On Touch, Intimacy, and Difference: Quarantine Exchanges with Santanu Das

HARDEEP DHILLON

Santanu Das and Hardeep Dhillon met in November 2018 where the two were invited to present their scholarship as part of a centennial commemoration of the First World War in Delhi, India. The two scholars kept in touch and reconnected in April 2020 to discuss how their research and literary interests have shaped their thinking during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the process, the two scholars also exchanged pictures of the gardens and flowers that surrounded them. What follows is the abbreviated version of a conversation and interview that unfolded between Das and Dhillon between April 2020 and January 2021. Some images from the conversation are also reproduced below.

Hardeep Dhillon: My beginning to our conversation is an act of refusal in the feminist sense—to highlight that business is not as usual and that people on a global scale are suffering in ways that continue to deepen already existing precarity. Therefore, let me begin by asking you how you are.

Santanu Das: I have so far been physically well, and safe, even sequestered, though currently mourning the death of a very dear person – an aunt who was also a neighbor, someone I had known forever. She was ill but had been fighting valiantly for several months till COVID-19 got to her and took her in a matter of days, on Christmas Day. She had an extraordinary appetite for life and found lockdown difficult; and indeed, as with millions of others in relation to their dear ones, my last memory of her is phantasmal for which I am nonetheless very grateful – it was a zoom call on her birthday when, with her two daughters – one in the UK, the other in the US – we connected with her in India. Earlier in the year, in May, I lost another aunt, living in a care-home just a few miles away from me in London; she was childless, and I was like her son, and would see her every week. Yet, it was during the peak of the pandemic and there was full lockdown, and so I could not visit her.

It makes me realize that loss is and is not a relative concept: for the person who loses someone, it is absolute. It doesn’t matter, at one level, whether the person was ailing or old; what matters is that you would never be able to see or touch them. And then, when we see the photographs of thousands of young migrant laborers walking across India during lockdown – hungry and destitute – one realizes the enormity and incommensurability of such suffering. Yet can one ever quantify grief? I don’t think so.

Hardeep: My deepest condolences and sympathies, Santanu. The pain must be immense. Please know that you are not alone and if we can do anything to help, we are here.

Your pain and that of others reminds me that the world is suffering in so many ways during this worldscape of contagion. The world in terms of borders that animate distance but also claim to profess safety and care; the world in terms of expendable laborers and bodies that face death and debility; the world as a place of homemaking and homelessness. I think, too, of those places that are less documented and centered in our analyses—indigenous reservations, detention camps for migrants and minorities, prisons, walled slums, disabled/differently-abled bodies, homes of domestic violence, to name some. I’ve been thinking about these places and peoples and others, centering their critiques and concerns and allowing them to steer me.

Santanu: ‘Worldscape of contagion’ is a resonant phrase – not the world, which continues to sprout and bloom and sing around us but the way we re-conceptualized - or ‘scaped’ - it in a matter of days, in units of 2 meters and aerosols. What also struck me, during the first lockdown in March/April, was the resilience, or you may call it indifference, of the natural world – spring of 2020 was, bizarrely, one of the most beautiful springs in the UK in recent years. I know that both of us have drawn a lot of strength from such beauty – here’s a picture taken from my garden on Easter Day.

Looking across the garden in London on Easter Sunday, 2020: Blossoms fringed with clematis. Taken by Santanu Das

It reminded me of Edward Thomas’s poignant poem ‘In Memoriam’ (Easter 1915’), written, obviously, in the middle of the Great War:

The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood
This Eastertide call into mind the men,
Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts should
Have gathered them and will do never again.

Where the very fullness of nature on the boughs evokes, almost perversely, the absent or rather a phantasmatic touch of all those men dead in France who would have otherwise picked the flowers. An entire worldscape contained within four lines. We must not aesthecize suffering but somehow what was happening around us this spring made the natural world seem immensely poignant even as it gave us hope.

