Arpita Bose (Hooghly Mohsin College), Barnali Chanda(Ashoka University), James Gethyn Evans (Harvard University), Sudarshana Chanda (Harvard University), Tansen Sen (NYU Shanghai)

This seminar intends to examine different narratives (including archival materials, travelogues, journals and newspapers) related to connections across Asia from the 19th and 20th Centuries. These narratives impart numerous perspectives on the notion of connections, journey and migration as ideological and intellectual pursuits in the Asian context. The documents describe the unstable social and political environment and provide an account of both the human and governmental enterprises. The narratives, describing cultural and linguistic experiences, espionage, different eye-witness and archival account of communist revolutions, disillusionment with socialist China reveal an empirical discourse. By examining the narratives and archival works, the seminar examines the connection between personal and collective memories which become a means to substantiate the knowledge about the past and their understanding of the present.