 Good evening everyone, welcome to this session. As Amani said, my name is Dr David Dunn and I teach at SOAS in the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics, primarily on South Asia and South Asian cultural history, literature and occasionally language. And this evening I'm here to give you a sense of what it might be like where you come to SOAS to study both South Asia and Southeast Asia. Now obviously that's a huge region and not all of our, our study is not always, you know, predicated on the idea of drawing the connections between these kinds of regions but what I want to talk to you tonight about is precisely something that does straddle those regions and allows us to take evidence from both sides of what we call the Bay of Bengal or Eastern Indian Ocean. And so, you know, move, I think what we're seeing in contemporary scholarship and contemporary research is a move away from what we've called the kind of old area studies paradigm, that's to say seeing these areas as defined and something we study as singularities but actually we're much more interested in drawing the connections between them and seeing them as historically connected as well as in the contemporary world. So tonight we'll be very much about the past but I hope you'll be able to see some ways in which it has resonances for the present. And I'm hoping to talk also not just about inter-regional connections between South Asia, India, in particular in the colonial period and Southeast Asia and particularly tonight Singapore though with trajectories through what is today Indonesia but also from a kind of interdisciplinary approach that is to say how do we answer the kind of questions about the past and about the present through interdisciplinary perspectives. So by looking tonight not just at history as history but also at art history and at literary and linguistic studies. So hopefully it'll be entertaining and informative all at once and we'll see how we go. And as I said, as Amani said, I'm very happy to take questions at the end either on anything I've said tonight or on what it's like to study that so as particularly in our MAs in South Asian area studies and Southeast Asian and Pacific Asian studies. So please do feel free to ask myself or as Amani said our student ambassador Jeffrey. So religion in the streets, secret societies, colonial anxieties and the evidence of a poem. What we're going to be looking at tonight is particularly focused around representations of Muharram in 19th century, in the 19th century. So Muharram in South Asia and Southeast Asia. As an outline of what I'm hoping to get through, we'll be thinking about how Muharram is talked about in 19th century India, how it is represented visually and you'll see here a particularly striking example that we'll come to on the right hand side of a man dressed as a tiger which we'll come to later. We'll be thinking through what it means to have representations from this period and accounts from this period that we use as historians today and particularly the predominance of colonial accounts and what that means for our understanding of the past. What is particularly striking in so many colonial accounts of Muharram as in so many colonial accounts of so much of colonial society is an element of disdain. And I think that we can safely say that that is predicated or based very much on a lack of understanding, a lack of proper awareness of what is going on when colonial viewers look at the traditions in the places they have colonised and are ruling. What characterises this so very often is a lack of understanding. So we'll be looking at disdain and particularly this idea of the carnival-esque. We'll then be shifting our focus over to Singapore at that point, part of what's called the straight settlements, and thinking about the kind of colonial trajectories. That is to say the ways in which colonialism not necessarily created links because in many ways links predated the advent of European colonialism between South and Southeast Asia and our well-known and well-established historical fact, but it changed and in some ways strengthened and in some ways distorted those linkages by very virtue of having colonised these territories but also through various modes of transportation, either through indentured labour, slavery, or in this case we'll be thinking also about the ways in which recruitment to colonial military powers influenced the culture in different parts of the Malaya Peninsula. We'll be thinking through colonial anxieties also. We'll be thinking about noise, we'll be thinking particularly about criminality and this idea of secret societies, and the so-called mutiny of 1857. Then we'll be thinking about alternative modes or forms of evidence for understanding this period and the events therein, and in particular I'll be drawing our attention to a 19th century Malay poem called The Shire of Talbot, the poem of the tomb effigies. And then in a kind of broader gesture, a kind of theoretical approach we might think what ideas of in Sheldon Pollock's terms future philology or in Stephanie Newell's terms the paracolonial might offer us for kind of approaching these