Side events

Beginning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the gravitational center of Armenian economic, cultural, and social history slowly moved from the rural landscape of the ancient Armenian homeland in eastern Asia Minor and the south Caucasus to the Indian Ocean basin and the port cities and trading centers of India. By the mid-eighteenth century, the overwhelming majority of the financial patronage shoring up an Armenian cultural “revival” movement in the diaspora came from Armenian merchant-patrons residing in or trading with India.
 
Bringing together economic, literary, legal, and cultural historians from the United States, India, Armenia, France, the United Kingdom, and Germany, Armenia in India/India in Armenia highlights how, beginning in the early modern period and continuing to the present, Armenians have traveled to India to make its distant shores and cultures their own. Armenians constituted a tiny presence in South Asia’s bustling urban centers and were quintessential “familiar strangers,” at once an organic part of its socio-cultural fabric but also an alien element. More than any other diasporic host land, India looms large in Armenian history and memory. It was not only the place where the first Armenian proto-constitution for an “imagined” nation-republic was published (Madras 1788/9), it was also the cradle of the first Armenian newspaper (Madras, 1794-1796), the first modern Armenian play (Calcutta 1823), and arguably where the first Eastern Armenian novel appeared (Calcutta, 1846), as well as the first Armenian treatise on the education of women (Calcutta, 1846).  Themes to be explored during this conference include the connected economic, literary, legal, and political histories of Armenians and Indians in South Asia and across the waters of the Indian Ocean. The distinguished keynote for the conference will be delivered by Professor Sanjay Subrahmanyam.
 
The conference will be preceded by an evening of conversations on the nexus between microhistory and global history featuring Carlo Ginzburg, Giovanni Levi, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, and Filippo de Vivo. This special event marks the Western Armenian translation of Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller, classic studies of microhistory by Giovanni Levi and Edoardo Grendi, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s Three Ways to be Alien: Travails and Encounters in the Early Modern World.