An essay by Professor of History Lisa Trivedi is included in Performative Communication: Culture and Politics in South Asia, recently published by Routledge.
“Depicting Labour, Performing Labour: Working Women in Pranlal Patel’s Jyoti Sangh Series” is based on a paper Trivedi originally presented at a 2015 conference in New Delhi. Co-hosted by Jamia Millia Islamia and the South Asian University, the conference brought together humanities and social sciences scholars from the U.S., United Kingdom, Germany, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and India.
Trivedi’s essay takes up the subject of photographs of ordinary women at work in the Western city of Ahmedabad, India, in 1937. These photographs were the subject of Refocusing the Lens: Pranlal K. Patel’s Photographs of Women in Ahmedabad, 1937, curated Trivedi and Associate Professor of Art Robert Knight. The photography exhibition was featured at Hamilton’s Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art in 2014.