periods and these questions. Now first of all some key terms, some of this might be extraordinarily basic for some of you, but just to make sure we're talking, we're all talking on the wrong send page. When we talk about Mahara, we are talking about the first month of the Islamic calendar. When we talk about Ashura, we're talking about then the 10th day of that month. And this commemorates the martyrdom of Imam Hussein at Karbala in well on the 10th of Muharram in the year 61 of the Muslim calendar or 680 AD. Now there are a range of a mourning rituals and commemorative rituals associated with Muharram. Azad Ali is a kind of catch-all term that might encompass this range and this stretch is of course from the Shi heartlands of contemporary Iran all the way throughout the Muslim world in many ways, with particular permutations in different regions and at different times. And we don't have time this evening to do a complete inventory of Muharram practices, but we'll be thinking in particular about this idea of Tazia, Tawwit, Tawwit or Hussein. These words again are indicative of the kind of spread that Muharram commemorations had in certain circumstances under the influence of these colonial trajectories, which is to say this procession of tomb effigies or effigies created to resemble the tombs of Imam Hussein and Hassan at Karbala and to commemorate the martyrdom in that battle, which are processed through the streets often accompanied by music and as we'll see various kinds of carnival-esque forms involving in South Asia in particular, but also into South East Asia dressing up and assuming various kinds of roles and we'll think about why that happens and what that means not just for the people involved in it, but also I think quite tellingly for the colonial observers who simply do not understand what it is that they're seeing. And so this idea of Tazia as condolence or mourning, the Tawwit, the Tawwit, the Tazia as perhaps in some dictionaries, the Ark of the Covenant and so on. And I mean when we're talking about Tazia in contemporary Iran, we're talking about a theatrical form, like we're talking about a kind of more quite distinct form of commemoration. Now, first of all I want to sort of introduce you to some of the kind of 19th century depictions of Mahram that are really extraordinarily widespread. We have a large collection of 19th century paintings done that depict the commemorations that take place on Ashura and in the month of Mahram remembering this martyrdom. And I think you can see from this particularly good example of the genre the kind of thing that's going on and I hope it's sort of visible in your screens reasonably well. But you can see here a large procession mainly of men proceeding along and on the right hand side of the image you can see two or three effigies, right? These tomb effigies, these tablets as we call them, designed to represent, as I've said, the tombs of Imam Hassan and Hussain. And you know towards the left hand side you can probably just about pick out an elephant there with some people on top. There are banners and there's no music here, there's no evidence of that in particular, but you see women observing in the hill and another group of people watching the procession in the foreground, right? And so a particularly good example of this coming from the Welkin Collection here in London. Another example, and again, you know, slightly different painting style, but still representing another way in which this was being depicted in the 19th century, right? A collection of Indian costumes, types and occupations is the name of the collection that this comes from. And again, you can see perhaps more elaborate tablet constructions here. On the right hand side you'll see several, you know, fantastical, somewhat fantastical figures, which you might, if you're at all aware, of the tradition surrounding Maharam or indeed Islam represents the Burak, right? The heavenly figure that carried the Prophet Muhammad. Some slight differences you may notice here, and again I'm hoping they might be visible on the screen, but if you look in the lower right hand side you'll see in this case, well, we have women participating in the procession. We have our elephant again, and also a couple of figures in the center and to the left representing something we didn't see in the previous picture, which is music, right? So drummers and flute players. And again, very hard to see, I'm sure, on these screens, but a variety of drums being played and a variety of music being played. In this case, some of the musicians dressed in European-style military uniforms. So, and again, this is just a sort of selection to say that this is really quite a common genre of painting. So here are another four examples that represent, I think, the kind of styles that we see. You'll notice some commonalities with what we've looked at more closely already, watercolors, go-ash, and all the rest of it. And a variety of depictions of what was fundamentally a very lively commemoration, right? But still here, very much within the realms of the comprehensible, the understandable. Again, another set of selections of other kinds