Thank you for that very kind introduction.
So I just just a couple of things before I start and this this project is and has been going for two and a half years now.
This article is one of two articles that's coming sort of just to be based on the project and have just started to write it.
So it's very much in draught form and anything that you see any comments you have,
any questions you have will be incredibly useful for me to to to improve it,
to to develop it further, particularly the argument is still in very much in the process of being formed.
And so, you know, I'm ready, particularly to welcome methodological and sort of questions about the argument and of course, the details.
The other thing I should say is that although South Asians play an important
part in this and I'm aware there's a South Asian intellectual history seminar,
but there are kind of other elements in it as well. But I hope that on the whole, this will be sort of interesting.
But I should also say that I'm not an expert in South Asian intellectual history in any way,
and I'm very aware that there are some very important and, you know, very, very highly thought of experts in this in this on this seminar.
I hope they could forgive any mistakes I make or any, any any anything.
I don't kind of really present in the way that it should be about South Asian intellectual history.
And the only other thing I need to say is that both my, my humans and my cat are in the house and may potentially interrupt, and I hope they won't.
But just in case they do, just do apologise in advance. OK, so.
This is a page from the minutes of the Debating Society of St. John's College,
and I'm I've I've kind of taken a photograph of that while I talk, you can have a look at it.
And would it be starting by talking about this particular debate?
This debate was held in 1910, and I selected it as a kind of starting point at all to see it from the on the website.
If you look at the work that we've been doing because I thought that this is really this
debate really kind of brings together many of the questions I'm trying to ask in this paper,
which are really about what happens in this kind of intellectual context.
How are these people interacting with each other and what does it mean for the history of empire and for the history of colonialism,
for that particular, for them, for the kind of intellectual history of empire that this sort of conversation is going on where there is
an there is a kind of assumption of equality and of of of a kind of openness to two opinions and ideas,
which obviously we know is totally at odds with what is actually happening in the outside world.
And so part of the kind of question here is really to understand what does this kind of space mean and
what does this kind of conversation mean for for understanding an institutional history of impasse?
What Oxford's interconnection with Empire and what does it mean?
So. I'll get I'll get back to that point later on, but let's just start with this debate.
So here's this debate. On a Monday evening after dinner in November 1910, a group of young men met in the junior common room at St John's College,
Oxford for the weekly meeting of the St John's College Debating Society.
They drank coffee.
They smoked tobacco, provided through a subscription fee paid to the society by members, exchanged jokes and banter and discussed private business.
There's internal matters concerning the society's rules and requirements.
And then together they performed at the informal, informal rituals of language and action that made the homeless social space of the debating society.
That then made it up a space which, like those produced by college sports and gamesmanship adjunct to the business of degrees examinations and so on,
and yet were as if not more essential to a fully realised and fully experienced membership of college and university life.
At 8:30pm, the meeting proceeded to public business reasons for associating the pre-announced debate of the evening.
And the debate was in this case that this House considers radical tendencies in the
treatment of India and Egypt opposed to the best interests of the countries concerned.
Now in this meeting, you will see that this is an opener who speaks as a man called Mr Barrow, who later very sadly died in the First World War.
And then the opposer was an Egyptian called Abdel Hufford.
Now Abdulgafar, this was his first year at St. John's and he was.
It came from a landowning family in Egypt, and he went back to becoming to become a minister for agriculture in the interior.
It's really hard to find information on him,
but the only reason I know this is that there was there's a dig through the internet and through looking at things.
And also and so there's there's a list that's made that that was printed at some point in some paper on which where the information is.
It's not clear what paper it was, but it's a contemporary paper from that time, which suggests that he was on that and that ministry.
But more importantly, there's a in the India office.
Records know the colonial office records. Sorry, there's a there's a record of a of a dispatch that was sent in the 1940s that described all these
different ministers and different sort of political figures in the in the Egyptian government,
and described Abdel Poffo as as a minister for agriculture in the interior and as being very he's described as being a very,
a very fiery speaker and impulsive in and slightly unbalanced, which of course, we must remember that this is a this is the this is a, you know,
this is a very common kind of representation of of people,
eastern people in western dispatches of this kind, whether it described as being emotional or over the top.
So he's described as being emotional, but in the British cause. Which, of course, is not what he's arguing in this particular debate,
and so one of the things about the debating society is that and I just want to kind of put this out even as I start to speak about this.
