At Sarmaya Talks, listen to some of the best minds in Indian art, history, conservation and culture talk about what fascinates them.
In this talk, Prof Harris introduces us to the Ethiopian slave-general Malik Ambar, who was responsible for designing Aurangabad and teaching the Marathas a form of guerilla warfare that helped them resist the Mughals. Ambar founded the city now known as Aurangabad and created the underground water supply system that fed it.
Jonathan Gil Harris is Professor of English at Ashoka University and President of the Shakespeare Society of India. Born in New Zealand, educated in England, employed in the US for 23 years, and now resident in India since 2013, he is interested in questions of migration, foreignness, and globalization in the early modern period and subsequently. Harris is the author of six books, including Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern England (Cambridge UP, 1998), Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism and Disease in Shakespeare's England (U Penn P, 2004), Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare (U Penn P, 2008; named by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Title for 2009), Shakespeare and Literary Theory (Oxford UP, 2011), Marvellous Repossessions: The Tempest, Globalization, and the Waking Dream of Paradise (Ronsdale, 2012), and, most recently, the best-selling The First Firangis: Marvellous Tales of Heroes, Healers, Charlatans, Courtesans and Other Foreigners Who Became Indian (Aleph Books, 2015). He also edited Indography: Writing the "Indian" in Early Modern England (Palgrave, 2012). Harris is currently completing a book called Masala Shakespeare, which will be published by Aleph Books in 2018.