The pathogen does not discriminate but Covid is not a great leveller. Instead, it tunnels into, preys upon, and exposes the structural and socio-economic inequalities you mention – homelessness or cramped living conditions, inadequate nutrition, low wages forcing people to go to work (as bus-drivers, cleaners, industrial workers) – rather than any essentialist biological factor that is often mistakenly assumed. Because of immigration patterns and unequal opportunities, many of those affected happen to be people of color. There is also a huge invisible white working-class population going through the same tribulations and feeling increasingly disenfranchised as there is so little coverage of them. Race, to be a meaningful category, has to be nuanced to socio-economic contexts: class is often the modality in which race is lived.

Hardeep: The poem you shared is beautiful. I have been reading ferociously, including Audre Lorde’s In A Burst of Light: Living with Cancer and much more. Much of what I read has moved me and there are moments where I am reminded that so many have pondered the depths of struggle and hardship, of changing worlds. They also make me question the ‘newness’ of this moment. A passage from José Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia is one piece of writing among others that has made its way to my heart:

“The here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there. Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of this moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds. Queerness is a longing that propels us onward, beyond romances of the negative and toiling in the present. Queerness is the thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing.”

My own floral arrangements also help.

Floral Arrangement on Writing Desk, photo taken by Hardeep Dhillon (c. April 2020), Cambridge, Massachusetts

I have also been thinking more generally about the place of touch and intimacy. Contagion is a word that literally means “to touch” but we now live in a world where touch and intimacies of various sorts are being reconfigured in public and private spaces. Your work, of course, highlights these topics. As a scholar of the senses, particularly touch, I am sure that you have been thinking about the way in which worldscapes of contagion propel us towards new and old imaginaries.

Santanu: One of the main casualties of this new ‘worldscape’ is the most intimate of our senses – touch. What makes Covid 19 different from previous pandemics is that it takes away our everyday gestures and rituals, those hugs, pats, and caresses by which we live, love, and mourn. Munoz’s definition of queerness is certainly evocative but I’m not sure how far such an all-expansive and diffuse description goes or what it does in terms of historical and political specificity in queer lives and culture. Let’s go back to one of the foundational moment in queer culture. Remember the photograph ‘that changed the face of AIDS’ – the last moments of the 32-year old HIV/AIDS activist David Kirby, held by his father; we also his sister comforting her daughter, the cargiver on the other side of the bed, all grouped around him. By contrast, for Covid, those two meters or six feet will determine not only how we reach out to the living but how we make peace with the dead. The poet Thom Gunn, living in New York during the HIV pandemic and losing many of his friends, remembered the time as one of ‘endless embraces’; for us, Covid-time will be one of infinite regret.

Even in our everyday life, what makes the practice of social distancing so challenging is that it is the denial of the reality of our bodies, of urges more primal than sex or love – the need to come together physically or at least within touching distance of each other, as if life lodged itself in the corpuscles of our skin. We have all struggled to grasp how distance, not proximity, can be the sign of our love for each other when our senses tell us otherwise. In the phantasmal life on Zoom or Whatsapp, the face is being increasingly called upon to do the work of touch, our smiles the magic of fingers.

I’ve been in the UK for 24 years now and, as with countless others no doubt, 2020 was the first year that I was unable to travel back to India and see my 72-year widowed mother who lives in Kolkata. Being vulnerable, she has been isolating on her own. Over the year, I have seen her face getting increasingly lined; what makes me go cold is the thought of how many such faces, seeking to reach us, touch us, from their solitary cells, may gradually turn to stone. Hopefully, the vaccine will free us all.

Hardeep: It is not surprising to me that many of us would live with such images. To borrow from Ocean Vuong, many of us write from a place that once was our mother’s body, we write as the children of our mothers.

