Obaid Siddiqi Lectures 2026 by Dr Samira Sheikh
Archives at NCBS | Obaid Siddiqi Lectures
Samira Sheikh
Obaid Siddiqi Chair in the History and Culture of Science, 2025-26
No Country for Old Maps
Lecture 1: The Mughal Map Mystery
Friday, July 10, 2026, 5:30 PM
Dasheri Auditorium, NCBS
Lecture 2: Walking the Dotted Line: Mapping Borders Before the Nation
Thursday, July 16, 2026, 5:30 PM
Coneference Hall (Ground Floor), Training Centre, National Law School of India University
(Registration required: https://bit.ly/nlsiu-register)
Lecture 3: Secrets and Lines: A Short History of Boundaries in India
Sunday, July 19, 2026, 5.30 PM
Bangalore International Centre
Made possible through generous support from TNQ Foundation (https://archives.ncbs.res.in/OS). All lectures in this series are free and open to the public.
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Lecture 1: The Mughal Map Mystery
Friday, July 10, 2026, 5.30pm
Dasheri Auditorium, NCBS
Surely the Mughals made maps. How could rulers of the vast, multilingual, mobile territories of pre-British India govern without them? But then, where are they? To answer this question, we must ask another: what counts as a map? This first lecture reconstructs the missing archive of early modern mapping and places it within histories of viewing, measuring, and making across India.
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Lecture 2: Walking the Dotted Line: Mapping Borders Before the Nation
Thursday, July 16, 2026, 5.30pm
Coneference Hall (Ground Floor), Training Centre, National Law School of India University
(Registration required: https://bit.ly/nlsiu-register)
Indian surveyors walked the territories they mapped, armed with precise strides and bamboo rods. Astronomers measured locations in the sky and on land. Seafarers plotted rhumb lines between ports and along coasts. But few marked political boundaries on their maps. This second lecture explores what it meant when such boundaries began to appear in Indian cartography. Do pioneering mapmaker Sadanand’s dotted lines in 1780 mark a moment when mapping became newly legal, administrative, and extractive?
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Lecture 3: Secrets and Lines: A Short History of Boundaries in India
Sunday, July 19, 2026, 5.30pm
Bangalore International Centre
People incessantly create and recreate the spaces they know, in languages and materials that evolve with changing times. In early modern India, spatial practices and maps encoded segregation and hierarchy, yet also carried pleasure, beauty, and affect. From the nineteenth century, India’s mapping history turned toward increasingly hardened visual, legal, and administrative lines that often stripped out affect while retaining older structures of power. This final lecture shows that older spatial practices did not disappear. They survived beneath, beside, and within the lines that came to organize modern India.
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Bio:
Dr Samira Sheikh is a historian of South Asia and Associate Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. She is currently the Fifth Obaid Siddiqi Chair at the Archives at NCBS (https://news.ncbs.res.in/spotlight/dr-samira-sheikh-fifth-obaid-siddiqi-...). Her research focuses on early modern and modern western India, with particular attention to Gujarat, riverine and coastal histories, mapping, and the social worlds of trade, labour, and governance. She is the author of Forging a Region: Sultans, Traders, and Pilgrims in Gujarat, 1200–1500 and is currently working on two book projects on mapping and mapmaking in South Asia. Her work combines archival research with spatial and digital methods to rethink how Indian spaces were historically known and made.