112th: Anand Pandian's 'Ayya's Accounts'
Join us Wednesday, October 29th, at 7pm for a conversation between Anand Pandian and Partha Chatterjee around Pandian's new work, Ayya's Accounts: A Ledger of Hope in Modern India.
Ayya's Accounts explores the life of an ordinary man orphan, refugee, shopkeeper, and grandfather during a century of tremendous hope and upheaval. Born in colonial India into a despised caste of former tree climbers, Ayya lost his mother as a child and came of age in a small town in lowland Burma. Forced to flee at the outbreak of World War II, he made a treacherous 1,700-mile journey by foot, boat, bullock cart, and rail back to southern India. Becoming a successful fruit merchant, Ayya educated and eventually settled many of his descendants in the United States. Luck, nerve, subterfuge, and sorrow all have their place along the precarious route of his advancement. Emerging out of tales told to his American grandson, Ayya's Accounts embodies a simple faith that the story of a place as large and complex as modern India can be told through the life of a single individual.
Anand Pandian teaches in the department of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. His books include Crooked Stalks: Cultivating Virtue in South India and the forthcoming Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation.
Partha Chatterjee is a political theorist and historian. He divides his time between Columbia University and the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, where he was the Director from 1997 to 2007. He is the author of more than twenty books, monographs and edited volumes and is a founding member of the Subaltern Studies Collective.
