1725-2025: Historical & Contemporary Links Between Scotland and South Asia

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“The Scottish connection with India really began in and around 1725…It is only from the 1720s that a remarkable number of Scots begin to appear abroad as servants of the East India Company.” (McGilvary 2011)

In the last 300 years, the connection between Scotland and the geographic region known as South Asia (before, during, and after colonialism) has only strengthened. Scholarship engaging with questions of migration, cultural exchanges, and historical interventions in the study of Scotland’s role in imperialism have led to an intellectual reckoning. On the occasion of this centenary as identified by McGilvary in his 2011 article, “The Scottish Connection with India 1725–1833”, our proposed symposium will investigate this historical framework of Scottish imperialism in the British Raj, to highlight its contemporary significance for South Asians in Scotland today. Drawing on academic works such as the AHRC-funded South Asian Britain: Connecting Histories and the South Asian influences highlighted by the University of Strathclyde and Royal Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow project A Hidden Migration History: South Asian Medical Professionals in Scotland 1872-2022 on Scotland’s scientific and community heritage, we propose to revisit South Asia’s historical origins in Scotland through alternative routes, including art, architecture, media, and activism that point to a complex relationship between the two regions, when approached through the lens of transhistorical exchange. Our updated framework will endeavour to reconstitute this connection between the Crown and the Colony, by presenting it as an evolving nexus of cultural assimilation, exchange, and dissonance through to post-colonial nationhood.

The aim of this symposium will be to bring into conversation established scholars, early career researchers, and cultural practitioners who will approach the ‘Scottish-Indian question’ from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives, including:

• Diaspora, travel and migration
• Cultural identity and assimilation
• Architecture and infrastructure of oppression
• Radicalism, anarchy and activism
• Roots/routes and human geographies
• Statues, monuments and the identification of new heritage sites
• European colonialism and Scotland’s role in maintaining Empire beyond British colonialism.

This symposium contributes to IASH’s ‘Making a Nation’ theme by highlighting the role that Scottish imperialism played in the creation of the postcolonial nations that make up the South Asian region today, namely India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar. It will contribute to questions of nationhood, immigration, citizenship, and the politics of identity, then and now.

See full agenda here.

Organised by Dr Sheelalipi Sahana (Heritage Collections Research Fellow, IASH) and Dr Fatima Naveed (Postdoctoral Fellow, IASH).

This event is funded by the generosity of the Susan Manning Fund at IASH.

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Host or Publisher Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities