An exhibition curated by Vidya Dehejia, with Dipti Khera and Yuthika Sharma

Dates: September 18 through December 13
Location: Miriam & Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, 826 Schermerhorn Hall, 1190 Amsterdam Avenue
See Gallery website for full information at http://www.learn.columbia.edu/delight/

A film series to accompany the exhibition Delight in Design: Indian Silver for the Raj

Dates: Wednesdays, September 24 through December 4 (no screening November 26)
Time: 6:15pm
Location: Room 832, Schermerhorn Building, 1190 Amsterdam Avenue
Wednesday, Decemner 3 screening: *Shakespeare Wallah*

"Describing Language before Linguistics: The View from Eighteenth Century Delhi."

A talk by Arthur Dudney, MEALAC Ph.D. candidate

Famously, the philologist Sir William Jones told the Asiatic Society in 1786 that Latin, Greek, Persian and Sanskrit came from a common source, and historical linguistics was born. Or was it? The fact is that theories about language in early modern India and in Europe were in many respects not that different, and one Delhi-based littérateur, Khan-e Arzu, appears to have come to a similar conclusion about the relationship between Persian and Sanskrit some forty years before Jones. Indeed, an author as influential as Arzu must have been known to Jones's Indian collaborators and may have influenced Jones. My talk will look at the achievements of Indian scholars writing in Persian about language and at how Europe's own march towards modernity (specifically towards defining a modern science of linguistics) ensured that the tradition to which Arzu belonged has been completely marginalized.

Date: Monday, November 24, 4:00pm - 6:00pm
Location: Room 1134 International Affairs, 420 West 118th Street.

"Globalization and Anti-Caste Movements"
A public talk with scholar-activist Gail Omvedt

Co-sponsored with the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life

Dr. Gail Omvedt is a senior fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum in Delhi. She is the author of numerous books and articles on class, caste and gender issues, including: We shall Smash this prison: Indian Women in Struggle (1979), Reinventing Revolution: New Social Movements in India (1993), Gender and Technology: Emerging Asian Visions (1994), Dalits and The democratic revolution (1994), Dalit Visions: the Anticaste movement and Indian Cultural Identity (1994) , Buddhism in India: Challenging Brahmanism and Caste (2003) and Seeking Begumpura: The Social Vision of Anticaste Intellectual (2008).

Date: Tuesday, November 25, 6:00-8:00pm
Location: Room 1134, International Affairs Building, 420 West 118th Street

"The Partition's Long Shadow: Legals, Illegals and a Hybrid Citizenship Regime in Assam, India"
A talk by Sanjib Baruah, Bard College

Time: 4:00pm - 6:00pm
Location: Room 1134, International Affairs Building, 420 West 118th Street

CHATURANGA (2008)
Screening followed by a discussion with director Suman Mukhopadhyay Tuesday, December 2, 6:00pm to 8:30pm

CHATURANGA (2008) is a film based on the 1916 novel by Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore. It is a story of two young intellectually inclined men confronted by the challenge of rationalist modernity and their dealings with the women around them. It is also a story of the travails of a woman whom men want to both protect and emancipate. Though set in colonial Bengal a hundred years ago, the film is surprisingly contemporary in its intellectual debates and suppressed sexuality. In the hands of Suman Mukhopadhyay, the director, the Tagore novel acquires a harder, crisper and less lyrical style than the well-known Tagore films of Satyajit Ray. CHATURANGA has been shown recently at film festivals in Montreal and Sao Paolo and will feature in the Indian Panorama section of the forthcoming International Film Festival in Kolkata. It is also to be commercially released in November.

The director Suman Mukhopadhyay is one of India's most accomplished young makers of serious theatre and cinema. His first film Herbert (2006) won much critical acclaim and is to be screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from December 11 to 17, 2008.

Location: Room 707, International Affairs Building, 420 West 118th Street

Democratic Revolution in an Islamic State: The Maldives
A talk by Dr. Scott Morrison

In October, for the first time history, the Indian Ocean archipelago nation of Maldives conducted competitive multi-party elections. The result was the ouster of its thirty-year President by a former political prisoner. Scott Morrison will introduce the Republic of Maldives and the history of the democratic movement that culminated in an apparent democratic transition in his self styled Sunni Islamic state.

Scott Morrison received his Ph.D in political science at Columbia in 2004. He spent 2007-2008 in the Maldives as a lecturer in the Faculty of Sharia’ah and Law at the Maldives College of Higher Education. He is currently teaching “Middle Easter Cultures” at NYU and researching Ziya Gokalp, a founding ideologue of modern Turkey.

Co-sponsored by Middle East Institute

Date: Thursday, 4th December 2008, 12:30pm-2pm
Location: Room 1118, International Affairs Building, 420 West 118th Street

"Crossing Caste lines: Global Modernity and the Cosmopolitan Dalit Identity"
A talk by Dr. K. Satyanarayana

Does Narendra Jadhav's Outcaste represent the dalit perspective on globalisation? Satyanarayana will examine Jadhav's recently published memoir Outcaste, widely discussed in the US. Satyanarayaha will discuss the discourse of globalisation and how it relocates the project of modernity in a different spatiality and in new discourses of power. Satyanaryana argues that Jadhav, a dalit bureaucrat and an economist, replays the tradition-modernity dichotomy. He reifies caste identities and locates them in the domain of a backward and oppressive "tradition." While Dalit writers critique the projects of national modernity (of both the nationalist and the Left varieties), Jadhav celebrates a new global identity. This new, cosmopolitan Dalit identity, mediated through the institutions of global society, undermines contemporary Dalit engagement with modernity in the village and the nation-state and too quickly reproduces the city and the global space as emancipatory spaces.

K. Satyanarayana is a lecturer at The English and Foreign Languages University in Hyderabad.

Time: 6:00pm - 7:30pm
Location: Room 1134, International Affairs Building, 420 West 118th Street