Events
Film Screening & Discussion on The Borderlands of Northeast India
| Date | : | 05 Oct 2015 |
| Time | : | 3:00 pm - 6:45 pm |
| Venue | : | Asia Research Institute Seminar Room |
| Contact Person | : | TAY, Minghua |
PROGRAM
| 14:45 | REGISTRATION |
| 15:00 | WELCOME REMARKS Prasenjit Duara | Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore |
| 15:15 | FILM SCREENING – ASSAM: A LANDSCAPE OF NEGLECT
Director: Pankaj Butalia The story of conflict in Assam continues to befuddle analysts. On the one hand is the struggle of Assamese sovereignty that ULFA is engaged in, and on the other, many smaller conflicts that the various tribes are involved in. Filmmaker Pankaj Butalia, has travelled extensively throughout Assam in an attempt to catch the small stories that we have lost sight of. Assam: A Landscape of Neglect captures this journey over an hour long documentary. |
| 16:20 | TEA BREAK |
| 16:50 | INTRODUCTORY REMARKS
Willem van Schendel, from University of Amsterdam will be showing extracts from the film, Khawnglung Run, a 2012 Mizo-language Action Romantic epic film, directed by Mapuia Chawngthu. It is based on true events of the historical massacre of Khawnglung during 1856-1859. The Khawnglung village raid was one of the most famous and the greatest massacre in Mizo history. He will also be sharing about his recent book on The Camera as Witness: A Social History of Mizoram, Northeast India (Cambridge University Press, 2015), which uses vernacular photography to highlight remarkable transformations and multiple forms of modernity that have flourished in Mizoram, Northeast India. |
| 17:30 | COMMENTARY REMARKS Sanjib Baruah | Bard College, USA |
| 18:20 | DISCUSSION |
| 18:45 | END OF EVENT |
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Pankaj Butalia has made thirteen documentaries and one fiction film. Most of his documentaries have been screened extensively throughout the world and one of them, MOKSHA, won four major international awards in 1993-94. His first feature film, Karvaan won a special award at Amiens in 1999 has been screened in film festivals in Venice, Toronto, Rotterdam, Belgium, Hong Kong, Turkey, New Delhi and Calcutta among other places.
Willem van Schendel is a historian and anthropologist, was a professor of Modern Asian History at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He has written on borderlands, flows of people and commodities, and the formation of ethnic identities. His recent books include The Bengal Borderland: Beyond State and Nation in South Asia (2005), A History of Bangladesh (2009), The Bangladesh Reader: History, Culture, Politics (2013), edited with Meghna Guhathakurta, and The Camera as Witness: A Social History of Mizoram, Northeast India (2015), with Joy Pachuau. His homepage is www.willemvanschendel.com.
Sanjib Baruah is Professor of Political Studies at Bard College, New York and Honorary Research Professor at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi. His books include India against Itself: Assam and the Politics of Nationality (University of Pennsylvania Press & Oxford University Press) and Durable Disorder: Understanding the Politics of Northeast India (Oxford University Press). His opinion columns appear in newspapers including the Indian Express, Asian Age and the Telegraph.
Prasenjit Duara is Raffles Professor of Humanities and Director of Asia Research Institute at National University of Singapore. He is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Chicago. Author of Culture, Power and the State: Rural North China, 1900-1942, winner of the Fairbank Prize of the AHA and the Levenson Prize of the AAS. Duara also wrote Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (1995) and Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (2003). He has edited a volume on Decolonization (Routledge, 2004) as well as a selection of his writings, The Global and Regional in China’s Nation Formation (Routledge, 2009). Duara has also contributed to volumes on historiography and historical thought. His work has been widely translated into Chinese, Korean and Japanese.
REGISTRATION
Admission is free. We would greatly appreciate if you RSVP to Ms Tay Minghua via email: minghua.tay@nus.edu.sg.