Lives in Motion: Indian Exiles in Germany Between the Wars
In this lecture Dr. Benjamin Zachariah will try to situate the lives and worlds of Indian exiles in Weimar and Nazi Germany, and raise questions of the framing of such histories, partly in terms of the problem of tracing the movement of ideas as well as of people, and of histories beyond narrowly national frameworks.
Between the First World War and the Second, a number of political activists, students, professionals, lascars, former prisoners of war, scientists and academics of Indian origin either lived in or regularly passed through Germany. In this lecture Dr. Benjamin Zachariah will try to situate their lives and worlds within a social history of lives in exile and of life in Weimar and Nazi Germany, and raise questions of the framing of such histories, partly in terms of the problem of tracing the movement of ideas as well as of people, and of histories beyond narrowly national frameworks.
Dr. Benjamin Zachariah is reader in South Asian History at the University of Sheffield. He is currently on research leave and based at the Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin where he is working on the aforementioned project on Indian exiles in Germany in the inter-war period. Dr. Zachariah has previously taught at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, the University of Sussex, the University of East London, and Presidency College, Calcutta. His research interests include the social and intellectual history of South Asia, in particular the intellectual history of development in its late colonial, post-colonial and Cold War contexts; interactions between metropolitan and Indian ideas; and political culture, political rhetoric and standards of political legitimacy in colonial and post-colonial India.