NHTR1 Archives

Postcolonial Air and Atmospheres

This volume reopens and revitalises debates on the materialities of air and atmospheres, including practices of breathing, in a multitude of postcolonial and Southern hemispheric contexts. It probes the limits, and extends the narrow spatial purview, of much of the emerging scholarship, considering historical questions of air and enslavement alongside South Asian histories of air-conditioning and the drifting toxic atmospheres of water bodies of the African South.

While studies of both land and water have recently worked increasingly at the intersection of environmental humanities and postcolonial and decolonial studies, this has been less the case with air and atmospheres, and the latter have been only sporadically developed as material and political subjects of research in the majority world and the hemispheric South. Affective atmospheres born of dust, damp, wind and sound; unfree and impure airs shaped by histories of inequality; and modes and manners of breathing, whether asthmatically, interoceptively, laboriously or as a means of creating an artwork, all reinvigorate our understanding of aerial elemental media. Throughout, the book explores ways to recalibrate forms of air, atmospheres and breathing for a more productively entangled, relational, regenerative and just world.

Hosts, Hospitals and Hospitalities

Current historical and political issues, such as the refugee crisis and climate emergency, are deeply intertwined with notions, images and narratives of (in)hospitality and climate emergency. Departing from seminal works such as those by Kant and Derrida on these subjects, the chapters in this volume engage with these issues and examine how new postcolonial, gender, environmental and medical perspectives reshape current approaches to hospitality in literature, culture and the arts.

Through a comparison of case studies from multiple national backgrounds, Hosts, Hospitals and Hospitalities shows how the concept of hospitality shapes the way in which we relate with the Other in diverse – as well as changing – cultural, political, social and environmental contexts. By examining the issues of hospitality from a post-pandemic standpoint, which revised the roles of our private and public spaces in the aftermath of Covid-19, by dwelling on novel issues of climate emergency and by focusing on current developments in terms of migration and displacement, the book adds new light and significant theoretical and methodological perspectives to previous debates about hospitality.

The India Museum Revisited

The museum of the East India Company formed, for a large part of the nineteenth century, one of the sights of London. In recent years, little has been remembered of it beyond its mere existence, while an assumed negative role has been widely attributed to it on the basis of its position at the heart of one of Britain’s arch-colonialist enterprises.

Extensively illustrated, The India Museum Revisited provides a full examination of the museum’s founding manifesto and evolving ambitions. It surveys the contents of its multi-faceted collections – with respect to materials, their manufacture and original functions on the Indian sub-continent – as well as the collectors who gathered them and the manner in which they were mobilized to various ends within the museum.

From this integrated treatment of documentary and material sources, a more accurate, rounded and nuanced picture emerges of an institution that contributed in major ways, over a period of 80 years, to the representation of India for a European audience, not only in Britain but through the museum’s involvement in the international exposition movement to audiences on the continent and beyond.

Chandragupta Maurya

We take it for granted that some historical figures become heroes, and others do not. Chandragupta Maurya evolved from obscure ruler to contemporary national icon. The key moment in the making of this Indian hero was a meeting by the banks of the River Indus between Chandragupta and Seleucus, founder of the Seleucid empire and one of Alexander the Great’s generals, in c.305-3 BC. This significant event was a moment of peace-making at the end of conflict. But no reliable account exists in early sources, and it is not even clear which ruler was victorious in battle. This uncertainty enabled British and Indian historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to interpret the sources in radically different ways. With Chandragupta representing India and Seleucus standing in for Britain, British scholars argued that Seleucus defeated Chandragupta, while Indian academics contended the opposite.

The writing and reception of history fundamentally influences how we engage with the past, and the evolving colonial and post-colonial relationship between Britain and India is crucial here. In India, the image of Chandragupta as an idealised hero who vanquished the foreign invader has prevailed and found expression in contemporary popular culture. In plays, films, television series, comic books and historical novels, Chandragupta is the powerful and virtuous Hindu ruler par excellence. The path to this elevated standing is charted in this book.