The annual History for Peace Conference 2025

24, 25, 26 July 2025

Calcutta

The Tollygunge Club

Historians face the daunting task of weaving narratives from scattered fragments, crumbling ruins, dusty archives and bulky manuscripts. Does their craft make them storytellers?

The sources they consult—be they archival or oral—often contain narratives of their own, refracted through the motivations of their authors. As Hannah Arendt noted, the ability to tell stories is how we become historical. It is perhaps time, then, to reimagine the traditional dichotomy between literature and history, or art and science and to question the empire of history.

Traditional history textbooks often present a sterile chronicle of events—a dry, factual record that flattens human civilization into a single authoritative narrative. In contrast, literature provides a deeply personal, immersive perspective on the past, capturing the values, ideas, struggles and transformations of societies. Stories create spaces that have possibilities of sanctifying the truth of experience.

This conference seeks to explore a crucial question: Can literature serve as a legitimate and effective source for teaching history? If so, how should it be approached and what are its advantages and limitations?

By bringing together educators, historians, writers and literary scholars, this conference will ask: Why is narrative crucial to history? And how can literature be used in the classroom to teach histories that humanize?

Speakers: Romila Thapar, Krishna Kumar, Rakhshanda Jalil, Kavita Panjabi, Sarmistha Datta Gupta, Meera Visvanathan, Rosy Singh, Avinash Kumar, Veio Pou, Parvati Sharma, Omair Ahmad.

Workshop Facilitators: Sunita Biswas, Anwesha Sengupta, Debarati Bagchi, Samata Biswas

Register here: https://tinyurl.com/yrjfr8jz

CONFERENCE SCHEDULE

Day 1

24 July 2025

Opening Address: Naveen Kishore

The Historian and the Storyteller

Meera Visvanathan

Are historians storytellers? As a historian, I find myself struggling with this question and it tends to beget further questions. How do historians deal with stories? In our own work, do we craft arguments or narratives? What are the limits that constrain historical narratives? In our engagements with public seeking certain kinds of pasts, what are the stories that we should tell? In this talk, I will lay our certain possibilities—discussing to what extent it is possible to combine a love of stories with the constraints of history as a discipline.

Meera Visvanathan is an Associate Professor at the Department of History and Archaeology, Shiv Nadar University. Her areas of research and writing focus on the history of ancient and early medieval India. She has also written multiple book reviews and popular articles and delivered several presentations focused on public engagements with the past.

On Shakuntala

Romila Thapar [Virtual]

There is an elegant circularity in the re-telling of the Shakuntala narrative in Romila Thapar’s examination of the well-known character that has been handed down to us through the centuries.—Geeta Doctor

Romila Thapar, in her seminal work on Shakuntala, explores the interactions between literature and history, culture and gender, that frame the development of this canonical figure, as well as a distinct conception of female identity, through a careful analysis of sections from Śakuntala and their various iterations in different contexts.

Romila Thapar is a pre-eminent Indian historian specialising in the field of ancient India. She is Professor Emerita of ancient history at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. Thapar’s research into early Indian history has heralded the ground breaking shift from the scholarly treatment of ancient history as Indology towards establishing it as a social science. Her work has reimagined the questions that were typically asked of textual and archaeological data in the study of ancient Indian history. Consequently, her scholarship has transformed historiography as a field and embedded modern perspectives of writing history into the study of ancient India. Thapar holds honorary doctorates from Brown

University, the University of Oxford, the University of Chicago, Edinburgh University and the University of Calcutta among others. She is also a recipient of the prestigious Kluge Prize (American Nobel), is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and

Sciences and is an honorary fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London and St Margaret’s Hall, University of Oxford. Thapar’s works include seminal books such as Interpreting Early India, Narratives and the Making of History, Cultural Pasts, Essays in Early Indian History, Early India, and Which of Us Are Aryans? Rethinking the Concept of Our Origins. Her most recent book, published by Seagull Books in 2023, is Our History, Their History, Whose History?