of paintings associated with Muharram here, generally looking at the shrines as they were being kept and prepared in Imam Bada's or religious houses prior to their procession. Now, as we move into the later part of the 19th century, we also see photography being put to use to document these kinds of events, right? So here, a particularly excellent example from around 1880 of a Muharram procession in Baroda. And this is in the British Library. And you can see the very crowded streets, this tall and elaborate tablet or shrine tomb effigy that's being paraded down. In fact, there are two there and the sense of real community participation, whether in the procession itself or on lookers. And we can think, and we might think a little later also about the ethnographic way, the ethnographic ends to which colonial era photography was also being put in the way and allowed certain kinds of depictions and cataloging of various peoples, again, in the service of colonialism. But I want to focus then on a slightly different kind of depiction of Muharram. And this comes in something that is elaborately termed the Muharram scroll, which is dated to around 1830 or 1840 from Madras. That is to say the presidency of Madras or the region of British or at this point, East India Company controlled India that surrounds modern day Chennai. Now, this is a around about six meter long scroll that is a continual procession and shows things that we will recognize from some of the others. So the depiction in the middle here of Attasia. But it also shows things that are not quite so immediately decipherable. So for instance, if you can see on the right hand side, the three men falling dressed in a way that doesn't comport with the rest of the picture. Or we can see the man just below the Attasia or in front of in the foreground in a costume that again, we don't quite immediately recognize or see as connected with the other participants in this procession. And other examples from this scroll are similar. Again, I can draw your attention to the figures in the foreground. And they are quite foregrounded in this Muharram scroll in this long painting. Or you can see them wearing leper skin, wearing various kinds of beads and carrying implements that aren't immediately obvious what they are. Or here, and this is the guy we saw at the opening of this on the right hand side, our man dressed as a tiger participating in the procession. We might also look at the, is it firepot carrying? Gentleman on the left hand side of the screen proceeding in this scene, the Attasia itself. And so we're immediately kind of, I think, provoked to try and think, well, what is this image about? Why is it so dramatically different from what we've looked at thus far? Again, those examples that we saw, indicative ones, illustrative ones, there are many, many such examples available to look at in various collections in the UK and elsewhere. So what is going on here? Why is this so very different? In attempting to understand this, we can turn it to a, and this is not a photographic kind of ethnography, but a written colonial ethnography, which is, in this case, a superlative, superlatively detailed text called the Kanun Islam, right? So the customs of Islam. And this was written, we are told, in Urdu in 1832 by a gentleman called Jafar Sharif. And in the language of the frontispiece here, composed under the direction of and translated by Herklots, right, who was a surgeon in the Madras establishment. So we're still in this kind of region of Southeast India of Madras, right, with 20 illustrations all the rest of it. Now, we don't have the original Urdu, so it's very hard if this Urdu does in fact exist. Some people have raised questions as to whether this is genuine or not. But we do have Herklots' 1832 translation. And we also have a 1921 reinterpretation of it by a gentleman called Krup. So if we're thinking about, for instance, and again, we don't have time to think about all the various depictions going on here. But if we're thinking about that, that gentleman dressed as a tiger, well, we find a few clues as to what he was doing there in this text, right, from Sharif and Herklots in 1832. In a section on Muharram, dedicated to Muharram, they describe the various kinds of fakiris, right, so the people adopting the mode and style of fakirs of religious mendicants, for want of a more exact term, and joining in the Muharram processions and the various other events that lead up to the Ashura processions on the 10th of Muharram, and the kind of commemoration of this. And how do we understand it? But we have this description, then, of those who dress up as the Bach for the tiger, right? And we don't need to read all this out or look at it in too much detail, but they make an artificial figure of a tiger, and the man entering his cell runs, crawling on all fours, playing about in the bazaar. They paint their own bodies in imitation of a tiger. They chain, and they tie a chain or a rope to their loins with a long bamboo tail supported, and they walk, and they run about with a piece of flesh in their mouth, frightening the people, the children run away at the sight of