Wednesday, November 18, 2015 – 12:45pm to 2:00pm
Colin Matthew Room, Radcliffe Humanities Building, Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, Woodstock Road

Part of Book at Lunchtime, a fortnightly series of bite size book discussions, with commentators from a range of disciplines. Free, all welcome – no booking required. A sandwich lunch is provided from 12:45, with discussion from 13:00 to 13:45.

Elleke Boehmer (Professor of World Literature in English, University of Oxford) will discuss her book Indian Arrivals, 1870-1915: Networks of British Empire with:
Megan Robb (Junior Research Fellow at Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, University of Oxford)
Faisal Devji (University Reader in Modern South Asian History, University of Oxford)
Santanu Das (Reader of English Literature, Kings College London)

About the book

Elleke Boehmer’s book Indian Arrivals 1870-1915: Networks of British Empire explores the rich and complicated landscape of intercultural contact between Indians and Britons on British soil at the height of empire, as reflected in a range of literary writing, including poetry and life-writing. The book’s four decade-based case studies, leading from 1870 and the opening of the Suez Canal, to the first years of the Great War, investigate from several different textual and cultural angles the central place of India in the British metropolitan imagination at this relatively early stage for Indian migration. Focussing on a range of remarkable Indian ‘arrivants’ — scholars, poets, religious seekers, and political activists including Toru Dutt and Sarojini Naidu, Mohandas Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore — Indian Arrivals examines the take-up in the metropolis of the influences and ideas that accompanied their transcontinental movement, including concepts of the west and of cultural decadence, of urban modernity and of cosmopolitan exchange.