- History for Peace
- May 14
- 14 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
The annual History for Peace Conference 2026
6, 7, 8 August 2026
Calcutta
The Tollygunge Club
A mountain is making its way to you, guns blazing. Will you persist?—Naveen Kishore
Yes, indeed. We must.
At a recent History for Peace conference, Anirudh Kanisetti spoke of a society-wide pattern that we are encountering from the information asymmetries that have always existed and are now being fuelled through easy access to technology. Multi perspectives and plurality—essential for a democratic society—have taken on a whole new meaning.
‘People are curious about history, but they rarely encounter accessible, critical work, despite the efforts of decades of scholars. So they pick up the first thing that promises insight and if it tells them something new, confirms an existing bias, and makes them feel a certain way, it suddenly becomes unquestionable truth.’
Of particular concern at History for Peace is the void that exists in our history education at the school level. With history syllabi covering events up to 1947 only, there is a systemic failure in how we are preparing our next generation to deal with the complexities of contemporary history that is often unvetted, reactionary and designed for manipulation.
How do we archive the present such that historians of the future have access to ‘facts’ that are honest records of not just ‘What happened’ but also answers to questions such as: Who is telling the story? Why are they telling the story? And what is being left out?
This year’s History for Peace Annual Conference focusses on bringing critical research on contemporary history into public conversations and simultaneously exploring the idea of ‘Histories of the Present’ to understand the importance and challenges of Histories in the Making.
Speakers and Facilitators: Angana P. Chatterji (online), Aparna Vaidik, Krishna Kumar, P. Sainath, Srinath Raghavan, Brahma Prakash, Akshaya Mukul, Vennila A., Sudeesh Yezuvath, Vignesh Rajahmani and Barathy MG
Confirmation awaited from Romila Thapar, Hartosh Singh Bal, Apoorvanand
DAY 1
6.8.2026
8 – 9 a.m. Registration
9 – 9.30 a.m.
Keynote: Naveen Kishore
9.30 – 10.45 a.m. Rohit De & Ornit Shani
Assembling India's Constitution
10.45 – 11:15 a.m. Coffee Break
11.15 a.m. – 12.30 p.m. Angana Chatterji
India, Histories of the Present: Method, Issues, and Urgency
[Description coming soon]
Angana P. Chatterji is Founding Chair, Initiative on Political Conflict, Gender and People’s Rights at the Center for Race and Gender, University of California, Berkeley. A cultural anthropologist and interdisciplinary scholar of South Asia, Dr. Chatterji’s work since 1989 has been rooted in local knowledge, witness to post/colonial, decolonial conditions of grief, dispossession, agency, and affective solidarity. Her foundational investigations with colleagues in Indian-administered Kashmir includes inquiry into unknown, unmarked and mass graves. Chatterji’s recent scholarship focuses on political conflict and coloniality in Kashmir; prejudicial citizenship in India; and violence (as a category of analysis) as agentized by Hindu nationalism, addressing religion in the public sphere, state power, gender and caste, Islamomisia, racialization, and cultural survival and accountability. Her research also engages questions of memory and belonging, and legacies of conflict across South Asia. Chatterji has served on human rights commissions and offered expert testimony to Indian Commissions of Inquiry, United Nations, European Parliament, United Kingdom Parliament, and United States Congress, and has been variously awarded for her work. She leads the creation of the Archive on Legacies of Conflict in South Asia. Her sole and co-authored publications include: Breaking Worlds: Religion, Law, and Nationalism in Majoritarian India; Majoritarian State: How Hindu Nationalism is Changing India; Conflicted Democracies and Gendered Violence: The Right to Heal ; Contesting Nation: Gendered Violence in South Asia; Notes on the Postcolonial Present; Kashmir: The Case for Freedom; Violent Gods: Hindu Nationalism in India’s Present; Narratives from Orissa; and reports: Access to Justice for Women: India’s Response to Sexual Violence in Conflict and Social Upheaval; BURIED EVIDENCE: Unknown, Unmarked and Mass Graves in Kashmir; and Without Land or Livelihood: The Indira Sagar Dam.