We both understand that this pandemic is not a war even though war rhetoric has been employed again and again. War, as you so deftly highlight in your scholarship, also reoriented touch, intimacy, and care as people from around the globe were brought together in new encounters—some that involved their bodies, others that did no—all to fight and bear the burdens of an imperial war.

Santanu: The mother’s body is usually our first memory. In situations of crisis, people revert to these primal moments: we crave once more for the maternal embrace. I work on the First World War, and I am reminded of young men in the trenches who, in their final moments, would often ask for their mother. Two scenes, in particular, come to mind. The first is from the soldier-writer Henry Williamson from the Western Front, the second from the memoirs of Mary Britnieva, a young Anglo-Russian nurse in a war hospital:

[I saw] a Saxon boy half crushed under a shattered tank, moaning ‘Mutter, Mutter, Mutter’, out of ghastly grey lips. A British soldier, wounded in the leg, and sitting nearby, hearing the words, and dragging himself to the dying boy, takes his cold hand and says: ‘All right, son, it’s all right. Mother’s here with you.[1]
Suddenly he raised himself: ‘Hold me, Sestritza,’ he said in a frightened voice, ‘hold me tight, it is coming!’ I put my arms around him holding him up with all my strength. ‘Now kiss me, Sestritza,’ he said. I kissed him. Then slowly he made the sign of the cross, and in a few moments, he was dead.[2]

As words fail and life ebbs away, the body moves in to fill the gap left by language. In the trenches and war hospitals, mutilation, mortality, loneliness, and fear broke down the tactile norms of civilian life. As the W.H.Auden wrote during the Second World War, even the crudest forms of affection in times of crisis can seem especially noble of which the world is so desperately in need of.

However, as you say, a pandemic is not war, in so many different ways. For a start, our roads may be empty, but our physical landscape has not changed; our cities and homes are intact. By contrast, think of Flanders, Dresden, Basra, Lebanon. The military metaphors, as you mention, are not just misleading but insidious: what we need is not ‘the fighting spirit’ but care for others, including those we do not know: obey the rules, be responsible and respect the regulations put in place for medical reasons. The entire reconceptualization of touch and intimacy is very hard but – if you must employ military metaphor – well, we shouldn’t expose ourselves and others to fire when Armistice is just around the corner.

Hardeep: We have all seen images from many hospitals now. Some with humans flowing down the street in queues. Others with gurneys lined against every wall. Some hospitals have trailers parked behind them holding the dead in large, black plastic bags because there is no space for their corpses inside, no body bags. Field hospitals in schools, stadiums, open lots, ships, tents, and convention centers are growing in number across the world, remapping spaces of social contact and engagement as those of medical care. We know the spread of COVID-19 inside prisons and detention centers is very high but medical care and access are incredibly limited. Concerns of accessibility are now applicable to the use and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, too.

Yet, this moment is not the first that we have globally or nationally encountered such crises. Your own work highlights how the Great War also brought colonial subjects to operating tables and hospitals, makeshift and otherwise, across Europe where European nurses and doctors provided medical aid, where many colonial subjects, largely men, experienced their first touch by European women and even men—at times, directly on their skin. These historical moments have been critical to your research. Yet, as we know, these moments of touch, perhaps also encounters of intimacy and care, did not go without controversy, particularly racial and sexual controversy.

Santanu: What you say about the ubiquity of death all around, its traumatic excess, reminds me of a letter of an Indian sepoy, writing back home after the battle of Neuve Chapelle in Match 1915:

God knows whether the land of France is stained with sin or whether the Day of Judgement has begun in France. For guns and of rifles, there is a deluge, bodies upon bodies, and blood flowing. God preserve us, what has come to pass! From dawn to dark and from dark to dawn it goes on like the hail that fell at Swarra [?] camp. But especially our guns have filled the German trenches with dead and made them brim with blood. God grant us grace, for grace is needed.[3] [Amir Khan. 129th [Baluchis] from France to his brother in Punjab, 18 March 1915].

