Upcoming Events
Humboldt Book Club
Invite
You are cordially invited to the next meeting of the Humboldt Book Club at 6pm on 20 May 2025 in Room 0.03, Dorotheenstraße 28, the premises of the Department of English and American Studies.
Our pick: Temporary by Hilary Leichter
In case anyone is feeling apprehensive about coming along to the Book Club, I would like to once again reiterate that this “club” is an interdepartmental social activity, open to everyone working or studying at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Rest assured, whatever your level of English, it will be enough for you to be part of the group. The atmosphere is very relaxed and people can particpate as much or as little as they wish.
For further details contact eimear.kelly@hu-berlin.de
Postcolonial Entanglements and the Ethics of Reading
Guest Lecture by Dr. des. Priyam Goswami Choudhury (Universität Potsdam): Bagaaniya Songs Outside the Bagaan: An Archive of Anti-Colonial Culture
Monday, May 26th from 2-4 p.m. in room 1.501, Dorotheenstr. 24.
The baganiya song, which can be loosely translated to the “garden song”, is a remnant of a long legacy of colonial overtures in agriculture and tea plantation in the popular culture of Assam.
Sung originally by the communities that was indentured labour of the tea plantation (“chabagaan”), it has become a part of the popular culture of Assam (and Bengal) and today is sung and performed by students for cultural events in Bengal and Assam. This is in contradiction to
the position of the community itself that has struggled to gain equal rights in both states.
In this class, I want to talk about this song tradition as one that has been used in order to create the illusion of a happy community, often within the symbolism of the happy tribal woman who is carefree and “at one” with nature itself. This gendered performance has to be read in opposition to the other gendered reading where the man from the same community is confused and enticed by women outside the bagaan. For this class, we will be listening to two songs: one from the film Chameli Memsahab (1978) (in full here) titled “Assam desher Bagicha” while the other song is a massively popular song called “Amba Pata Lamba Lamba” released in 2004. By
comparing the two songs, I want to argue that if read within the contextualised locus of indentured history and labour, the bagaaniya gaan is both an archive of class difference that was installed into Assam by colonialism while also creating the male “bagaaniya” (“of the bagaan”)
figure as the danger against ethnocentric purity discourses that are important to land relations in India’s northeast. Critically, this is an archive that is persistently telling its listeners of the history of violence that was used to entrap communities into indentured labour. The entanglement of the postcolonial state in this context is where this reading practice could be activated as an encounter that is radical in its category of desiring.