Lipika Pelham
About
lipika.pelham@gmail.com
Lipika Pelham is a fellow at the Herbert D. Katz Centre for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
Her work examines the diverse expressions of Jewishness across global geographies, with a particular focus on the "Baghdadi" Jewish traders who settled in Indian cities during the mid-18th century.
Her research on "Jewish Asia" reassesses the success of Baghdadi satellite communities in Indian Ocean trade and the formation of unique transnational identities.
By focusing on Mizrahi resurgence and Sephardi diasporic history, Pelham contributes to a broader understanding of how exile and commerce unite disparate Jewish communities.
Lecture Abstract:
My paper investigates the rise, transformation, and eventual dispersal of the Baghdadi Jewish communities of Bombay (Mumbai) and Calcutta (Kolkata) - a Jewish Middle Eastern diaspora that became a distinctive presence in colonial India from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Emerging from a small group of Arabic-speaking merchants escaping political turmoil in Ottoman Iraq and Syria, the ‘Baghdadis’ were drawn to the economic opportunities and relative freedom afforded by the British East India Company. As ‘Protected Persons’, they developed thriving commercial networks that stretched across India and later throughout the Indian Ocean world—from Basra and Bombay to Rangoon, Hong Kong and Shanghai. Despite their remarkable success, their history remains fragmented, lacking a comprehensive historiographical account that situates them within broader frameworks of the larger topics of colonialism, Jewish communality, and global migration. My project conducts deep archival research into both established and previously unexplored sources: personal diaries, Judeo-Arabic newspapers, family correspondence, community records, and British East India Company files – to reconstruct a critical history of Baghdadi Jewish arrival, settlement, and prosperity in India. The leading questions of this research include an examination of how the community navigated its complex status as non-European Jews within a British-dominated colonial society and how it cultivated a unique religio-cultural grouping among other migrants such as Parsi, Armenian, and Chinese traders. My project also identifies and collects the community's dispersed cultural heritage manuscripts, printed texts, visual materials, artefacts, and oral histories that remain spread across various global diasporic locations. By integrating archival investigation with ethnographic approaches, my work seeks to illuminate how contemporary descendants remember, reinterpret, and preserve the legacy of this ‘vanishing’ world, while becoming a part and parcel of India’s growth—both economic and cultural.