The talk will go though some of the pivotal moments in my 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 an Honorary Senior Fellow at University of Manchester in U.K. He served as the founding Vice-Chancellor of Darjeeling Hills University in 2023. Prior to that he was Professor in Cultural Encounters at Rosklide University in Denmark for a decade.
He has been Humboldt Senior Fellow, Carlsberg Senior Fellow at Cambridge University and Visiting Professor at Fudan University in China and in Heidelberg University. He is the author of many articles and books on nationalism, postcolonial studies and cultural interfaces. His Invented Futures: Fin de Siècle Fantasies (2016) has recently been revised and updated in Chinese and published as Cengjing de weilai 曾经的未来. His monograph India:Through the India-China Border: Himalayan Kalimpong has just been issued by Cambridge University Press, which investigates India-China relations through the optic of borders in the eastern Himalayas. His continuing interest in ‘state’ and ‘nation’ as conceptual contexts for analyzing cultural representation forms the centre of his forthcoming work on the Politics of the Passport.
Speaker
- Prem Poddar, Honorary Senior Fellow at University of Manchester
Discussant
- Lyla Mehta
Chair
- Jing Gu, IDS Research Fellow
How to watch
This event will be available to watch in person in the Convening Space or online on zoom.
Accessibility
This event will take place in the IDS Convening Space which is on the 1st floor of the IDS Building. If you need to use a lift then press floor 1A.
If you have any accessibility issues then contact [email protected]
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