them, and so on and so forth. So a situation we have here, then, which is not immediately understandable what this has to do with the commemoration of the margitum of the Imam in the 7th century AD. It's not immediately clear to us what we should make of this, I would like to suggest, especially if we're coming at it, either from a kind of Western colonial perspective or post-colonial perspective, for that matter, or indeed from within traditions in South Asia. So there was, especially in the late 19th century and early 20th century, a strong tradition of critique from within the South Asian Islamic community for these kinds of practices, the suggestion being this was jahid, or foolishness that had ignorance, really, that had nothing to do with the proper practices of Islam. So again, something that is contested within religious traditions, as well as something that is not understood from without. But this lack of understanding from without is, I think, key to understanding particular modes of colonial condescension and misinterpretation that were going on in the 19th century. And this kind of condescension informs so much of colonial attitudes towards these practices and has, as we'll see, real-life implications in various contexts. So I mentioned already that this text that we're looking at is written by Sharif, theoretically, and Urdu and translated by Herklots in English. But the 1921 English edition, which is the one that most people have had more access to, given mass, expanded printing and all the rest of it, rather changes people's perceptions of it. And we can see Kruk intervening and making additions. This comes from the end of the section on Muharram. And you'll see on the left a fairly banal description of the ending of the period during the 13 festival days. Muslims never do any work, et cetera, et cetera. This changes somewhat in 1921. And particularly, I want to draw your attention to the addition of the end. This, of course, does not apply to duty as public servants or to other work of necessity. The rights observed in southern India, right? Southeast India, we've been mainly talking about Madras, of which the above is mainly an account, differ greatly from the distinctive morning observations, observances in the north, where no buffoonery such as that of the Muharram Fakirs takes place. Now, I think we can do many things with this simple paragraph of addition. We can question to what extent Kruk's assertion that the north and the south are completely different in the context of South Asia, in the context of India, is true. But we can also, I think, pick up on that word buffoonery, right? Where no buffoonery such as that of the Muharram Fakirs takes place. And we can detect in it, I would suggest, a particular kind of late 19th and early 20th century disdain, right? Distain for indigenous practices and disdain, in particular, for religious practices that colonial writers and ethnographers and administrators did not understand and were not capable of understanding as being religious, right? As being in any way connected to faith, devotion, or genuine expressions of religiosity. I think that lack of understanding is key to the kind of policing of this under colonial authorities that we see both in India and, as I'm going to turn to now, in colonial Singapore. Now, when we go to Singapore, well, here's a couple of images that suggest that there are similar, though not as extensive, traditions of from a colonial gaze documenting and depicting the kinds of activities that were taking place. So here is an 1858 watercolor painting representing Muharram in Singapore from a German artist, Schlitter, which, again, different in style in many ways to what we've seen before. But you can see elements of what we saw in the previous pictures here as well, which is to say the procession and the tazia there at the center of the tomb effigy. And again, similar to what we see in the South Asian context, we see in Southeast Asia this move in the 19th century to a kind of fascination with photography and the use of photography to depict and capture and document the traditions, the peoples, and the scenes of the Orient or the East. And here, I think, also telling me very much in a picture postcard format. So this idea that postcards with these kinds of scenes, depicting these kinds of scenes, served as a kind of social currency among colonial colonists. So to be sent back home to families in Britain, or indeed to family in other parts of the empire. So a tradition that really springs up, and we had a very interesting exhibition on colonial era postcards that saw us just a year or so ago, based on the work of some of these pictures here. So I mean, it's really a kind of fascinating area to explore as to what was going on. But with that similarity in depictions and traditions of capturing and documenting this in artistic forms, we can also note tradition similarities in terms of disdain and incomprehension. This is drawn from a newspaper account from Singapore, my apologies. And you can see here, we must congratulate the public upon the suppression of the last night's procession. The Mohammedans, the Muslims used to