12.30 – 1.30 p.m. Krishna Kumar
Personal pre-history and History of the Present
A point comes in childhood when you realise that parents were also children once. How ‘long’ ago was that and what all have they ‘seen’ are questions that wait for intellectual development to occur—to a point where imagination and reality can be held together. When that point comes, it evokes a range of questions too vague to articulate, but nevertheless capable of shaping attitudes and behaviour. Let us probe the role that history plays in this trajectory: Does it answer the child’s curiosity about ‘how things got ‘here’?
Krishna Kumar is Honorary Professor of Education at Panjab University, Chandigarh. For most of his academic career, he taught at the Central Institute of Education, Delhi University. He served as Director of NCERT from 2005 to 2010. He is a bilingual author, columnist and children’s writer. Some of his books In English are Politics of Education in Colonial India; Education, Conflict and Peace; Prejudice and Pride; Battle for Peace; The Child’s Language and the Teacher, and Thank You, Gandhi. His books in Hindi include Raj, Samaj aur Shiksha, Vichaar ka Dar, Choori Bazaar mein Larki, Padhna zara Sochana, and Bhasha ki Sanjeevani. He writes a column on poetry teaching in Cycle.
1.30 - 2.30 p.m. Lunch
2.30 – 3.45 p.m. Vennila A.
Histories of the Present: Reimagining History Education
History has increasingly become reduced to memorizing kings, battles, dynasties and dates and is often perceived as distant and burdensome rather than meaningful and engaging.
The problem lies largely in limiting history to political chronology while sidelining social, cultural, linguistic, and everyday histories. Students rarely learn how languages evolved, how societies changed, or how migration, labor, food, and local cultures shaped their present realities. Rote memorization, examination pressure, and static textbooks all leave little room for inquiry or interpretation. History intersects with anthropology, sociology, linguistics, archaeology, geography, and cultural studies, offering a broader understanding of human experience. A meaningful engagement with history can nurture empathy, democratic values, and civic responsibility among young people. Reimagining pedagogy through local histories, oral narratives, archives, debates, museums, and inquiry-based learning can transform history classrooms into spaces of critical thinking. The abrupt absence of post-1947 developments in school curricula further leaves students disconnected from contemporary India.
In an age of digital misinformation and polarized narratives, historical literacy becomes essential for distinguishing evidence from propaganda and complexity from simplification.
A.Vennila, a luminary in Tamil literature, hails from Vandavasi, Tamil Nadu, leaving an indelible mark on the literary landscape. A prominent poet and writer, she has significantly enriched the Tamil literary world with her profound understanding of cultural nuances and deep connection to Tamil heritage and contemporary themes. Vennila's evocative language and poignant exploration of human emotions resonate with readers, embodying feminist ideologies, particularly evident in her short stories. Notably, this dedication to her craft also earned her the prestigious Tamil Nadu Government Award for Best Poetry, cementing her position as a leading voice in the Tamil literary landscape.
Her recent work is the critically acclaimed and readers favourite novel 'Neeradhikaaram,' unraveling the incredible tale behind the construction of the Mullai-Periyar Dam in South India. Vennila's literary acumen, marked by acclaim for 'Neeradhikaaram,' solidifies her status as a pioneer in Tamil literature, seamlessly fusing history, emotion, and societal relevance in her captivating works.
Another significant contribution is the historical fiction 'Gangapuram,' explores historical narratives, particularly the lives of Emperor Raja Raja Chola and Rajendra Chola.
3.45 – 4.15 p.m. Coffee Break
4.15 – 5.30 p.m.
Gandhiji: Noakhali to Delhi, his pathway to death.
Sudheesh Yezhuvath
This talk focuses on Gandhiji’s life from November 1946 till his assassination in January 1948. In this period, India saw large scale communal violence and Gandhiji travelled to these sites of violence such as Noakhali, Bihar, Calcutta and Delhi, spreading his message of non-violence, love and communal harmony. In the end, he paid for it with his life, but his blood cemented together a country that was falling apart.
Today, India is faced with a situation that demands that it revisits and learns from this part of its history; Gandhiji’s teachings and messages are more important than ever. It is in this context that a team of four—PN Gopikrishnan, Poet; Sudeesh Yezhuvath, Photographer; Murali Cheeroth, Curator; Dr. Jayaraj Sundaresan, Curator—undertook a journey in 2024, visiting all these areas that Gandhiji had visited in the last phase of his life. They met with people, visited places, took photographs and videos and put together an exhibition.
