On Thursday, 1 November 2018, the new Queen Mary South Asia Forum (SAF) was launched with a public lecture from Professor Gyan Prakash (Princeton University), who spoke on ‘Democracy and Emergency in Modern India’. The lecture drew on material from his new book, Emergency Chronicles: Indira Gandhi and Democracy’s Turning Point (Princeton University Press, 2019), exploring questions of political representation, politics and poetics, imprisonment and the nature of freedom.

Supported by the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, SAF has been established to provide a space for scholars at QM interested in South Asia to meet, debate and collaborate. Prof Prakash’s lecture was preceded by an afternoon workshop where participants presented new research and discussed future directions for the Forum.