have two informal days. The first was put down sometime ago. The second was held for the last time in 1864. These night processions were great nuisance to all persons of other denominations residing in the time that is in Singapore, and endangered the safety of the place by the innumerable torches that were carried. They imposed much extra work on the police. We are confident that if the processions of the Mohammedans, the Muslims, and the Hindus were entirely suppressed, and here they used the term for South Indian's clings, would be transformed from riotous and disorderly citizens into peaceful subjects of her most gracious majesty. And you can sort of feel, test the sense of imperial supremacy and entitlement on these pages. And this was referring then to the procession, the processions associated with Muharram, particularly on Ashura, on the 10th day of Muharram, where the tablet, as we've seen, the Shrine, the tomb effigy, would be paraded through the streets, excuse me. And here are a couple of more, a couple more observations from the Straits Times, the English language colonial newspaper in Singapore at the time, which of course still runs, still in print today. And this, again, from 1864, and this is the pivotal year for what I want to look at at this point, the Tablet Festival, or the Muharram Festival, which the better informed followers of Muhammad did not observe, is now being celebrated by the lower classes. The procession of the tablets takes place tonight when, as usual, the din of tomtoms, etc., will greet those scarcely gratified ears of the more quietly disposed portion of the community. And you can sort of, again, this is a hyacinth bouquet type from middle class, disdain for noise, for disruption, and for the kinds of performative traditions that were associated with Muharram at this time and in this place. And then, from the day after, last night, a rye on a very large scale, or a large scale between two rival tablets were Muharram processions, very nearly took place in the town, which it is supposed would have led to a serious breach of the peace. But for the prompt steps taken by the police in the matter, but as it was, there had been some disturbances during which missiles of every description in the ship, bricks, bottles, etc., were thrown about, inflicting minor wounds on the mob. And then here is an account from some 14 years later on a report for the police force for 1877, again in the straights time, when Maxwell tells us that Muharram, which is a Muslim feast, would in any case lead to quarrels, became most dangerous when the red and white flags have yearly made it the occasion for fighting, stone throwing, etc., and in consequence permission for the procession has been refused. Now, there's a few references there that I think are worth teasing out. I've already suggested that there's a huge amount of disdain and distemper and unwillingness to accept as authentic or in any way valid or valuable, the kinds of religious processions that white Western colonists did not understand and did not appreciate and did not see, in fact, as being religious in any meaningful sense of the term. Noise, tomtoms, din, the drums, the other musical instruments, and there were in fact a whole host of musical instruments being played in Muharram processions, was noise, was not music as far as these people were concerned. Now, it's interesting to think, well actually there was a huge amount of noise in the soundscape of Singapore at this time, and a huge amount of religious noise that of course white colonial individuals would not have considered as noise at the same time. So we can think of in a religious context the ringing of church bells, which of course would have marked the day throughout the firing of cannons, hymns, and other kinds of public displays of either religious activity or other kinds of musical activity and bands and various public performances were a common feature of colonial times, but that which was done by the quote-unquote natives was not worthy of the same kind of respect, whether that was Muharram processions or for instance in the Strait Solomon's Chinese opera. Now, more to the point for our topic here tonight, is this suggestion of the uncontrollable nature of these processions, that every year when it happens we get this from the coverage, right, every year when this happens there is always some kind of breach of the piece, there is always some kind of rivalry between the red and white flags in this case, and this refers then to what the colonial authorities understood were secret societies operating among the quote-unquote native populations and most dangerously forging connections between them. So the idea that there were again in the straight settlements in Singapore, in Penang and other parts of Peninsular Malaysia, secret societies not just among Chinese arrivals to the area, but among South Indian Hindu Muslim communities as well and indeed incorporating local Malay populations into them. So a real anxiety, right, and the work of Rajesh Rai is particularly interesting on this, in suggesting that these anxieties about secret societies and other kinds of formations