POSTPONED: Prof. Edward Simpson Inaugural Lecture - The Indian Village: Karl Marx to Narendra Modi

Professor Edward Simpson

POSTPONED: PLEASE CHECK BACK FOR FURTHER INFORMATION AND A NEW DATE

Ghosts, nostalgia and routine

Against the backdrop of life in modern rural Indian, this lecture examines the ways in which the villages of the country have been used and abused in social thought. Marx saw the Indian village as unchanged since the ‘dark ages’; Gandhi saw a hopeful future for the country in the village. Both saw an important distinction between urban and rural ways of life, a division which no longer holds sway, and is being further collapsed by the development agenda of the current government. What, we may ask, is in store for the future?

The lecture also marks the official opening of an exhibition in the Brunei Gallery, The future of the rural world: India’s villages 1950-2015 .

Edward Simpson is a Professor of Social Anthropology at SOAS. He is the author of The political biography of an earthquake: Aftermath and amnesia in Gujarat India (Hurst, 2013) and Muslin society and the western Inian Ocean: the seafarers of Kachchh (Routledge 2006). He has a long-term research interest in western India and is currently Principal Investigator on a project funded by The European Research Council looking at the development of road infrastructures in South Asia.

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