Indians and the Antipodes

Edited by Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Professor, Asian History and Director of the New Zealand India Research Institute at Victoria University, and Edited by Jane Buckingham, Professor, history at the University of Canterbury

Sekhar Bandyopadhyay is Professor of Asian History and Director of the New Zealand India Research Institute at Victoria University of Wellington. His primary research interest is in the history of nationalism and caste system in colonial and postcolonial India. He is also interested in the history of Indian migration and the Indian Diaspora. He has written seven books, edited or co-edited nine books, and published more than forty book chapters and journal articles. His most recent books are From Plassey to Partition and After: A History of Modern India (Second Edition, 2015) and (co-ed.) Religion and Modernity in India (2016). In 2009 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand. In 2014, for his book Decolonization in South Asia he was awarded Rabindra Puraskar. Jane Buckingham teaches history at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. She specialises in Indian history and has published in areas including medical and disability history, human/animal relations, business and

legal history. She is particularly interested in histories of health, migration and labour. She is the author of Leprosy in colonial south India: medicine and confinement (2002). Her most recent co-edited book is Conflict, negotiation, and coexistence: rethinking human-elephant relations in South Asia (2016).

Margaret Allen is Professor Emerita in Gender Studies at the University of Adelaide, where, in 2010, she finished her teaching career: four decades in history and gender studies. She researches transnational, postcolonial and gendered histories, focusing upon links between India and Australia from c1880-1940. She has published on Australian missionaries in India and the experiences of Indian men negotiating the White Australia Policy. Currently she is working on an Australian Research Centre funded project focused upon India, 'Beyond Empire transnational religious networks & liberal cosmopolitanisms' with Associate Professor Jane Haggis (Flinders), Professor Fiona Paisley (Griffith) and Professor Clare Midgley (Sheffield Hallam). With these scholars she recently published, Cosmopolitan Lives on the Cusp of Empire: Interfaith, Cross-Cultural and Transnational Networks, 1860-1950 (2017).

Robyn Andrews is a Senior Lecturer in the Social Anthropology Programme at Massey University, New Zealand. Her PhD, Being Anglo-Indian: Practices and Stories from Calcutta (2005) was the first of a number of Anglo-Indian Studies projects she has been involved with in India and the diaspora. She published Christmas in Calcutta: Anglo-Indian Stories and Essays (2014) and writes articles and book chapters for both academic and community publications. She co-edits the International Journal of Anglo-Indian Studies.

Sekhar Bandyopadhyay is Professor of Asian History and Director of the New Zealand India Research Institute at Victoria University of Wellington. His primary research interest is in the history of nationalism and caste system in colonial and postcolonial India. He is also interested in the history of Indian migration and the Indian Diaspora. He has written seven books, edited or co-edited nine books, and published more than forty book chapters and journal articles. His most recent books are From Plassey to Partition and After: A History of Modern India (Second Edition, 2015) and (co-ed.) Religion and Modernity in India (2016). In 2009 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand. In 2014, for his book Decolonization in South Asia he was awarded Rabindra Puraskar.

Purushottama Bilimoria is a Distinguished Teaching Fellow and Core Doctorial Faculty with Center for Dharma Studies at Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, a Visiting Professor at the University of California in Berkeley. He is also Honorary Research Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Studies at Deakin University and Senior Fellow at University of Melbourne, in Australia. He is a Co-editor-in-chief of SOPHIA, (Springer) and of the Journal of Dharma Studies (Springer).
Among his recent (monograph and co-edited) publications are '?abdapram??a: Testimony in Indian Philosophy (2009); Indian Ethics Classical Traditions and Contemporary Challenges (2007); Emotions in Indian Thought-Systems' (2015); Indian Diaspora : Hindus and Sikhs in Australia (2015); Globalization, Transnationalism, Gender and Ecological Engagement (2015); Postcolonial Reason and Its Critiques: Deliberations on Spivak's Thoughts (2014), Postcolonial Philosophy of Religion; Indian Ethic vol II Gender Justice and Ecology (forthcoming); 'Gandhi and African American Civil Rights Movement' (multi-media production) His extensive publications are listed in data-profiles of the Australian universities he is affiliated with, and in academia.edu, or other public media.

