Routledge/Round Table Commonwealth Studentships 2021-22

Elza is a doctoral candidate at the Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE), based at the Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology, India. Her research looks at the public garden as a space of negotiation between the colonial and the locals in Bangalore under British rule.

Elza plans to use the Routledge/Round Table Commonwealth Studentship to investigate how the colonial circulation of plants and garden ideas to Bangalore from other parts of the British Empire- such as Australia - shaped the public garden practice in Bangalore. She also intends to investigate the nature of the agency of the local people and land in the making of these landscapes by recording the oral histories of local gardening communities and the mapping of gardens.

Abraham won the award for 2021-22 but chose to defer his award until the 2022-23 academic year. Abraham is a DPhil researcher in the Faculty of History at the University of Oxford. He has a master’s degree from Royal Holloway, University of London.

His dissertation was shortlisted for the 2021 British Association of South Asian Studies' MA dissertation prize. Abraham’s DPhil project investigates transformations in the nature of Christian identity, politics, and community in the Punjab region of north India during the upheavals of the twentieth century. He asks how challenges of caste, economic crises, the violence of partition, the evolution of the modern nation-state, and war, have been negotiated by missionaries, religious thinkers, and everyday practitioners of Christian communities.

His project will evaluate this development as an interaction of Indian ‘untouchable’ and ‘high caste’ groups with missionary institutions within colonial and postcolonial structures. It will therefore be a study of the development of their particular subjectivity, and politics of community, consensus, and self-representation. In doing so this project injects a new perspective into a historiography characterised by a lack of vernacular sources, and dominance by western scholars.