Talks
Posters as Historical Record
G. Arunima
Join us for a lecture by G. Arunima, Professor at the Centre for Women’s Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University for a mapping of the women’s movement in India through its posters.
From cinema to tourism, posters have been part of India’s visual landscape for at least a century. Alongside, political posters that featured significant leaders of the Indian national movement, from Gandhi, and Ambedkar, to Subhas Bose and Sarojini Naidu, have also found their place within this archive of political presence. What makes the collection of posters from the Zubaan Poster Women archive distinctive is that it chronicles the complex histories of the Indian women’s movement. The posters featured in the digital stories as part of the series Frames of Struggle: Tracing a Movement in the Sasken Multimedia Gallery attest to the diversity of regions, issues and modes of articulation that characterise the women’s movement(s). It also is a testament to the fact that there is no issue that is not a ‘women’s issue.’ This talk will open up ways to think of this visual archive as a means of understanding Indian women’s histories of struggle, agency and political consciousness.
Image Courtesy: Posters from the Poster Women archive, Zubaan
Bookings
G. Arunima
Professor, JNU
G. Arunima is a Professor at the Centre for Women’s Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and is a historian by training. She has researched and published on both the historical and the contemporary contexts of Kerala and India, focusing particularly on cultural, visual and material texts, and rethinking the politics of the contemporary. Her publications include There Comes Papa: Colonialism and the Transformation of Matriliny in Kerala, Malabar ca 1850-1940 (Orient Longman, 2003); The Hijab: Islam, Women and the Politics of Clothing, edited with PK Yasser Arafath (Simon & Schuster, 2022); Love and Revolution in the Twentieth-Century Colonial and Postcolonial World: Perspectives from South Asia and Southern Africa, edited along with Patricia Hayes and Premesh Lalu (Palgrave, 2021); He, My Beloved CJ (translation of Ivan Ente Priya CJ, Rosie Thomas’s biography of her iconic litterateur husband, CJ Thomas), Women Unlimited, 2018.
