Dear Friends and Colleagues,
The Society for the Study of Archives cordially invites you to the launch of its journal ‘Reading the Archive’, a graduate journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences. The event will feature an inaugural lecture by Prof. Madhavan K. Palat on Genocide: Barbarism in Civilization in the Twentieth Century
The lecture will be chaired by Prof. Salil Misra, Visiting Faculty, BML Munjal University, Gurgaon.
Date: Sunday, 14th September 2025
Time: 2:00 PM; Venue: IIC Lecture Room 2 (Annexe)
Abstract: Genocide has occurred so frequently since the beginning of the 20th century that it seems like a disease of modernity. It seems especially so since modern civilization has nearly successfully combated the natural causes of mass death, namely, disease, natural famine, and natural disasters. Human beings are replacing Nature as the greatest killers. Why do genocides occur with such regularity?
The advancing technology of killing makes it ever more possible. But the Rwandan genocide was carried out with mere hand held knives and reached the same daily count as at Auschwitz. Warfare creates the best conditions; yet even total wars have occurred without genocides. Modern warfare is often conducted with the goal of total victory and with it, of total annihilation of the enemy, which entails genocide.
Modern conditions also permit people to imagine a perfect society, and with it, to dream o f the erasure of imperfection. This is imagined as illness, disability, variable sexual orientation, and especially as another race or community. Civilization has armed humanity for good as much as for evil, and we must cope with it as best we can.
About the speaker: Madhavan K. Palat was born in 1947 and read history at the Universities of Delhi and Cambridge. Thereafter he specialized in late Imperial Russian History and took the D.Phil. degree at the University of Oxford. He taught history at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University from 1974 to 2004, was Visiting Professor in Imperial Russian History at the University of Chicago in 2006, National Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study in Shimla 2010-2011, and was Editor of the Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru from 2011, seeing the project to completion in 2019.
He is now the Secretary of the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund and Editor of the forthcoming comprehensive edition of the Nehru Archives online. His publications have been mainly on Russian and Soviet History, on workers, peasants, Eurasianism, Dostoevskii, Solzhenitsyn, Nikolai Roerich, nationalities policies, and Central Asia. On other subjects, he has published on Eric Hobsbawm, History and Memory, delivered the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Lecture, ‘The Spiritual in Nehru’s Secular Imagination’ on 14 November 2019, published “Socialism in India” in The Cambridge History of Socialism, 2022, and “Nehru’s Southeast Asia” in Recentering Southeast Asia: Politics, Religion, and Maritime Connections (Routledge, 2024), edited by Himanshu Prabha Ray.
A selection of his publications may be accessed at www.madhavanpalat.academia.edu
We look forward to your presence at this event!
Organising Committee ; Society for the Study of Archives
Email: readingarchive.aud@gmail.com
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Madhavan Palat: Forms of Union – Russian Empire and the Soviet Union (1991)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Historian of Decline and Prophet of Revival. By Madhavan Palat
The Grand Inquisitor and the Holy Fool: Madhavan Palat’s lecture on Dostoevsky
After the truth-shower 