One of the things about it is that what people say is not necessarily what they think because it's a debating society.
This is a it's a performative. This is a performative speech and it is.
It is spoken and presented within a context that is very particular where rhetoric and performance are a vital to to the context
and people understand that people understand that people are taking positions that they may or may not actually believe them,
although with a. If you look at the range of debates that he just participated in, it seems very clear that he has very strong,
anti-imperial views, whether these views are views that he actually holds or not, and whether they change over time.
That's another of those the sorts of questions about what it means to have these young
men who are from the Empire and who go back into into into parts of the British Empire,
not always back to where they came from and what the debate in society and St. John's role in that development
and that intellectual development in particular and what that is and what that actually constitutes.
So [INAUDIBLE] be out of the hopper and he talks about Egypt, and he speaks about Egypt, his native country.
He denies it. Any Englishman can look at Egypt in an unbiased way. He defends neither liberals or conservatives, but his own cause.
He says that we rely on the English nation as a whole, not English politics,
and that the English occupation has brought new, better conditions with it.
And then we have a description of what Prophet is saying and the and the description of the
the the form and not just the content of the of the speech by the man who's writing this,
who happens to be an Englishman called Lambert, who was later actually president of the.
He was a he was a civil servant in England, but he was also the president of the Society for Psychical Research,
which is another very interesting, has very interesting connexions with with with colonialism, but we won't go into that now.
So what we have to remember again is that what we're reading is a speech of a person who may or may not hold those views that has
been reported to us by somebody else who is listening to that speech and who has their own position and particularly their own,
their own role within the society, which is in this case, being the person to the debating society and being the person who's recording it.
GW Lambert at the end of it. So this debate continues.
And then after Ghaffar, there is a speech by Mr Narayan of India, who is also appears to come from a landowning class in India.
But he has a much more, a much more kind of moderate view on imperialism and what he and he says.
He spoke that in in in support of the opener, not in support of the conflict, and he says he finds it difficult to fall in with many of the openers.
Comments and points. But and he says he deplores the fact that in the English Englishman of today doesn't mix with Indians.
But he says that there are two parties in India, the moderate nationalists and the advance nationalists,
and he considers that India doesn't want to be separate from England. So this is a very different point of view from afar.
Then the debate continues further, and at the end of it, you have a result, which is voted for 23 and against 19.
That's quite a close debate as quite the close results for this and John Society at this point.
St. John's is a fairly conservative edge in terms of the way in which it speaks about in debates empire.
It's quite different from colleges like Virginia, where there are kind of more radical points of view being presented even at this stage.
And so this is this is an unusual this is an unusual result.
And whether that again,
whether that is to do with Corker's eloquence or whether it's to do with the physical presence of people from the empire whose countries
are being discussed and whether that makes makes a difference to the to the fact that you have people participating in the debate.
Young men from St John's who are sharing that physical space with embodied representations of empire,
other young men who are supposed to be their fellow students and their fellow members of the debating society.
Does that effect impede changed in any way or influence the way in which they
vote to the way in which they they engage with each other in this discussion?
Lambert is also very, very positive about the way in which he speaks, and we can see that it says here.
I mean, you can probably see this, but I'll just read it the way he says that.
He shows clearly he showed clearly that he has he had a thorough and undisputed knowledge of the subject.
This was a really stirring speech and was delivered with a feeding and enthusiasm of one who has his views
firmly rooted in the depth of his heart and wishes others to look at the position from the same point of view.
So whether the the quality of the speech, the eloquence involved affected the result or not, it's certainly affected Lambert.
And so we took this. This was so this was the moment that that is in 1910 and this discussion takes place.
And over the course of his career at St. John's, he continues to have several the largest deposits in several debates,
which are about imperialism, including, for example, Italy's role in East Africa, the erosion of Ottoman powers by European imperial ambitions.
And he's very, very anti-European, and imperialism is quite pro Ottoman sort of ideas.
But he's also he also takes bold comfort, is quite an active participant.
He takes part in debates about other things that are internal to British politics,
including questions about land reform and social reform that are taking place at this time.
And his view on these are quite well, they're very much the view of a landowner.
Whichever country it comes from.
So they all views that in terms of class are quite conservative, although in terms of or at least they're quite there.
They favour the landowning class, they favour the status quo, whereas in questions of imperialism, they don't favour the status quo.
