Join us for a presentation by Nilanjana Mukherjee, Mittal Institute Bajaj Fellow Fall 2024, moderated by Robin Kelsey, Shirley Carter Burden Professor of Photography in the Department of History of Arts and Architecture.
Lunch will be served! Please RSVP below.
In the seminar, Nilanjana Mukherjee will present her research on the Thar Desert in North-Western India. She will argue that the desert has evolved as a frontier zone due to British imperial transactions and stakes in the region and due to the politico-economic exigencies of a specific spatial cartographic logic of the colonial state. This rationale, format, and layout has come to be adopted by the present-day independent India. The desert’s location at the fringes, as though guarding the mainland, strengthens the imagination around its constructed identity as an altogether impervious region fraught with danger. Environmental and interdisciplinary study of this arid zone, with a special focus on the history and mobile lifeworld of nomadic pastoral peoples there, can reveal how a human-non human relationship transmit an alternate geography of connections to the colonial cartographic imagination.
Read our interview with Nilanjana here.
