South Asian Studies Center Seminar: Beyond Boundaries
Date: 6 April 2024 (Sat), 13:00-15:45
Venue: Room 304 (Multimedia Conference Room), Research Institute for Languages andCultures of Asia and Africa (Ajia Afurika Gengo Bunka Kenkyujo), Fuchu campus, Tokyo
University of Foreign Studies / online (hybrid)
http://www.aa.tufs.ac.jp/en/about/accesshttps://www.tufs.ac.jp/english/abouttufs/contactus/campusmap.html (Building No.6on this map)
* If you would like to attend the seminar online, please register from the following site by3 April 2024.
Registration site: https://forms.gle/Qz7xANAzRHV3zBw1A
Speakers:
Dr. Simon Leese (University of Amsterdam) ‘Bombay Cinema in the Egyptian Press:
reimagining Indian Ocean cross-cultural connections in the age of Non-Alignment’
Dr. Alaka Chudal (University of Vienna) ‘What shall we speak about?: Indian prisonersof the First World War in Germany’
Discussants:
Dr. Fuko Onoda (Osaka University)
Dr. Taeko Uesugi (Meiji Gakuin University)
Chair: Dr. Riho Isaka (University of Tokyo)
Abstracts:
Dr. Simon Leese (University of Amsterdam) ‘Bombay Cinema in the Egyptian Press:
reimagining Indian Ocean cross-cultural connections in the age of Non-Alignment’
Recent years have witnessed a burgeoning scholarly interest in historical processes ofmigration, trade, and cultural exchange across the Indian Ocean. Within this larger arena,connections between South Asia and the Middle East have constituted one importantchannel of transfer. This talk will explore cultural relations between India and Egypt
during the early period of the Cold War when they took on a renewed and urgent

signiﬁcance. It focuses on Egyptian literary and cultural journals in the 1950s and 1960s,
which provided a forum for a range of writers to reinterpret cultural connections in aradically new context. Although writers in previous centuries had long reﬂected on theconnected history of the two regions, trajectories of colonialism, struggles forindependence, and postcolonial politics in the twentieth century inevitably cast culturalrelations in new terms.
The talk will draw on a variety of voices represented in these journals, including theEgyptian ﬁlm critic and later documentary ﬁlmmaker Salah El-Tohamy, the political
geographer Gamal Hamdan, and Indian scholars living in Egypt such as Mohiaddin
Alwaye. These writers wrote on topics ranging from shared histories of anti-colonial
struggle to how Bombay Cinema might provide inspiration for Egyptian national cinema.
Alongside this, some writers drew on older Arabic-Islamic geographic knowledge to frame
contemporary non-alignment solidarity and cooperation. By considering these diverse
perspectives together, this talk will show how geographic imaginings of third-worldism
and non-alignment not only appealed to shared colonial histories but actively andimaginatively reinterpreted pre-colonial histories of cultural exchange.
Dr. Alaka Chudal (University of Vienna) ‘What shall we speak about?: Indian prisonersof the First World War in Germany’A large number of soldiers from South Asia —India (before partition) and Nepal—whofought for the British on the battleﬁelds of Europe during the First World War in 1914
and 1915, were captured and imprisoned in Germany in early 1915. In the same year, theRoyal Prussian Phonetic Commission was set up in Berlin to create a sound archive of all
the languages in the world by recording the voices of those prisoners of war. This talktunes in to the selected voices of those imprisoned South Asian soldiers to uncover theiragency, their self and the purpose of their ﬁghting, if they were aware of it, in the songs,
poems and stories they sang, recited, and told for the Phonetic Commission. Thesearchival documents from the ﬁrst half of the 19the century serve as valuable primarysources for the study of various features of South Asian culture at the time.
Hosted by: Center for South Asian Studies, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
Co-hosted by:Center for South Asian Studies, University of Tokyo
Joint Research Group “Dynamism of Cultural Contact in South Asia”, Research Institutefor Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa
Center for Indian Ocean World Studies, Osaka University (HINDOWS)