that might act against colonial interest really come to the fore in the wake of 1857, 1857 of course being the year of the Indian mutiny, right, or in other terms rising for support of Indian independence and other ways of portraying it, right, the first, the dramatic challenge to East India Company rule that really destabilized the company fatally and resulted in direct crime rule taking, being imposed over over British India and the dismemberment of East India Company. So we have then, and this is only again a selection of sources from the period and that depict these public demonstrations of religiosity and here of Muslim religiosity as fundamentally threatening to the colonial order as something that cannot be understood as something that is a space for secret societies and other distressing elements to take over the public space, right. And we also have, though I don't have any of the text up here for you this evening, we also have extensive documentation from a variety of criminal trials that took place in the wake of this, this maharam in 1864, which was as we've seen from these accounts suppressed by the police. The first is the trial that is launched against the supposed ring leaders of the red flag society and seeks to suppress these secret societies, whether if they really existed in the in the way that the British imagined they did, that's a question that remains I think, a little difficult to answer at this point, though I do know of some research and being done by a colleague in Germany that might help clear up some of this. And the second trial ended up being, so this was called the Great Conspiracy case. The second trial in the following year, 1865, was the police conspiracy case where policemen, but particularly so-called native policemen, were accused of conspiring with the secret societies of having accepted bribes and so forth. But most importantly, what we get from this is a sense of, well, in contemporary terms, what we might call the thin blue line, right, an idea of the police standing to, you know, keeping order and protecting this supposedly vulnerable colonial establishment and society and keeping the, again, quote unquote, natives in their place. And this, of course, being a police force that in the lower ranks was staffed by Malays, by South Asians, Indians, but at the upper levels, in spectra and so forth, by Europeans, by British officers. And so we can see in the colonial archive, in various works of history that have to date and kind of treated this event in 1864, which was the last time that Maharam was allowed in Singapore, we have a narrative that has become quite accepted of what happened, why it happened, and how it was dealt with. But we can also find alternative narratives. And this is where a poem called the Shire Tabardos, a poem of the two mephigies, which was written in Singapore in 1864 and documents the events of Maharam that year comes into play. Now this scroll lay unstudied and forgotten in the university, in Leiden University Library. And there are presumably, there were presumably more copies printed, you can see the kind of on the left hand side here, the lithographed printed version of this scroll. And at the end of this one copy that we know survives, the last page is a little more, a little harder to read. But this poem tells a very different kind, gives us a very different kind of Maharam that year. And I wanted to just briefly demonstrate how it's different in two ways. The first is an account of religiosity. Right, so I think what we've seen in the colonial disdain, in the colonial anxiety is a sense that what was going on in these kinds of assemblages and these kinds of processions was not really very religious at all. Now we don't know much about the gentleman who wrote, in fact we don't know almost nothing at all about the gentleman who wrote this Malay poem. But we know he was from in Kulin and we suspect he may have had South Asian ancestry because he uses a lot of words in his Malay that have Indian, Hindustani, possibly Bengali origins. And he does various points of point to direct connections to East or South India. Still, this question of religiosity is a key one. And we see throughout the poem, which is some 140 quatrains long, we see distinctly religious imagery being invoked in the preparations for and in the conduct of the Maharam processions. So for instance, look at a quatrain 12 there, the light of the multitudes shone so brightly the drum was beaten with utmost force, bless Allah and the house of Muhammad, believers all gathered together in a crowd. Through the blessed help of the Prophet, the second tablet was lifted up, the music was played with terrible force and burst out of the door. We get a sense again in poetic terms, not just of the kind of vibrancy of this procession and of this commemoration, but in particular of the religious devotional aspects. And this frames very much the start of the poem, and in particular, at the end when they go to the river and the Maharam procession by submerging the tablet or the tomb effigy in the water at the end of the year's commemorations. From a historical perspective, however, this