"Khadi Caps and Kenya Gandhi : Transnational nationalism and diasporic politics" a talk by Dr. Sana Aiyer at Teen Murti House, Teen Murti Marg > 3pm on 9th December 2013

Time : 3:00 pm

Entry : Free (Seating on First-Come First-Served basis)

Place : Nehru Memorial Museum & Library (NMML), Teen Murti House, Teen Murti Marg, New Delhi - 110011
Venue Info :  Events | About | Map | Nearest Metro Station - 'Race Course(Yellow Line)'

Event Description : The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library cordially invites you to a Seminar on ‘Khadi Caps and Kenya Gandhi : Transnational nationalism and diasporic politics’ by Dr. Sana Aiyer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA.

Abstract : This lecture traces the political aspirations of South Asians in Kenya who transitioned from being sub-imperialists in East Africa demanding to be made equal partners in the colonial project in the early 20th century, to developing an anti-colonial critique in the 1920s by linking their claims in Kenya with both the anti-colonial Khilafat, non-cooperation movement in India and an African anti-settler agitation led by Harry Thuku who aspired to be Kenya’s “Gandhi”. Highlighting the connections between these three movements, the talk uses the Indian Ocean as the main unit of spatial analysis to study the political strategies, rhetoric, and specific claims of South Asians in colonial Kenya. It explores diasporic expressions of political “belonging” as multiple rather than singular affiliations to both India and Kenya, and broadens the contours of colonial and national history to accommodate the experience of diasporic South Asians from whose perspective the neat historiographical spatial separation of India and Kenya does not adequately reflect the reality of the interracial, transcolonial – and eventually transnational – economic and political spaces within which they operated. In doing so the talk brings into relief the possibilities and limitations of transnational nationalism by placing diasporic politics squarely within two homelands.

Speaker : Dr. Sana Aiyer is a historian, currently Assistant Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA.  She is completing a book on the political history of the South Asian diaspora in Kenya, c.1895-1968 (forthcoming with Harvard University Press). She received a Ph.D from Harvard University and has worked as Assistant Professor, South Asian History, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison before joining the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA.

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