Rutgers Global Asia Initiative Graduate Working Group
Modern Asias: Rethinking Mobility, Intimacy, & Surveillance
Presents a talk by
Sudarshana Chanda, PIIRS Postdoctoral Fellow, Princeton University
‘Surveillance and Intimacy in Postwar British Malaya’
October 19
4:00 to 6:00 PM
Alexander Library, Conference Room 342,
Sudarshana Chanda is interested in how intimate and familial relationships shaped broader histories of migration and law under empire in transnational Asia. She is working on her book manuscript, which explores how petitions from ordinary individuals in multiethnic and transnational families reshaped the classificatory frameworks that governed access to rights and resources in British Malaya. Though rooted in Malaya, her work heavily draws on research and literature from other imperial territories in Southeast Asia, as well as from South Asia, China, and Japan, to trace the development of a plural legal order. To emphasize narrative and the "small voice(s)" one encounters in the archive and beyond, this project uses a range of sources, including government records such as intelligence files and bureaucratic petitions, alongside newspapers, novels, and oral histories in Hindi, Bengali, Chinese (Mandarin), Malay, and Indonesian.
About the Speaker: Sudarshana Chanda is a historian of modern South and Southeast Asia. She completed her Bachelor's in History (hons) at the University of Delhi, a Master’s in History and China Studies at the Yenching Academy of Peking University, and has a PhD in History and a secondary Master's in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. She is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies.