The decolonial turn in the academy is recent but pervasive. Scholarly manifestoes in many academic disciplines, ranging from ethnography to geology, have urged on the need to explore, and contest the impacts of colonialism in their respective fields. But what possibilities and challenges are revealed when decolonising insights are applied to rethink specific categories in animal history? In this talk, I address this question by focussing on mosquitoes in British India. In the process, I will elucidate three distinct historical processes: ‘invisible labour’, ‘dissent’ and ‘re-colonisation’.

Saturated with tropes of honour, nation and gender, military deaths are political instances that attach meaning to private grief to produce a public politics of service and sacrifice for the nation-state.

This talk explores the ambiguities surrounding Indian citizenship in Assam, Northeast India. The stigmatised category of the “suspected Bangladeshi”, a product of competing histories of land loss and migration, has emerged more recently from shifts in immigration regimes and electoral politics. Based on participant observation in two Foreigners Tribunals, I show how the police and the judiciary make suspicion, rather than legal certainty fundamental to the manufacturing of Indian citizenship.

This talk will discuss how a small-town Newspaper used lithographic technology to cast a significant slice of Urdu journalism conversation as distinctively Muslim. Discussing a chapter of the recently published book Print and the Urdu Public: Muslims, Newspapers, and Urban Life in Colonial India, the talk will discuss the development of the newspaper Madinah as an extension of networks of correspondence and kinship in North Indian qasbahs.

As Mughal imperial authority weakened by the late 1600s and the British colonial economy became paramount by the 1830s, new patrons and mobile professionals reshaped urban cultures and artistic genres across early modern India. In iterating exuberant and ephemeral atmospheres of their city of lakes, painters from Udaipur viewed the moods of places as open to adaptation, admiration, and assimilation.

This paper examines how the encounter of radical activism and peasant militancy reshaped economic and political relations—indeed, the forms and functions of informal and state institutions—in northwestern Pakistan. The 1970s Frontier peasant movement achieved lasting de facto land and tenancy reforms that were ultimately regularized by state intervention. I argue that both the de facto land reforms and the state intervention itself were consequences of the rising organizational (and armed) power of tenants and landless labourers under the radical Mazdoor Kisan Party.