Event — IIAS Lunch Lecture

More than Just Nostalgia: Assembling the Living Archive in India’s Silicon Valley

Exponential urban growth in Bengaluru has led green spaces, water bodies and heritage buildings to be lost at a staggering rate. The city’s pasts have become the focus of pervasive nostalgia, and a vast array of photographs and objects of the past are being collected. In this lecture, Emily Stevenson (SOAS, University of London) explores how the nostalgically motivated acts of collecting, digitising and sharing become enmeshed in a process of collective learning that actively assembles the city’s pasts as a ‘living archive’ in line with dissatisfaction with the present, and anxieties and hopes for the future.

Speaker: Emily Rose Stevenson, SOAS, University of London​

Lunch is provided. Registration is required.  

Since May 2016 there has been a wave of discussion in the media of Bengaluru as a dying city with either no future at all or, at best, a very dystopic one. At the start of the 20th century the city was lauded as ‘The Garden City’, whilst towards the end of the 20th century hopes abounded as it was cast as on-route to becoming ‘The Singapore of India’. However, these and other imagined identities of the city have faded away as exponential urban growth has led green spaces, water bodies and heritage buildings to be lost at a staggering rate. In this context, the city’s pasts have become the focus of pervasive nostalgia, as many Bengalureans look back to before the 1990s liberalisation of the Indian economy when the IT revolution took hold and the city’s urban transformation gained momentum.

It is within this context that a vast array of photographs and objects from the city’s pasts, including colonial picture postcards, post-Independence family photographs, cinema tickets, contemporary photographs of heritage sites and newspaper clippings, are being collected, digitised and shared in ways which complicate notions of nostalgia as an unproductive disorder solely concerned with the past. In this paper, I therefore explore how these nostalgically motivated acts of collecting, digitising and sharing become enmeshed in a process of collective learning that actively assembles the city’s pasts as a ‘living archive’ in line with dissatisfaction with the present, and anxieties and hopes for the future.

Emily Rose Stevenson is currently a fourth year Ph.D. candidate in the Anthropology & Sociology Department at SOAS, University of London, whose research was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council. As a social anthropologist of South Asia, her research specialises in both historical and visual ethnography with a particular regional focus on southern India.

Her thesis, entitled Picture Postcard Bengaluru: Visual and Material Pasts in India’s Silicon Valley, analyses the social life of British Indian picture postcards of Bengaluru from their initial production and consumption in the early 20th century into the postcolonial present. Whilst the current body of literature on colonial picture postcards has been conducted solely from a historical perspective, her research shows that their biographies continue into the present as they act as material mediators in postcolonial experiences of history, heritage and urban transformation. Along with Dr Stephen P. Hughes, Emily is also currently co-organising an exhibition on the construction of colonial cities in British Indian picture postcards to be held at the Brunei Gallery, SOAS, London in the summer of 2018.

 

Registration (required)

Please register via the webform below if you would like to attend.
Register by 21 February to secure a lunch box provided by IIAS.

About IIAS Lunch Lectures

Every month, one of the IIAS affiliated fellows will give an informal presentation about his/her work-in-progress for colleagues and others interested. Lunch lectures are sometimes also organised for visiting scholars.

IIAS organises these lectures to provide the research community with an opportunity to freely discuss ongoing research and exchange thoughts and ideas. Anyone with an interest in the subject matter at hand is welcome to attend and join the discussion.