So the other thing that I want to try to bring out in this in this this kind of analysis that I'm trying
to do of the debate Oxitec's minutes is what are the intersections which between class and race?
And I'll get to this in a minute. Well, a bit later in the paper of gender.
So what? What does it matter what? What do positions concert positions of gender, race and and class have to do with each other?
And how do they intersect with each other and how do they influence each other?
So this is a photograph which shows Guy William Lamberti as the man who's been extremely poetic about about a man, Cofer.
So the point of this article is that it's taking the minutes of the debating society as a historical
record of the college and the university as a place of empire where the is present in intellectual form,
which is a kind of been the way that I've described as as a constellation of ideas and arguments and
embodied form in in the presence of these people who are interacting with each other physically and.
And then there also it's also present in the form of some of the the the commodities that are being consumed.
I mean, in a perhaps in a in a in a more ominous sense.
But the coffee and the tobacco, the dead, the drinking and smoking also comes from the empire.
And quite a lot that a lot of the private business and the discussions that take place of a private business are
about the cost of coffee and the importance of the tobacco or the vat of the kind of tobacco that's being used.
So this is that they're very vital to the society sort of meetings,
and they also clearly create they they help to create the atmosphere of the conviviality
and they contribute to the atmosphere that enables this kind of interaction.
So they're not they're not just they're not just additional extraneous elements,
they they're kind of integrated into the way in which these people are interacting with each other.
There is a further way in which the empire is present here and that is in potential.
But it is, and it's present in the potential of these young men to enter into jobs in in
well in colonial and clear in the colonial and civil service which they do,
and to use St. John's as a kind of as a kind of.
A passageway, a locus from which to through which to have access to the rest of the empire.
And you do have cases of not only people going back and getting possessions,
obviously in the civil service or the colonial service in their own countries. So you have lots of people, for example,
from India who go back to the Forestry Service because in Jones has the forest fire department is actually situated right close to St John's.
And so you have a lot of people from India and then later on from Nigeria.
But you also have people who use their time at Oxford as a way to get to a different part of the empire.
So, for example, there is a Sri Lankan coal set of two in 1919.
Who ends up as a journalist in Penang and ends up getting a job as a journalist in the time.
So you also have somebody to speak of in a minute, a man called Singh, who ends up working in what was then known as the Gold Coast in Akimoto.
And as a in again in the in the colonial educational service.
So it's kind of where point a point in between that enables these sorts of intersections and crossovers.
So the question is, who could participate in these rituals of interaction and why and how?
And one of the things that I'm trying to argue is that is that the is that the by the nature of the debating society and the
particular form of social of sociability it produces and fosters the debating society and other similar societies are more enabled,
amenable to certain kinds of diversity than to others specifically,
that it may have been easier for men of other races and cultures to access the space and its rituals of conduct.
And that it was more accessible to men of other races than to women.
I know, as I said, I'll get to that towards the end of this paper.
It may also have been more accessible to men of certain classes, whatever their race.
And this is harder to define, because one of the problems is that the students who come from some so St John's OK.
So first of all,
St. John's is not is not one of the elite colleges and one of the colleges that has a lot of students who come from sort of the the few well,
they come from feudal classes, but they don't they don't come from from nobility, if you like.
They have been mainly merchants, they come from merchant families because it's founded by a merchant tailor called Thomas White.
And a very large part of its fellowship is reserved for people from the merchant tailor school who come from merchant backgrounds.
And so it's really quite a bourgeois college so that the gentleman sons they own land, but they're not in the aristocracy of the nobility.
So that's that's the kind of background,
but they more or less uniform and the they're pretty uniform in because of because they got because most of them come from certain schools.
They're not just uniform in terms of the kind of class they come from, but also the belts of the country they come from.
Then mostly English, and there are when there are Irish or Welsh or Scottish or Scotsman involved in a debating society,
it's made very clear in the way in which they interact with each other that they that they are distinct.
But I think that one of the things that that happens when you start having people from the Empire is that it's hard to do.
It's hard to perhaps fit them into pre-existing categories,
and it may be easier for them to slip under the radar and be incorporated into a space into the space,
rather than men who are more easily identifiable as being of a different class or of a different background.
They're very geographical distance may have made them less categorise able.
It's also true that that the men who come from the empire,
from Britain's formal or informal empire such as Cofer, some of them come from London e-mobility classes.
