IIT-M meet revisiting Jallianwala Bagh inaugurated

Organised by the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, the event was inaugurated on Mahatma Gandhi’s 150th birth anniversary and revisits a major event in national history of freedom struggle.

The unique state-of-the-art conference, which seeks to create Academia-Artwork-Industry collaboration in the field of Memory Studies, is an attempt to enquire into the ways in which Jallianwala Bagh has been documented/remembered in the last 100 years in various narratives and spaces, both public and personal, a release stated.

The conference organisers propose to use Jallianwala Bagh as a prefatory event to help enter the complex as well as overlapping discourses on nationalism, historiography, memory, and event.

Prof Mahesh Panchagnula, Dean (International and Alumni Relations), IIT-M, and K Padmanabhan, Vice President, TCS, Chennai, inaugurated the conference.

The inaugural session was followed by a talk titled, ‘The Future of Memory Studies’ by IIT Madras faculty convenors Dr Merin Simi Raj and Dr Avishek Parui.

In close correspondence with academic presentations from across India as well as from abroad, IIT Madras will have an exhibition displaying mural artwork styled by state-of-the-art augmented reality animation from the XR-Lab of TCS, the IIT-M release stated.

Faculty Convenor Dr Avishek Parui, Assistant Professor (English), Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT-M said, “Memory studies is an interdisciplinary field that draws on a range of research from history, psychology, literature, law, machine studies, and medicine.’’

The conference was a dialogic platform for such research which was further accentuated by the Augmented Reality animation on artwork on Jallianwala Bagh by the XR Lab, TCS Chennai.

“Revisiting a major milestone in our national history through a range of representations and interpretative lenses, this event is the first of a conference series that we are hoping to host in collaboration with our industry partners that will eventually help in forming a Centre for Memory Studies at IIT Madras in the not too distant future,”Dr Avishek added.