When: Thursday, 25th of March at 6.30pm GMT
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This talk is about a spatial and experiential world of paper records, files, textual cultures, bureaucracies, officers and clerks. I look at ordinary buildings of British colonial everyday governance in interior areas of India in the nineteenth century. Colonial governance in India was based on global technologies of writing produced by European mercantile capitalism, as well as on the transformation – into paper-forms – of the embodied administrative knowledge held by extant Indian (Mughal) officials. I reflect here on how the material logic of paper and paperwork profoundly shaped and permeated the spaces of the colonial office (cutcherry). I also think about their connection with wider geographies of (colonial) Indian paper and ink economy, as well as how various immaterial processes and information networks in fact subverted colonial paper rule and worked through alternative spatialities.
Dr Tania Sengupta