Under the Radar of Empire: Australia-India Connections by Dr Devleena Ghosh

This Tiffin Talk explores unregulated circulation of ideas, people, objects and flora from South Asia to Australia and argues that these movements constitute both an integral and a destabilizing element in the conceptualization of the nation state and diasporic movements in the19th and 20th century. Differential mobility for populations, for example, depending on race, class and gender, meant that attempts by imperial and colonial governments to control the movements of their subjects met with indifferent success. Such unregulated journeys were hard to monitor, difficult to police and ultimately, impossible to regulate within the expanded imperial networks of communication and transport which opened up new ways for people, ideas and technologies to circulate under the radar of Empire.

Devleena Ghosh is the Director of the Indian Ocean and South Asia Research Network (IOSARN) at the University of Technology Sydney which is hosting the first ICCR Chair of Contemporary Indian Studies in Australia, currently held by Professor Ujjwal Singh (University of Delhi). She is the author of Colonialism and Modernity (with Paul Gillen, UNSW Press, 2007) and the editor of several books including Water, Borders and Sovereignties in Australia and Oceania (with H. Goodall, Routledge, 2008). Devleena has published widely in the areas of colonial and South Asian studies.