Four million non-white men were recruited into European armies between 1914 and 1919, of which 1.3 million were from South Asia. They served in places as diverse as France and Flanders, Mesopotamia, East Africa, Gallipoli, Egypt, Palestine, and Salonika. While in the trenches and the battlefields they faced for the first time the horrors of modern industrial combat, a very different world of contact was opening up behind the frontlines. Often, these young men, far away from home, formed deep bonds with elderly French women who had themselves lost their sons and whom they addressed as their ‘French mothers’. Consider the following letter from an Indian sepoy Sher Bahadur Khan, written in France on January 9, 1916:

The house in which I was billeted was the house of a well-to-do man, but the only occupant was the lady of advanced years. Her three sons had gone to the war. One had been killed, another had been wounded and was in hospital, and the third was at time in the trenches. … During the whole three months I never saw this old lady sitting idle, although she belonged to a high family. Indeed, during the whole three months, she ministered to me to such an extent that I cannot adequately describe her (kindness). Of her own free will she washed my clothes, arranged my bed, polished my boots for three months. … When we had to leave that village this old lady wept on my shoulder.[4]

This is the rich stirring realm of personal contact: affection, maternity, bereavement and loneliness are fused and confused.

There was also erotic contact between these young sepoys and local women in France, a domain which was zealously policed, lest they imperil ‘white prestige’. An extreme example of this imperial paranoia about ‘miscegenation’ happened in the city of Brighton in the UK where there was a number of hospitals where Indian sepoys were being nursed back to health. For example, fences were set up around the Brighton Pavilion Hospital, and a guard stationed outside the York Hospital in an early example of ‘social distancing’ to stop allegedly profligate English working-class girls cavorting with ‘depraved’ Indian sepoys, in a classic intersection of racial, gender and class prejudices.

Hardeep: As the war drew to a close, however, commemoration efforts sought to build an image of the world that glossed over questions of race, class, imperialism, and even ability/disability. In my field—history—the question of commemoration is raised repeatedly to understand the relationship between public history, landscape, memory, and memorial. In the wake of far more avid protests, statues in public and private spaces around the world promoting slave-owning families, Indigenous persecutors, and racist leaders have become central to debates of how we should memorialize the past. Do you see the Great War as an example of how we can think about such questions?

Santanu: The First World War has been invented as the grand-stage to play the theme of multiculturalism and tied to an agenda of social cohesion and community-building. While this is very important and has altered the color of war memory, such masala commemoration can also become an ideological smokescreen, with little attention to what reactionary political functions certain ethnic communities are being made to serve. The Indian soldier is always invariably turned into a colonial hero, as if heroism and gallantry were the only ticket to remembrance. While such positive depictions, as we are told, are good for brown or black self-esteem in multicultural societies, it can lead to the sanitization of both empire and violence. Diversity does not mean decolonization. At a time when the heroic-martial rhetoric has been largely expunged from public discourse in the UK – thanks to the largely middle-class white poet-soldiers such as Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Robert Graves and the anti-war surge in the 1960s and 1970s, it is being brought back and celebrated by ring-wing politicians in collaboration with certain ethnic groups under the umbrella of multiculturalism in a racialized variation of militant white nationalism.

Why do we commemorate the war dead? To recognize and pay our debt for protecting the country and civilians, own responsibility and prevent further wars. But is there always a belligerent impulse in the act of official commemoration, whereby war service gets dressed up in a language of heroism and sacrifice? In official programs, tributes for the FWW dead often becomes an ode to all war dead, so that commemoration becomes a process of legitimization of different kinds of wars, from FWW to soldiers invading Iraq and Afghanistan: depending on where you are, the FWW soldier blends with the British soldier recently dead in Iraq or the Indian soldier in Pakistan. I would like to leave you with a question: is it possible to commemorate and recognize the courage of a fallen soldier for the supreme gift of life without endorsing the values he stood for or even the cause for which he fought and fell? On a related note, I think it’s important for us to remember and mourn this horrid period of Covid 19 and the people we have lost without trying to attribute any value or meaning to the pandemic in terms of some redemptive logic around nature’s way of ‘re-setting the balance’ – that is just so weird.