Alison Booth's research focuses on; performance networks, cultural representation and producing festivals and events, that engage the Indian diaspora. She completed her PhD thesis; Performance networks: Indian cultural production in Aotearoa/New Zealand at the University of Otago in 2014. Her 2016 publication; Negotiating diasporic culture: festival collaborations and production networks in the International Journal of Event and Festival Management, was Highly Commended 2017 Emerald Literati Network Awards for Excellence. She is the Bachelor of Arts (Event Management) Programme Leader, Lecturer and Post Graduate Supervisor, in the Faculty of Culture and Society, at Auckland University of Technology. She represents Auckland University of Technology as an Associate Director of the New Zealand India Research Institute.

Jane Buckingham teaches history at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. She specialises in Indian history and has published in areas including medical and disability history, human/animal relations, business and legal history. She is particularly interested in histories of health, migration and labour. She is the author of Leprosy in colonial south India: medicine and confinement (2002). Her most recent co-edited book is Conflict, negotiation, and coexistence: rethinking human-elephant relations in South Asia (2016).


Devleena Ghosh teaches in the Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney. She researches and publishes in the areas of gender, environmental & postcolonial studies. She is the co-author of Colonialism & Modernity (with Paul Gillen, UNSW Press, 2007) and recipient of the 2016 Wang Gungwu award for the best article published in Asian Studies Review. She is currently collaborating with Heather Goodall on a project on connections between progressive women in India and Australia.

Todd Nachowitz currently lectures in the Studies in Religion programme at the University of Waikato, New Zealand, and is the Centre Establishment Coordinator for the Religious Diversity Centre in Aotearoa New Zealand. He holds a PhD in Political Science & Public Policy from the University of Waikato, and his thesis is entitled 'Towards a Framework of Deep Diversity: Identity and Invisibility in the Indian Diaspora in New Zealand'. He completed his BA in South Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1983, and his MA in Anthropology from Syracuse University in New York in 1991 on indigenous resistance to large-scale development projects in India, focusing on the Tehri and Narmada dams. His interdisciplinary areas of specialty include Religious Studies, Anthropology, South Asian Studies, Hindi and Urdu language, diversity governance, development studies and demography.

Michael Roche is Professor of Geography in the School of People Environment and Planning at Massey University, Palmerston North. An historical geographer he completed his PhD at the University of Canterbury. He has contributed to the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, the Historical Atlas of New Zealand and Te Ara, the official online encyclopaedia of New Zealand. He is a Life Fellow of the New Zealand Geographical society and a member of the New Zealand Geographic Board Pou Taunaha o Aotearoa, the national place naming authority. His research interests have spanned from forestry and land settlement in New Zealand, to World War one soldier settlement schemes, to the development of university geography in New Zealand.

Amit Sarwal is the Founding Convenor of Australia-India Interdisciplinary Research Network and a Producer with SBS Radio Hindi. He has previously held positions Deakin University, RMIT University, Monash University and the University of Delhi. Amit has a PhD in English Literature from Jawaharlal Nehru University and MBA from Federation University. His research papers have appeared in prominent journals such as Dance Chronicle, Dance Research, Antipodes, South Asian Popular Culture, South Asian Diaspora and Culture, Society and Masculinities. He has many books to his credit, prominent being: Wanderings in India (2012), Bollywood and Its Other(s) (2014), Labels and Locations (2015), Salaam Bollywood (2016), South Asian Diaspora Narratives (2016), Louise Lightfoot in Search of India (2017), and Vyakul Rashtra (2017).

Sita Venkateswar is Senior Lecturer in the Social Anthropology programme and Associate Director of the Massey chapter of the New Zealand India Research Institute. She received her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Rutgers University in 1997. Sita's research incorporates critical feminist scholar-activist research methodologies, designated as Public Anthropology, informed by feminist and postcolonial theories. She uses a comparative and reflexive anthropological lens to address issues of internal colonialism, gender, poverty, social oppression and structural violence within the postcolonial and neoliberal contexts of South Asia. She is currently embarked on new research exploring a visual and multi-species approach to food resilience and climate justice that focuses on millet cultivation in India, and community supported agricultural initiatives in New Zealand. . Her most recent co-edited book is Globalization and the Challenges of Development in Contemporary India (2016).