About the event
by Sheelalipi Sahana
In this talk, I will examine a few short films that are part of the British Film Institute’s ‘India on Film: 1899 to 1947’ collection, digitised and made freely available as part of the 2017 UK-India Year of Culture programme organised by the British Council. These are some of the earliest film footage of India, as seen through the eyes of the coloniser and documented to serve various propagandist aims, such as imperialism, evangelisation, missionary work, tourism and travel.
Of the over 100 videos in the collection, I will analyse three short films — Commissioner Higgins Visits Ahmedabad Girls' School; Boys' Home in Ahmednagar; and A Day at St. Christopher College and School (Madurai). Through my focus on the documentation of children and young adults on film, my presentation will critically evaluate these short films through two oppositional critical lenses: imperial ethnography and decolonial visual resistance.
Under the first, I read the instructions of discipline, conduct, and obedience in these schools as contributing to the Christian-imperial framework of subjugation and the performative spectacle of ‘civility’. However, through the latter lens, I also detect moments of refusal within the children and young adults to perform for the technological gaze of the colonial regime. These moments are fleeting, non-verbal, and reactionary. By studying these frames of ‘accidental realism’, I map children’s visual resistance to colonial pedagogical hierarchies built to serve the British Raj.
About the speaker
Sheelalipi Sahana is a Heritage Collections Research Fellow with the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, studying anticolonial visual and material cultures in Scottish archives. She has a doctorate in English Literature from the University of Edinburgh. Her thesis interrogates the architectural spaces that Muslim women occupied in 20th century India and how that shaped their un/modern identities.
She is the co-founder of Tasavvur Collective, a consortium of researchers interested in the social, historical and literary representation of South Asian Muslims in cultural productions. She has previously guest-edited the ‘Writing Muslim Women in South Asia’ Special Issue for South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies and published in The Journal of Postcolonial Writing.
How to attend
This event is open to all, and free to attend. You can reserve your spot on Eventbrite.
