Online Event | Missing Voices: South Asian Perspectives on the Gwillim Archives
Join us for the launch of the Missing Voices: a website that explores how South Asian women create their own archives today, and how they use and experience colonial archives made by European women in India over 200 years ago. We’ll hear from New York Times journalist Alisha Sawhney as she recounts her experience making the podcast Lost Voices: An Untold Story of the South Asian Diaspora, which invites young women in Canada to share their perspectives of history, identity and memory. We’ll speak with Minakshi Menon, a scholar whose work explores colonial sciences in South Asia, about her experience working with the Gwillim Archives. We’ll also hear from Deborah Thiagarajan and Rekha Vijayashankar, of the DakshinaChitra Museum in Chennai, who undertook a re-photography project to link places and scenes in Chennai today to images in the Gwillim Archives, creating a contemporary archive of new images.
This event will be live-streamed for remote attendance.
About the Speakers
Alisha Sawhney is passionate about how we consume news online, and loves experimenting with new social platforms and storytelling formats that cut through the noise to stand a chance at survival in the attention economy and have a lasting impact. When she is not hosting podcasts that speak to second-generation Millennials, she is a Staff Editor with the New York Times.
Deborah Thiagarajan is an art historian, President of the Madras Craft Foundation and former Director of the DakshinaChitra Museum. She founded the Madras Craft Foundation in 1984 with the objective of establishing the DakshinaChitra Museum in Muthukkadu, Chennai. The Museum opened in 1996.
Minakshi Menon is a member of Research Group Krause, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, where she leads a Working Group on the famous Dutch herbal, the Hortus Indicus Malabaricus - “Hortus Indicus Malabaricus: the Eurasian Life of a Seventeenth-Century 'European' Botanical Classic”. Menon is working on a monograph with the working title, Empiricism’s Empire: Natural Knowledge Making, State Making and Governance in East India Company India, 1784-1830. She recently edited a special issue of the journal South Asian History and Culture, vol. 1-18 (2021) and wrote the Introduction - “Indigenous Knowledges and Colonial Sciences in South Asia”.