Collectors, Coolies, and Climbers in the Himalayas: Picturing Indigenous Histories
November 30, 2017
Jo (Jayeeta) Sharma
This talk focuses on a paper of the same title that examines three key occupations that indigenous people undertook in mountain spaces ruled by the British Empire: plant collectors, coolie labourers, and climbers, and explores their histories of work and life from those. To do so, it interrogates visual and textual materials and discusses how sources as varied as botanical drawings and tourist postcards allow us to write ‘histories from below’ of local and indigenous people, far from the original intent of Euro-American producers. Finally, the paper discusses the Sherpa oral history archive produced in collaboration between UTSC and the Himalayan Club and the exciting possibilities that such digital media offers.
Bio
Jo (Jayeeta) Sharma is an Associate Professor in the Historical and Cultural Studies Department and the Graduate Department of History at the University of Toronto. She studied in Assam and Delhi before she travelled to the University of Cambridge as a Commonwealth Scholar for her PhD in History. She is the author of Empire’s Garden: Assam and the Making of India (Duke 2011), which examines tea plantations and labour migration in the British Empire. She is on the Editorial Board of Global Food History and the Editorial Collective for Radical History Review, and is editor of the Empires in Perspective book series at Routledge. Her research and teaching focus on food, family, global commodities, and diasporic cities. Her current book project explores the making of the Himalayas as a local and global space for cultural encounters and mobile people.
