Kenneth X Robbins
About
rajanawab@kjrobbins.com
Kenneth X Robbins is an independent scholar and psychiatrist who has published 17 books and over 150 articles on Indian history and South Asian minorities.
His research focuses on maharajas, local rulers, and the history of Jews and Africans in South Asia.
He has curated numerous exhibitions, including Bollywood & Beyond: Indian Jews in the Movies, and is currently developing an Indian Jewish Heritage Trail.
Robbins’ work is instrumental in documenting the "Golden Ages" of Jewish life under Muslim regimes and the contributions of Jews to the Indian national art project.
Lecture Abstract:
My Indian Ocean archives have been created over seventy years to bridge historiographic gaps utilizing paintings, photographs, prints, books, scholarly articles, documents, stamps, coins, medals, postcards, ephemera, etc. Therefore, they offer the opportunity to document trade, political, religious, artistic, and cultural movements across many centuries with a maritime focus on both Indian Jewish communities/networks and individual Jews in South Asia. Religious, Cultural and Trade Encounters Between Jews and Muslims in South Asia is one of the eight multi-authored eight books on Jews in India that have been produced. Surprisingly, there were even many incidents of Jews working with the Portuguese in trade. My talk would outline the presence of Jewish merchants in ports like Kollam, Kochi, Mangalore, Bharuch, Thane, Madras, Surat, Bombay, and Kolkata. Their sojourns in these ports were based often limited in time as trade moved to other sites. The lecture could also touch on diverse subjects ranging from the importance of the 14th century Catalan Atlas in international trade to the presence of Indian Jews in the navies of the African Nawabs of Janjira, the Angrias of Kolaba, and the Republic of India.