Hardeep: Your writing and methodology take such care to always think with material objects and writing in deeply sensuous ways that bring the intimate relations between people, people and objects, and objects and the world to the fore. How do you describe your methodology?

Santanu: To do cultural and emotional history of the war from below, we need to de-Europeanize our tools as well as our sources. While not abandoning traditional sources, it becomes crucial to visit, anthropologist-like, the actual sites, and communities, go beyond the conventional sources and reconceptualize the ‘archive’ – objects, artifacts, sketches, photographs, oral records, testimony, gossip, rumor, songs, literary accounts as well as more recognizably ‘historical’ sources. They then can be put together in dialogue and allowed to argue with each other; above all, we need to know what questions to ask of our material.

For example, while researching for my book on India, Empire and First World War Cultures: Writings, Images, and Songs (Cambridge, 2018), I came across in an archive in West Bengal a pair of broken and blood-stained glasses belonging to an Indian combatant killed in France; a confiscated trench notebook of a jihadist who defected to the German side, along with fellow Afridi Pathans, one rainy night in May 1916; a German helmet adorned with animal horns and hair found with the Naga laborer in Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford; a note in child’s hand asking her father serving in Egypt to come back to the family in Punjab. Why are they important? The the glasses, the torn diary page or the child’s scrawl are not just new sources but provide new ways of understanding colonial history from below in times of war; they are the archives of touch and intimacy; they are the flotsam and jetsam of life disrupted by war, the contact-zone where testimony is born. The only thing we can be certain about is their uncertain, tentative nature, that they will provide only momentary flashes before it all goes dark again.

I take as my inspiration the wonderful essay ‘The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory’ by the great Caribbean poet Derek Walcott:

Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than the love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. The glue that fits the pieces is the sealing of its original shape. It is such a love that reassembles our African and Asiatic fragments, the cracked heirloom whose restoration shows its white scars.

Hardeep: Historians are already thinking about how future generations will write this pandemic in due time. Is there an archive this pandemic is charting that draws your interest?

Santanu: It is a very interesting and difficult question for what Covid has done, beyond the regime of facemasks, shields and gloves, is to deny the materiality of our bodies: it has been such a phantasmal year. I think it will be a primarily visual archive, a digital archive; the problem will be one of surfeit, of having too many images, not knowing what to choose. Let me take up your question with three examples:

The first is one of the most joyful, creative and poignant things I have come across – the ‘lockdown video’ put together by the dancers of the National Opera Paris (here is the link) – among other things, you get intimate glimpses into lives of others in their bedrooms and kitchens, with their kids and pets; it’s also one of the most moving testimonies to the life of the body and the senses when they are being most denied, yearning to reach out and connect, particularly poignant for a community of people who routinely express themselves through their bodies. I have watched it so many times.

The second one is heart-breaking where the digital platform is at once the medium, the memory, and the archive; it is also a story of our times, of migrancy and precarity, of the body at once grotesquely real and phantasmal. It is the story of Rajesh Jayaseelan, a 44-year-old migrant Uber driver working in London and supporting his family in Bangalore.

After he caught Covid, he was thrown out of his one-room flat and forced to isolate in his car. As his condition deteriorated, he drove himself to the hospital. The hospital-staff connected him to his family in Bangalore through video-call before he lost consciousness: his wife and two small children were able to communicate with his intubated face. Each of these – from the car to the hospital-bed to a ventilator – tells a story but none as powerfully as the video-call.