The photographer in that group, Sudeesh Yezhuvath, will present some of those photographs and share the experience of the journey.
Sudeesh Yezhuvath is an engineer and IT entrepreneur from Chittur in Kerala’s Palakkad District. He is actively involved in socio-cultural activities and has been very interested in photography since 2005. His first exhibition, based on the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp, was titled “Yours is not to reason why” (www.yoursisnottoreasonwhy.org), and was held at Kochi, Kozhikode, Bangalore, Madurai and some other towns. His second exhibition is based on the last 16 months of Mahatma Gandhi’s life and is titled “You I could not save, Walk with me”. It has been exhibited at Ernakulam Durbar Hall Art Gallery, Thrissur and at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale.
Sudeesh is an avid reader and art lover, which has also helped develop his photography practice. His travel writings can be found at www.yezhuvath.com. He lives in Bangalore with his wife and son.
DAY 2
7.8 2026
9 – 10.15 a.m. Srinath Raghavan
The History of our Own Times
When Benedetto Croce claimed that “all real history is contemporary history”, he was emphasizing the inextricably intertwined temporality of all history writing. Our approaches to the past are inevitably shaped by the interests and concerns of our own time. In that sense, the present is always history. Then again, writing the history of the recent past does present its own challenges of periodization and conceptualization, sources and access, historical narratives and popular memory. This talk examines these problems in the context of writing India’s post-independence history and the considers the problems and pedagogical opportunities that lie ahead of us.
Srinath Raghavan is Professor of International Relations & History at Ashoka University. He is also a Visiting Senior Research Fellow with the National University of Singapore. He has previously taught at King’s College London and worked at Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.
Raghavan’s research spans the historical and contemporary aspects of international, strategic and political affairs in South Asia. He is the author of several books, including Indira Gandhi and the Years that Transformed India (Yale University Press, 2025); Fierce Enigmas: A History of the United States in South Asia (Basic Books, 2018), India’s War: The Making of Modern South Asia, 1939-1945 (Basic Books, 2016), 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh (Harvard University Press, 2013), and War and Peace in Modern India: A Strategic History of the Nehru Years (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). He has also co-authored/edited another five books. He is a recipient of the Infosys Prize for Social Sciences (2015).
10.45 a.m. – 12 p.m.
Aparna Vaidik
Futures Past: Archives and Contemporary History
Essential to the historian’s craft is their relationship with the archive. But what if all that the archives had to tell us was exhausted, revealed, and written up? What if, even the new archival findings did not say anything new or redemptive? For instance, we all know colonialism was bad beyond all doubt, the British were well-intentioned but misguided rulers and all their policies brought about more ruin than progress. New archival findings wouldn't really change this narrative, would they? Bill Hochman in his book Becoming Palestine calls this phenomenon ‘archival fatigue’ where we are already saturated with the 'truth’ of what happened. How do we then move out of this fatigue? He makes a case for re-thinking the ‘temporality of the archive’ - that is, archive not simply as a repository of the past but where we think of the present as an archive of the future. Where we turn to the archive to examine not simply to the traces of the past but of the future. This talk examines the significance of this future-oriented archival imagination for the practice contemporary history.
Professor Aparna Vaidik teaches History at Ashoka University. Educated at St. Stephen’s College, Cambridge University and Jawaharlal Nehru University, she has previously taught at Georgetown University, Washington DC and University of Delhi. She has authored Imperial Andamans (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), Waiting for Swaraj (CUP, 2022), Revolutionaries on Trial (Aleph 2024), and a creative non-fiction My Son's Inheritance (Aleph 2020). She is also a recipient of research grants from the British Academy, Andrew Mellon Foundation, Indian Council for Historical Research, and Charles Wallace India Trust. She has been actively involved in public pedagogy and is President Trustee of a charitable trust that houses a community library with 5000+ members. She lives in Delhi and is a parent of two rambunctious homeschoolers.
