Associate Professor of History Lisa Trivedi was invited to speak at Hobart and William Smith Colleges on Nov. 11. Her talk, "A Photography of Working Ahmedabad: the Jyoti Sangh, Pranlal Patel, and women workers" addressed a series of 70 photographs that Trivedi uncovered during her research in India this past spring. Sponsored by the Asian Studies Program, Trivedi's talk was part of a series of South Asian specialists.
In the paper, Trivedi explores how an elite middle class women's organization, the Jyoti Sangh, and an amateur photographer, Pranlal Patel, came to create stunningly intimate portraits of ordinary women performing unskilled ad semi-skilled labor in 1937. Never published before, these photographs provide a rare glimpse at Ahmedabad's working population before Indian independence. This unusual group of photographs will likely be the subject of a new seminar that Trivedi will teach at Hamilton during the 2012-2013 academic year.