An archive partly lies in the eyes of the beholder/researcher, the way it speaks to them, the questions one brings to it. One video I’ve returned to again and again is of my friend – the singer-song-writer Sahana Bajpayee – singing a Rabindrasangeet (Tagore’s song) with/to her daughter in an open veranda in Shantiniketan. She actually lives in London but went with her daughter to her hometown where they got stranded. Shantiniketan, as you know, is associated with the Indian writer and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore. Why does it qualify as an archive? The song starts with – ‘What is this heaviness of the heart?’? For me, it speaks to the homesickness and separation anxieties many of us – immigrants – felt during the lockdown, away from our families; fantasies of freedom and of unrestricted, safe space; of childhood memories, with the song, and the camera slowly panning across the skies and buildings and trees we had grown up with, touching something too deep for tears; it is also about the primal bond of the mother and the child, of the artist’s complete surrender to their art. It is an archive of feeling, rather than of knowledge, and it makes us rethink what an archive can be.

Hardeep: The archive we are leaving behind is full of every emotion. At times I am left without words to describe human love, loss, and despair. Thank you for sharing these videos. In the spirit of our exchange, I also wanted to share an image I recently took on a long walk.

Sun Dial at Fort Worth Botanic Gardens, Photo taken by Hardeep Dhillon (Nov 2020)

When we began this conversation in April, we had not witnessed the proliferation of activism that we do today. We had not witnessed the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement across the world. The names of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, in the wake of Freddie Gray and Eric Garner and so many who remained unnamed in the public imaginary. We did not know that we would both watch from afar as cyclone Amphan devastated your home region. In this last month alone, we both tuned in for what would become the largest election in the United States with women of color, especially Black women, making their mark on history once again.

In India, we are perhaps witnessing the largest protest in world history as farmers, their families, and their supporters take to the streets to demand greater security in an international commodity market. I am curious to know how you’ve been witnessing, experiencing, and thinking about the many events around us and the sort of watershed moment you imagine this pandemic to be. Do you imagine the pandemic as a portal to imagine something new, as Arundhati Roy has highlighted, or do you imagine this moment differently?

Santanu: 2020 has been such a difficult and intense year. When we were already at the peak of the infection rates in India – and we had recently seen the images of the migrant laborers– came Amphan to devastate Bengal. One is reminded of Edgar’s line in King Lear - “And worse I may be yet: the worst is not so long as we can say, 'This is the worst.'” By comparison, the victory of Biden and Harris was one of the few high-points in this otherwise ghastly year.

On 11 July 1966, in his essay ‘A Report from an Occupied Territory’, the great American writer James Baldwin wrote:

Negroes have always held, the lowest jobs, the most menial jobs, which are now being destroyed by automation. No remote provision has yet been made to absorb this labor surplus. Furthermore, the Negro's education, North and South, remains, almost totally, a segregated education. And, the police treat the Negro like a dog.’

George Floyd’s murder showed we are still inhabiting the same moment. The extraordinary energy and fundamental revisioning we saw following his murder across the world was as inspiring as it was needed but I wonder whether the pent-up energies and frustrations, particularly of the young, during the long period of lockdown also fed into and galvanized the movement.

In Oxford we have been in the midst of the remarkable ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ movement and, while it has my sympathies, I wonder whether it has any tangible effect on the everyday lives of working-class black people in council estates. Or rather, what it needs to do to have a tangible effect? Class is often the modality in which race is experienced.

Hardeep: The racial formations of our time are historical inheritances but I see them as having changed over time while retaining a genealogy in larger histories of slavery, Indigenous dispossession, and colonialism. The beauty, too, of historical and ongoing political movements is that they teach us so much about our intellectual, ethical, and political preoccupations, and how we envision and think of the worlds around us. On that note, may I ask what is next for you?

Santanu: Yes, it is an increasingly fractious and hostile world and I have come to understand more and more the power of kindness and, as a historian, the messiness of the past.

