The Center for Asian Studies presents

11th Annual Kiang Lecture: “Chin aur Hind: An Indian Subaltern's Travel Narrative of China in 1900-1901"
with Anand Yang, Professor, International Studies and History, University of Washington, Seattle

May 1, 2014
Reception: 6:00 p.m.
Discussion: 7:00 p.m.
Social and Behavioral Sciences Gateway, Room 1517

About the speaker:
Anand A. Yang is a professor of international studies and history at the University of Washington, Seattle. Between 2002 and 2010, he was director of the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies and the Golub Chair of International Studies. He is the former president of the Association for Asian Studies (2006-07) and the World History Association (2007-09). His publications include The Limited Raj: Agrarian Relations in Colonial India and Bazaar India: Peasants, Traders, Markets and the Colonial State in Gangetic Bihar; an edited volume on Crime and Criminality in British India; and numerous articles in journals in Asian studies, history, and the social sciences. Currently, he is working on two book projects; one on coerced Indian labor in Southeast Asia and one on Chinese and South Asian labor migrations across the globe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

About the talk: “Chin aur Hind: An Indian Subaltern's Travel Narrative of China in 1900-1901”
In 1900 an Indian man traveled to China accompanied by a large contingent of his fellow countrymen.  His journey there was unusual, in part because few Indians went to or resided in China at the turn of the twentieth century, and in part because virtually no one from abroad sought out Beijing as a destination, as he and his fellow travelers did that summer, at a time when its foreign residents were under the siege of an insurgent group known as the Boxers. They were moving against the tide because they were members of a large military contingent of almost 20,000 foreigners representing eight nations whose “relief force” was organized into an International Expedition and charged with lifting the siege of the foreign legations and defeating the ruling Qing dynasty, which, by then, openly sided with the Boxer Uprising and its anti-foreign and anti-Christian movement. Yang’s  talk will narrate the story of Thakur Gadadhar Singh, one of the Indian soldiers of the British "relief" force, and the vision of “Chin aur Hind” or China and India, and the rest of Asia that he forged from his experiences in and around Beijing.

About the Center for Asian Studies:
The center is comprised of more than 40 interdisciplinary UCI faculty members who study China, Japan, Korea, South Asia, and Southeast Asia and enhance the study of the many countries and cultures of Asia. The center provides a forum for discussions across geographic and disciplinary boundaries both on campus and within the community.

For further information, please contact Sylvia Lotito, slotito@uci.edu.