Krishna Kumar

Gandhi: History, Fiction, Truth

Are fiction and truth incompatible? How we respond to this question will shape our approach to Gandhi—his relevance and the problem of studying him. Our response will also have wider implications for the teaching of history at school. These implications compel us to reflect on the possible uses of literature as a resource for the history teacher. This reflection might help us to cope with the problem that history textbooks pose.  

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.

Plenary Workshop

Reflections on the morning

Day 2

25 July 2025

Narrating the Nation: Literature as Archive, Allegory and Antagonist in Historical Understanding

Avinash Kumar

This presentation examines how literature—across genres, periods, and regions—has not only reflected but actively shaped our understanding of history. Moving beyond traditional archival sources like official records and correspondence, the presentation demonstrates how fiction, drama, poetry, and autobiographical writing function as rich repositories of emotional, ideological, and cultural truths.

Starting with E.H. Carr’s historiographical inquiries and Hayden White’s notion of history as narrative, the presentation builds a case for viewing literature as both a methodological tool and a contested terrain of meaning. From the Russian Revolution chronicled in both nonfiction and fiction, to Charles Dickens' representation of the French Revolution, the literary imagination captures the affective dimensions of historical experience in ways that official historiography often cannot.

The paper surveys how scholars like Lucien Febvre and Robert Darnton argued for an 'emotional history' by including the arts and how literature became central to understanding social transformations—class mobility, gender anxieties, urbanization, and the sensorial life of modernity. In the Indian context (particularly Hindi), it explores how literature became both a mirror and moulder of nationalism—from Bharatendu Harishchandra and Maithilisharan Gupt to Premchand and Mahadevi Verma.

Institutional developments post-1857, especially the embedding of English literary studies in colonial universities, gave rise to parallel traditions in vernacular literatures. Through examples such as Gora, Premashram, Godan and Angaarey, the presentation maps how caste, class, colonial violence, and regional identity were debated within literary forms.

Literature is thus approached not only as archive but also as allegory—and sometimes antagonist—in the telling of national histories. With references to critical traditions from New Criticism to Marxist and feminist readings, the paper offers a methodological overview of how literature can be productively engaged in writing more textured, inclusive, and critical histories.

Dr. Avinash Kumar is a historian and civil society leader whose work bridges academic scholarship with frontline policy and advocacy. He holds a PhD and MPhil in Modern History from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and was a Charles Wallace Fellow at SOAS, University of London. His early academic work focused on questions of citizenship, caste, and identity in colonial and postcolonial India, and he has taught courses on peace studies, gender and language politics at institutions including Mahatma Gandhi International Hindi University, IIM Kozhikode, and MDI Gurgaon.

Over the past two decades, Dr. Kumar has held senior leadership roles in Amnesty International India, WaterAid India, and Oxfam India, leading major rights-based campaigns and policy research on inequality, education, health, and governance. He is currently a Distinguished Fellow at the Centre for Equity Studies, where he leads work on public accountability, social movements, and equity-based programming across South Asia.

Dr. Kumar’s writing spans research reports, policy papers, and academic publications. His recent work includes Citizenship and Education in Postcolonial India (SAGE, 2022), and Modern Slavery and Discrimination Based on Work and Descent, presented at the UN High-Level Political Forum. He has a long-standing interest in the intersection of narrative, state formation, and marginality—and continues to explore how literature and public culture have shaped the political imagination of modern India.

Two Lived Realities: Exploring the Intersection of Literature and History 

Dr Rakhshanda Jalil

This talk will begin by addressing the question of what literary history is and ask what is the task of a literary historian. It will go on to assert how literature is not history and makes no claim to be so, nor does it claim to be objective. However, poetry, short fiction, novels, memoirs can and often do supplement and complement the histories provided by chroniclers and professional historians. I will delve into my own work in exploring this intersection, culling examples from my edited anthologies on the First World War, Jallianwalla Bagh, the creation of Bangladesh, the Great Bengal Famine, Gandhi's First Non-Cooperation Movement, as well as the short stories of the 'partition generation' of Urdu writers such as Saadat Hasan Manto, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Krishan Chandar, etc.

