Dr Yashashwini Chandra – Domesticating the Margins: Bibis in the Mofussil
This talk is based on case studies from an ongoing project, A Multiracial History of Women’s Spaces of Colonial India. The research seeks to articulate the embodied experiences of diverse Indian and European women across the lines of caste and class to present an alternative history of colonialism. In the talk, I focus on interracial relationships between British men and their Indian bibis or companions/concubines in parts of the mofussil as examples of the gendered nature of colonial enterprises to unpack the overlaps between these projects to domesticate the margins and the intimate lives of their agents. At the same time, the talk discusses the means for uncovering the histories of such subaltern women by utilising a range of sources, from reading archives against the grain to drawing on material culture – including the materiality of the landscapes and sites they occupied.
About the Author
Yashaswini Chandra is Lecturer in South Asian Art in the University of Edinburgh. She specialises in South Asian art and material culture, working across premodern and colonial periods. My research includes the arts and cultures of the Himalayas, Rajasthan, Mughal India and colonial India, combined with animal studies and women’s history. There are threads that connect her diverse interests. The foremost is a concern with locating art at the centre of interdisciplinary research and pedagogy. The second is an interest in marginalised places and groups of South Asia, and approaching centres from the peripheries. She aims to establish a link between the past that survives in archives, museums and historiography, that which is reformulated in popular imagination, and the past that exists as lived history in contemporary India.
Her first book is The Tale of the Horse: A History of India on Horseback. It was published in South Asia by Pan Macmillan India under the Picador India imprint, 2021 (paperback, 2023) and in the UK by Holland House Books, 2022, also coming out as an e-book (Pan Macmillan India, 2021) and an audiobook (Audible, 2023). She is currently working on her next book, based on her ongoing project, a multiracial history of women’s spaces of colonial India.
Prior to joining the University of Edinburgh, she was based in India, where she was an affiliated fellow of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi, guest faculty at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, as well as visiting faculty at Ashoka University, Sonipat. She also spent many years working for Sahapedia, an open online resource on the arts, cultures and histories of India. On behalf of Sahapedia, she managed the multi-volume documentation of the Rashtrapati Bhavan (President’s House) in New Delhi and other institutional collaborations. In connection with the work on the Rashtrapati Bhavan, she co-edited two volumes, Right of the Line: The President’s Bodyguard on the household cavalry of the Indian head of state, and Life at Rashtrapati Bhavan tracing its transformation from a colonial stately home as the Viceroy’s House to its postcolonial afterlives.
*Note: This event will not be recorded or broadcast over Zoom