Please join us for the 2026 Papiya Ghosh Memorial Lecture. This year's speaker is Prof. Lisa Mitchell from the University of Pennsylvania.
Five decades ago, the Andhra Pradesh Radical Students Union launched the Go to Villages Campaign, in which groups of university students were sent to rural Dalit settlements, where they were eventually tasked with documenting the conditions of life and labor. Centering on the role of the notebook in generating and recording data for wider dissemination and its relationship to ethnographic writing, this talk asks why Telugu South India saw the emergence of new socio-political writing and activist documentation practices in the 1970s, highlighting four examples: documentation produced by the APRSU’s Go to Villages Campaign that eventually made its way into reports on agrarian conditions; the introduction of regular “fact-finding missions” by the Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee; the Jana Natya Mandali's (People’s Theatre Troupe) new documentary-style song-story compositions; and the village research that went into producing the recommendations of the 1976 Andhra Pradesh State Harijan Conference.