Others have scholarships and they come from fairly indigent backgrounds.
It's also. Possible that the PC space is likely to be exclusive, that society act as a kind of a form of transmits transmutation,
that it it through the rituals, through the membership of that society,
through the rituals and off of the phone, which are, as I said, quite homosexual in their in their and their form,
that that becomes a kind of rite of passage to access and be able to access the college and its membership.
So analysing this text of the one debate reflects the significance of this material as a source for historical research in on empire and colonialism.
But taking a broader view also elucidate an extended density of connected and intersecting elements,
fostering a richer comprehension of race and empire.
But it means paying attention to both the form and the content of the debates, what is debated, who is debating and which position.
What are their histories and future trajectories.
What arguments are used and what are the exchanges and actions around the debate, both at the time and later on?
It's all. Of course,
we can't forget that the Debating Society and Oxford Space Place in the Empire makes debating in Oxford something that's a particular significance,
because debating in Oxford for particularly for young men from Britain and England is a kind of training ground for political careers in Westminster,
in Parliament. So. And that is known to the young men who are participating in it, and so when they are presenting their speeches,
there is an awareness of the the act of speaking being a means of accessing future careers
and not just the particular social space that they're able to integrate themselves into.
And that is also true of people from the Empire, as we will see in a minute,
that it may also enable those who came from elsewhere to be able to to go back and access careers,
particularly in in public service, in law, in, in politics and through their practise,
but also possibly through the connexions they're making while they're in the debating society.
This is a this is an aspect that they haven't been able to do enough research on yet.
But when Golfo, for example, is at St. John's soon after, around the time that he's there, Alexandra Kirk and Boyd,
who was quite important in the British administration in Egypt, is there just before half hour.
And it seemed it would be.
It's interesting to think about whether or not they encounter each other when they're in Cairo or whether they don't and what that means,
whether it means anything that they have previously been both at St. John's and members are debating of the debating society,
whether it has an effect on on their their interaction or not.
And whether it has an effect on their political persuasions or not, in the case of cholera, for example,
I think it's also important to recognise that therefore that that that the young men who are
speaking and who are presenting their voices in the debating society may be self-conscious,
self-consciously aware of public roles they may play in the future and that what they're leaving
is a trace of themselves that can be picked up in the future because these minutes are.
It's not that they expecting historians to read it, but they do it.
But they are records of the debating society that will be read, at least by future members of the Debating Society.
And so it's there. It's a chance to incorporate their voices into a record which where they're going to be visible to posterity and to a to a future.
And it's a presence that deny that it's a kind of presence that's denied to
them by the many forms of colonial record where you don't get to have people
writing their own voices or you don't get to really get a sort of direct
transcription of speech where here there does seem to be direct transcriptions.
And this is becomes even more so when you start having, I'll get to have them the second when you start having presidents who are from.
So in this case, conflict is not a precedent. He never writes his own record.
But in the future, there are people who actually even before him.
There are people who come from the empire who then become presidents of the debating society and or vice presidents and then build their own record.
And so you actually have an in that record, just like here, you get to hear their opinions on what is being said.
But you also get to get you get to get to see the language that they use, which is often which often uses forms of form about literary tropes,
forms of exaggeration, burlesque, comedy, irony, very graphic or graphic representations of what's going on.
And so they're and they're leaving their own sort of their own.
And. A sense of that, they have their presence and not just their voice and their presence and their perspectives within this record.
And that's that's also that's also something you remember when you look at this record of all of these different elements coming together.
So I'm going to move on. Sorry, sorry.
We're about halfway through. I'm going to move on because I've tried to give you this part of it.
I'm sorry. It's quite it's quite vague, still, because I'm really trying to trying to get get a handle on what I'm trying to do.
What's the best way to approach this text? And so that's why I'm letting you hear the hesitations, because there are hesitations.
I'm not going to try and I have actually got a text which I could read you and probably will.
So it sound more polished. But I want I want to make it clear that this is this.
This is a source and a material that I'm still struggling with in order in terms of how to how to read it and how to interpret it in a
way that doesn't reduce its complexities and its vulnerabilities and its gaps and its duplicity in in trying to kind of come up with,
Oh, this is this is what happened in the debating society. This is what it means for the college.
This is what it means for Oxford. I want I want to draw attention to the.
The fact that it may mean a number of things or not,
so let me let me move on from all of this sort of theoretical suffering around to talking about some of these people in particular.