Dr Rakhshanda Jalil is a multi-award-winning translator, writer and literary historian. She has published oovr 25  books and written over 50 academic papers and essays. Some of her books include: Liking Progress, Loving Change: A Literary History of the Progressive Writers Movement in Urdu (OUP, 2014); a biography of Urdu feminist writer Dr Rashid Jahan: A Rebel and her Cause (Women Unlimited, 2014); a translation of The Sea Lies Ahead, Intizar Husain's seminal novel on Karachi (Harper Collins, 2015) and Krishan Chandar's partition novel Ghaddaar (Westland, 2017) and recently two collections of essays entitled But You Don’t Look Like a Muslim (Harper Collins, 2019) and Love in the Time of Hate: In the Mirror of Urdu (Simon & Schuster, 2024), among others. She runs an organization called Hindustani Awaaz, devoted to the popularization of Hindi-Urdu literature and culture. 

Literature as History: Kafka and Manto

Rosy Singh

Rosy Singh is Professor, Centre of German Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. Her research interests include literature, arts, semiotic and translation studies. She has worked extensively on Franz Kafka, Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Mann and Peter Handke and in the South Asian context on Shah Hussain and Saadat Hasan Manto. Some of her books are Rilke, Kafka, Manto: The Semiotics of Love, Life and Death (Harman, 2001), Tagore, Rilke, Gibran: A Comparative Study (IIAS, 2002), Autobiography: Fact and Fiction (ed.) (Aryan Books, 2009) and Aesthetics across Cultures (ed.) (Routledge, 2024). 

Jallianwala Bagh and the Politics of Memory [On site visit to Alipore Jail Museum]

Sarmistha Dutta Gupta

Drawing upon my research which led to the book The Jallianwala Bagh Journals. Political Lives of Memory (Jadavpur University Press, 2024) and to the curation of an installation ‘Ways of Remembering Jallianwala Bagh and Rabindranath Tagore’s Response to the Massacre’ at the Portrait Gallery of Victoria Memorial Hall (artistically directed by Sanchayan Ghosh in March 2020), I would focus in this talk on the use of multiple archives and the heterogeneity of narratives—including literary narratives—in order to problematize issues of remembering and memorialization, counter erasure of diverse and local histories and resist depersonalization that is representative of statist history-writing. The categorization of sources as ‘legitimate,’ ‘superior,’ or ‘inauthentic’ and ‘unreliable’ would be questioned in the process. Through the use of a wide range of sources, I would want to vivify dormant histories of the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre of April 1919 and understand the aspects we have remembered and as well as those we haven’t been allowed to remember when we think of Jallianwala Bagh today.

Sarmistha Dutta Gupta is an independent researcher, bilingual writer, curator and literary translator. She has written extensively on gendered histories of politics, nationalisms and sexualities, women’s writing in the sub-continent and memory and memorialization. Her books include The Jallianwala Bagh Journals. Political Lives of Memory (Jadavpur University Press, 2024) and Identities and Histories. Women's Writing and Politics in Bengal (Stree, 2010). Her articles have appeared in several anthologies and in journals like the Economic and Political Weekly and the Indian Journal of Gender Studies. She received the literary award ‘Sudha Basu Smarak Purashkar’ from the West Bengal Bangla Academy for her book Pather Ingit (on women’s polemical writings and social consciousness in late-colonial Bengal; Stree, 2007). The Charles Wallace India Trust's research grant was awarded to Sarmistha for her work on the History of Girls' Schooling and Education in Bengal in 2010-11. She is also the President of Ebong Alap, a non-profit society founded in 2003 to work towards gender-sensitive citizenship through innovative pedagogic interventions.

