War & Peace | Perspectives from the Global South
On the 13th of November 2023, the ‘War & Peace: Twentieth Century Responses from the Global South’ critical-thinking community organized a conversation between Dr Santanu Das (Professor of Modern Literature and Culture) and Dr Yasmin Khan (Associate Professor of Modern History) at The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH). It marked the culmination of a cross-disciplinary reading group that was formed in the summer of 2023 to critically engage with a range of material — visual and textual, historical and literary, intellectual and quotidian — from the twentieth century, ‘to generate inquiries and imaginations for thinking normatively against warfare in our own times.’
The conversation was preceded by a couple of provocations. The first was Thakur Gadadhar Singh’s (a subaltern in the 7th Rajput Regiment of the British Indian Army) eye-witness account of the brutal suppression of the Boxer Rebellion in China by an imperialist consortium of countries that would eventually end up fighting the First World War among themselves. The second provocation considered the poet Rabindranath Tagore’s ruminations on aerial bombardment as a weapon of colonial warfare — the very idea of which continues to lend itself especially well to loosening the grip of morality over human actions during conflict.
Dr Das spoke at length about the need to re-centre empathy in warfare without concomitantly memorializing war itself. He argued that it is not enough to simply ‘recover’ non-literate ‘small voices’: we must ask difficult questions of them and appreciate the deeply literary sensibilities with which their testimonies are often imbued. He proposed that the ephemeral and the compromised not be ignored while writing ‘small moments’ back into the histories of big wars.
Dr Khan spoke about how the subaltern turn in history-writing had initially left the discipline of military history largely untouched and complacent. Complicating the neat separation between wartime and peacetime, home-front and war-front, she insisted that we pay much closer attention to the haunting presence and immediacy of warfare all around us, and not take the historically persistent trappings of militarism in contemporary British social life for granted.
The conversation was richly textured by slides featuring both Dr Das’ and Dr Khan’s findings from under-researched archives. It was followed by a lively discussion session with the audience. Opening remarks were offered by Madhurima Sen, co-convenor of the reading group. The conversation was deftly moderated by Dr Urvi Khaitan. She clarified that ‘Global South’ in this case was a tentative category — a political loci of entanglements — not without its own limitations. Adrita Mitra, co-convenor of the Oxford Transnational and Global History Seminar, a key collaborator in this event, delivered the vote of thanks.