So one of them? Was had there.
And I bring him up because he is again quite close to the time the coffin is there.
He's very hard to see here, but this is the only photograph we've been able to find where he's present.
He is. If you can see my pointer, that's him over there.
So he is at St. John's from nineteen hundred and five to seven.
This photograph was taken in nineteen hundred and six. He's a member of the debating society.
You don't hear you partly because I think the and again, this is this is why it's so important.
Who's recording it? Because in the case and the president at the time doesn't really record much detail in terms
of how people are speaking because there isn't a uniformity of representation of records,
people, right? And every time there's a different president or a different vice president,
and the way in which the record is written is different, there's more detail or less detail, more description, less description.
In this case, all we know is that had they all spoke about the introduction of Chinese labour in South Africa.
He was he spoke against the introduction of Chinese labour in South Africa, and that's it.
That's all we know. He appears in a couple of other debates where he's just present not what he what he's representative saying.
He's not representing us speaking. But he is one of the first colonial thinkers.
Well, colonial students, as they were known to appear in the records, although he's not the first for those of you who don't know who they are was.
He's a really interesting figure in the history of, particularly of the mobilisation of anti-imperial opinion amongst South Asian diaspora.
And so when he was at St John's, in fact, that's when he he seems to have.
Become very close to a man called Challenging Depression, Obama, who was at the time, the the assistant to the well soon after.
This is a button as money.
Williams's dad, who was a professor, the youngest ever mayor, was at Oxford as assistant to the button, professor Sam Smith, who was Mona Williams.
And then he goes on to London. It's also something that I know this because I've looked at the records of UCL of University College London.
The time because November almost was offered the Sanskrit professorship at UCLA.
And it's a very strange and it's a very peculiar document because you have a meeting of the committee where they talk
about offering him the professorship and they decide to open the professorship and there's a red line through that.
And then in the end, the next page, it says that it's it's been offered on a temporary basis to somebody else.
And it's not clear what happens then, and this is around the same time. So how that becomes close to some discussion of our mothers?
There is a suggestion in in some of the records. We don't have very many records of him at St. John's, but so it seems his wife came with him.
And she also was actually studying at Oxford at the same time. But Caddell is a political opinions ripen at this point to a to a point where he feels
no longer comfortable ideologically with accepting the funding that he's getting.
So he's on a government scholarship. He's clearly extremely an extremely brilliant Sanskrit as well as Sanskrit, as well as justification Obama.
But he has a Boden's scholarship, as well as a Capitec's exhibition,
which is a very prestigious prise at St. John's and a government scholarship from India.
And he gives all of that up and he leaves before he finishes his degree.
And then he goes on, he goes to India, goes to Paris, and then he ends up in the U.S. and California.
I'm not going to go into that because it's a that's a that's a whole other story, but it's interesting that you have figures here at St. John's,
which is not really a college that is known for its radical networks or very strong South Asian networks that you have
some really some thinkers who are clearly involved in some interesting anti-colonial and then post-colonial ideas.
And and oh and also involvement in in the empire, in and in the kind of intellectual development of empire.
So 7:00 a.m. to whom I mentioned is one of them, but in a different way.
Nelson and this is not his involved, and this is this is so Nelson is a figure who comes from Demerara, and he is not.
He's not the first black student at St. John's that Sanderson, whom you see here, who came in 1889.
But Nelson is the first black student who is a member of the debating society.
That's why the interesting interested in him that we know of,
but he's also president of the debating society and not only the best in the debating society. He then he represents St. John's.
He he's he's a member of the Oxford Union. He represents St. John's and various intercollegiate debates.
And then he represents Oxford at the Cambridge Union.
And we know this because there are accounts of Nelson speeches and his participation in the Oxford Magazine,
which is a student magazine that's founded in the 18th in the early 1980s.
And they describe Nelson speeches and his presence. His Nelson's way of keeping records is also very characteristic, very strong, very eloquent.
And he is. He also has very strong opinions, but he rarely he is rarely involved in debates about empire.
What does happen, however, is that you can see him develop a rhetoric,
a developer voice and develop a kind of a clearly an expertise in language in the language of debating which seems to hold in,
stand him in good stead when he moves on and becomes a prequel to the ball.
And he actually becomes a barrister in Manchester, so he never goes back to Ghana and never goes back to Demerara.
