Nayanjot Lahiri: Partitioning the Past – India’s Archaeological Heritage After Independence

Nayanjot Lahiri of Delhi University, India will be giving a talk on �Partitioning the Past: India’s Archaeological Heritage after Independence� on March 2nd as part of the South Asia Colloquium lecture series. Her talk concerns the fate of monuments and antiquities after India gained freedom from British colonial rule on 15th August, 1947, when in a profound irony, almost all of the important Indus Valley sites were found to be in Pakistan while many of the prominent Islamic monuments remained in India.

She is a Professor in the Department of History, Delhi University, where she has taught since 1982, and where she was also a student from her undergraduate to her doctoral years. Her research interests include archaeology and ancient Indian history. What drew her to history �were a couple of wonderful teachers and the joy of discovering the unknown. Even today, whether it is across India’s archaeological landscape or it is in the archives, there are unknown facets about our past that are waiting to be discovered and which so frequently change our perceptions of it.� It is this deep commitment to uncovering forgotten facets that drive Professor Lahiri�s passion for archaeology and history. Professor Lahiri has been awarded many prestigious fellowships, including the Daniel Ingalls Fellowship at Harvard University, and the Hughes Endowment Visiting Fellow at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. In 2006, she was elected an honorary member of Societa Indologica �Luigi Pio Tessitori� at Udine, Italy, while in 2007, she was the sectional president of the 39th Session of the Punjab History Congress at Patiala, India.

She is a very prolific scholar with several books and articles to her name, notably her book Finding Forgotten Cities: How the Indus Civilization was Discovered that came out in 2005 as also the volume Ancient India: New Research that she edited with Upinder Singh and which came out in 2009. She has also published several articles in prestigious journals like Economic and Political Weekly, Indian Economic and Social History Review, Man and Environment, and World Archaeology.

Professor Lahiri also actively engages with the world beyond academia. She is a regular contributor to the Hindustan Times, one of India�s leading English language dailies, and to the Times Higher Education (London). She is also a member of the Delhi Urban Art Commission and helped draft the Ancient Monuments Amendment Bill, passed by the Indian Parliament in March 2010.

The talk will be held on March 2nd in Room 202, Luce Hall, 34 Hillhouse Avenue and it will start at 4:30 pm. The room is wheelchair accessible.