
Dr Tana Trivedi - https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9824-8551
CSMCH-IASH Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow in Modern and Contemporary History, August 2022 - January 2023
Home Institution: Ahmedabad University
Dr Tana Trivedi is faculty at Ahmedabad University, Gujarat, India since 2015. With over fifteen years of teaching experience in the fields of literature, literary theory, and postcolonial diaspora studies, her research interest lies in examining the notions of nation and identity formation. Her PhD in contemporary Indo-Fijian poetry and literature was inspired after meeting Professor Sudesh Mishra, a contemporary Australian-Fijian poet at Stirling University (2004-05) while pursuing her MLitt in Postcolonial Diaspora. She has authored a book chapter “Fragmented Lives: Locating ‘Home’ in Poems of Sudesh Mishra”, in Borders and Mobility in South Asia and Beyond, edited by Reece Jones and Md. Azmeary Ferdoush, published by the Amsterdam University Press in 2018. Her paper titled “Precarious Poetry: Institutionalized Ecological Destruction and the Changing Idea of Home in Fijian Literature” won the best paper award at the18th Annual South Asian Literary Conference held at New York in January 2018. She has also presented papers at several national and international conferences. While Tana has been deeply interested in the history and identity formation of Indians in Fiji, closer home, she has been investigating Indian history from the lenses of vernacular Gujarati narratives from the 1920’s and 30’s. She is the Academic Advisor for the Pattani Archives, an ongoing project in archiving, digitizing, and preserving the family archives of the erstwhile diwan of Bhavnagar State. As a part of the project, her research includes studying quarterly journals from the region and chronicling the administrative and political reforms in the princely states, especially in the early twentieth century. This project contributes significantly to the existing knowledge on regional identity politics and formation of a nation around the time of Indian independence.
Project Title: The Counterfactual Republic: Towards revisiting the “Deshi Rajyas” of Kathiawad
This project seeks to revisit the existing historical Gujarati journals and look anew at the series of negotiations that took place within the princely nation-states of Kathiawad-Saurashtra, a politically, socially, and culturally significant region of the Indian subcontinent. The early twentieth century offered multiple possibilities of imagining a post-colonial India, and all the Princely States of India were evidently concerned about their own future within a larger republic. It was almost impossible to arrive at a clear political framework due to several voices offering their renditions of an imagined nation. On one hand the Indian National Congress was creating their own charter of an independent nation and on the other, the Chamber of Princes met and discussed several possibilities of their administrative and political powers could be consolidated into different levels of federal governance. One such source from Gujarat that offers a detailed glimpse into the discussions that took place amongst the “deshi rajyas” or the Indian States is a monthly journal titled “Deshi Rajya: The Only Monthly discussing questions pertaining to Indian States from a Constructive Point of View”. While the contributions to the magazine were not limited to Kathiawad region, most of the writing emerged from Gujarati speaking states of the Western Indian subcontinent.
A project on cultural and social decolonization involves a radical dismantling of the prevailing euro-centric historical discourses, to make way for inclusive and diverse voices from different corners of the world. These voices must be revived from their secondary status and be examined as crucial testimonies of historical debates that shaped the ethos of the region. The endeavour, therefore, is not a literal translation of the Gujarati vernacular journals such as the “Deshi Rajya” into English rather, it is to facilitate a reading that stems from a personal response to the non-inclusivity of Gujarati historical accounts in the larger story of a nation. An attempt at creatively interpreting bi-lingual historiography, offers a window to a new world of nation building exercises that are not included in conventional colonial discourses. A potential output, therefore, will be in lieu of the theoretical framework of IPD ’24, which entails a re-imagining of the world through an “epistemic disobedience”, challenging the existing discourse on the construction of a nation-state.