But his involvement, I'm going to say he's involved in Empire.
This is controversial because it's a question of whether you think England is part of Empire or not.
But this is a time when in Manchester there are a series of violent riots which are provoked
by white male workers against a black African workers who come to work in in in Manchester,
in the US and under these riots and a number of these,
these young black men are then arrested and Nelson is involved in in arguing that case and then eventually exonerating or getting some of them off.
And it's quite a celebrated case. Nelson's also really unusual in having an entry in the Oxford Dictionary national biography,
which at this time for a subject from the MP is very unusual.
He's also involved in various other celebrated cases, including one case of murder, where he's where he ends up representing the murderer.
I think so. He's a really interesting figure.
What's also interesting about him is that he's apparently very well integrated into kind of the the local life of Manchester.
And when he dies, there's this very elaborate funeral where all the local dignitaries and a number of people,
including the police officer and the local police chief, they will attend this funeral.
So he. So in a sense, he's participated in the debating society and in the college becomes a way for him to.
And it contributes,
perhaps to his capacity to integrate himself into into British society in ways that he may not otherwise have been able to do and to participate
in that sort of controversial and potentially violent situations where he is able to argue in a way that in a way that makes him that,
that allows him to achieve a certain kind of success. And that capacity could also, you could also see is honed by exactly this kind of environment.
So there is. There is a kind of an element of the debating society, which is.
Which which could which is which is this sort of space where there is a kind of a performative equality or equity ability that takes place.
But it's also a space where people like Nelson have the opportunity to to
subvert some of those sympathies to the kinds of structures that exist outside,
possibly through systems of speaking and language and rhetoric that allow him to.
To be seen as. To be seen as as.
Equal outside of the debate is that is that is that makes sense in the sense that he's able to carry out a kind of stick to carry to to carry with
him a kind of representation of the space that he's able to occupy within the debating society and present it or mimic it in a different space.
He's able to carry it on outside. I don't know that that's a very bad way of putting it, but that what we can come back to it.
But that's what I'm trying to say is that he's is that there is a there is that there is a possibility that the the the training that they get,
that the skills that they get can be then used outside to reconstruct the kind of context that is created within the debating society.
And that makes sense. OK, I'm going to give you one more example and then I'll just talk about women and then I'll finish.
So Jeff balancing Munda came to St. John's in.
I think this is his first year at St. John's.
In 1923, he came to St. John's, so £J England up, who was born in Bihar and he came from the Mondaire village to the Munda,
are an oddity bossy community that means a community of indigenous people.
And he was he. He was basically he was given a missionary education in Bihar,
and then he was funded by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, which you may have heard of,
which was based in Oxford and which has quite strong connexions with with the kind of
history of of empire and in parts of different parts of of different parts of empire.
Well, connecting Oxford with different parts of Empire, but including, for example,
the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel was instrumental in in the elections for the first Bowdoin professorship,
which was a professorship of Oxford of Sanskrit at Oxford, and which was that the elections were held in 1832.
And the person who won was a man called Wilson HRH Wilson, but the his abuser was put up by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel.
And the reason for that was that it was understood and that was indeed the the plan that that that the man who founded the professorship had my uncle,
Joseph Bowden, that it was understood that the teaching Sanskrit at Oxford would eventually help convert Indians to Christianity.
And so. So there are these very strong connexions between Oxford and and the SPG and the sort of, you know, the wider the wider world of empire.
So are passing one docent here to Oxford in 1923 by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel.
And he then is at St. John's and he becomes, he is like Nelson.
He's a very he's a figure that participates very strongly in college life, both as a sportsman.
And Nelson was also exposed from the photograph that you saw. There shows Nelson in the cricket, cricket and cricket.
11. And Japan Singh Munda was a hockey player.
In fact, he captained India to the Olympic Games, the in Amsterdam and got them through a series of qualifying games.
But then he had a disagreement with the, I think the the coach or the manager, the manager of the team who happened to be English and then he left.
But the English, the Indian team actually won the hockey gold that year, so he was a very keen hockey player.
He was also a very keen debater, and he was. And then he was draughted into the debating society.
And like Nelson, he also has a very distinctive voice.
He is participating in in a lot of debates, but he also records the debates that he is and where he's chairing as precedent in again,
great minute detail with with with a richness of comment and and rhetoric and and sort of a
real grasp on the arguments that are being that are being held and that are being presented.
