Monday 1 March 2010. 2-6 p.m. 
Convocation House, Bodleian Library, Oxford
Reception in Divinity School: 6-7.30 p.m.

The month-long exhibition, Indian Traces in Oxford, linked to the AHRC-funded project Making Britain: South Asian Visions of Home and Abroad, 1870-1950, (Open University, Oxford University, and King’s College London) and mounted in collaboration with the Bodleian Library, will showcase the remarkably wide range of textual and photographic traces or leavings of Indian students, activists, politicians, artists and others in the Bodleian special collections and College libraries, in the period 1870-1950. The exhibition will open with a half-day workshop, on 1 March 2010, in Convocation House, to be introduced by the acclaimed Indian novelist – and Oxford alumnus – Amitav Ghosh. 

Whereas ‘Making Britain’ examines how Indian travellers, students, politicians etc. contributed to British cultural life in the period, Indian Traces at Oxford will focus in close detail on Indians’ impact on Oxford University’s life and culture.  The texts and images in the exhibition and accompanying workshop, to be presented to the audience with the help of the Bodleian’s manuscript visualiser, will include: Mohammed Iqbal’s letters to Edward Thompson; a classics examination script of the Indian poet MM Dutt (S.P.G. papers); the diaries of Cornelia Sorabji, Oxford’s first woman BCL student; selected MK Gandhi letters and an MS poem of Tagore from the McGregor-Ross collection; and numerous College sports photographs featuring Indian students (1910s-).  Each MS exhibit will be introduced by a speaker with related expertise including Professor H Ansari (RHUL, on Iqbal), Professor E Boehmer (on Tagore), and Professor Richard Sorabji. 

Both the exhibition and the 1 March workshop will consider the value and meaning of manuscript traces, how they reflect on the ways in which Indians and Britons interacted in the period, and how we are able to imagine the lives of these early Indian travellers to Oxford into these textual tracks and marks.

The exhibition will be held in the Proscholium, 1-27 March.

More information can be found on the website.