12 – 1 p.m. Workshop: Aparna Vaidik
Archiving Futures Past
This workshop requires you to time-travel and to create an archive. The time-machine will take you into a ‘yet-to-come’ future of your family/city/community/world that may seem unimaginable today but this is a future that you desire and wish to aspire to. Returning to the present, the task for you will be to construct an archive for this future. The question you will ask is: What needs to go from my present in this archive to make that future possible? The aim of the workshop is to disrupt our historical thinking by focusing our attention on the present. Living in present, we tend to think of it as a location that makes imagining only certain kinds of futures possible. The workshop however disrupts this historical causality and pushes against the political limits being put on one’s imagination. The speculative and imaginary archives that you create will hold out new possibilities that are being expunged from our consciousness.
1 – 2 p.m.
Lunch
2.15 – 3.15 p.m. In Conversation: V. Geetha & Urvashi Butalia: In Conversation
History of the Women's Maovement
3.15 – 3.45 p.m. Coffee break
3.45. – 5 p.m. Vignesh Rajahmani
Reading Rooms and Surnames: A Tamil History of the Embraces, Refusals and the Present
Tamil Nadu today carries one of the few living legacies of an anti-caste social movement: millions of people whose surname is simply their father's first name, with no caste marker. Where does that practice come from, and why does it persist in a country where caste names still dominate? The answer lies in two everyday infrastructures built by the Self-Respect Movement and its political offspring, the DMK, in the middle of the twentieth century. The first is the padippakam, the neighbourhood reading room. From the 1950s, thousands of these appeared in tea shops, cycle sheds, and back rooms, where Dalits, workers, and women read newspapers aloud, debated in Tamil, and learned to speak in public. The second is the school roll. In the same decades, schoolteachers across the state, themselves products of the movement and often DMK sympathisers, refused to record caste names on student rolls, putting the father's first name there instead. How did Tamil Nadu get to where it is today? Through small rooms and small refusals that became history. The talk closes by asking what that past offers teachers now, in an age when reading and arguing together have moved onto screens.
Vignesh Rajahmani is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Indian and Indonesian politics at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV), and holds a PhD in Political Science and Public Policy from King's College London. He is a postdoctoral affiliate at the Center for Information, Technology and Public Life at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a research affiliate at the King's India Institute and a visiting scholar at the SOAS South Asia Institute. He is the author of The Dravidian Pathway (Hurst, UK-EU; Context Westland, South Asia) and associate editor of Caste and the Crisis of Dignity: Periyar E.V. Ramasamy Speaks (Speaking Tiger Books, 2025). With over five years of experience in public policy, legislative research and political consulting, his work spans political mobilisation, democratic development, and political communication.
5 – 6 p.m.
[To be confirmed]
DAY 3
8.8.2026
9 – 10.15 a.m. Brahma Prakash
Choreographic Acceptations of the Counter-Revolution of Hindutva
In most cases the studies on the Hindutva or Indian far-right has largely focussed on events and ideologies. This talk intends to focus on moments and scenes of everydayness that marks the choreographic presence of the right. Drawing on my book, Spectacle State: How Hindutva Shapes Feeling and Culture (2026), I would like to focus on the encounters that shape an affective presence of Hindutva in the cultural sphere. These moments are marked by counter-revolutionary moves that not only try to undermine the democratic access and new possibilities but also counter-revolution itself as a revolution. The choreographic acceptations are rebellious in nature. This talk takes Hindutva as a pervasive cultural force that reshapes feeling, culture and everyday life. It explains why violence and exclusion can appear more attractive than repulsive. To capture these 'those moments of intense experiences,’ I analyse objects and images (such as bulldozers and swords) that remain central to Hindutva’s mobilization.
Brahma Prakash is an Indian cultural theorist, writer and academician, who teaches theatre and performance studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He writes critical essays on art, culture and politics. He is the author of critically acclaimed books, Cultural Labour: Conceptualizing the ‘Folk Performance’ in India (Oxford University Press, 2019) and Body on the Barricades: Life, Art and Resistance in Contemporary India (LeftWord 2023). Body on the Barricades was shortlisted for the David Bradbuy Monograph Award. He is also the recipient of the Dwight Conquergood Award (2013) bestowed by Performance Studies International. He has also widely published in various research journals, including Asian Theatre Journal, Performance Research, Contemporary Theatre Review, Theatre Research International, Economic and Political Weekly, Global Performance Studies, South Asian History and Culture and several edited volumes. He was a fellow at the South Asia Institute at Heidelberg University, Germany (2021) and CRASSH at the University of Cambridge, UK (2018-19). His columns on art, culture and politics frequently appear in Outlook, Scroll, The Wire and other media platforms. His opinions have also appeared in the BBC, Aljazeera, New Arab, DW News and other popular podcasts in Hindi and English.
