Details
24 May 2026/१० जेठ २०८३ (आइतबार, दिउँसो ३ बजे)
A Conversation on Histories of Modern South Asia
Gaurav C. Garg, Ashoka University and Pratyoush Onta, Martin Chautari
About the conversation
This is a conversation between two historians of modern South Asia, one who specializes in modern history of India and the other on 20th century Nepal. They will talk about how history writing about South Asia has changed in the past 70 years. They will discuss the emergence of the Subaltern Studies and how it sort of became the reigning orthodoxy by the late 1990s leaving the left-nationalist and Cambridge School behind. They will then discuss the shift to global history. They will also reflect on the emergence of pop history in India. They will also track the shifts in the historiography of Nepal, emphasizing the institutional locations that have been important to these shifts.
About the speakers
Gaurav C. Garg is an Assistant Professor of History at Ashoka University, India. He was trained in the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University and obtained his PhD from New York University (NYU). He is a historian of cities, business, mountaineering, and development in modern South Asia. His first book Agents of Inertia: Business, Urban Crisis, and Economic Decline in Twentieth-Century Calcutta will be published by the Cambridge University Press in July 2026. His works have also appeared in journals such as Comparative Studies in Society and History, Journal of Global History, Journal of Historical Geography and South Asia: The Journal of South Asian Studies.
Pratyoush Onta is a historian of 20th century Nepal based at Martin Chautari. He has written about Nepali nationalism, Gurkha history, institutions, area studies, the politics of knowledge production, media and education. He is the founding editor of the journals Studies in Nepali History and Society (est. 1996) and Samaj Adhyayan. His last co-edited volume is Nepal in the Long 1950s (2024).