Very early in the morning of 20 November I left Washington DC for the Bertrand Russell Archives in Hamilton. No time for lunch, so I quickly snacked on a roasted sweet potato (with me just wondering how this, to me, so Chinese winter snack of 烤地瓜, arrived in on my path in Hamilton!). Upon arrival at…

“The next stop, I am getting off of this train, no matter what!” I said, fully determined. Abhishek glanced up and mumbled: “And they call it Gorakhpur Express… Arpita said nothing. The three of us were stuck together by the shared ordeal of Indian Railways. The twelve-hour delay affected Abhishek and Arpita much more: they missed…

On my third day in the Auroville archives, as I was leafing through the World Union journals, I came across an interesting yet almost forgotten exchange between an anti-nuclear sailing voyage and an Indian ashram. In 1977, Judy Ferris writes about how the Fri Peace Odyssey came into contact with the Aurobindo Ashram! 

The Fri…

Doing research in archives is a lonely business… or is it? The idea of a collaborative research week is to gather a group of historians around a theme – in our case, peace movements and decolonization, and first get to know each other’s research projects. What are we working on, what are we hoping to…

In November, I was invited to participate in the Global South Colloquium of CAPI: the Center for Asia-Pacific Initiatives of the University of Victoria on Vancouver Island. This year’s theme for the colloquium was “Asia in World History: Indian Ocean Perspectives.” This was the perfect place to think through issues of peace and decolonization in…