Prof Niranjana is co-founder of the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society in Bangalore. She received her PhD in English from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her most recent monograph is Mobilizing India: Women, Music and Migration between India and Trinidad (Durham: 2006). She has edited, along with Wang Xiaoming, Genealogies of the Asian Present: Situating Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (Delhi: 2015). She is conceptualiser and co-producer (with Surabhi Sharma) of the film Jahaji Music: India in the Caribbean (2007) and a film on Hindustani music in Mumbai (2016). In June-July 2015, she curated an exhibition titled Making Music-Making Space, based on her research. Her video installation on Indian music, developed with Surabhi Sharma, is being displayed at the Shanghai Biennale, opening in November 2016.

This lecture will discuss the challenges faced in studying a culture that is not one's own. Taking examples from my decade-long engagement with the Caribbean, I will focus on old and new forms of globalisation and the production of 'local' identities like 'Indian' and 'African' which have specific meanings in Trinidad.