So and then after his time in St. John's and jeopardising joined the civil service, then he didn't like it.
He left he he then worked in Calcutta for a while, and then he took this job in Achimota.
Then he went back to India and he ended up becoming the.
A member of the constituent assembly, and he was then the first president of the All India Adivasi Mutzabaugh.
And what I'm going to do now is let you listen to, I hope you can hear it.
I hope the sound will come true. Actually, I'm I do it on my phone because sometimes when I share, you can't hear.
You can hear hear what I'm playing to through YouTube on the computer, so I'll play it for you here.
Three and. OK.
And I thank you for giving me an ad as representing the Aboriginal community of Cyrenaica.
I wanted to say a few words to congratulate Dr Rajendra Prasad, especially on behalf of the tribal members of this committee in December.
So far as I have been able to count. We are only five.
We are millions and millions and we are the real owners of India.
It has recently become the passion to call India.
I do hope this is the earliest stage for the rehabilitation or the resettlement of the real people of India.
If the British quit, then after that all the later comers, later intruders quit, then they will be left behind only the Aboriginal people of India.
We are indeed very glad that we have a doctor that in group is said to be the permanent chairman of this assembly.
We tribals feel that as he belongs to a province where there is in the southern portion of it, the most compact Aboriginal area in the Horn of India.
Perhaps that we, in presenting our case will at least get a sympathetic hearing from him.
I do not wish to say so.
If you listen to that, you can see how he's making this very, very radical argument for body.
But he writes using a language and a rhetoric that is now familiar to anybody who's been to a debate at Oxford.
The whole the way that he presented it, the the and the tone of voice that he uses the accent.
Of the speeds, it's it's remarkably reminiscent,
and I think that that's that's what I'm trying to get at when I talk about the capacity that you could have you being able to use these tools
that are given to them temporarily or they have access to temporarily to then recreate that space and be able to do quite radical things with it.
So that's Japan saying.
And and then what I want to say about boxing now is to connect, to connect us with this kind of point I want to make about women.
So boxing is one of the one and the reason.
So the connexion here is that boxing basically records. He's the president at one point when there is a debate with.
I think it's a debate with some of the old college now in that debate.
There is. There is. They are invited to Somerville and they go to debate with some of them.
And he records that first of all, he says,
I wish you know that he wants to put it on record that the topic of debate was selected by their hosts and not by them.
He's clearly, clearly wishes to distance himself from this selection of the topic,
which happens to be that intellectual harmony between partners is more something I'm I'm I'm paraphrasing.
Intellectual harmony is more important than physical attractiveness when choosing marital partner.
And then this this this, then this debate takes place, which is remarkably, you know, has very strong overtones of.
Of of kind of we're talking quite well overtones.
It is it is very directly talking about sexual relations and and interactions between men and women in ways that are extremely blunt and
forthright about women choosing their partners and on what basis they choose their partners and on what basis they'd like to be selected.
And it's clearly because obviously all of this has been written down by posting,
and he's clearly not comfortable with the with the tone of this debate.
And he also says that he wishes to make it clear that the committee that the St John's College Committee unanimously refused
to take this topic and that he persuaded them that this was what they had to do because the hosts are chosen the topic.
And further, that he was and he and he's he's very clearly disapproving when he says this, that the the women's,
the the the sum of the society had made it clear that they did not wish to engage in any political discussion.
So. What I wanted to talk about now.
Very quickly before I kind of close to kind of, you know, try and wrap up is that there is a very clear distinction between the way in which.
Debates are held between men and men in the space, and debates are held when women start to enter the space.
And this starts to happen very late for us and John.
So when women's colleges are founded on started in Oxford from the late 19th century, they start to have their own debating societies.
And there's a lot of there's a lot of writing about women and debating societies and not just in Oxford,
but in all the universities and school debating societies, etc. And there is clearly part of the reason for this is because women want to
participate in public life and they want to they want to discuss populist politics.
But at the same time, there's a very curious tension where it seems that there is a reluctance to discuss political political subjects.
When they entered this kind of male Homo social space,
and it's not clear to me why that should be so whether they feel disabled in some way or whether they feel the
fact that there isn't the kind of equity ability that I've been trying to frame or trying to kind of represent.
And with with all these other men who are often men taking part in the debate.
So some of it, for example, had three debating societies that did the tub thumpers, the up and parliament and shall practise.
