Presented by the Geographies of Injustice: Gender and the City working group:
Graduate organizers:
Sohini Chattopadhyay is a PhD Candidate in the History Department at Columbia University. Her dissertation focuses on the science of managing mass death in colonial cities, with a particular interest in Bombay and Calcutta among other cities in the early twentieth century. She edits an online journal Borderlines, and her research is funded by the Social Science Research Council and the American Institute for Indian Studies. She’s also a public health research volunteer for Peoples’ Archive of Rural India.
Laura Yan is a PhD Candidate in the History Department at Columbia University. Her dissertation focuses on migrant port workers’ everyday life in Singapore from 1945 to 1979 and Singapore’s place in broader networks of migration and capital around the Indian Ocean in the twentieth century. Her research is funded by the Social Science Research Council.
Papers presented:
Panel 1: Oceanic Urban Histories
Discussant: Debjani Bhattacharyya, Drexel University
Darren Wan, Cornell University, “Nationalist Narration and the Horizons of Anticolonial Internationalism: Evacuating Singapore for Bombay During the Japanese War”
Thomas McDow, Ohio State University, “Seeing Muscat from Bombay: Intellectual Networks of Indian Ocean Port Cities”
Nidhi Mahajan, UC Santa Cruz, “Of Those Who Stay: Seasons of Sail in the Western Indian Ocean”
Panel 2: Social Formations in Port Cities
Discussant: Sheetal Chhabria, Connecticut College
Gaurav Garg, New York University, “Urban Land and Strategies of Accumulation: Real Estate, Business Interests, and Finance in Calcutta and Bombay, c.1900-1970”
Michael Sugarman, University of Bristol, “Differentiating the Deserving: Water, the environment, and an Indian Ocean urbanism in Bombay and Rangoon, 1860-1941”
Radhika Gupta, Leiden Institute for Area Studies, “Muslim Charity and (Re-) scaling urbanism from the city to the community: Notes from Bombay and Dar es Salaam”
Panel 3: Built Form and Urban Sensoria
Discussant: Abigail McGowan, University of Vermont
Tim Riding, University of York, “Company Urbanism: Colonial Failure at Bombay, 1668-1790”
Urna Mukherjee, Johns Hopkins University, “Uncertain Geographies and Urban Development: The Geographical Imagination of Colonial Bombay and the “Drainage” Debates of the 1860s”
Leilah Vevaina, Chinese University of Hong Kong, “To Hong Kong and Back Again: Parsi Charity and the Building of Bombay/Mumbai”