Tour of Jail Museum

Day 3

26 July 2025

Seeing ourselves in our history

Omair Ahmed

Much of Omair Ahmad's writing has focussed on the margins of history, with The Storyteller's Tale set in a fictionalised retelling of the departure from Delhi after the sack of the city by Ahmad Shah Abdali, to his recent book of short stories, Tall Tales by a Small Dog, exploring the history of Gorakhpur from the 19th Century to the new millenium through legends and myths from the region. His talk, ‘Seeing Ourselves in Our History’, explores the personal reasons why his own interaction with the history and reality of Uttar Pradesh shaped his point of view on why 'the margins' are important, how we see them or do not and how literature and history could interact.

Writing Community Memory: Reading History through Literature

Veio Pou

The much-hyped quote from George Orwell’s Animal Farm, 'All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others,' has been alluded to while discussing political and philosophical issues. Perhaps, one can also draw parallels in writing the history of a diverse society like India. Many narratives get overlooked or ignored, though, in principle, we emphasise the constitutional parity of every story. It may not be far-fetched to say that the Northeast of India remains much misunderstood and underrepresented in the larger narratives of the nation. It is only now that one finds a token presence of the Northeast in the curriculum, at the school level as well as in the university. Of late, however, there have been overtures to the growing body of literature from the region, perhaps, in a sensible way. A lot of these recent writings represent and epitomise the voice of the people that longs to be heard. The fact that many communities of the region have undergone various political and historical upheavals makes it important to see how the stories encapsulate the people’s experiences.

Literature often plays an important role in realistically depicting society, both the past and the present and enlightens the readers about the socio-cultural, economic and political aspects of the times the writer writes about. And because literary works often project the less heard of voices of the common folks who are often invisibilized in the larger historical narratives, they become the vehicle of protest and assertion. Sometimes a fictional work can speak the truth more forcefully than factual reports or what one would find in non-fictional accounts. And sometimes, truths are best told concealed in symbols and metaphors, just as the best gifts come in wrappings. This paper/talk will try to illustrate how writing is emerging as an important way of keeping community memory alive. And to some extent, because the Northeast has historically experienced a lot of political conflicts, I shall dwell on how revisiting the conflicts of the past through the lens of literature can help us reflect and move towards a healing process.

Dr. KB Veio Pou is an associate professor in the Department of English, University of Delhi. He is the author of Literary Cultures of India’s Northeast: Naga Writings in English (2015), and his debut novel, Waiting for the Dust to Settle (2020), won the Gordon Graham Prize for Naga Literature (Fiction) in 2021. He edited the volume Keeper of Stories: Critical Readings of Easterine Kire’s Novels (2023), and his latest publication is Elijah on the Road: A two-part narrative poem (2024). His research interests include studies on the Northeast of India, oral/written interface, and cultural studies, for which he has published widely, including contributions to The Routledge Companion to Northeast India (2023). Besides his academic engagements, he also likes to discuss everyday narratives centred on literature & culture, society & politics and faith & folklife in the contemporary.

But thinking makes it so: The perils of persuasive narratives and the pleasures of bewilderment

Parvati Sharma in conversation with Kavita Panjabi

We live in a time when information is more freely accessible than ever before and yet, ironically, misinformation is rife. A time when facts and 'alternative' facts hammer it out as narratives, 'peddled' or 'busted'; and a time when the past commands urgent hearing in present political discourse. In short, we live in an age of storytelling, of immersion and consequently, perhaps, an age that requires of us the ability to break the fourth wall.

This concluding session will explore

Kavita Panjabi is a former Professor of the Department of Comparative Literature,  Jadavpur University and author of Unclaimed Harvest : An Oral History of the Tebhaga Women’s Movement  and a Pakistan diary, Old Maps and New: Legacies of the Partition. Amongst other volumes, on Sufism and Bhakti in South Asia  and on Feminist Culture & Politics, she has also co-edited two on borders in South Asia and the Americas. She is currently working on an oral history of Balti people in Ladakh. 

