Indian Institute of Technology Madras Department of Humanities and Social Sciences is organizing an International Memory Studies Conference titled ‘Event, Memory, Re-Membering: One Hundred Years of Jallianwalla Bagh,’ which has its centenary this year, from 2nd to 4th October 2019.
Inaugurated on Mahatma Gandhi’s birth anniversary and re-visiting a major event in national history of freedom struggle, this is a unique state-of-the-art conference in India, which seeks to create an active Academia-Artwork-Industry collaboration in the field of Memory Studies, also involving international partners.
This conference is an attempt to enquire into the ways in which Jallianwalla Bagh has been documented/remembered in the last one hundred years in various narratives and spaces, both public and personal. The conference organizers propose to use Jallianwalla Bagh as a prefatory event to help enter the complex as well as overlapping discourses on nationalism, historiography, memory, and event.
Prof Mahesh Panchagnula, Dean (International and Alumni Relations), IIT Madras, and Mr. K. Padmanabhan, Vice President, TCS, Chennai, inaugurated the conference. The inaugural session was followed by a talk titled ‘The Future of Memory Studies’ by IIT Madras faculty convenors Dr. Merin Simi Raj and Dr. Avishek Parui.
In close correspondence with academic presentations from across India as well as from abroad, IIT Madras, will have exhibition displaying mural artwork stylised by state-of-the-art augmented reality animation from the XR-Lab of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Chennai.
Speaking about the significance of this Conference, Faculty Convenor Dr. Avishek Parui, Assistant Professor (English), Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras, said, “Memory Studies is an interdisciplinary field that draws on a range of research from history, psychology, literature, law, machine studies, and medicine. This conference is a dialogic platform for such research which is further accentuated by the Augmented Reality animation on artwork on Jallianwalla Bagh by the XR Lab, TCS Chennai. Revisiting a major milestone in our national history through a range of representations and interpretative lenses, this event is the first of a conference series that we are hoping to host in collaboration with our industry partners that will eventually help in forming a Centre for Memory Studies at IIT Madras in the not too distant future.”