaife, Commissioning Editor, Peter Lang Ltd, c.scaife@peterlang.com.
Horrors of Partition, by A.G. Noorani
Frontline Vol 29 – Issue 4
Book review of The Punjab Bloodied, Partitioned and Cleansed by Ishtiaq Ahmed; Partition Observed edited by Lionel Carter and Partition and Locality by Illyas Chattha.
In addition to the loss of human lives and property, the near-fatal blows on cultures mark Partition’s distinctively hideous features.
THE partition of the subcontinent of India deserves to rank as one of the 10 great tragedies in recorded human history. That is saying a lot. It is not only the loss of human lives and property but the near-fatal blows on cultures that mark its distinctively hideous features. Urdu and the composite Ganga-Jamuna tehzeeb (culture) suffered grievously. People were uprooted, leaving an impoverished culture behind them. Of all the provinces, Punjab suffered the most. The massacre that preceded and followed its partition, along with that of India, was predictable and was predicted.
“Pakistan would mean a massacre,” the Premier of Punjab Sir Sikandar Hyat Khan predicted to the distinguished civilian Penderel Moon as early as in October 1938 ( Divide and Quit, page 20). That was well before the Muslim League adopted the Pakistan resolution on March 23, 1940, in Lahore, radically altering Sir Sikandar’s draft just 24 hours before it was passed. He repudiated it because it dropped the organic link between the two parts of India, which he had provided. He told the Punjab Legislative Assembly, on March 11, 1941, “We do not ask for freedom that there may be Muslim Raj here and Hindu Raj elsewhere. If that is what Pakistan means I will have nothing to do with it.”
Read full review:
2 job vacancies at the University of Birmingham
The Department of History at the University of Birmingham seeks to appoint a Postdoctoral Research Fellow for two years and a Research Assistant for one year, to work with Dr. Jelle van Lottum on his new project ‘Migration, human capital and labour productivity: the international maritime labour market in Europe, C. 1650-1815’, which was recently funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). This project will investigate the link between economic development and
labour migration in Europe before the Industrial Revolution, with a specific focus on the contribution of skilled labour migrants to economic performance.
Closing date: 16th March 2012
For more information see:
Research Fellow
http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/ADY337/research-fellow/
Research Assistant
http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/ADY336/research-assistant/
Sikhs in Europe. Migration, Identities and Representations, Edited by Knut A. Jacobsen & Kristina Myrvold
Sikhs in Europe. Migration, Identities and Representations, Edited by Knut A. Jacobsen, University of Bergen, Norway; Kristina Myrvold, Lund University, Sweden (Ashgate, 2011)
Sikhs in Europe are neglected in the study of religions and migrant groups: previous studies have focused on the history, culture and religious practices of Sikhs in North America and the UK, but few have focused on Sikhs in continental Europe. This book fills this gap, presenting new data and analyses of Sikhs in eleven European countries; examining the broader European presence of Sikhs in new and old host countries. Focusing on patterns of migration, transmission of traditions, identity construction and cultural representations from the perspective of local Sikh communities, this book explores important patterns of settlement, institution building and cultural transmission among European Sikhs.
Contents: Introduction: Sikhs in Europe, Knut A. Jacobsen and Kristina Myrvold; Part I Sikhs in Northern and Eastern Europe: Institutionalization of Sikhism in Norway: community growth and generational transfer, Knut A. Jacobsen; The Sikh community in Denmark: balancing between cooperation and conflict, Helene Ilkjaer; The Swedish Sikhs: community building, representation and generational change, Kristina Myrvold; Sikhs in Finland: migration histories and work in the restaurant sector, Laura Hirvi; The Sikhs in Poland: a short history of migration and settlement, Zbigniew Igielski. Part II Sikhs in Southern Europe: Mirror games: a fresco of Sikh settlements among Italian local societies, Barbara Bertolani, Federica Ferraris and Fabio Perocco; ‘Did you get papers?’: Sikh migrants in France, Christine Moliner; Caste, religion, and community assertion: a case study of the Ravidasias in Spain, Kathryn Lum; Sikh immigrants in Greece: on the road to integration, Niki Papageorgiou. Part III Sikhs in the United Kingdom and Ireland: Sikh diversity in the UK: contexts and evolution, Eleanor Nesbitt; Sikh-ing beliefs: British Sikh camps in the UK, Jasjit Singh; The Valmiki, Ravidasi and Namdhari communities in Britain: self-representations and transmission of traditions, Opinderjit Kaur Takhar; The Sikh diaspora in Ireland: a short history, Glenn Jordan and Satwinder Singh; Glossary; Index.
Link to publisher – Ashgate: http://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&pageSubject=549&calcTitle=1&sort=pubdate&forthcoming=1&title_id=10934&edition_id=14157
Punjab Research Group 
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