So there were three kinds of debating starting.
There was also an Oxford student debating society, which is only women's colleges, all and all debating society to women's colleges.
And there were accounts of these published of the debates that were held.
St. John's was very slow to invite women that one of the last debates in 1914 on the eve of the war is is the debate about whether or not they should.
They should invite the debate in society of Lady Margaret, all to attend to,
to take part in a debate with St. John's, and they are almost unanimously against it.
The result is almost unanimously no. And then the debate in society breaks off during the course of the war from about 1915 and 1919, they reconvene.
And one of the first debates, in fact, I think it is the first debate is about whether or not they should invite an image to this,
to St. John's to have a debate and is almost unanimously yes.
So there is a process that happens over the course of the war where obviously and we know this,
we know that there are changes happen in the First World War and sadly women then are able to to enter the space.
But all of the debates that are held with women.
None of them are about about empire or international politics or even about sort of other kinds of political considerations.
So the St John's College Debating Society discusses Empire.
There are many, many debates, but I'm sorry I didn't actually get a chance to say this.
I'm going to ask me about it and questions, but take it from the 1870s, there are debates about about Britain South African ambitions.
There are debates about until about vying with other European powers in in Africa.
So there is a debate, for example, about what is called the ultimatum to Portugal,
which was which is about Portuguese ambitions in Africa, which there is.
There is an argument to say that that is is the ultimatum that basically Britain gives to Portugal to stop them is is is a result of plea,
a special plea made by by Cecil Rhodes. So, you know, there's the debate about that.
There's a debate about about the annexation of Burma.
There's a debate about the Anglo Egyptian financial sort of takeover and whether or not in Britain,
as Britain and France should take over the financial affairs of Egypt, they think that they should.
And there's also as we get to the end of the 19th century, a lot of interest in what's happening in Ireland.
And of course, most of these debates do end up siding very much on the side of keeping the status quo.
There is a very strong interest in maintaining Britain's, which is Britain's power and Britain's sort of presence in the Empire,
but also a clear identification of a kind of cultural exceptionalism,
a cultural kind of national identity with this sort of idea of Britain as imperial power.
So that somehow that that that kind of notion of being English is tied up with with being present to the empire.
But when, when and and these debates continue into the 1930s and after.
But where there are debates with women, they never they are never discussed.
And most debates with women is about things that might be supposed to supposed to interest women.
So they're about suffrage suffragists.
They're about women's votes, about women's higher education, about women's role in society and marriage and so on.
And then about general things like literature and novels and whether novels are corrupting to the morals of society in that kind of thing.
The other thing that I want to quickly say I like kind of gone past the 45 minutes now.
Sylvia? Yes, but that's OK, I feel feel free to.
OK, I just want to make two more points, which is that the other the other case that could be looked at in terms of who you know,
who enters the space is when St John starts debating with Ruskin College.
The Ruskin College is founded at the end of the 19th century,
was founded specifically as a working men's college in order to provide education to a wide range of people beyond the elite in Oxford and Sydney.
Ball, who was first a philosophy professor and then the senior tutor at St. John's,
is quite a strong supporter of the scholarship, and so there are several, several debates with Ruskin.
And then again, it is really interesting to see how an empire is very rarely discussed.
I actually never discussed,
and the debates are often are always about about things that might be supposed to be of relevance to socially and economically disadvantaged men,
i.e. the men at Ruskin College. And so again, there seems to be a difference in terms of the range of possibilities of discussion when
you get these intersections of a menu of other classes or other backgrounds and women.
Oh, I think I'm going to I'm going to stop there.
The last thing I do want to say, and I'm just going to throw this in there and then we can talk about this,
is that one of the things I thought about in terms of framing this is I don't know if you ever heard of the concept of the of the paper called.
I think it's it's called Alter the Contact Zone by Mary Louise Pratt.
So she's so Mary Louise Pratt talks about the contact zone and various in various papers,
but essentially she's a she's a scholar of early modern Mexico, Hispanic Mexico.
But her argument is that is that there are these spaces of interaction,
such as early modern Hispanic Mexico, where there is where there's a contact zone,
which is an interaction that takes place in a space that is specifically politically and politically an economically unequal.
And and yet that that space offers the possibility of two versions.
And and that these and this subversion is one of the art of the zone.
And so that is one of the ways in which I'm wondering whether it's possible to frame this kind of space.
So I'll stop there.