10.15 – 10.45 a.m.
Coffee Break
10.45 a.m. – 12.15 p.m. In Conversation: Akshaya Mukul and Barathy M.G.
Moral Universes of Sanatana and Nastika: Exploring Gita Press and the Madras Secular Society
Centering caste and women’s questions, Akshaya and Barathy explore the dynamics of change and continuity within colonial voluntary associations whose legacies continue to shape personal and institutional life across the subcontinent.
Akshaya examines the moral universe of Gita Press and its attempt to uphold an “unchanging” Sanatana order. Gita Press, established in 1923 by Marwari businessmen, publishes Hindu sacred canons at cheap prices and played a dominant role in constructing a perception of Hindu India. As part of this project, the Press developed its own pedagogic vision, since according to the Marwari organizers the colonial education merely produced clerks, irreverent youth, and atheists. Through a vast range of moral textbooks and didactic literature, Gita Press sought to reinforce caste hierarchy, prescribe domestic roles for women, and establish the supremacy of Sanatana Dharma as an enduring and unchanging moral framework.
Barathy works on a relatively unknown atheist organization called the Madras Secular Society, which operated in the city of Madras between 1878 and 1890. The Society propagated rationalism, empiricism, scientific thought, atheism, anti-caste critique, widow remarriage, and female education, while engaging in polemical debates with various religious organizations. The Madras freethinkers similarly understood social reform as fundamentally pedagogic: they disseminated freethought literature, scientific ideas, and modern theories in an effort to combat caste oppression and female subjugation. Their moral vision drew upon both materialist traditions and modern secular worldviews that sought to relegate religion to the private sphere. However, in contemporary times, both anti-caste movements and caste associations claim continuity with the legacy of the Madras Secular Society.
Through this conversation, Akshaya and Barathy reflect on how these ideologically divergent organizations attempted to construct their own moral subjectivities and how their competing visions continue to shape public and private discourse in the twenty-first century.
Akshaya Mukul is a citizen historian and the author of Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India and Writer, Rebel, Soldier, Lover: The Many Lives of Agyeya. He was a journalist for over two decades, working at the TOI, HT, Pioneer and Asian Age.
Barathy M.G. is a research scholar in the Department of History at Ashoka University. His research focuses on the intellectual history of religion and unbelief in colonial South Asia, with particular attention to the evolution of modern rationalist thought in the Tamil country in the nineteenth century. He is a recipient of the Charles Wallace India Trust Short-Term Research Grant and currently serves as Associate Director of the International Society for Historians of Atheism, Secularism, and Humanism (ISHASH).
12.15 – 1.30 p.m.
[Details coming soon]
1.30 – 2.30 p.m. Lunch
2.30 – 5.30 p.m. P. Sainath:
Talk followed by Workshop
[Details coming soon]
Palagummi Sainath is founder-editor of the People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI). A journalist and reporter for over four decades, he has covered rural India for over 30 years.
After obtaining an MA in history from the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, Sainath joined the United News of India in 1980. In 1982, he became foreign editor of The Daily and deputy chief editor of the weekly Blitz in Mumbai. In 1993, he left Blitz to work full-time on reporting rural poverty. In subsequent decades, he has produced the largest body ever of reporting on agriculture, inequality and deprivation in the Indian countryside.
Two universities, the University of Alberta in Edmonton, and the University of Francis Xavier in Nova Scotia, have conferred honorary doctorates on him.
Sainath has won over 60 national and international reporting awards and fellowships.
He is deeply involved in the training of journalists.
In December 2014, Sainath launched PARI, a unique online site on rural India. Publishing in 14 languages, PARI is an independent multimedia digital platform, whose reporting mandate is to cover every region and section of rural people. In 7 years, PARI has won over 50 journalism awards.
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