The Centre de Sciences Humaines is pleased to invite you to the CSH Seminar on:
Resilient Communities
Speaker: Girija Joshi (Centre d’études sud-asiatiques et himalayennes)
Discussant: Tanuja Kothiyal (Dr. B. R. Ambedkar University Delhi)
Register to attend at CSH Delhi
Register to attend online via Zoom
CSH Seminars are in hybrid mode. Please pre-register for offline and online registration before Wednesday, 27 May, 2:00 p.m. IST.
About the Talk:
Resilient Communities offers a historical perspective on the relationship between community, subsistence, and governance in north-western India. Focusing on Panjab, it explores the continuities in kinship and caste practices of rural Panjabi populations from the mid-eighteenth to late nineteenth centuries. Working from the household outwards, it studies how agropastoral lineages formed, and how some of these managed during the eighteenth century to establish autonomous states or riyasats of their own. From the early nineteenth century onwards, this riyasati order was systematically dismantled by the colonial state. Nevertheless, this book suggests that colonial attempts to settle and reform rural society, by changing both its relationship to the environment and by imposing new definitions of ‘community’ upon it were met with uneven success. Colonial subjects in rural Panjab continued to forge bonds of kinship beyond the legal limits imposed by the state.
About the Speaker:
Girija Joshi received her doctorate in History from Leiden University in 2021. Her PhD thesis explored the sociopolitical and ecological transformation of the region that today falls within Haryana and eastern Punjab, between the mid-eighteenth and late-nineteenth centuries. Having completed her doctorate, Girija moved to the Centre d’études sud-asiatiques et himalayennes (Paris) for a postdoctoral project centred upon a corpus of Persianate histories that she had first used for her PhD. Her current research, funded by the Gerda Henkel Stiftung, extends this investigation by focusing upon the Persianate household archives of landholding lineages across the Indus Plains and the Thar Desert between the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. Her most recent research was published in the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient.
![[CSH Seminar] Resilient Communities (G. Joshi)](https://csh-delhi.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Girija_Resilient-Communities-1024x767.jpg)