Parvati Sharma has written two historical biographies, Jahangir: An Intimate Portrait of a Great Mughal and Akbar of Hindustan. She has also written history for children, The Story of Babur and Rattu & Poorie’s Adventures in History: 1857. Her debut was a collection of short stories called The Dead Camel and Other Stories of Love, followed by a novella, Close to Home. Parvati writes on books and history for various publications and has been a jurist on several awards, including the JCB Prize for Literature 2019; the Rainbow Awards 2023 and 2024; the AutHer Awards by JK Paper and The Times of India 2024; and the Crossword Book Award 2024. She was invited to be a writer-in-residence at the Maison des Ecrivains Etrangers et Traducteurs (Institute for Foreign Writers and Translators) in Saint-Nazaire, France, in 2021.

Parvati lives in New Delhi, where she has studied English literature and Indian history and worked as a travel writer, editor and journalist.

Parallel Workshops

Workshop 1

Our Languages Our Pasts: Exploring History through Regional Literature

Sunita Biswas

History and literature enjoy a deep and symbiotic relationship. Literary works reflect historical contexts just as historical events shape and influence literary creations. Literature has served as a mirror, a commentary and a catalyst for change, as it portrays identity, memory, trauma, injustice and resilience that is shaped by past events. This workshop aims to explore the interconnectedness between the two disciplines, highlighting how the rich tradition of regional literature from eastern India has grappled with historical events, social and economic issues and cultural exchanges. Through critical reading of selected texts a nuanced appreciation and understanding of diverse regional literary works will be examined as vital sources for reconstructing subaltern and local histories. The workshop will also highlight translation as a tool in making regional histories and literatures accessible to a wider audience.

Sunita Biswas taught history at the middle and senior levels at Modern High School for Girls, Kolkata. For more than 30 years her aim has remained to share with her students her passion for the subject. She has taught different curricula across different schools. In the classroom she has always tried to instil a questioning, critical interest that goes beyond the textbook and the curriculum and that stretches far beyond school. For this she encourages her students to delve into songs, pictures—still and moving— posters and advertisements, among other sources. She likes to use a multi-disciplinary approach, encouraging students to join the dots and use lateral thinking to engage with History.

Sunita is a Senior Programme Officer at History for Peace.

Workshop 2

Reading Partition in School Classrooms: Possible Dialogues between History and Literature

Debarati Bagchi, Anwesha Sengupta, Samata Biswas 

The scholarship on partition is a deeply contested site in South Asia. Consequently, children of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh read very different, often hyper-nationalist, accounts of the ‘great divide’ in their school textbooks. Such understandings may fail to induce empathy towards diverse experiences of partition. Can creative literature be used along with history textbooks to introduce a more nuanced understanding of partition? How can we use works of fiction in history classrooms to teach partition sensitively? What are the possible limitations of such usage?

The workshop will address these questions through conversations between three facilitators --two of them are trained in history and one in literature and cultural studies. The conversation will be followed by group readings of selective texts to understand the possibilities of such exercise.

Debarati Bagchi is a Senior Research Fellow and Deputy Director at the Max Weber Forum for South Asian Studies, Delhi. Debarati’s PhD dissertation (Delhi University) titled ‘Many Spaces of Sylhet: Making of a Regional Identity’ explored the agrarian and cultural histories of frontiers and borderlands in colonial Northeast India. Post-PhD, Debarati’s area of research shifted towards the history and sociology of education. She has completed two postdoctoral projects, one on the connection between language and mass education and the other on education and urban transformation. Currently, she is part of the focus area Education and Learning at MWF Delhi. She works in the field of child pedagogy, public history and the history of production and regulation of textbooks in India. She has written and co-edited a series of alternative history books in Bengali for middle school children. 

Anwesha Sengupta teaches history at the Institute of Development Studies Kolkata. Her areas of interest include partition, decolonization, popular movement, gender, urban history and public history. She has written and co-edited a series of alternative history books in Bengali for middle school children.  

Samata Biswas teaches in the Department of English, at the Sanskrit College and University, where she regularly discusses texts related to gender, caste, forced migration, enslavement and partition. Samata runs the blog Refugee Watch Online and is the book review editor of Refugee Watch: A South Asian Journal of Forced Migration. She has curated three short films on the theme Calcutta Migrant City and writes regularly in Bangla and in English.

Workshop 3

[To be decided]