Bengal special: two papers on the geography and history of Bengal

Andrea Butcher will speak on "Production Without Medicalisation: an examination of antibiotic use in Bangladeshi aquaculture. Initial findings and thoughts." 

This paper relates to the new ESRC-funded project Production Without Medicalisation which is a multidisciplinary collaboration examining the social drivers for antimicrobial use in Bangladesh’s shrimp and prawn aquaculture industry. Principle investigator Steve Hinchliffe (professor in human geography) and anthropologist Andrea Butcher work collaboratively with a multidisciplinary team of academics, industry experts, and local NGO expertise in Bangladesh and across the UK to generate knowledge about the uses of and socio-economic drivers for antibiotic use in aquaculture in South Asia, a major regional export industry as well as a source of livelihood and food security. Amongst other project deliverables, the team will work with local farmers to monitor pond health and develop sustainable disease management strategies that can be disseminated using a farm-based tool. The research contributes to initiatives underway to minimise antimicrobial resistance and its potential threat to human, non-human animal, and environmental health, one of the global challenges of our times.

Zuleikha Chaudhuri will speak on "Rehearsing the witness: The Bhawal court case"

Zuleikha Chaudhuri, theatre director, will discuss her work related to the "retrial/restaging" of the Bhawal court case, famously written about by Partha Chatterjee in A Princely Impostor (Princeton, 2002). This case about the identity of an heir who claimed to have returned from the dead, ran for sixteen years, from 1930 – 1946, from district courts in colonial Bengal to the Privy Council in London, involving hundreds of witnesses and a range of efforts to establish the identity of the Kumar (prince). Zuleikha uses this trial about a possible impostor to re-examine the enormous archive that the case produced; she uses performance as a means of rendering problematic the notions of evidence, archive and identity. She sees the domains of the law and of theatre as framing larger questions pertaining to the production of truth and reality,  believable identities and the construction of credible narratives. Zuleikha has presented various stages and versions of her work at Mumbai and Kochi, and is currently preparing for an expanded performance at the Dhaka Art Summit, February 2018.