This talk offers a history of the “fact-finding mission” in post-Emergency southern India and asks what it means to establish political "facts." Placing corporeal forms of witnessing, practices of citizen surveillance, and processes of documentation into longer genealogies of inquiries and investigative commissions, it also offers a discussion of the impacts of fact-finding on competing claims to truth and contestations over collective memory.

Speaker

Professor Lisa Mitchell

Lisa Mitchell is Professor of Anthropology & History in the Department of South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Hailing the State: Indian Democracy between Elections (Duke University Press 2023; Permanent Black 2023) and Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India: The Making of a Mother Tongue (Indiana University Press 2009; Permanent Black 2010), which received the Edward Cameron Dimock Prize in the Indian Humanities.

Discussant

Dr Kriti Kapila

Kriti Kapila is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology and Law at King’s College London, where she is based at the King’s India Institute and the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine. Her research spans the anthropology of the state, law and anthropology, ethnographic theory, science and technology, and contemporary India. She is the author of Nullius: The Anthropology of Ownership, Sovereignty, and the Law in India (HAU Books, 2022), and has written extensively on the politics of recognition and indigeneity. Her current research examines genomics, ancient DNA, and digital state-making in India.