Raminder Kaur Kahlon Speaks about Post-Nehruivan Narratives in Indian Film

As part of the South Asian Studies Council Colloquium Series, Raminder Kaur Kahlon, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology and School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex, will deliver a paper titled, “Bertrand Russell in Bollyworld”: Post-Nehruvian Narratives about Peace and Japan in 1960s India”. Using filmic excerpts as historical ‘docu-drama-ments’, her paper addresses two unique incidents: first, the implications of the cameo appearance of a British philosopher, Bertrand Russell, in an Indian popular film from the 1960s, and second, the reproduction of the 1945 Hiroshima atomic attack in Japan.

October 17, 4:30pm • Room 203, Luce Hall, 34 Hillhouse Avenue

Released after Jawaharlal Nehru’s death in 1964, the film, Aman, throws a compound lens on intersectional points of transition - between shifting paths of nuclear development in postcolonial India, its tensile relation with the international peace movement in the context of Cold War, as well as indicating changing relations with countries to the east in the sobering aftermath of India’s defeat in the 1962 war with China.

Dr. Kaur Kahlon is the author of Atomic Bombay: Living with the Radiance of a Thousand Suns (2012) and Performative Politics and the Cultures of Hinduism (2003/5). She is also co-author of Diaspora and Hybridity (with Virinder Kalra and John Hutnyk, 2005), and co-editor of Censorship in South Asia: Cultural Regulation from Sedition to Seduction (with William Mazzarella, 2009), Bollyworld: Popular Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens (with Ajay Sinha, 2005) and Travel Worlds: Journeys in Contemporary Cultural Politics (with John Hutnyk, 1999).