Highland Affinities: Perception, Aesthetics and the Everyday in the Making of a British- Himalayan Town, Shimla

A Fellow in Global Humanities at the Kate Hamburger Centre for Advanced Study in the Humanities ‘global disconnect’, Munich, Siddhant Pandey, through this series sheds light on the perceptual and aesthetic evolution of Shimla , the erstwhile Summer Capital of British-India and now a popular tourist site as well as the capital of Himanchal Pradesh. Along with a politically crucial status, Shimla also evolved as a visual and emotionally potent space, one whose legacy continues to define its reception and regard.

Ploughing through a number of archival sources as well as the speaker’s own research and images, the talk aimed to present a multifaceted perspective on the town’s affective history and everyday identity, that was of interest to an interdisciplinary audience.

Siddhant Pandey is a 2022-2023 Fellow in Global Humanities at the Kate Hamburger Centre for Advanced Study in the Humanities ‘global disconnect’, Munich. He is also an instructor and resource person for the Himalayan Institute of Cultural and Heritage Studies (HICHS), Shimla, under whose aegis he runs a course titled, “Mountains, Media, Materiality: The Loved and Imagined Cultures of the Western Himalayas.” He has an MPhil and PhD (2019) from the University of Cambridge (UK) in Fantasy Literature and Material Culture Studies, and his post-doctoral research at Yale, LMU, and the Paul Mellon Centre have spanned disciplines as diverse as art history, global history, colonial travel cultures and indigenous cultures. His first book, Fossil (2021) was a geo-mythological exploration of the Himalayas, and was shortlisted for the 2022 Banff Mountain Fiction and Poetry Award.

Date: October 19, 2023
Time: 2:30 PM - 4:00 PM
Venue: 235, GICT Building, Central Campus