Public Lecture by Professor G. Arunima, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi & Scholar - in - Residence, KCHR

Critical geographies, and urban studies, have recast ways of studying towns and cities. This talk is on Trivandrum, and is part of the ongoing work on reading the history of Kerala through a lens of its different religious groups and claimants. This is an attempt to understand the ways in which towns and cities are produced as a relationship of bodies and spaces, marking differential claims, entitlements and erasures. The talk will also unpack the paradoxical ways in which the archive of the city determines both ways in which its history may be written, while containing significant absences that limit our understanding of histories of caste, labour or gender that are critical to a study of city formation.