Priya Satia, professor of modern English history at Stanford University, will give three lectures as part of the Baker-Nord Center for Humanities’ 2018 Walter A. Strauss Lecture Series.
In each of her three lectures, Satia will explore how people with conscience have committed unconscionable acts in the modern period.
Her third lecture, titled “The Self Divided: The Partition of 1947,” will be held Friday, Sept. 21, from 5 to 6 p.m. in Tinkham Veale University Center, Ballroom A.
About the talk
The Partition of South Asia into Pakistan and India in 1947 resulted in the biggest human migration in history, accompanied by horrific violence on a mass scale.
In this lecture, Satia will explore the enduring mysteries around the violence:
- The complicity of the departing British rulers;
- How neighbors became enemies overnight; and
- How Partition laid the groundwork for a new, divided South Asian self—a split consciousness and conscience.
About the lecture series
In some ways, the “modernity” of the modern period lies precisely in the growing awareness of conscience as an ethical rather than religious quality—a new self-consciousness about conscience. This understanding of conscience was tied to the modern historical sensibility; it depended on a sense of how much agency, and thus responsibility, humans have in shaping their world and their lives.
Satia will examine this phenomenon in three lectures covering key moments in the history of the British Empire:
- The question of a Quaker gun-maker’s conscience in the period of the Industrial Revolution;
- The way British officials professing deep understanding and love for the Middle East invented a violent regime of aerial policing there during World War I; and
- How the violence among neighbors during decolonization in postwar South Asia weighed on the conscience of all those involved.
Together, these case studies enable exploration of the well-meaning yet destructive nature of modern imperialism itself.
As part of the series, Satia will present:
- “Pacifists Making Guns: The Galton Family and Britain’s Industrial Revolution”Monday, Sept. 17, from 5 to 6 p.m. in Tinkham Veale University Center, Ballroom A;
- “The Defense of Inhumanity: Interwar Air Control and the British Idea of Arabia” Wednesday, Sept. 19, from 5 to 5:45 p.m. in Tinkham Veale University Center, Ballroom A; and
- “The Self Divided: The Partition of 1947” Friday, Sept. 21, from 5 to 6 p.m. in Tinkham Veale University Center, Ballroom A.
This lecture series, in memory of Walter A. Strauss (1923-2008), who was the Elizabeth and William T. Treuhaft Professor of Humanities, is generously supported by funds provided by the Paul Wurzburger Endowment.
All three events are free and open to the public. Learn more about and register for the events.