Dr Rohan Deb Roy will present his recent research as part of our Research Seminar Series.
By focussing on the history of white ants in colonial South Asia, this talk argues that co-constitutive encounters between the worlds of insects and politics have been an intrinsic feature of British colonialism and its legacies in South Asia. British rule in India was vulnerable to white ants because these insects consumed paper and wood, the key material foundations of the colonial state. The white ant problem also made the colonial state more resilient and intrusive. The sphere of strict governmental intervention was extended to include both animate and inanimate nonhumans, while these insects were invoked as symbols to characterise colonised landscapes, peoples and cultures. Nonetheless, encounters with white ants were not entirely within the control of the colonial state. Despite effective state intervention, white ants didn’t vanish altogether, and remained objects of everyday control till the final decade of colonial rule and after. Meanwhile, colonised and post-colonial South Asians used white ants to articulate their own distinct political agendas. Over time, white ants featured variously as metaphors for Islamic decadence, British colonial exploitation, communism, democratic socialism and more recently, the Indian National Congress.
Rohan Deb Roy is the author of Malarial Subjects: Empire, Medicine and Nonhumans in British India (Cambridge, 2017) and the co-editor of Locating the medical: Explorations in South Asian History (Oxford, 2018). He is Lecturer in South Asian History at the University of Reading, where he is also a Co-Director at the Centre for Health Humanities. He is a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, an Associate Reviews Editor of the American Historical Review, Book reviews editor of South Asian History and Culture, and a member of the Research Resources Committee of the Wellcome Trust.
View the Lent Term line up for the Research Seminar Series here.