Current political movements, such as the BLM, enable us to see the past in fresh ways and try to rectify the present. It also makes us ask fundamental questions about what we mean by ‘history’, who writes such history and for whom, what are our sources and lead us, more powerfully than ever before, about the reconceptualization of the ‘archive’ I was talking about. Indeed, what counts as ‘archive’ when traditional archives are so silent about subjugated groups? In fact the farmers’ protests – their songs, their chants, their performances – are one of the important ‘archives’ for contemporary India, especially if we want to do histories of emotion or movements from below.

Any act of historical recuperation – whether of the enslaved, the indigenous, or the colonised – is also an act of interpretation, a relationship between the past and the present. The past can often be ugly, painful and contradictory where the lines between who holds power and who participates in it get blurred – think of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919 and that it was Gurkha, Sikh and Pathan sepoys, on the order of General Dyer, who opened fire on unarmed fellow-Indians. We cannot and must not sanitize the past according to a particular movement or agenda, however well-intentioned they might be. While we have to be open to re-reading the past, we need to guard against presentism or indeed ‘the condescension of posterity’. One of the things I try to find out while researching ‘difficult pasts’ is whether a particular mentality or attitude was ‘wrong’ even in the historical period in which it originated rather than in terms of our current moment.

I spent the first ten years of my academic life trying to understand and examine the sensuous world of the battlefields and hospitals of the Western Front through the letters, diaries, memoirs, poems, and fiction of white British combatants, war writers and nurses; and the next ten years trying to de-center that narrative by trying to recover the largely hidden world of colonial and racialized war service through a focus on the one and half million Indian troops as well as the worlds they had left behind – their wives, mothers, children. My next project actually combines these two impulses, the sensuous and the racial, through a different historical and literary experience – an intimate history of sea-voyages, from Victorian times to now, from the last sailors and whalers to lascars and colonial passengers, and the way they have been written about, represented, re-imagined – from Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad to Fred D’Aguiar and Amitav Ghosh.

Hardeep: Thank you for sharing, Santanu. As always, it has been a pleasure.

Hardeep Dhillon is a social and legal historian in the History Department with a secondary in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGS) at Harvard University. Her dissertation, “Indians on the Move: Law, Borders, and Freedoms in the Early Twentieth Century,” works across Asian and Asian American Studies to explicate the foundations of modern immigration and border controls.

Santanu Das is Senior Research Fellow and Professor of Modern Literature and Culture at All Souls College, University of Oxford. Das has strong interests in early twentieth-century British literature; in theories of body, gender, sexuality and affect; and in the relationship between modernism and colonial/postcolonial cultures, with a particular focus on South Asia. For the last several years, Das has worked on the cultural and literary history of South Asia and the First World War. He is the author of Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (2006) which won the Philip Leverhulme Prize, and editor of Race, Empire and First World War Writing and Cambridge Companion to the Poetry of the First World War, all published by Cambridge University Press. His latest book India, Empire and First World War Culture: Writings, Images, and Songs (Cambridge 2018) was awarded the Hindu Literary Prize for Non-Fiction, the Ananda Coomaraswamy Prize and the European Society for the Study of English Book Prize in 2020. In addition to his academic writing, Das occasionally writes for the Guardian and has appeared in First World War-related programmes on BBC2, Discovery Channel and NDTV.

Additional notes:

[1] Henry Williamson, The Wet Flanders Plain (1929; Norwich: Glidden Books, 1987), 18.

[2] Mary Britneva, One Woman’s Story (London: Arthur Barker Ltd, 1934), 18-19.

[3] Amir Khan. 129th [Baluchis] from France to his brother in Punjab, 18 March 1915, Censor of Indian Mail, 1914-1918, L/MIL/5/825/2, 141-2.

[4] Letter of Sher Bahadur Khan, France, 9 January 1916, Censor of Indian Mails, 1914-1918, L/MIL/5/828 Part I, FF.1-202, 112.

ConversationsBorderlines CSSAAMEFebruary 10, 2021