EVENTS

Modern India-China historiography is often narrated through overarching frameworks like nations and geopolitics. Momentous events such as the India-China war of 1962, obscure ordinary historical subjects with their scale and sweep. However, Hindi-language cinema produced in Bombay, where ethnic Chinese performed as labor, as "extras” and “junior artists”, provides an alternative archive for the two nations shared history, fleeting presence of the ethnic Chinese performing on the Indian screens intertwines the known and forgotten histories of material flows and migration, enlivening the phantom histories of Bombay city built on the fortunes of cotton and opium trade with China, and the repressed histories of war and persecution. Such fleeting memories question the primacy of overarching frameworks completely devoid of the vantage of the margins and question the contemporary framework that define Sino-India relations.

Speaker

Navnidhi Sharma is a doctoral scholar in Cinema Studies at New York University. Her doctoral research weaves together the story of India and China with that of popular cultural production in India. Through the archive of Indian cinema and print in the twentieth century, she considers how China-India history is shaped by, and in turn shapes, the history of popular cultural production in India."

Chair

Avijit Banerjee is a Professor in Chinese and Head of the Department of Chinese Language and Culture (Cheena Bhavana), at Visva-Bharati University. Dr. Banerjee completed a Ph.D. in Chinese Language and Literature from Visva-Bharati. He studied in China at Beijing Language University during 1996-97 under the India-China Bilateral Cultural Exchange Programme. Dr. Banerjee has authored many articles and chapters in several volumes and co-edited two books titled India in the Eyes of the Chinese Youth in April 2016 and China Through the Eyes of Indian Youths in 2017. Dr. Banerjee’s research interests include Chinese language and India-China cultural studies. He has attended and presented papers at many national and international conferences. Dr. Banerjee has most recently translated a book, titled Doctor and Internationalist Dwarkanath Kotnis: A Memorial Volume from Bengali into Chinese.

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