Advertisement
This event is a run-up event to the Institute for the Humanities upcoming October 2024 Neo-Liberal Fascism and the Future of Radical Democracy Conference. (Details to be announced soon).
Co-sponsored by The Hari Sharma Foundation, Centre for Comparative Muslim Studies and Rungh Magazine, and UBC CISAR (Centre for India and South Asia Research).
Global legacies of the “spring thunder”: Indian People’s Association in North America (IPANA), 1975-1987.
The Indian People’s Association in North America (IPANA) was an anti-imperialist organization of immigrants from India living in the United States and Canada. These Left radicals identified themselves as a stream of global Maoism. Its founding in June 1975 in Montreal happened to coincide with the declaration of Emergency in India, which IPANA strongly opposed as an anti-democratic act in its founding statement. It had 14 city chapters at its height, including Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto and New York. Its founders were highly educated professionals working in universities and research institutions. The organization soon expanded by bringing students and working-class immigrants into its fold. Initially, its main objective was to generate support for the communist revolutionaries, popularly called the Naxalites in India, who were facing severe state repression. However, it soon embraced the issues faced by the South Asian diasporic communities and initiated anti-racist and working-class organizing by forging intercommunity alliances, like the work done by BC Organization to Fight Racism (BCOFR) and the Canadian Farmworkers Union (CFU), both formed by IPANA activists. IPANA’s political ideology was informed by the Three Worlds Theory, and it established close contacts with Third World revolutionary and anti-colonial struggles locally and globally, contributing immensely to social transformation and institution- and community-building during this period. This presentation illustrates IPANA’s legacy and brings to the fore the diverse ways this radical past speaks to the present.
Speakers Bio
Dr Ajay Bhardwaj is a research scholar and documentary filmmaker. He has engaged with memory, social movements, and popular culture in South Asia and its diasporas for over three decades. He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities, SFU. For his doctoral research at the Dept of Asian Studies, UBC, he examined the Left-wing cultural activism of the South Asian diaspora, especially the role of progressive Punjabi writers and literary societies in British Columbia. The dissertation was accompanied by a feature-length documentary, When the Tide Goes Out, which interrogates the absence of Punjabi women farmworkers’ voices and subjectivity in the multimedia archive and memory culture of the farmworkers’ movement. His first independent documentary, A Minute of Silence, chronicled the nationwide protests by the left activists and students against the killing of student leader Chandrashekhar Prasad of the Jawaharlal Nehru University in 1997. In his long stint as a documentary filmmaker, he examined the impact of India’s partition on the Northwestern state of Punjab. This decade-long inquiry resulted in his Punjab trilogy – a set of documentaries, namely Where the Twain Shall Meet, Thus Departed Our Neighbours and Let’s Meet at Baba Ratan’s Fair, located at the intersection of Dalit religiosity, performance traditions, and memories of the partition. Dr. Bhardwaj’s research interests include the long sixties, South Asian diaspora, social movements, memory, archives, oral history, post-partition Punjabs and documentary film.
Anjali Appadurai is a climate justice advocate and communicator. She began her career as an activist in international climate politics, organizing young people from around the world to build a strong youth and civil society voice at the UN Climate Convention. Appadurai has worked on issues of fossil fuel accountability and climate justice in the non-profit sector in British Columbia for the past seven years. She is now climate justice lead at Sierra Club BC and sectoral organizer at the newly formed Climate Emergency Unit. She recently formed the Padma Centre for Climate Justice, an organization that will provide a space for young people from Global South diasporas and immigrant communities to come together around issues of climate change, globalization and equity.
Sadhu Binning D. Litt, is a bilingual teacher, advocate/founder, author, and editor, has lived in Vancouver since 1967, when he migrated there. During his resilient career, he has published and edited over nineteen poetry, fiction, plays, translations, and research books. His works have been included in more than fifty anthologies both in Punjabi and English. He edited and co-edited the Punjabi magazines Watno Dur and Watan. He co-founded Vancouver Sath, a theatre collective (1983), Ankur, an English literary magazine (1993), and founded the Punjabi Language Education Association and various other literary and cultural organizations, including the Punjabi Literary Association (1973). He has sat on the BC Arts Board, is a central figure in the Punjabi arts community, and was named one of the top 100 South Asians who made a difference in BC. He has received numerous awards in Canada and Punjab, India, including the supreme nonresident Punjabi author in 2015. Sadhu Binning received an honorary Doctorate of Letters from UBC in 2019.
Advertisement
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
515 W Hastings St, Vancouver, BC V6B 0B2, Canada