poem also offers us something quite different, which is to say who was responsible for the violence that erupted that year. I think we can take it as as uncontestable that violence did erupt, that there were was violence associated with the procession. But if you read the Malay, the Malay account, the poetic account, it has very little to do, or well, it has some to do with with the various groups that were associated with the different processions taking place. But it also has an awful lot to do with the European policing of the event. And I feel like this has more resonance at the moment that I intended it to have given recent events in London, but nonetheless. But here we see a kind of account that really doesn't sort of suggest that the police are this thin blue line, but in fact were instrumental in provoking the violence. The inspector, he says, was very fierce. He ordered the attack of the Bibara, the one of the leaders of one of the groups. By the bright night, it looked as if people were at war. Praise to God, it was a wonder as if in battle in the way of Allah, it was all the doing of the inspector, so they willingly surrendered. He beat up a few people. He beat up a few people. In the end, they were all arrested. He turned them over to the police men in total around 100. Every one of them was of the party. The inspector alone was having fun. The situation took an illegal turn. Bribes were taken with delight. So what can we get from poetry? What can we get from reading these kinds of literary and poetic accounts of the past? Quite a lot, I suggest. And this is obviously a very limited time we have this evening and a very limited topic that we're looking at, these particular events of Maram in 1864 in Singapore. But we get, I think, ways into understanding history through the literary and indeed through the art historical that we definitely don't get from the colonial record and the colonial archive. And so much recent work in theorising has been done around the limitations of the colonial archive and the constructed nature of it in all kinds of fields, not just in the kind of purity historical, but when we come to queer theory and other influential work. One concept that I find quite useful in trying to understand these kinds of events and these kinds of situations is something developed by Stephanie Newell. Now Newell's work is very much on West Africa. So really nothing directly to do with the South Asian or Southeast Asian situation. But she develops an idea of what she calls the paracolonial. So not the colonial per se, but the paracolonial. And what does she suggest this means? She says the shift to paracolonial allows us to discard the center periphery motif and instead to analyse in historical and sociological detail of a local cultural productivity which undoubtedly took place over the generations alongside and beyond the British colonial presence as a consequence of the presence, but not as its direct product. I think this allows us to do multiple things. It allows us to obviously to recognise the impact that colonialism had, but to make sure that we are not overprivileging that impact when it comes to cultural formations in any part of the Global South or the previously colonised, formally colonised territories. So thinking about that which happens that is alongside colonialism and that is fundamentally as I think in this case well illustrated, illegible to colonial knowledge production. Events, buffoonery, the carnivalesque, the dressing up that doesn't make any sense to colonial authorities and therefore allows us to recognise very much the limits of colonial knowledge production and the colonial archive. And finally, I want to just throw out as someone who works very much on literary sources myself, what Sheldon Pollack has offered us on what he calls future philology, the fate of a soft science in a hard world. He says, for all the positive value of Orientalism, this is Edward Said's foundational and enormously valuable text. One of its deeply deleterious consequences however much unintended was to dissuade a whole generation of students from precisely the sort of philological engagement to which at the end of his life Said wanted to return. After all, what's the point of learning Arabic, Persian or Sanskrit philology of deeply engaging with these textual worlds if knowledge of the non-west is always already colonised? Well, I think it's not an entirely accurate reading of Said's position necessarily, but it does point to the fact that we have tended not to do the kind of philological work that was so compromised by its associations with colonial authority. It's very easy to denigrate ethnographers and anthropologists and colonial administrators more generally for their kind of complicity in colonialism, but the philologists and the dictionary makers and those who studied language and literature were also very much invested in putting their knowledge at the service of colonialism and imperial projects. I'd like to think that that is no longer the case, at least not at Soas, which of course as a colonial institution par excellence has rather moved away from its colonial origins. We hope through the study of literature, language and the interdisciplinary approaches to these regions that we can bring light to bear on the atrocities and behaviors of the past, but also on the implications of that past behavior for contemporary situations. So I will stop there. I hope that's been of some interest. I'll stop sharing the screen and if there are any questions, please feel free to put them in the Q&A. Brilliant, thanks so much. Yeah, as David said, we've got the Q&A box. If you've got any questions you'd like to ask, whether it be about the course specifically or just about student life in general, and our student ambassador or David can answer them. Yeah, so I'll just see if there's anything that comes through. I wonder if people are spending time for me. They've been questions are. Well, seeing as how we've got Jeffrey with us, do you maybe want to talk about just very briefly what you're studying and what your experience has been like as us so far? Sure, sure. So I'm actually doing an MA here at Soas and my MA is the area study program. It is on Southeast and Pacific Asian Studies. So I would say the design of the Soas program is actually very interdisciplinary. You could really choose and frame your own study according to your interest and background. For example, for me, actually I did my undergraduate back in Hong Kong and in Hong Kong on art history and comparative literature. So for this program, I could still continue with my focus with art history. So I pick quite a lot of Southeast Asia art history courses. And for example, I have also taken like a Southeast Asia film studies class and also a politic class. So you could see you could really get courses and knowledge from multiple disciplines and different department and school across Soas. And a lot of the teacher, they're very helpful because they understand under this kind of structures, you might be new to the discipline and they are very patient to teach and introduce you to the discipline and answer your questions. And for I think for all or at least I think for Southeast Asia area study program, there is also a language component that you need to study. For example, for me, I pick Indonesian as my language module. So for the term, for example, for me, as I am a beginner, so I will take level one, one A and one B Indonesian class throughout the year. But if you have a background in some one, maybe one of the Southeast Asian language, after assessment and tests, you could also take higher level of high level courses. Yeah, but this also depends on your previous experience on studying languages. Oh, I see a question. Thanks, Jeffrey. Yeah, I mean, I just just to in some ways expand on what Jeffrey's just been saying. And thank you, Xenia, for your questions. What module choices are there? I mean, it varies from year to year. One of the things that characterizes the area studies degrees that we have, whether it's South Asian studies or Southeast Asian and Pacific Asian studies, is the multidisciplinarity of the options that are available. And in fact, that kind of interdisciplinary approach is what characterizes the degrees in any meaningful way. So you would have to take at least three disciplines and no more than, as we talk in terms of credits, no more than 60 credits in any one discipline. And that may include language if you want it to. So language is not a requirement, but it's there as an option. We have various languages on offer in any given year, but certainly from the South Asian side, Hindi or Sanskrit as a standard and Bengali hopefully next year as well. And the Southeast Asian context, Indonesian, Thai, Vietnamese, and I'm probably forgetting a couple of others somewhat embarrassing. And in fact, so across those so and then the options that are available are taught, most many of them in other departments across so as in law, politics, anthropology, development, history, religions, philosophies, arts, and then in this department that hosts these degrees and literature, film studies and cultural studies more broadly. So there's a range of options. It does vary somewhat from year to year as departments update their offerings, but you'll find an interdisciplinary selection available for you. And yes, thank you, Amani, for putting up those links that you'll see there or sorry, Jeffrey, sorry, forgive me for putting up those links in the chat. Brilliant. So I don't see any more questions in the Q&A function. So I just want to say a big thank you to David and to Jeffrey for joining today's session and to everyone that's joined. Like I said, this has been recorded, so you will be able to find it on the website when it's been published. And yeah, I hope you all have a lovely evening and thank you. If I may, thank you for joining us. And please do feel free to get in touch with any of us if you have questions. My email is readily available on the website as a convener of MA South Asian Studies. And my colleagues on the Southeast Asian side will also be very happy to be in touch. So if you have any questions about this, do feel free to write to us. But otherwise, thank you for coming. All right. Thank you all for coming. Bye.